By Kevin Hershey
With all of the rhetoric going around college campuses about "going green," I want to congratulate University of Portland on the new water bottle ban, which goes beyond the trendiness of the green revolution by making a sacrifice for the good of the environment, human rights across the globe and staying true to Catholic Social Teaching.
I realize that bottled water may seem like a very minor and silly part of all of this, but in reality, it is a major contributor to waste, environmental harm and human rights.
The University has a moral responsibility, especially as an institution of faith, to stop the sale of a such socially irresponsible product and I applaud them on taking this risk.
There are several aspects of life here on The Bluff that we more or less take as "givens" or merely as part of what is to be expected from a Catholic university.
For example, we may grumble about having to take Bib Trad, but we accept it as part of our school's mission. Some criticize the Health Center for its lack of access to birth control, but again we accept this drawback as just what comes with the territory of a Catholic school.
So why the outcry about the water bottle ban?
I think it is because people simply do not understand the moral implications behind the sale of water in plastic bottles.
First and foremost, people seem to be ignoring the fact that bottled water is a humanitarian issue. Many consumers do not know where the water they drink comes from.
The truth is, many water companies get their water from sources in developing countries, such as India and Fiji. In those places, the companies take water that once belonged to an entire village and buy it for themselves, forcing the villagers to pay for water that they used to be able to use as a community, free of charge.
Furthermore, local water sources are polluted in these areas by bottling plants so that the many who cannot afford privatized water have to walk miles and miles, often through intense heat, just to access clean drinking water.
All of this just so that we students at UP can drink water from a bottle instead of taking a few extra seconds to turn on the tap out of which pours some of the highest quality water in the nation? How is that morally acceptable?
In the case of Fiji water, we wealthy U.S. citizens pull beautiful bottles of imported, clean, pure water off the shelves of the supermarket, while thousands of the poor who actually live in Fiji walk for several miles only to collect meager amounts of polluted and diseased water. How does it make sense that I, as an American, can walk to the store and pick up a bottle of clean water from Fiji, whereas residents of Fiji themselves do not have this luxury?
The only thing that makes sense about it is that I have money and as well as a classically American entitlement complex that tells me I deserve whatever I can afford.
This, fortunately, is not what the University of Portland stands for and this is one of the many reasons we no longer supply bottled water.
The ethno-centric attitude of many American citizens also dictates to us that water is a completely renewable resource that will forever be a universal right.
While this should be true about a life-giving and essential resource such as water, it is true that in many parts of the world, water access has become a privilege rather than a right.
In many poor nations in Africa and Central America, water has already been privatized so that large amounts of the population cannot afford it. The saddest part of these policies is that the U.S. government itself often enforces them.
On my UP trip to Nicaragua, I witnessed personally the struggle of a community living in the city dump that had all access to water cut off by United States foreign policy.
This community survived months without clean water before a strong single mother stepped up to the plate and took legislative action to regain the right to water for her, her daughters and her neighbors.
Beyond the human rights violations in the water industry, there are obvious environmental abuses.
Most obviously, the millions of plastic bottles produced in bottled water companies not only contain harmful chemicals and petroleum, but also often end up rotting in landfills and leeching these chemicals into the earth. There is also the issue of shipment and the fossil fuels wasted in transporting water from someplace like India or Michigan to the UP campus.
Many of us know that the Bull Run Watershed gives us some of the cleanest and most delicious water in the country, so why would we import water from anywhere else?
It is all too common that the water we drink out of bottles comes from one of two places: a developing country whose resources are pillaged by American corporations or a municipal plant somewhere in the Midwest.
I ask you, what is the point of wasting fossil fuels and increasing our carbon footprint to ship this kind of water to a place like Portland, where clean and tasty water is abundant?
There is none.
It seems that it is hard for our inflated American egos to handle being told what we can and cannot buy.
However, if we had experienced life in a less developed nation, it is likely that we would have had water cut off from us altogether.
Why do we deserve water out of bottles when so much of the world has to give up their own water so that we can have it?
We must accept that the University deserves the right to ban the sale of morally and environmentally harmful products because they are counter to its mission.
We sigh and accept the University's unwillingness to sell condoms in the bookstore because we know full well that a Catholic school could not morally provide them.
The same should be said for bottled water.
A Catholic school, rooted in the social justice mission of the Congregation of the Holy Cross, should not be selling a product that harms God's creation, abuses humans all over the world, and perpetuates the privatization and what all human beings deserve.
Kevin Hershey is a sophomore Spanish major
