Back when the price of gasoline was ninety-six cents in Corpus Christi, TX, the guy in line ahead of me was grumbling about it. He was also buying himself a quart-sized bottle of some kind of cola, for which he was paying $1.75. When I pointed out to him that he was paying seven dollars a gallon for the drink, he said "F--- you!" and stomped out. The clerk and I rolled our eyes at one another.

I, of course, had long since begun riding a bike exclusively, so the price of gas meant nothing to me. Married again now, and stuck with having to own a car, I'm installing hydrogen converters, and hyper-driving whenever we have to travel.

I agree with Voltaire, but that doesn't make me sanguine. Not much scares me like the thought of "Americans" trying to reason.

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In my opinion the anti-bottled-water ideology has become a cultural style and a self-serving rationalization untied from reality - much as the reusable-shopping-bag ideology - don't use disposable bags - has also become a matter of style untied from reality.

Making one small, easy choice and then lauding it in article after article that become more and more exaggerated, sensationalized, and removed from reality - is part of our problem as a greedy, unsustainable culture, not part of the solution.

This article is a perfect example.

And the Swiss have found that the environmental impact of bottled water is 90 to 1000 + that of tap water.

This sentence might make somebody feel righteous who wants to applaud themselves for being a low-impact consumer, but it does little to shed light on the difficult issues involved and, in fact, it is misleading.

The article goes on to discuss the importance of not refrigerating the tap water. By refrigerating tap water, the environmental impact becomes - to quote from the article:

The relative difference here is less, amounting to approximately one fourth to 50% of that of bottled water.

So, the next time somebody makes a comment that they would never purchase bottled water, while pulling their Brita container out of the refrigerator, realize that they are negating a huge fraction of the benefits, and that the environmental impact of their water choice is close to half that of bottled water.

Also, pouring water from the tap into a jug and then driving 2-3 miles to the gym for a workout - rather than purchasing a bottle of Dasani at the gym - may erase the environmental benefit of tap water, for the simple reason that single-use excursions in an automobile to transport small quantities of items are vastly less efficient than car-pooling, or packing goods efficiently prior to shipping.

Similar comments could be made about reusable shopping bags - and then filling those shopping bags with one small packaged item after another. Almost every individual packaged item on the supermarket shelf has an environmental impact equal to or greater than that of the paper or plastic bag that it is carried home in.

Anybody who feels qualms about using paper or plastic shopping bags, but does not feel equal qualms about purchasing small quantities of food that comes in packaging, would seem to be basing their choice on style - not substance.

Although both the issues of bottled water and reusable shopping bags are important - they both represent easy lifestyle choices and are therefore rationalizations. They do not represent the fundamental lifestyle changes that we need to make in order to deal with our addiction to greed and selfishness. These changes require a radical restructuring away from a profit-based economy.

Dan Nissenbaum

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No offense, but you know not of which you write. Fannie and Freddie are *not* tanking no matter how much ink the mainstream media waste on trying to make it so and perpetuating the myth that they are only encourages the stock market to act even more like a bunch of 15 year-olds gossiping about who hooked up and who threw up and oh my god did you see what she wore to the party? Yes, it's about that informed.

Given that the state of at least one of those companies is daily conversation at my house, and our ability to pay bills depends on it, I'm going to believe my SO, who should know, before I believe the newspapers.

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