"But!" you might say, "The people raising this objection are just trying to bring attention to the looming water crisis, and that's totally legitimate."
Well, if we want to talk about that, maybe we should talk less about this charity challenge or even about turning the tap off when you brush your teeth and more about how Dasani and Aquafina source their bottled water from some of the most drought-affected areas in California, which is symptomatic of the ways in which water resources are increasingly treated as a commodity rather than a public good.
Basically, this watery criticism of the ALS ice bucket challenge makes the mistake of thinking the cause of our problems is the behaviour of individual people, which we can endlessly moralize and criticize and get sanctimonious about, rather than the ways in which we institutionally mobilize resources as a society.
