Hey, if you were organizing a conference on water scarcity and climate change, would you give your speakers tap water or plastic bottles filled with water from a distant tropical island? At the [Michael] Milken Institute‘s global conference this week, organizers chose to do the latter, providing speakers with bottles of Fiji Water. The irony wasn’t lost on attendees: “At a Milken Global Conference panel on water supply. The speakers are all drinking Fiji bottled water. Aaaargh,” tweeted Paul Hyneck. Fiji, need we remind you, is an island where water supplies are scarce and locals have struggled to find clean, reliable supplies of drinking water. Meanwhile, Fiji Water owns the rights to the island’s largest underground aquifer, drawing water into its diesel-fueled factory and bottling it using heavy-weight plastic. All this makes having Fiji Water at a panel about “the most creative solutions being attempted to meet the water challenge in the United States and around the world” hard to swallow.
