Sustainability Now! | Daniel Jaffee | Unbottled: The Fight Against Plastic Water | 9-18-23

On this week’s Sustainability Now!, your host, Justin Mog, opens the tap for a much-needed conversation with Dr. Daniel Jaffee, author of the brand new book, "Unbottled: The Fight against Plastic Water and for Water Justice," released by University of California Press, September 2023 (https://www.ucpress.edu/book/9780520306622/unbottled). Dan Jaffee is an environmental and rural sociologist, and Associate Professor of Sociology at Portland State University. He is the author of “Brewing Justice: Fair Trade Coffee, Sustainability, and Survival” (revised edition, UC Press 2014), which received the C. Wright Mills Book Award. He has published a number of articles and book chapters on water commodification and on social conflicts around bottled water. He received his Ph.D. from the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 2006.

Unbottled is an exploration of bottled water's impact on social justice and sustainability, and how diverse movements are fighting back. In just four decades, bottled water has transformed from a luxury niche item into a ubiquitous consumer product, representing a $300 billion market dominated by global corporations. It sits at the convergence of a mounting ecological crisis of single-use plastic waste and climate change, a social crisis of affordable access to safe drinking water, and a struggle over the fate of public water systems.

Unbottled examines the vibrant movements that have emerged to question the need for bottled water and challenge its growth in North America and worldwide. Drawing on extensive interviews with activists, residents, public officials, and other participants in controversies ranging from bottled water's role in unsafe tap water crises to groundwater extraction for bottling in rural communities, Dan Jaffee asks what this commodity's meteoric growth means for social inequality, sustainability, and the human right to water. Unbottled profiles campaigns to reclaim the tap and addresses the challenges of ending dependence on packaged water in places where safe water is not widely accessible. Clear and compelling, it assesses the prospects for the movements fighting plastic water and working to ensure water justice for all.

Learn more at http://danieljaffee.net

As always, our feature is followed by your community action calendar for the week, so get your calendars out and get ready to take action for sustainability NOW!

Sustainability Now! is hosted by Dr. Justin Mog and airs on Forward Radio, 106.5fm, WFMP-LP Louisville, every Monday at 6pm and repeats Tuesdays at 12am and 10am. Find us at http://forwardradio.org

The music in this podcast is courtesy of the local band Appalatin and is used by permission. Explore their delightful music at http://appalatin.com