We should be allowed to destroy only what we ourselves can re-create. We cannot re-create this world. We cannot re-create “wilderness.” We cannot even, truly, re-create ourselves. Only our behavior can we re-create, or create anew.
—Alice Walker, “Everything Is a Human Being,” Living by the Word (1989)
I.
The Flint River shone, as bright as if it were its own source of light. Trees tilted toward their own reflections, their leaves thick with shades of green that can be found only in late August. Just off the riverbank, a few miles outside of downtown Flint, about thirty people gathered. Kathleen Gazall was one of them, the architect and city booster. So was Congressman Dan Kildee and Steve Carmody, the Michigan Radio reporter. It was an eclectic group brought together by the Flint River Watershed Coalition for one of its summer paddles.1 That afternoon in 2016, the group rubbed sunscreen into their skin, tugged down the brims of their hats, climbed into plastic kayaks, and, for the next few hours, rowed through the water toward Vietnam Veterans Park. The river was calm and wide, curving around woodlands and meadows, under bridges, and through city neighborhoods. For a while, the white spider-legged water tower at the treatment plant stood before them, straight ahead, like a steeple, or a setting sun.
The problem is not the river. That was the message of the watershed coalition. The drinking water wasn’t dangerous because the river itself was poisonous, as so many assumed, remembering the long shadow of the polluting past. The waterway was in fact becoming healthier all the time, with the advent of environmental laws, the decline of industry, and the day-to-day work of river recovery groups. In the years leading up to the water crisis, nearly four hundred species of birds, reptiles, and fish (some even safe to eat) had been spotted in the Flint River and its tributaries. Even bald eagles had returned.2 The river’s mouth was in the Shiawassee National Wildlife Refuge, a haven for tens of thousands of migratory birds. From there it joined a chain of waterways that flowed out toward the Saginaw Bay and on to the Great Lakes.3
The coalition had supported the temporary switch to the river “as an opportunity for education about a fabulous resource,” said Rebecca Fedewa, the red-headed director.4 “‘Look, now you’re drinking it!’” Had the move been handled well, “it could have been tremendous.” But it wasn’t. It had brought devastation. One consequence among many was that it perpetuated myths about the river. Fedewa’s heart sank when she saw phrases like “the toxic Flint River” show up in news articles and even in the presidential debate held in Flint.5 She and other volunteers used every tool they had, from an enormous amount of data to social media (#itsnottheriver) to break through the noise. The results were mixed.
The small nonprofit, which relied on volunteers for river cleanup and water monitoring, had big ambitions. Its activities covered all seven counties that touch the river. Its chapters worked on cultivating the Flint River Trail, the downtown river corridor, and the watery stretch that runs through Lapeer County. Through summer paddles and floats, the group sought to end people’s alienation from the river. To the coalition, it was an overlooked wonder in an area that was hungry for beauty. And there was something else: all the communities in the 1,400-square-mile watershed—the city, the suburbs, the outlying rural towns and farms—had a common stake in the river’s health. It was an opening for a divided region to come together, for people to see themselves as connected through the ecological fact of the land they lived upon. If they took better care of their river, perhaps they would take better care of each other, too.
With the crisis, the watershed coalition feared that its support would plummet and the community’s estrangement from the river would only deepen. So it was shocking when the opposite happened. Attendance at the coalition’s 2016 annual meeting broke the all-time record.6 Between thirty and forty people came to each canoeing and kayaking event that year, double the usual number. The cataclysm had made people curious about the river. They wanted to see for themselves.
II.
It took more than two years of squabbling and legal battles, but at the end of 2017 Flint decided to stick with the Detroit water department, forgoing the Karegnondi Water Authority entirely.7 The city was still responsible for the $7 million annual payment for the KWA bonds, but in exchange for signing a thirty-year contract, the Detroit utility—now restructured as the Great Lakes Water Authority, or GLWA—agreed to credit that sum to Flint’s account. The Detroit system would receive the rights to nearly all of what would have been Flint’s share of raw water from the KWA. The deal, approved by Flint’s council, included funds for relieving high water bills and a promise by the governor to put a city representative on the GLWA board. Governor Snyder also tried to persuade the General Motors engine plant on West Bristol Road to return to Flint’s water supply, delivering a letter requesting as much in January 2018. But a GM representative said there were no plans to make the change.8 Other Genesee County communities that had contracted with the KWA began their water switch in November 2017, with the help of an all-new $72 million treatment facility. KWA got its financing in the end, with or without Flint. “Our treatment goal is to match the water quality of the [Detroit] system,” said one of the engineers.
There was still long, hard work to be done rebuilding Flint’s water infrastructure, including the full replacement of thousands of lead service lines. With insufficient funding, this started as an excruciatingly dragged-out process, including pilot projects, pricey contractor bids, and best guesses about where the pipes were actually located.9 For those on the ground, it was maddening. “We need a clear, concise plan of action to replace the pipes so we don’t have to live out of a bottle of water when we’re surrounded by the Great Lakes of Michigan,” declared Yvonne Lewis, one of the community leaders.
So the legal settlement that would replace Flint’s service lines was a breakthrough. It was supplemented by an additional $100 million that came through from the federal government, which included a law change that allowed Michigan to forgive the $20 million that Flint owed in water loans, dating back to 1999. This meant that the city would be able to undertake the wholesale replacement of its pipes, both lead and galvanized steel. It was an almost unprecedented public works project. To date, Madison, Wisconsin, and Lansing, Michigan, were believed to be the only major cities that had fully removed their aging lead-based service lines.
But cities around the country now felt unable to take their pipes for granted. Flint’s story was a wake-up call. A 2016 investigation by the National Resources Defense Council found that fifty-three hundred water systems were in violation of federal lead rules.10
Rural America was vulnerable, too, especially because small utilities, serving a few thousand people or fewer, are given a pass on lead regulations. (They don’t have to treat the water to prevent contamination until lead is discovered, and even then, they’re rarely compelled to remove it.11) Flint helped others to realize the stakes of their public water systems, inspiring communities to examine them with an urgency that had not been seen since the grand old days when they were built. For these modern-day alchemists, though, the trick isn’t to turn lead into gold; it’s to make it disappear.
Over in Lansing, city hall was inundated by calls from people who wanted to know how it had worked this magic. Lansing’s story showed how it could be done. The city, which draws its water from the Saginaw Aquifer, four hundred feet below the surface, had carried out a full pipe replacement program. The overhaul was not prompted by a public health emergency or court order, and it was so efficient and cost-effective residents barely noticed it. “When we show up at homes to replace the lead service lines, people think there’s a problem with the water,” said Steve Serkaian of Lansing’s Board of Water and Light.12 The notion that there was no problem—that the work was preemptive infrastructure improvement—was so unusual that it came as a surprise.
The project began when Virg Bernero, then a Michigan state senator, learned about the lead-in-water crisis in Washington, D.C., in 2004. He and his staff began asking questions of the city’s Board of Water and Light and state agencies. They also contacted Marc Edwards at Virginia Tech. While Lansing had an effective anticorrosion program, and the city’s lead tests appeared fine, “we didn’t have confidence in the results,” Bernero said. By then, he’d learned enough about the loopholes in the Lead and Copper Rule. Given that no amount of lead exposure is safe, his team wanted to err on the side of caution.
Bernero formed a safe drinking water task force that included professors from Michigan State and other experts who “did not have a vested interest in the system such as it was.” Together, they put the system under the microscope. They met with a great deal of defensiveness at first, but in 2004 the BWL’s commissioners accepted the task force’s recommendation to replace all the lead service lines. It got to work on a methodical ten-year, $42 million plan to replace every one of Lansing’s fourteen thousand pipes. (Bernero had the opportunity to oversee it; he was elected mayor in 2006.) The plan went slightly over schedule—the city was hit by the recession and state revenue-sharing cuts, just as Flint was—but by the end of 2016 they were done.
The money for the project came the old-fashioned way—Lansing “just raised the rates,” Bernero explained, referring to water bills. One unusual advantage: unlike Flint’s system, the 130-year-old BWL is a wholly owned city subsidiary, which simplified its ability to build the cost of new infrastructure into its rates.13 Also, while Lansing has a lot in common with Flint—it’s another GM legacy town, one that built Oldsmobiles, and it has roughly the same size population—it was not nearly as challenged by vacancy. It had powerful anchor institutions that sustained it over the years, as the home of the state government and with Michigan State’s campus based just two miles away in East Lansing.
Also, because BWL owns the entire water system, it could replace all parts of the infrastructure without involving homeowners. In other communities, the customer may own some portion of the line leading to their property; if a utility wants to replace it, some of the cost is put on the customer’s tab.14 Many anti-lead advocates claim that utilities should be responsible for the whole replacement: the homeowner didn’t put the lead line in the ground, and in fact it was often legally required to have it there. Homeowners have no meaningful control over the part that is considered their property.
Lansing’s other trick was to design a graceful method for execution that cut the cost and time of pipe replacement in half. After two years of digging trenches, and with the prospect of disrupting untold square miles of streets, sidewalks, and yards, Lansing decided to rethink the way its workers were laying the new lines. Experimentation yielded an innovative technique. All workers had to do was cut two squares in the ground at either end of the line. One exposed the water main and service connection at the curb, and the other exposed the service box. Then, using a special tool invented by engineers in the city’s own machine shop, it took just one elegant motion to thread the old lead pipe out and the new copper pipe in.
“We submit notifications [to residents] to explain what’s happening,” Serkaian said, “because we need permission to enter their basement and disconnect the lead service line to the meter, and hook the meter up to the new copper line. There’s a minor inconvenience for an hour or so in not having water service.” Occasionally, the city also had to issue traffic advisories; vehicles were diverted when crews were working on major streets. But that was it.
Lansing also minimized disruption by mapping out its pipe replacement to follow the construction of another infrastructure improvement: updating its sewage system to better deal with flooding. The sheer scale of the pipe project also had accelerated efficiency built into it. Work crews had done it so many times, they only became faster and more adept. “They’ve learned how to overcome any and all obstacles,” Serkaian said.
It was a promising picture of how to make cities work better. And it cut against the broader pattern. When the 21st Century Infrastructure Commission that Governor Snyder had called for released its report, it laid out how Michigan’s spending on infrastructure is near the bottom nationally. Between 2002 and 2013, it saw the third-largest decline in that allocation as a portion of its GDP.15 This happened even though infrastructure spending brings an almost immediate economic boost. Every dollar that goes into water and sewer projects returns $2.03 in revenue.16 And the benefits for the environment and public health are obvious: for example, the opportunity to stop the 5.7 billion gallons of untreated sewage that had flowed into Michigan waterways since 2008.
Nationwide, states and municipalities have slashed infrastructure spending by about 55 percent since 2003, while federal spending has dropped by almost 19 percent. Infrastructure investment plummeted from a high of 3 percent of the nation’s GDP in the late 1960s to less than 2 percent in 2014.17 It happened at a time that roughly correlates with the abandonment of America’s core cities in favor of sprawling metropolitan regions. Shaken by the Flint water crisis, Congress passed a federal aid package that President Obama signed in the last weeks of his administration that included $20 million in loans for water infrastructure improvements around the country.
Mayor Bernero is sympathetic to competing priorities in local government. But that’s exactly why he felt cities should find out where they stand with their water systems. “We’ve got pipes in the ground in many cities that are close to one hundred years old, aging, underground and easy to ignore,” he said. They have to be replaced eventually anyway—lead ones all the more so—and while it might seem that “no news is good news” when it comes to pipes, any slight change in water chemistry can pose a devastating threat, as it did in Flint and Washington, D.C.
Lansing was fortunate to be able to pay for its new pipes through a simple rate increase. Madison, Wisconsin, used a different model, although it was also served by having a city-owned and -operated system. Within eleven years, it replaced eight thousand lead water lines in a pioneering $19.4 million effort. The city offered $1,000 rebates to homeowners who replaced their own pipes, with the cost averaging $1,300. (Apartment owners paid more.) The reimbursement money came from revenue the Madison water utility received from providing space on its water towers for cellular antennas. The idea of using public money to help pay for replacing private pipes was controversial, especially when some doubted the risk of the lead service lines. But, especially in the wake of the Flint water crisis, the city has received national acclaim.
“Infrastructure issues were never a partisan thing,” Bernero said. “We built this country with the greatest infrastructure in world, which resulted in the most productive society, the most incredible middle class in modern history. Now our infrastructure is beginning to go by the wayside, and there’s this Tea Party mentality that makes people afraid to raise taxes for anything.
“People will suffer,” he said, “and of course, the poor suffer the most. Let’s face it, the rich can insulate themselves from travesty … [they] can afford bottled water. They can move out to suburbs or wherever. The rich have always found ways to insulate themselves. Though ultimately, when we have a complete and utter infrastructure failure … no one is safe.”
America’s lead service lines took decades to install, and even a wholly committed effort to root them out will in turn take years. It’s critical to do so, advocates say, but at the same time, we cannot wait for that to happen. There are other steps we can take now to address lead in drinking water. Among them: taking a closer look at what counts as “lead free” plumbing fixtures; addressing high water bills (since shutoffs cause stagnation, which can worsen contamination); and closing the loopholes in the federal Lead and Copper Rule.
If utilities sampled water in a way that truly set out to find the worst-case levels, between 54 and 70 percent of those with lead lines in their systems would uncover severe contamination, affecting up to 96 million people. That’s according to a study by the American Water Works Association, and it echoes the sampling that was flagged in, for example, New York City schools.18 Yanna Lambrinidou, the medical anthropologist, has continued her advocacy against lead in drinking water, and through public information requests, she’s found other ways that water authorities undermine the spirit of the Lead and Copper Rule. Philadelphia’s water department, for example, instructed samplers to “run only the cold water for two minutes” before taking a sample, since lead dissolves more easily in hot water. This was similar to stipulations given to people, for example, in Rhode Island and Michigan.19
The EPA, perhaps in an effort to repair its beleaguered reputation, urged state governors, environmental agencies, public health commissioners, and tribal councils to reckon seriously with the Lead and Copper Rule, to warn people about the risks of lead pipes, and to seek ways to go beyond minimum requirements to make water safe.20 Its own reevaluation of the LCR—scheduled for 2017, but delayed—could be an opportunity to address the gaps that are routinely exploited. These include pre-flushing and using small-mouthed bottles, but also the absence of any requirements for testing at schools and the lack of a federal limit on the amount of lead allowed in tap water in any individual home. The LCR formula requires action only when there is excessive lead found in many homes.21
One way or another, the point is to do something—not perpetuate the kick-the-can strategy of past decades. In Michigan, in Snyder’s last year of office, he called for a program to replace every lead line in the state. He also wanted the state to implement lead rules for drinking water that were tougher than the federal regulations, which were, after all, a baseline; states can choose to go further. Maybe, instead of being a national disgrace, the Great Lakes State could become a national model.
III.
Civic Park was looking forward to its one hundredth anniversary. From rise to decline to resurgence: that’s the journey that Pastor Sherman McCathern hoped to see captured in a centennial mural that the church’s Urban Renaissance Center commissioned from an artist.22 In the early months of 2018, the artist, Cardine Humes, who had moved to the area from the South, was hard at work. Bundled in a parka, he painted on an outside wall of the Dort Meats Company on Dupont Street, bringing color and shadow to ordinary neighborhood scenes, making them as grand as anything: a school, a lawn, a pine tree, children at play. In the center, community leaders are pictured, planning for a better future.
If there’s any message to take from Flint, not only the water crisis, but its full history, it’s that nobody has a monopoly on wisdom. Lived experience is as important as technical training. One of the ideals of environmental justice—that people should have a meaningful voice in the decisions that affect them—isn’t intended just as a respectful courtesy; it also leads to better decisions. The people of Flint had no say at all in what came out of their showers and kitchen sinks, certainly not with four consecutive state-appointed emergency managers in place when critical changes were made to the city’s water supply. Residents used every democratic means available to them—meetings, protests, grassroots organizing, citizen science—to spotlight the deteriorating quality of their water. Not only did their concerns go unheard but there was no accountability for poor decisions made under the EMs’ tenures, at least not until states of emergency had been declared at every level of government.
The Michigan Civil Rights Commission, which investigated the Flint water crisis, ultimately recommended that the state’s EM law be replaced or restructured. It specifically said that EMs should have regional authority, rather than city authority, because many of the most serious problems plaguing cities are not contained by their own borders. Cities are connected to their neighbors, and always have been. For the same reason, the commission suggested that a form of regional government, or at least regional cooperation, be implemented that would require core cities and suburbs to work together collaboratively to solve the problems to which they are both party. In a separate investigation, a joint select committee of the Michigan Legislature suggested that the single emergency manager be replaced with a three-person team, including a local ombudsman, and making EMs liable “for certain harms they cause.” Some Flint leaders wanted to see the oversight system completely abolished.23
What of the other principle of environmental justice—that specific minority groups not be disproportionately burdened by environmental harm? The people making the ill-fated decisions in Flint were not necessarily racists and did not mean to treat the city differently because most of its residents are black, according to the civil rights commission. But, it said in its report, “the disparate response” to the crisis—the delays and dismissals—was “the result of systemic racism that was built into the foundation and growth of Flint, its industry, and the suburban area surrounding it.”24 Decades of segregation created a cascading series of problems that prove the error in the “separate but equal” doctrine espoused by a flawed U.S. Supreme Court decision more than a century earlier.25 Current civil rights law is not adequate to address the problems in the state, the commission argued. It’s designed for individual complaints, with proof that someone acted in an overtly racist way. That does not appear to be the story of the Flint water crisis. One decision after another, one policy after another: they were colorblind. Nobody explicitly argued that Flint should settle for water with high lead levels because it is mostly an African American city or because so many residents are poor. And yet.
“If this was in a white area, in a rich area, there would have been something done,” said Yolanda Figueroa, a Flint resident, at one of the civil rights hearings. “I mean, let’s get real here. We know the truth.”26
Half a century after the civil rights era, segregation persists so much that core cities serve as proxies for communities of color. Disinvesting in cities means disinvesting in them. The legacy of housing discrimination deprived Flint of its political clout—not only by losing half its population, but by losing the power to elect its own empowered city representatives. The commission itself acknowledged that it had failed to take the residents’ concerns about the water seriously. Way back in January 2015, in the midst of the TTHM crisis, its staff was among those who had received coolers and bottled water from the state for its Flint office.27 The report said that most of the commission had some vague “awareness of what was happening.” The lack of serious attention spoke “to the level of importance we ascribed to ‘those’ people in Flint at the time, not that they didn’t exist.”
People in Flint were frustrated by the unlikelihood of the state dismissing their complaints had they lived in wealthier and whiter communities. African American leaders in Flint pointed out that the water crisis didn’t seem to register until “our white sisters”—people such as LeeAnne Walters and Melissa Mays, who were also married and mothers—became the face of it. Putting them forward in media accounts was a strategic choice, they said. But not only people in Flint. “I mean, everybody on the street was asking that question, and by asking the same question, everybody had the same answer. The answer was ‘no, it probably wouldn’t have,” said Ken Sikemma, co-chair of the task force that Governor Snyder commissioned to investigate the crisis.28
That erasure didn’t really end, even when the Flint disaster was widely known. There was an addiction to hero narratives, as Yanna Lambrinidou has described it. As the news story began to shift uneasily into history, the narrative tended to single out one or two figures—especially Marc Edwards and Mona Hanna-Attisha—while minimizing the role played by community organizers well before they came along. The hero narrative replicated a dangerous dynamic of “saviors” and “saved” that disempowered the community all over again, and what’s more, it was simply false; it didn’t sync with what actually happened. As writer Derrick Z. Jackson observed, in later years, when there were major environmental or social justice awards to give, many with large cash prizes, they typically went to non-black figures: Walters, Edwards, Hanna-Attisha.29 Of course, the trio indeed made major contributions to bringing the dangers of Flint’s water to light, and they deserved recognition for it. But those who organized the early protests, the pastors and local businesses that ran bottled water drives, the local politicians who spoke out—they were missed by late-coming national media and then overlooked again by the awards circuit. These anonymous black residents of Flint “have not been recognized as possessing the agency of non-black figures involved in the crisis,” Jackson wrote. “They figured into the national narrative almost exclusively as helpless or hapless victims.… America still too often requires a non-black hero or victim before it can turn proper attention to an issue that primarily affects African Americans.”
Environmental disasters don’t solely affect people of color—just look at Love Canal or Toms River, New Jersey, both middle-class white areas, or the extraordinary lead-in-water crisis in the nation’s capital city. But the higher probability of them is in the DNA of segregation. That’s the logical outcome of concentrated vulnerability. Not long after the Love Canal movement, a North Carolina community protested chemical dumping in a landfill near a residential neighborhood where mostly poor African Americans lived. Polychlorinated biphenyls, or PCBs, were contaminating the soil. The protests won the support of the NAACP and led to two national studies that described how hazardous waste facilities were consistently located in places where people of color tended to live. This fact is so persistent that race is the very best predictor of the presence of pollutants, even when controlled for other factors such as income and property values.30
In an echo of the racialized practices of the mainstream housing industry, the land where it is most cost-effective for a company to build its hazardous facility usually happens to be near where black and brown people live. Their very presence is part of what, historically, makes the land cheap. The downward cycle continues as the industrial polluter devalues nearby homes even more, undermining residents’ stability and the area’s tax revenue. While the polluter partly makes up for that devaluation by paying its own share of taxes, the dynamic still results in one of the trademarks of environmental injustice: the polluter’s contributions create equal benefits for all the region’s residents—taxes, jobs, economic stimulus—but only one group of people bears nearly all the harms and risks, often without their knowledge or consent.
In Flint, about 37 percent of the residents are white. But as researcher Laura Pulido points out, “they suffer a fate similar to their Black neighbors insofar as the entire city is racialized as Black.”31 (To say nothing of other communities in Flint, particularly the sizable Hispanic population.) That’s an echo of the days of redlining and racially restrictive covenants, when a neighborhood could be black or it could be white, but never both.
The more that cities are divided by race and class, the more that environmental racism becomes likely. And this isn’t just a local metropolitan trend anymore; regional inequality skews it even further. In 2017, the Lincoln Institute for Land Policy examined shrinking legacy cities in the Midwest and Northeast—cities such as Flint, Akron, Syracuse, Muncie, Camden, Scranton, and Albany. Of the twenty-four locations it looked at, twenty were home to at least one Fortune 500 company between 1960 and 2015. Many were home to five or more. Today, only twelve are. Thousands of jobs—between 2 and nearly 40 percent—were erased in nearly all the cities in that time. Flint had the largest drop. (It was home to 62,700 jobs in 2002 and only 39,200 in 2014.) Some of these jobs moved to the suburbs, which grew over the same time period. However, as wealth and economic opportunity have concentrated in a tiny handful of major American cities, even these suburban metropolitan areas are losing ground. And when inner-ring suburbs start looking like core cities—whether because of pollution or crime or unemployment or the presence of people of color—exurbs are built farther and farther away.
To avoid association with hollowed-out cities that have become largely black and poor, some suburban communities have changed their names, zip codes, and school districts. School secessions go back to 1954 in the South; it was a supposedly race-neutral way to redraw the lines of segregation after the U.S. Supreme Court’s Brown v. Board of Education ruling.32 Today, a “local control” movement has led to a wave of communities splintering off into new majority-white school districts. In Boston in 2012, the Hyde Park neighborhood won its battle to change its zip code so that it would no longer have the same postal number as neighboring Mattapan.33 In 2017, Flint Township, the same suburb that allowed the GM engine plant to hook on to its water, made moves to change its name to Carman Hills and get new zip codes. “You gotta take every step to secure your business and that got me thinking separating ourselves from Flint started to make sense,” a dive shop owner in Flint Township told a local news station.34
Despite trying to make ever-finer distinctions between “here” and “there,” the dividing lines are not always neat. Andrew R. Highsmith, in his history Demolition Means Progress, observes that the “ascendance of the suburbs during the twentieth century was without question one of the most consequential developments in American history.” But while it fostered “easy stereotypes of suburban plenty,” there were also “schoolchildren attending study halls in gymnasiums, taking shop classes in converted coal sheds, and learning to read in tents”—images that defied assumptions about suburbia.35 That’s true in the modern era, too. With the rise of exurbs and regional inequality, and with larger numbers of racial minorities and immigrants moving to the suburbs—more than half of African Americans nationwide live in suburbs now (most immigrants, too)—the distinctions have blurred.36 Nobody has a single story. People in every kind of community, from city to suburb to countryside, experience a particular mix of privileges and disadvantages through which they navigate their lives.
At the same time, the pattern is plain and must be named. The structural underpinnings of environmental racism, replicated again and again, are what the Michigan Civil Rights Commission was trying to get at when it asserted that “it is not enough to say the result is unintended.” We must recognize that “being colorblind is not the solution, it is the problem.”