Most Likely Safe Favorite 

Practitioner: 

Date: 

Apr 29 2011

Location: 

New York City

In April, 2011, Food and Water Watch partnered with Yes Lab to raise questions regarding drinking water around New York City. Yes Lab, an organization that collaborates with activist groups, aims to create successful media-related creative actions that help raise awareness regarding pertinent causes and create desirable action, often by staging interventions for the existing status quo by imitation and alteration. In this instance, along with Food and Water Watch, Yes Lab launched a campaign called "Most Likely Safe", calling the safety of drinking water into question.

"Most likely safe" is hardly a reassuring phrase—especially when it's applied to drinking water. The stickers bore a city Department of Environmental Protection logo, the words "Safe to drink" in capital letters and a drawing of someone holding a match to a dripping spigot. They urged drinkers to "expose water to flame" if they're concerned about contamination from hydraulic fracturing. The stickers, and the website they refer to, were created in order to alert citizens to just what would be at stake if a moratorium on hydrofracking in New York State were to be lifted.

In June 2011, the real New York DEP complained about the website. Not wanting to pick a fight with the DEP—who, also, is firmly opposed to hydrofracking in the New York watershed—the activists took down the website.

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