The first video in the “Land Governance” series examines the historical context of Indigenous Peoples’ dispossession from the lands that sustain them within Canada, and identifies the legal and policy landscape that created the conditions for today’s environmental and social crises. It explores the need to build on the rights and responsibilities of Indigenous Peoples, which are rooted in inherent governance of their territories.
See:
This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.
The Senate passed a bipartisan bill to provide $35 billion to fund water infrastructure in states and on tribal lands on Thursday. The legislation, which sets aside funding for underserved communities, now goes to the House for consideration.
The Drinking Water and Wastewater Infrastructure Act (DWWIA) allows for gradual increases in state funding for water infrastructure programs from 2022 to 2026.
It nearly doubles funding for lead removal projects, including removing lead pipes from schools, and allows for over 40 percent of funds to go toward helping underserved and tribal communities. It also promotes investments in projects to improve water infrastructure to be more resilient to the effects of the climate crisis.
The legislation passed the Senate 89-2. The two no votes were cast by Senators Mike Lee (R-Utah) and Ted Cruz (R-Texas). Proponents of the bill say that the bill is desperately needed to improve water infrastructure in the U.S.
“To truly ‘Build Back Better,’ our nation must prioritize putting Americans back to work repairing and upgrading the aging pipes we all depend on to deliver our water,” said Sen. Tammy Duckworth (D-Illinois), lead author of the bill. “Years of failure to make adequate investments in our water infrastructure has led to a status quo where millions of Americans are served their drinking water through what is essentially a lead straw.”
Water infrastructure in the U.S. is indeed in need of improvement. In their 2021 infrastructure report, the American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE) gave drinking water infrastructure in the U.S. a C minus, saying that “the system is aging and underfunded.”
Investment in water infrastructure in the U.S. has seen a dramatic decline in the last four decades. A 2020 study by the ASCE found that the investment gap for drinking water and wastewater would grow to $434 billion by 2029 if left unchecked.
This is particularly an issue for poor and minority communities. Studies have shown that the problem of a lack of access to clean drinking water — like the still-ongoing water crisis in Flint, Michigan — is most often experienced by poor communities with large nonwhite populations.
A 2019 study by the National Resources Defense Council found that water systems that continually violated the laws on clean drinking water were 40 percent more likely to be located in communities with a high proportion of residents of color.
Wide support for the DWWIA in the Senate indicates that there is bipartisan support for infrastructure investments — a topic du jour, thanks to President Joe Biden’s recent infrastructure proposals. Biden’s infrastructure bill also includes a proposal to replace all lead pipes among many other infrastructure improvements, but Republicans have aligned themselves against it.
The DWWIA might be a welcome step toward repairing the country’s water systems, but some environmental advocates say that it still won’t be sufficient to address issues of years of racist policies that have long disadvantaged nonwhite communities.
“While this legislation is a great start, it cannot be the final investment in communities that have been in peril even before the COVID-19 pandemic further devastated them,” said Julian Gonzalez, legislative counsel for Earthjustice, in a statement. “We look forward to Congress continuing to act through a larger infrastructure package, with significantly more robust funding for removal of lead service lines, more grants to disadvantaged communities and tribal nations, and more funding for ratepayer assistance.”
This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
During the Reunion with Mother Earth: Global reflections for the defense of Pachamama, the Plurinational State of Bolivia assumed the commitment to lead, in coordination with all the peoples of the South, a global action in this matter and requested the Secretary General of the United Nations (UN), António Guterres, to urgently convene an Earth Assembly to “continue developing the cosmobiocentric paradigm, not anthropocentric, within the framework of multilateralism.”
Representing the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela, the People’s Power Minister for Foreign Relations, Jorge Arreaza, focused his speech on the failure of the savage capitalist system, which has turned nature into merchandise and under which there is no way to comply with the goals of humanity…
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Canada – B.C.’s free-entry mining system allows any individual or company to stake a claim — and subsequently explore for minerals on that claim — anywhere in the province that is not already set aside as a protected area. This includes private land and Indigenous territory. Under provincial laws, which date back to the mid-1800s, no consent or consultation is required.
“It’s so archaic. It’s so colonial,” Marsden says.
In the mid-2010s, mineral exploration and mining companies started staking claims on Gitanyow territory. A tenure allows a company to conduct exploratory work, and if it finds enough evidence of minerals, it can then propose a mine. But even exploratory work has impacts on the landscape, Marsden says.
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In Connecticut, a condo had lead in its drinking water at levels more than double what the federal government deems acceptable. At a church in North Carolina, the water was contaminated with extremely high levels of potentially toxic PFAS chemicals (a group of compounds found in hundreds of household products). The water flowing into a Texas home had both – and concerning amounts of arsenic too.
All three were among locations that had water tested as part of a nine-month investigation by Consumer Reports (CR) and the Guardian into the US’s drinking water.
Since the passage of the Clean Water Act in 1972, access to safe water for all Americans has been a US government goal.
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Florida workers over the weekend rushed to prevent the collapse of a reservoir wall containing hundreds of millions of gallons of wastewater from a defunct phosphate mine, a looming environmental catastrophe that prompted mandatory evacuation orders and a declaration of emergency by Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis.
A leak in the Piney Point reservoir was first reported late last month, sparking fears of a complete breach and possible upending of stacks of phosphogypsum, a radioactive waste product of fertilizer manufacturing. During a briefing on Saturday, a public safety official for Florida’s Manatee County warned that “structural collapse” of the storage reservoir “could occur at any time.”
To prevent a full-fledged breach and contain spillage, local work crews on Sunday continued actively pumping tens of thousands of gallons of toxic wastewater per minute into Tampa Bay. As The Guardian reported Sunday, Manatee County officials “warned that up to 340 million gallons could engulf the area in ‘a 20-foot wall of water’ if they could not repair” the leak.
Let’s be clear. This “mixed saltwater” is industrial wastewater. Acidic, full of nitrogen and phosphorus and oh yeah, radioactive! #PineyPoint https://t.co/8vYu1mIXsE
— Dr. Jayne Gardiner (@GardinerLab) April 3, 2021
Justin Bloom, founder of the Sarasota-based nonprofit group Suncoast Waterkeeper, said in a statement Sunday that “we hope the contamination is not as bad as we fear, but are preparing for significant damage to Tampa Bay and the communities that rely on this precious resource.”
“It looks like this is turning out to be the ‘horror’ chapter of a long, terrible story of phosphate mining in Florida and beyond,” Bloom added.
Aerial footage posted to YouTube by a local news outlet shows the leak at the Piney Point reservoir as of Sunday morning:
The Environmental Protection Agency said late Sunday that it is “actively monitoring the ongoing situation at Piney Point” and has “deployed an on-scene coordinator” to work with local officials.
Jaclyn Lopez, Florida director at the Center for Biological Diversity, said Sunday that the crisis was “entirely foreseeable and preventable” and cries out for immediate intervention by the federal government.
“With 24 more phosphogypsum stacks storing more than one billion tons of this dangerous, radioactive waste in Florida, the EPA needs to step in right now,” Lopez said. “Federal officials need to clean up this mess the fertilizer industry has dumped on Florida communities and immediately halt further phosphogypsum production.”
This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
“This is the first time that we’ve ever had record-breaking, five to six straight days of below-freezing temperatures,” Ronnie Crudup Jr., Member of the Mississippi House of Representatives and Executive Director of New Horizon Ministries told WURD radio in an interview on Wednesday. “Our infrastructure just could not handle that.”
The ice on the ground didn’t help the speed of government aid either once Jackson’s water treatment plant went down. “The local guys are doing the best they can,” Crudup said. State leaders have done little to help with on-the-ground needs or longer-term efforts to replace the sewer and water treatment system, estimated to cost $2 billion—six times the city’s annual budget. “We haven’t seen the federal government at all.”
“Just that ‘landmass’ in between, right? It’s just like that. We’re always last.
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After a winter storm caused record low temperatures and snowfall across the U.S. in February, thousands of residents in Jackson, Mississippi, lost water in their homes. As the city slowly fixes water breaks, some residents are now in their fourth week without water.
Tens of thousands of Jackson’s 160,000 residents went weeks without water after the storm, and the rest of the city was, and still is, under a boil-water advisory. Last week, the city’s public works director Charles Williams said that a quarter of the city, or about 10,000 connections, still lacked water. As of Friday, the city had restored connections to 42,000 customers total and fewer than 5,000 customers still lacked water.
The storm had frozen machinery at the city’s water treatment plant and had caused 101 water main breaks and leaks, at least 70 of which the city had repaired last week, the city said. The National Guard has been assisting in water distribution to the residents of the city, but they’re still waiting for hours in lines to get water bottles or non-potable water for flushing toilets.
There are many residents, however, who can’t access the water that the city is distributing. With over a quarter of the city’s residents in poverty, many people don’t have the time or resources to wait in lines for hours for water.
Many organizers, residents and observers say that part of the reason for the crisis is that the city has a majority Black population, and the city has thus had less funding and support. Over 82 percent of the city is Black, and the city has been losing residents, mostly white ones, for decades. The declining tax revenue as a result of the population loss is just one contributor to the city’s infrastructure problem.
The Mississippi city’s infrastructure has been in poor shape for decades, and the city’s mayor, Chokwe Antar Lumumba, has called Jackson an “aging city with an aging budget.” The city has a budget of about $300 million a year and “a more than $2 billion issue with our infrastructure,” Lumumba said during a press conference last month.
Donna Ladd, editor of The Jackson Free Press and the Mississippi Free Press, said in an article for MSNBC that the state and city’s white supremacist leadership in the past decades has set up Jackson for failure.
“The fact that low-income Jacksonians are living amid the stench of toilets that won’t flush is a direct legacy of white-supremacist thinking at the state level,” wrote Ladd. “It is the state of Mississippi’s role to help fix this problem.” White state-level politicians, Ladd says, have continually made moves to stunt Jackson’s growth, financially and otherwise.
The crisis is also connected to climate catastrophe. The February storm was almost certainly a result of the climate crisis causing unusual weather patterns and increasing the frequency of extreme weather, which Lumumba has acknowledged. The city’s infrastructure, much like the energy infrastructure in Texas, was not ready for the cold temperatures that suddenly hit the state.
“Not only do we need this investment because of the aging infrastructure,” Lumumba said earlier this month, “we need this investment because of the increased pressure that these extreme weather conditions are taking.” Lumumba has requested $47 million in emergency funding from Republican Gov. Tate Reeves for needed water infrastructure updates.
This isn’t the first time that Jackson has experienced issues with their water; the city’s residents have continually experienced service issues over the years, and have grappled with lead pollution crises in the past. The recent water shortages, one local resident told Gizmodo, are just a continuation of environmental racism that Jackson and many other nonwhite communities will continue to face as the climate crisis worsens.
This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
While the Mississippi city of Jackson works to fully restore water, various community organizations have been filling in the gaps with relief. Mutual aid is a new term for some, but providing it is an old practice in many Black communities.
“As a southern Black girl, who grew up in rural Mississippi, mutual aid has always existed in my life,” Calandra Davis, an organizer with the Jackson chapter of Black Youth Project 100 (BYP 100), told NewsOne. Davis said community institutions have always provided aid in times of need. “The churches [and families] in my community always provided mutual aid,” she added.
Providing support to communities in Jackson and across the state, the Mississippi Rapid Response & Relief Coalition is a statewide coalition, including rural partners. Member organizations include the Mississippi Poor People’s Campaign, the People’s Advocacy Institute, the Milestone Cooperative, Mississippi M.O.V.E., Mississippi Prison Reform Coalition, BYP 100 and Sarah’s Touch.
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More than 14.6 million Texans, about half of the population of the state, remained under a boil-water advisory Friday, according to Texas Commission on Environmental Quality spokeswoman Tiffany Young. This encompasses more than 1,225 water supply systems and 63 percent of Texas counties following the record winter storm which hit the state last weekend.
In a press conference Austin Water Director Greg Meszaros stated that “we know that there are tens of thousands of leaks,” and that the Austin Fire Department responded to “thousands upon thousands of burst pipes.” In Houston, the fire department received almost 5,000 reports of burst pipes.
Texas Republican officials are currently in the process of trying to pin the blame on each other for the disaster. Governor Greg Abbott blamed the state’s grid operator, the Electric Reliability Council of Texas (ERCOT), claiming that it told state officials five days before the blackouts that everything would be under control.
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Anton Flores thought it would be simple to help someone get their water turned back on.
“I had a single mom, who was undocumentable, whose utilities had been cut off, and she came to me,” Flores, an immigration activist in the small Georgia city of LaGrange, said. He helped new immigrants navigate unfamiliar systems frequently.
He figured all they had to do was come up with the money—so they did. Together, they went down to the municipal utility office. But it turned out, getting utilities turned on in LaGrange was a lot more complicated than having the money to pay.
In fact, for the undocumented woman in question, it was impossible: with no social security number, the municipal clerk denied her request.
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Water became a commodity traded on Wall Street in December amid fear of scarcity, and now oxygen is being speculated on in Mexico.
With most hospitals full, many Mexicans are battling COVID-19 at home. Oxygen tanks and oxygen concentrators (devices that concentrate the oxygen from a gas supply, typically the air) have become scarce, as individuals and companies are taking advantage of the pandemic and selling or renting them at extremely high prices. Others are using the situation to fraudulently sell tanks without delivering them, or to steal customers’ personal information. The situation is only compounding the debt, poverty and inequality that has worsened with the pandemic. It also portends a new wave of fraud and speculation, when vaccines arrive.
At the time of writing, Mexico had registered 160,000 deaths from COVID-19. However, Mexico’s emergency service says the real figures are at least three times that, given how many people are dying at home, and given that testing — especially outside of the capital, Mexico City — is expensive and difficult to access.
In Mexico City, people have been lining up for up to five hours to refill tanks, many of which only provide a few hours’ worth of oxygen. The demand for oxygen has grown by 700 percent over the past month, according to the Office of the Federal Prosecutor for the Consumer (PROFECO).
People have turned to social networks to try to find oxygen supplies, using lists compiled informally by individuals, as the government is not providing such information. Most of the companies or names on these lists are part of an underground market, and the minister for internal affairs, Olga Sánchez, says crime networks are getting involved.
I contacted various numbers on a list for the city of Puebla to confirm whether the owners of the listed numbers were speculating, and under what conditions they were supplying oxygen products. Many of them never replied. I wrote to someone identifying as Andres Madrid on Twitter, who was advertising oxygen concentrators for sale in Puebla. He said he was selling six-liter concentrators for 30,000 pesos (US$1,484), but when I asked if he represented a laboratory or where he got the concentrators from, he stopped replying.
Another supplier asked for a 10,000 peso deposit (US$495) and would only accept cash, while another was selling a normal eight-liter tank for 36,000 pesos (US$1,782). Those only accepting cash likely didn’t want any records of the transactions.
The figures represent roughly a quadrupling of prices since November. The National Alliance for Small Businesses (Anpec) stated that an oxygen refill has gone from 250 pesos in December, to 690 pesos on average today, while concentrators used to cost 11,000 pesos, and on average are being sold for 60,000 pesos. In most of Mexico, the minimum wage is 123 pesos per day, though many informal workers don’t earn that much. Such prices mean people having to pay up to 20 months’ wage for an oxygen concentrator.
Given the demand and profit rates, it is no surprise that there have been incidences of people intercepting trucks delivering oxygen tanks and stealing all of them, and that police escorts sometimes have to be provided when oxygen is being transported.
There are numerous Twitter accounts and fake websites selling oxygen tanks. Some are being used to commit fraud and obtain people’s personal and banking details; many involve using stolen IDs when sending quotes to customers, and others ask for an advance payment and then don’t follow through.
PROFECO acknowledges that the situation is serious. The head of the office, Ricardo Sheffield, says the agency has already deactivated 700 Facebook profiles and 100 pages involved in the fraudulent sale of oxygen. He also noted that some companies sell industrial oxygen tanks that aren’t medical grade and thus not fit for personal use, and told people to only buy from officially recognized companies like INFRA, Linde or Air Liquide.
INFRA is a producer and distributor of industrial gases and welding materials, but is also one of the main suppliers of medicinal oxygen. I visited one of its stores in Puebla. People were lining up in cars going back almost three blocks. I wondered what the majority of people, who don’t own cars, were doing to transport tanks — which are extremely heavy.
One person waiting for a refill, Antonia Garcia, said, “At first, it was hard because you don’t know where to get oxygen, and then you find out about the different shops, but then you don’t have a tank to refill. We had to buy a tank — it cost 30,000 pesos. It was full, but then we have to fill it up every day, and that costs 470 pesos. We are shopkeepers and we covered the costs between the whole family, but I don’t know what other people do. You wouldn’t be able to pay it because it costs a lot.”
Gloria Gonzalez, who was refilling a tank for her sick grandmother, said, “We asked friends and we went on social media asking for tanks. They are very hard to get, and in the end, we borrowed one. The prices keep going up. The tiny one we’re using costs 6,000 pesos and you have to refill it a few times a day. It’s very stressful, and it’s very sad.”
Given the under-the-table nature of the underground market, and the lack of studies or reporting into the situation, it is hard to quantify the impact this is having. However, there is no doubt that many people are going into debt to buy oxygen tanks, to pay bills and rent, or even just to get COVID-19 tests. And the loans are likely coming from friends or organized crime, as government credit or banking loans are inaccessible for most.
Local media reported that in one hospital in southern Puebla, four patients died after a private contractor didn’t provide the necessary quantity of oxygen, and around the country, 40 percent of people say that they or a family member have now lost all of their income due to the pandemic and its impacts.
This new underground market and the other crimes only flourish because of already existing black-market structures, organized crime and inequality. The U.S.’s Merida Initiative — an agreement with Mexico and Central America to combat cross-border crime, drug trafficking and money laundering — and the “war on drugs” saw a drastic militarization of Mexico, massive increases in drug prices, an intensification of organized gangs and cartels, increased extortion and an arms black market estimated to be worth US$100 million.
And with unreliable water and health care systems, there are underground markets flourishing in those sectors as well. For those who can’t access any or enough water, there is a private market of water trucks selling water at elevated prices, while in 2018, Mexico had the sixth-largest medicine black market in the world.
The pandemic has only seen that worsen, as surgeries are being canceled. There is an increased demand for cancer medications, and in Mexico City, for example, 38,000 of such medicines were stolen from storage by armed men.
Some 57 percent of the working population are informal workers and therefore not registered for social security, and only 14 percent of second-level hospitals* attend to such people. On top of that, high levels of corruption in the sector mean health resources (from medicine to machines) are diverted into the coffers of private companies. In 2016, at least 6 billion pesos (US$295 million) worth of federal resources assigned to Seguro Popular (public health insurance that covers a wide range of services without co-pays for its affiliates) were mismanaged.
Corruption also means many hospital buildings contracts were never completed. The disastrous state of Mexico’s health care system, combined with the pandemic and a lack of official information, means that many people feel desperate and helpless when they contract COVID-19. They often don’t investigate or ask questions, because it is better not to know, and many are highly susceptible to social media scams.
In Mexico, there have already been various instances of people trying to profit from the demand for vaccines. Though currently only available through a government program, Mexico has said private companies will be allowed to import the vaccine.
Meanwhile, the federal health commission, COFEPRIS, is already worried about fake sales of the AstraZeneca vaccine. In the states of Guanajuato and Quintana Roo, there were reports of people visiting houses or calling and asking for personal information with the vaccine as the pretext. One website pretended to be Pfizer Mexico and tried to sell a fake vaccine, and people have tried to sell fake vaccines through social networks.
This issue isn’t limited to Mexico. The inequality experienced here is also reflected on a global scale; wealthy countries hoarding vaccines will lead to insecurity and deep economic problems that will end up impacting them as well, since poorer countries tend to manufacture and produce a lot of the goods that wealthier countries use.
Interpol warned of the potential for organized crime related to vaccines, as the pandemic has “already triggered unprecedented opportunistic and predatory criminal behavior.”
Already, 2 billion people globally lack access to medicines and medical devices, which leaves a gap that is often filled by substandard and falsified products. Up to 169,000 children die yearly from pneumonia after receiving counterfeit drugs, and the figure is similar for adults for fake anti-malarial medication.
While high-income countries so far have 60 percent of the vaccines (but only 16 percent of the world’s population), the European Union has confirmed it will control vaccine exports in order to put its citizens first. But World Health Organization Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesu says, “We will not end the pandemic anywhere until we end it everywhere.”
* Mexico has three levels of health care. The first is preventative, emergency etc. The second is the biggest area and covers most health issues that involve hospitalization, such as surgeries, urgent care, as well as children and gynecology. The third level is specialist care.
This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
The first thing Deborah Bell-Holt does each morning is check whether water still flows from her bathroom faucet.
It always does, thanks to an April executive order from Gov. Gavin Newsom banning water disconnections during the pandemic. But that didn’t stop her utility debt from snowballing to nearly $15,000.
“They say you’re safe,” said the 67-year-old retired nurse, who manages finances for her household of twelve in South Los Angeles. “But you see that bill. How is that supposed to make you feel? You’re scared to death.”
At least 1.6 million California households, or one in eight, have water debt.
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The January 22, 2021, episode of CounterSpin brought together archival interviews about the Flint water crisis from Chris Savage, Talia Buford and Peggy Case. This is a lightly edited transcript.
Cartoon by Politico‘s Matt Wuerker.
Janine Jackson: Welcome to CounterSpin, your weekly look behind the headlines. I’m Janine Jackson. This week on CounterSpin: Michigan’s attorney general has indicted nine state officials, including former Gov. Rick Snyder, the state’s former health director and two of the emergency managers of the city of Flint, for exposing at least 100,000 people to dangerous levels of lead in their drinking water, and for an outbreak of Legionnaires’ disease that killed at least 12 people and sickened many more.
In an op-ed for The Hill, Michigan Congressman Dan Kildee called the 2014 decision to switch the source of Flint’s drinking water “one of the greatest environmental injustices in our lifetimes.” Which is true, but “the environment” didn’t do it: It’s often forgotten that Flint was a crisis of democracy. Decision-making had been taken out of the hands of Flint’s elected officials and given to an “emergency manager” tasked with reining in costs—a system that seems to be used disproportionately in communities of color, taking decision-making out of community hands but leaving them to deal with the fallout of those decisions.
There’s been a $640 million settlement of class action lawsuits, but Michigan Radio reports that many civic leaders say the deal presents inappropriate hurdles—children might not get their settlement if they don’t undergo a specific bone lead test—and some question how money could ever compensate Flint residents for months and months of washing and bathing and cooking with bottled water to avoid exposing themselves and their families to a neurotoxin, all while officials deflected and denied and belittled their concerns.
We’ve talked about Flint on CounterSpin, in its particulars and in terms of how it fits into bigger questions around environmental racism and resource control and local governance. In light of the renewed attention around the story—which has not ended, even as media have looked away—we’re going to revisit some of those conversations today.
You’re listening to CounterSpin, brought to you each week by the media watch group FAIR.
***
Janine Jackson: While Flint’s water became a symbol—a meme, even, around the world—of environmental racism and government indifference, it was mainly local reporters who really tracked the political actors and actions behind what was not at all a natural disaster.
In January 2016, we talked with Chris Savage, owner/publisher of the Michigan-based Electablog.com, about the chain of events.
Chris Savage: “The ironic part about this, and the really just disgusting part about this, is that that phosphate treatment would have cost them about $60 per day to do. It was very inexpensive to do.”
Chris Savage: The whole thing really began in 2013. Prior to that, Flint had been considering changing where it got its water. It was at the time getting its water from the city of Detroit, through the Detroit Water & Sewage Department; they had a nearly 50-year contract with them. However, the water was very expensive; they had some of the highest water costs in the country, actually, in Flint, Michigan.
They joined up with other regional concerns, like Genesee County and other groups around the area, and decided to form what was called the Karegnondi Water Authority. And they’re building a pipeline and a water treatment plant to provide their own water, rather than purchasing it from Detroit. That happened in April of 2013.
Several days after they did that, the Detroit Water & Sewage Department exercised its option to cancel their current contract with the city of Flint, which meant they had to give one-year advance notice. This was done, by the way, with Detroit being under an emergency manager as well. So both cities were actually under the control of emergency managers at the time, who were making all of the decisions for the local government.
So what transpired in the following year was that Flint had to make some decisions about where they were going to get their water, or if they were going to renegotiate their contract with Detroit. Just prior to when Detroit’s contract ended with them, in April of 2014, the Detroit Sewer & Water Department sent Darnell Earley, who was at the time the Flint emergency manager, a letter saying you can stay on our system, you’re not being kicked off, but they were going to renegotiate the contract. And of course, because of this, their water rates were going to go even higher. And I find some brutal irony in this, that both cities were under emergency managers, and yet you have one city basically exploiting the other city for higher water costs.
JJ: Right.
CS: So Darnell Earley at that point just sent them a letter back, saying thanks but no thanks. He had made the decision they were going to go to the Flint River. And in April of 2014, that is when that happened. And that really was the fateful decision, that decision not to remain on Detroit water, but to switch to the Flint River in the interim, while the Karegnondi pipeline was being completed.
The idea that they would go to Flint had been considered in the past, and a report was sent to the state of Michigan in 2013, telling them that going to the Flint River would require considerably more water treatment, including phosphate treatments to prevent the mineral scale and biofilm on the insides of people’s pipes from being eroded away and revealing the lead solder underneath. And it’s that lead solder in the pipelines going from the main water line in the streets to people’s homes that is the source of the lead in people’s drinking water.
They made the switch in April 2014. Almost immediately, people in Flint began to report this disgustingly discolored water coming from their taps. The water smelled foul, people were getting rashes, people were getting sick. They found that there were high levels of E. coli, so there was a boil-water alert for some time. They began treating with chlorine to fix that problem. And because of the overtreatment with chlorine, it started creating trihalomethanes, which are a byproduct of disinfection. They exceeded the Clean Water Act’s regulations on those. That had to be treated. So they had a lot of problems before the lead issue manifested itself.
It took a while for that water of the Flint River, which is more corrosive than the Detroit River, to sort of erode away this coating that’s on the inside of these pipelines. And it was basically around January of 2015 that the lead problem started to become manifest.
Reports that were being sent to Michigan’s Department of Environmental Quality, which is in charge of approving all water treatment plants for municipalities, they had been doing testing according to guidelines, and they were using the guidelines incorrectly. They were supposed to be testing 100 different high-risk homes at the tap and then, if the lead level in the 90th percentile was above 15 parts per billion, then they were supposed to take action. This is required by federal law. They had only taken actually 72 samples, which they were supposed to take 100, and some of those had spiked pretty high, putting them in the action zone in the 90th percentile. And so people that were responsible for that reporting were instructed by DEQ to remove two of the samples, and that brought them down below the action level of 15 parts per billion, and so they could continue on without further treatment.
The ironic part about this, and the really just disgusting part about this, is that that phosphate treatment would have cost them about $60 per day to do. It was very inexpensive to do, this phosphate treatment, which is very effective at maintaining that film that covers the lead, and protects the water from being exposed to lead. But the DEQ signed off on the treatment that did not include the phosphate, and that’s why the Snyder administration—Governor Snyder is our governor—and his administration is complicit in this.
I do give a lot of credit to our local media. I don’t always do that, Janine, but the Detroit Free Press, the Detroit News, MLive, these organizations have done a very good job over the last couple of years in following this story and making sure that people knew what was going on. In an interesting turn, the ACLU actually hired an investigative journalist, Curt Guyette, and he’s done a lot of the FOIA work, and has revealed a lot of the information that we have today that has shined a light on the Snyder administration, and the ways that they have so tragically failed the Flint residents.
***
Janine Jackson: There were those who claimed that the fact that Flint is a predominantly African-American and predominantly poor community had nothing to do with the poisoning of their water. We talked around such people in February 2016 with Talia Buford, then a reporter at the Center for Public Integrity, working on a series called “Environmental Justice, Denied.” She filled us in on the role of agencies like the EPA.
Talia Buford: “When you have something ‘not in my backyard’ from these more politically connected people, it still goes in someone’s backyard.”
Talia Buford: I think that what we see in Flint is a failure on a number of different levels, a failure from the city level to the state level to the federal level. EPA has a role, of course, as an overseer of the Michigan Environmental Agency. The Michigan department should be probably the one that has a bigger responsibility than the federal agency, since they are working in conjunction with the state, but I think that everyone here had something that they did where they fell off the job.
JJ: A headline of a piece that you co-wrote recently was “Environmental Racism Persists, and the EPA Is One Reason Why.” Those are strong words. You’ve talked about the Office of Civil Rights. What did your investigation turn up about the actual track record of that office?
TB: In our investigation, we looked at more than 15 years of complaints that citizens had filed to the EPA Office of Civil Rights. These are minority communities, often low-income but not always, who are saying, we live next to a sewage plant that makes it horrible for us to sit outside on our porches, or there are pesticides being sprayed on the fields next to our schools.
So what we found is that over the 22-year history of the office, the agency had only had about 300 complaints, and they’ve never made a formal finding of a Title VI violation. They’ve made one preliminary finding, and there have been some investigations, but they’ve never come out and said, Texas or Indiana or whatever state, you are violating Title VI of the Civil Rights Act.
And that struck us as something—especially over a decades-long history—that you can’t find one bad actor, when we know that there are so many of these cases; we hear about them all the time. To hear that there’s been no wrongdoing, it struck us as kind of odd.
So in our investigation, what we also found is that only 12 of those cases that the EPA has found, they’ve closed with any actual official action. That means they’ve either negotiated or had some sort of informal settlement. The rest of them were all resolved among the complainants or the agencies, or dismissed. And that even beyond that, there are several cases, almost 20, that have been just waiting in limbo, waiting for EPA to act in some way. In some cases, they’ve been waiting more than a decade.
JJ: Your thoughts on journalistic coverage of this?
TB: I’m thinking about it in the context of Flint, and I think that a lot of the local news media is paying attention, and there’s been some amazing reporting and watchdogging that’s been coming out of the Detroit Free Press and the Flint Journal. But a lot of this really comes down to people not being listened to—either by state officials and, in some cases, by the national media.
There is so much information that’s just out there if you look for it. Our series was built on data that we pulled from the EPA that was publicly available. We were able to get it through a FOIA request. We actually created a database and made it public on our website, so that people can tell their own stories using our data as well.
So I think that these stories like Flint, or other stories out of the Office of Civil Rights even, can be a jumping off point for us to just start asking more about our communities and asking more about the world that we live in, and looking for the data to back those questions up.
***
Janine Jackson: We spoke with Talia Buford again in July 2017, after Michigan’s Attorney General brought involuntary manslaughter charges against five officials, one of whom—Health and Human Services Director Nick Lyon—had been reported saying, “Everyone has to die of something.” Now at ProPublica, Talia Buford gave us some history of environmental justice as a state concern.
TB: It popped up during the civil rights movement, but it really took hold in the early ’80s, when citizens in North Carolina really pushed back on the state choosing to dump contaminated soil in a landfill near their homes. After that happened, the federal government started to take notice. There were some studies by EPA, and then there was a church group that also did a really instrumental study on just where toxic facilities were sited around the country.
And after that, President Bush—this is George H.W. Bush—at that point decided to implement the Office of Environmental Equity, which is today the Office of Environmental Justice. That was in ’92.
Two years later, President Clinton gave us, I guess, the biggest win for the environmental justice community. Clinton signed an executive order in ’94 that required federal agencies to consider environmental justice in all of their policies. What he also did is he declared that environmental injustice was a violation of Title VI’s Civil Rights Act, which was huge, because it’s the same law that also sought to end segregation in schools. So this is a really powerful tool that advocates now had to use.
During the second Bush administration, however, a lot of those protections got rolled back. They were watered down, in some instances. The Title VI office was basically dormant for years, cases languished for literally a decade, and there just wasn’t any movement on the issue.
And Democrats in Congress tried to push legislation on this issue forward, to really mandate and legislate some of the protections that Clinton had tried to implement through the executive order, and just really make them law and really crystallize them and give them some teeth. They weren’t able to even get a vote on any of those issues during the time that they were in Congress, and, actually, there’s never been a vote on an environmental justice bill in Congress ever since this has become an issue.
Under Obama things got a lot better, but they still weren’t perfect. He was able to really focus on environmental justice during his administration. They cleared a backlog of civil rights complaints, they really elevated the idea of environmental justice, and the Office of Environmental Justice was really, really productive during that period. They were able to go out and give grants, and they had meetings and really talked to communities, and it really did a lot of education during that point.
But even then, there was still a lot more that could have been done. There could have been a stronger executive order that was put forward, to maybe have a federal environmental justice advisor at every federal agency, or we could have tried to push further to codify a lot of the things into law that the executive order professed, and those things were never done.
So there was a lot of progress, and then things just kind of stalled a little bit. And now the movement is at a point where a lot of the protections they had been relying on are possibly in retreat.
JJ: The fact that the Trump White House is looking to eliminate the EPA’s Office of Environmental Justice, that’s no surprise, and it fits with everything else. They’re doubling down on this ideological twist, if you will, that you note predates them, that comes really from Bush Jr., this effort to say, oh, sure, all people deserve protection from environmental harm.
TB: Right. And some of the people we talked to, they called it the “all lives mattering” of environmental justice. The idea that, yes, of course, everyone should not be subjected to intense environmental pollution. And, yes, you do want to have protection for everyone. But by not focusing on the people who currently do not have those protections, you’re basically ensuring that they never will.
Phys.Org (1/20/16)
JJ: I just want to cite the work of Paul Mohai, from the University of Michigan, who researched the chicken-or-the-egg question in terms of environmental racism. You know, do polluting industries cause white people to move out, or people of color to move in (for lack of options, for example)? Or do companies locate polluting industries and hazardous waste facilities in minority and poor communities? And he found that it’s the latter, that existing minority communities are targeted. It’s not happenstance, and class has a lot to do with it, but it’s not class alone. There’s this irreducibility of racist impacts that it seems to me the whole environmental justice movement is about, and I guess I’m asking what one of the sources in your piece asks: Do we have to prove this all over again?
TB: A lot of work has been done to tie a lot of zoning issues to environmental justice. Think about whatever community your listeners may have grown up in; think about where facilities were sited in your community. Were they in the more affluent areas, with tree-lined streets, and along the waterfront in a very affluent part of town? No, they were probably—maybe they’re on the waterfront, but they were on a part near a landfill and near, you know, a power plant, and near dilapidated buildings or more industrial areas. And there are always homes still around there.
So you have to think about the people who are maybe not allowed to, either through restrictive covenants or other more blatant reasons, not allowed to move into some of those nicer places, some of those more affluent places, and had to settle or had to move and make their homes in communities in places that were less desirable, less affluent areas or generally less desirable areas. So that’s definitely a part of it.
And when you don’t take into account the history of the way that communities are formed or have been formed in our country, you’re in danger of ignoring an entire section of the population that needs that special attention, or needs, at least, that focused attention, in order to make sure that they aren’t being unduly harmed.
JJ: Yeah. I cited the Mohai research, because I think sometimes people think that environmental justice is about the feeling that some people are disproportionately impacted, or it’s just a sense that we have—and people should understand that there’s plenty of data to back it up.
I wanted to bring you back for just a moment. In the piece, you talk about one of the early beginnings of the environmental justice movement, in Afton, North Carolina, and you cite a pastor who was one of the people resisting a landfill there. And what he says is so important: He says, “Nobody thought people like us would make a fuss.” And so we really are talking about political voice.
And that seems to be what the Flint story is about, too. It’s not just the water; it’s the way the community was treated when they complained. It really is a story about political agency as well.
TB: That’s a main tenet of environmental justice, that the communities that are impacted have a voice, their voices are listened to, and they’re taken into account before decisions are made. And I think that definitely, that’s what you saw in Flint. That was where you had people complaining for months and months and months, and they were literally being dismissed, and told that they were wrong and that there was nothing wrong, even though we now know that it was the state and then the federal regulators who were doing something wrong.
Environmental justice, when I think about it, a lot of times I think of the idea of “not in my backyard.” There are certain communities that if something were to happen, they’re able to call their local congressman, or their city council member or the mayor, and get a direct line and complain, maybe because they have donated money for a campaign, or maybe because they’re politically connected in some other way, and their concerns are listened to.
But there are other people who, whether they are minorities, or whether they are low-income, or whether they just don’t have a lot of political clout, are often cast aside, and their issues are not championed in the same way as someone who is a little bit more connected would be. And so when you have something “not in my backyard” from these more politically connected people, it still goes in someone’s backyard, and those backyards are often the people who are low-income, minority or speak a different language.
***
Janine Jackson: By April 2018, a judge was calling an agreement to screen Flint’s children for learning disabilities a “win/win situation for all sides.” The state cut off free bottled water for residents, whether or not their tap water was safe. And, to complete the circle, Michigan decided to let Nestlé extract more spring water to sell for profit.
It shouldn’t take much to connect these things, which is what Peggy Case, president of Michigan Citizens for Water Conservation, did when she spoke with us in April 2018. First, we noted that when media said Nestlé faced a fight moving into Michigan, her group was who they were talking about.
Peggy Case: Flint “get[s] money taken away from them; Nestlé gets profits given to them, in the form of free water. It’s just completely unjust.”
It took a nine-year court battle and a million dollars to win a case. It was a partial victory. We didn’t get Nestlé out of there. They had to reduce their pumping by a half, down to 218 gallons per minute, and the judge ruled that anything more than that is damaging to the environment.
So that’s a court precedent case that still stands on the books, and it’s important to know that, because almost two years ago, Nestlé applied for a permit to increase their pumping at a well in Evart, Michigan, 20 miles down the road from where the original battle was, to 400 gallons per minute, the exact amount they were told they really couldn’t take from Mecosta.
It’s spring water, which is bottled as “Ice Mountain,” and they were given an increase of 100 extra gallons per minute, with no public comment, no chance for anybody to go through the proper procedure, and we think it really violated the existing water withdrawal laws. Then they tacked on another 150 when they applied for the 400 permit. So it gets very complicated after a while, and your head starts to spin. But the bottom line is that Nestlé’s wanting to take even more out of a stream that’s already damaged. So of course we’re contesting that again.
And I just wanted to say that I’m really glad that you started your comments out by mentioning Flint, because that’s been really significant for us. We have been connected to the Flint battles over water from the beginning. We were invited to come and consult in Flint four years ago, when things first began to develop. We find it totally outrageous that Flint is still in the condition that it’s in, and people are getting shut off from their water.
And you mentioned the high water bills. They’re even higher than you suggested. Some people we know are paying $350 or $400 a month for water that they still can’t drink.
JJ: Wow.
PC: And at the same time, the water that the city claims is good water, now, people are being shut off from that water as well. It’s not just that they’re not delivering bottled water to people; they’re also cutting people off at the tap, in the same way that they’ve been doing in Detroit now for a number of years. We think those issues, Detroit and Flint, are intimately related to what’s going on with Ice Mountain.
Before the Flint crisis, the state had cut Flint off of revenue-sharing money that could have been used to fix their infrastructure. They get money taken away from them; Nestlé gets profits given to them, in the form of free water. It’s just completely unjust.
JJ: There’s not been a tremendous amount of coverage, but those stories that have existed, that are deeper, will mention that this has been a twisty road for Nestlé, and that in fact they were initially rejected by the state’s water withdrawal assessment tool, that said, “You’re going to harm streams, you’re going to harm fish.”
But Nestlé appealed that decision, and it’s that appeal that is now being approved. So it’s not as though it was always obvious, you know, there’s no environmental impact, or no harm here.
PC: Yeah, the water assessment tool, which they got scored a D on it—that’s the lowest grade you can get—so they didn’t pass that. So they go to the site-specific review, which is not site-specific at all. It’s a computer model. It takes place in an office. They never visit the actual site to determine what’s really going on there. So in both cases, you’re dealing with computer models; you’re not dealing with reality.
Whereas, we walk out and walk around in the woods and tromp around in the streams and the wetlands, and take reporters who are interested to look at the actual site where the streams are dried up, where Nestlé claims that water is pumping at 250 gallons per minute, and you’re looking at a puddle that’s one-foot wide and there’s no water moving in it at all.
They were given a lot of expert testimony, legal testimony, extensive, that was submitted as part of those 80,000 comments. They chose to ignore that as well.
JJ: I guess it’s a question of, “Who are you going to believe, me or your lying eyes?” Because Nestlé’s natural resources manager for Michigan says, “We never take out more than nature’s bringing back in.”
PC: Yes, that’s probably Arlene, right?
JJ: Yes.
PC: Yes. We’ve gone to their dog-and-pony shows, which is what we call them, where they do their PR work. It’s very fancy, charts and graphs, and they keep passing the same information out to people all the time.
The other issue is that they create 3,000 plastic bottles—I can’t remember whether it’s in an hour or what. So there’s the plastic bottle issue as well. Another story.
JJ: What would you say to people who hear that now a company, Nestlé or another company, is coming to their community to pump their water out from under them?
PC: One of the things that has to happen is that people have to strengthen the laws that are supposed to be protecting the water. Because we do have the public trust doctrine in Michigan, which requires that the state of Michigan protect the water for all of us. And if that were actually honored, they wouldn’t be able to come and take it and send it off in bottles elsewhere, and they wouldn’t be allowed to destroy the environment.
In 2008, however, the state of Michigan weakened its laws a bit. They gave themselves the loophole to send it out as much as they wanted to, in small plastic bottles that end up in the Pacific Ocean. There’s some pieces of that Safe Drinking Water Act that could be used by the government to protect the water, but they don’t choose to use those pieces of the law.
So I would tell people, “Get those laws in place that actually make the government protect the water.”
Particularly it’s important that the state laws get strengthened, and that the people who are paying attention continue to put pressure on the various agencies to do it.
***
JJ: We’ll end on that note of people paying attention and applying pressure. That was Peggy Case of Michigan Citizens for Water Conservation. Before her you heard Talia Buford of ProPublica and Chris Savage of Electablog.com. And that’s it for CounterSpin for this week.
CounterSpin is produced by the national media watch group FAIR. We’re engineered by Erica Rosato. I’m Janine Jackson. Thanks for listening to CounterSpin.
This post was originally published on FAIR.
Throughout the world, scientists are speaking out like never before. They’re talking about an emergency situation of the health of the planet threatening “complex life,” including, by default, human life.
It’s scary stuff. On this subject, America’s green NGOs prefer to address the danger by sticking to a middle ground, don’t scare people, too much doom and gloom backfires, turns people off, it’s counterproductive.
However, emergencies have been happening for some time now. So, it’s kinda hard to ignore. In fact, that’s why it’s so obviously easy to declare emergencies today, yesterday, and the day before yesterday and many yesterdays before that. In other words, the house has been on fire for some time but the fire engines never show up.
A recent fundamental study discusses the all-important issue of failing support of complex life:
Humanity is causing a rapid loss of biodiversity and, with it, Earth’s ability to support complex life.
The ramifications are unnerving. Accordingly, Earth’s ability to support complex life is officially at risk. That’s what the scientists are implying within the meaning of the article’s title: “Understanding the Challenges of Avoiding a Ghastly Future.”
Indeed, the article identifies a life or death chronology, or summation, of all of the emergencies already underway. That’s real! Moreover, the risk of a “ghastly future” is not taken lightly; rather, the heavily researched article includes high-powered renowned scientists authoring one of the most significant articles of the 21st century, boldly describing risks of an offbeat pathway to a ghastly future, therefore begging the question of what a ghastly future really looks like.
An armchair description of a ghastly future is a planet wheezing, coughing, and gasping for air, searching for non-toxic water, as biodiversity dwindles to nothingness alongside excessive levels of atmospheric CO2-e, bringing on too much heat for complex life to survive. Sound familiar? In part, it is.
Along the way, the irretrievable loss of vertebrates, or complex life forms like wild mammals, birds, reptiles, and amphibians have reduced to 5% of the planet’s total biomass. The remaining 95%: (1) livestock (59%) and (2) humans (36%). (Bradshaw, et al) How long does that cozy relationship last?
It’ll likely last for decades, maybe, but probably not for centuries. But then again, nobody really knows for sure how long it’ll last. Meanwhile, the human version of complex life resides in comfortable artificial lifestyles framed by cement, steel, glass, wood, and plastic, and surrounded by harmful fertilizers, toxic insecticides, and tons of untested chemicals. There are more than 80,000 chemicals registered for use in the U.S., most of which have not been studied for safety or toxicity to humans.
As a consequence of how artificial lifestyles influence how people view the world, it’s no surprise that Disneyland is a huge success, a big hit, with its flawless artificiality that offers a comfort zone for families within its mastery of hilarious bio-diverse imagery, all fake.
But, while Disneyland prospers, biodiversity is on a slippery slope, barely hanging on for dear life at 5% of total biomass. Once that final 5% goes down the drain, which now looks promising, human life will be all that remains along with herds of cows, pens of pigs, and coops of chickens. Phew!
Already, it is mind-blowing that two-thirds of wild vertebrate species have disappeared from the face of the planet within only 50 years, a world-class speed record for extinction events. At that rate, the infamous Anthropocene will usher in the bleakest century since commencement of the Holocene Epoch of the past 10,000-plus years, especially in consideration of the remorseful fact that, over the past 300 years, global wetlands have been reduced to 15% of their original composition.
That one fact alone, as highlighted in the Bradshaw report, describes an enormous hole in the lifeblood of the planet. Wetlands are the “kidneys for the world’s landscape” (a) cleansing water (b) mitigating floods (c) recharging underground aquifers, and (d) providing habitat for biodiversity. What else does that?
Once wetlands are gone, there’s no hope for complex life support systems. And, how will aquifers be recharged? Aquifers are the world’s most important water supply. Yet, NASA says 13 of the planet’s 37 largest aquifers are classified as overstressed because they have almost no new water flowing in to offset usage. No wetlands, no replenishment. Ipso facto, the Middle East is on special alert!
Meanwhile, dying crumbling ecosystems all across the world are dropping like flies with kelp forests down >40%, coral reefs down >50%, and 40% of all plant life endangered, as well as massive insect losses of 70% to 90% in some regions approaching wholesale annihilation. It’s entirely possible that the planet has never before experienced this rate of loss.
Alas, the loss of biodiversity brings a plethora of reductions in associated benefits of a healthy planet: (1) reduced carbon sequestration (CO2-e already at all-time highs), (2) reduced pollination (insect wipe-out), (3) degraded soil (especially Africa), (4) foul air, bad water (especially India), (5) intense flooding (especially America’s Midwest), (6) colossal wildfires (Siberia, California, Amazon, Australia), (7) compromised health (rampaging viruses and 140 million Americans with at least one chronic disease, likely caused, in part, by environmental degradation and too much toxicity).
Barring a universal all-hands-on-deck recovery effort of Earth’s support systems for complex life; e.g., revival of wetlands, it’s difficult to conceive of a future without the protection of Hazmat suits.
Integral to the continual loss of nature’s bounty, an overcrowded planet brings in its wake regenerative resource limitations. Accordingly, some estimates claim 700-800 million people already are currently starving and 1-2 billion malnourished and unable to function fully. Um, does that describe life or is it sub-life?
One of the most telling statistics within the Bradshaw report states: “Simultaneous with population growth, humanity’s consumption as a fraction of Earth’s regenerative capacity has grown from ~ 73% in 1960 to 170% in 2016.” Ipso facto, humans are consuming more than one Earth. How long does that last, especially considering the deflating fact that regeneration turned negative, circa 1970s?
Ecological overshoot is a centerpiece of the loss of biodiversity:
This massive ecological overshoot is largely enabled by the increasing use of fossil fuels. These convenient fuels have allowed us to decouple human demand from biological regeneration: 85% of commercial energy, 65% of fibers, and most plastics are now produced from fossil fuels. Also, food production depends on fossil-fuel input, with every unit of food energy produced requiring a multiple in fossil-fuel energy (e.g., 3 × for high-consuming countries like Canada, Australia, USA, and China; overshootday.org). (Bradshaw, et al).
As loss of biodiversity delves deeper into the lifeblood of the planet, it becomes a festering problem that knows no end. Still:
Stopping biodiversity loss is nowhere close to the top of any country’s priorities, trailing far behind other concerns such as employment, healthcare, economic growth, or currency stability. It is therefore no surprise that none of the Aichi Biodiversity Targets for 2020 set at the Convention on Biological Diversity’s (CBD.int) 2010 conference was met. (Bradshaw, et al)
No surprise there.
Making matters much, much worse:
Most of the nature-related United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) (e.g., SDGs 6, 13–15) are also on track for failure. (Bradshaw, et al)
No surprise there.
Even the World Economic Forum, which is captive of dangerous green-washing propaganda, now recognizes biodiversity loss as one of the top threats to the global economy. (Bradshaw, et al)
No surprise there.
So, where, when, and how are solutions to be found? As stated above, there’s no shortage of ideas, but nobody does the work because solutions are overwhelming, too expensive, too complicated. Yet, plans are underway to send people to Mars!
Meanwhile, the irrepressible global warming fiasco is subject of a spaghetti-type formula of voluntary commitments by nations of the world (Paris 2015) to contain the CO2-e villain, all of which has proven to be nightmarishly inadequate. Human-induced greenhouse gases continue hitting record levels year-over-year. That’s the antithesis of success. According to the Bradshaw report: “Without such commitments, the projected rise of Earth’s temperature will be catastrophic for biodiversity.” Hmm — maybe declare one more emergency. Yes, no?
Alas, it’s difficult to imagine loss of biodiversity beyond what’s already happened with 2/3rds of wild vertebrate life gone in only 40-50 years. Also, not to forget invertebrates. When’s the last time a bug splattered on a windshield anywhere in America?
Looking ahead, the best advice may be to make preparations for universal pandemonium, which coincidentally is the namesake of the Capitol (Pandemonium) of Hell in John Milton’s Paradise Lost, circa 17th century England.
What to do? Maybe forego any new emergency declarations (the current crop of emergencies, like impending loss of The Great Barrier Reef, are already happening and too much to absorb) and remediation plans that go nowhere, leaving behind a stream of broken promises and false hope, especially after so many years of broken promises and protocols and meetings and orgs that go nowhere, but meanwhile, they preach stewardship of the planet. What’s with that?
Postscript: The scale of the threats to the biosphere and all its life forms—including humanity—is in fact so great that it is difficult to grasp for even well informed experts. (“Underestimating the Challenges of Avoiding a Ghastly Future”)
This post was originally published on Radio Free.
Water in a Flint, Michigan, hospital, 2015.
This week on CounterSpin: Michigan’s attorney general has indicted nine state officials, including former Gov. Rick Snyder, the state’s former health director and two of the emergency managers of the city of Flint, for exposing at least 100,000 people to dangerous levels of lead in their drinking water, and for an outbreak of Legionnaires’ disease killed at least 12 people and sickened many more.
In an op-ed for The Hill (1/19/21), Michigan Rep. Dan Kildee called the 2014 decision to switch the source of Flint’s drinking water “one of the greatest environmental injustices in our lifetimes.” Which is true, but “the environment” didn’t do it: It’s often forgotten that Flint was a crisis of democracy—as decision-making had been taken out of the hands of Flint’s elected officials, and given to an “emergency manager” tasked with reining in costs—a system that seems to be used disproportionately in communities of color, taking decisions out of community hands but leaving them to deal with their fallout.
There’s been a $640 million settlement of class action lawsuits, but Michigan Radio (1/11/21) reports that some civic leaders say the deal presents inappropriate hurdles—young children might not get their settlement if they don’t undergo a specific bone lead test—and some question how money could ever compensate Flint residents for months and months of washing and bathing and cooking with bottled water, to avoid exposing themselves and their families to a neurotoxin, all while officials deflected and denied and belittled concerns.
We talked about Flint on CounterSpin, in its particulars and in terms of how it fits into bigger questions around environmental racism, resource control and local governance. In light of the renewed attention around the story—which has not ended, even as media looked away—we revisit some of those conversations this week.
This post was originally published on CounterSpin.
Continue reading THE EXTINCTION OF THE EXTINCTION REBELLION
This post was originally published on My Articles – Everald Compton.
This short film was produced by the Glassbreaker Films team at The Center for Investigative Reporting. Glassbreaker Films is an all-female group of filmmakers working to promote gender parity in investigative journalism and documentary filmmaking. The initiative is funded by The Helen Gurley Brown Foundation.
The 2000 film “Erin Brockovich” seemed like a successful David versus Goliath story. A single mom of three took on PG&E for contaminating drinking water in Hinkley, California, and came out victorious, suing and winning $333 million from the giant utility company. But whatever became of the tiny town?
For the roughly 600 residents who received part of that payout, the ending wasn’t all happy. Residents who lived there in the ‘90s, such as Roberta Walker, say they suffer from residual health problems. And while they can’t disclose how much money they received from the lawsuit, they say it wasn’t enough to keep them afloat for long. Now, 21 years after the lawsuit, it seems the same public health hazard continues to affect the welfare of Hinkley residents.
From natural disasters to national tragedies, the media swarms around major stories, hurling those affected into the spotlight. But what happens after the cameras are gone and the country moves on to the next headline? The Aftermath revisits stories that once dominated the news, investigating where people are now and what has happened since, to tell the story after the story.
For more on The Aftermath series: revealnews.org/theaftermath
This post was originally published on Reveal.
