Text 2 　　One sultry day in 2012, a handful of New Yorkers laid out a rich red carpet in Union Square Park. As a jazz band grooved in the background, vested and begloved hosts led guests to the star attraction: a drinking fountain. The event, called “Respect the Fountain,” was staged by a group with an unlikely mission—to make water fountains cool again. 　　Fountains were once a revered feature of urban life, a celebration of the tremendous technological and political capital it takes to provide clean drinking water to a community.Today, they're in crisis. Though no one tracks the number of public fountains nationally, researchers say they’re fading in America’s parks, schools and stadiums. Water scholar Peter Gleick writes that they’ve become “an anachronism, or even a liability.” 　　This loss isn’t a result of some major technological disruption. While U.S. consumption of bottled water quadrupled between 1993 and 2012 (reaching 9.67 billion gallons annually), that’s more a symptom than a cause. What’s changed in the past two decades is our attitude toward public space, government and water itself. “Most people over the age of 40 have really positive stories of drinking fountains as kids,”says Scott Francisco, who helped organize the Union Square event with Pilot Projects, an urban design company. The sense today, though, is that “they’re dangerous, they’re not maintained and they’re dirty.” 　　In short, we don’t trust public fountains anymore. And it’s making us poorer, less healthy and less green. 　　However, the disappearance of water fountains has hurt public health. Centers for Disease Control researcher Stephen Onufrak has found that the less young people trust water fountains, the more sugary beverages they drink. Studies have found that kids who consume sugary drinks regularly are 60 percent more likely to be obese, and adults who do so are 26 percent more likely to develop Type 2 diabetes. 　　The reliance on bottled water rather than fountains also has serious environmental effects. According to the Earth Policy Institute, it takes about 1.5 million barrels of oil to create the 50 billion plastic water bottles Americans use each year. (That’s enough oil to fuel 100,000 cars for a year.) Less than a quarter of those bottles are recycled. And these statistics don’t even account for the fuel used in transporting the water around the country and the world. 　　Bottled water is also expensive. Drinking eight glasses of tap water a day costs about 49 cents a year. If you got that hydration exclusively from bottles, you’d pay about $1,400, or 2,900 times more. If you’re living at the poverty line, that’s 10 percent of your income.