Yesterday I ended my post with the following sentence: “We don’t treat air as a commodity to be owned, bought and sold by powerful people, so why water, which is equally essential to all living things?”

Then my old friend, Jock, sent me this:

“Canadian start-up sells bottled air to China, says sales booming”

“Vitality Air said that the first batch of 500 canisters filled with fresh air from the Rocky Mountain town of Banff went on sale in China last month and sold out within two weeks.”

Vitality Air’s website describes its five-step process for getting the Canadian Rockies’ “freshest air” to customers around the world. They even sell oxygen in strawberry, grape and root beer flavors.

You can get your own at amazon.com.

“Time to invest!” Jock wrote. “The last frontier of ‘monetizing' everything!’”

And my young friend, Tim, posted this in response to yesterday’s blog:

“I remember doing an analysis of bottled water a few years ago and Fiji was the worst waste offender. Essentially it took the equivalent of seven bottles of water to make one bottle of Fiji for sale (waste, transport and production), leaving me with the thought that drinking a bottle of Fiji was like taking a 5-minute shower and then leaving the water running for another 30 minutes.”

There are a lot of absurdities about the way we use water:

It takes 4.9 gallons to grow one walnut, so we grow walnuts in the desert.

Each pound of beef we export carries with it the 441 gallons of “virtual water” required to produce it.

And now we learn that it takes seven bottles of water to produce . . . one bottle of Fiji water.