From xxxxxx <[email protected]>
Subject Will Flint Water Trial Spark More Court Battles for Environmental Justice?
Date February 23, 2021 1:00 AM
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[The stakes for environmental racism need to be even higher than
jail time. What if any company responsible for major ecological
devastation was dissolved? Or politicians colluding with or enabling
environmental destruction could not hold office?]
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WILL FLINT WATER TRIAL SPARK MORE COURT BATTLES FOR ENVIRONMENTAL
JUSTICE?  
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Leanna First-Arai
February 3, 2021
Truthout
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_ The stakes for environmental racism need to be even higher than
jail time. What if any company responsible for major ecological
devastation was dissolved? Or politicians colluding with or enabling
environmental destruction could not hold office? _

,

 

For the first time
[[link removed]]
in Michigan’s 184-year history, an official having served as the
state’s chief executive is facing criminal charges related to their
time in office — for willful neglect in a drinking water catastrophe
that’s been likened to genocide and described as a textbook example
of environmental racism.

On January 14, Solicitor General Fadwa Hammoud announced a flurry of
criminal charges against former Gov. Rick Snyder, seven other former
state officials and one current official — 42 counts in total
[[link removed].]
— for alleged involvement in the water crisis, during which
astronomically high levels of lead in the city’s water started
making people sick after officials switched the city’s water source
from Detroit water to Flint River water and opted out of paying to
prevent corrosion
[[link removed]]
in an attempt to steer the city out of bankruptcy. Snyder faces two
counts of willful neglect, a misdemeanor carrying a maximum sentence
of a year and a $1,000 fine. Charges against other officials include
[[link removed].]
perjury, obstruction of justice, extortion and involuntary
manslaughter. An Environmental Protection Agency (EPA)
[[link removed]]memo
[[link removed]]
from 2015 alerting state officials to high lead levels, as well as
call records
[[link removed]]
obtained by _The Intercept, _among troves of other evidence, suggest
state officials knew about the threats lead and Legionnaires’ posed
to residents, but failed to inform the public.

The Flint water crisis
[[link removed]],
which began in 2014, has been linked to 12 deaths
[[link removed]]
and at least 90 people
[[link removed]]
who got sick with Legionnaires’ disease — a severe form of
pneumonia typically stemming from an infection — according to state
data. An investigation
[[link removed]]
by _PBS’s_ “Frontline” suggests dozens of additional deaths
linked to the crisis went uncounted. It’s also taken a long-term
toll on Flint’s children and families. Between the 2012-2013 and
2018-2019 school years, the district saw a 56 percent rise
[[link removed]]
in special education students, according to
[[link removed]]_Education
Week_
[[link removed]].

Snyder’s lawyer has called the charges
[[link removed]]
“ridiculous” and “politically motivated,” and is working to
get them dismissed
[[link removed]].
Some organizers question whether the criminal charges against
individuals will result in any systemic change to prevent similar
atrocities from happening in the future. Other environmental justice
organizers and attorneys around the U.S. argue that the charges are a
relief and a potential catalyst for more accountability for polluters
and corrupt officials, especially given the Biden administration’s
latest wave of executive orders addressing the climate crisis, which
instill a commitment to environmental justice across federal agencies.

Environmental law professor at Michigan’s Wayne State University,
Noah Hall, calls criminal law the “ugliest last resort of the legal
system,” but told _Truthout _that when government officials break
the law, victims of injustice deserve to see the law come down in a
way that affirms the wrong that was committed to them, which rarely
happens in cases of “white-collar” crime. Hall served as special
assistant attorney general for the state’s investigation into the
Flint crisis for three years.

“The story line of Flint shows these systematic problems, but they
were also individual people who made decisions and took actions that
resulted in people losing their lives. It’s not just a failure of
government or a system,” Hall said.

None of the charges against the nine Michigan officials include civil
rights violations.

Anthony Karefa Rogers-Wright, director of environmental justice for
New York Lawyers for the Public Interest, told _Truthout_ that in
addition to illness and death, Flint families are facing factors like
increased medical and mental health care costs that are more difficult
to quantify. “What would they have become if they weren’t
inflicted by not just a level of incompetence or willful ignorance,
but dehumanization?” Rogers-Wright asked. “If you’re going to
put something in a population to keep them down for a generation, it
would be lead,” he said, referring to how lead poisoning has been
shown [[link removed]] to cause
behavioral problems and difficulties learning to listen, speak, read,
write and reason. Rogers-Wright also noted that none of the charges
against the nine Michigan officials include civil rights violations.

Lynnette Williams, an ophthalmologist in Memphis, Tennessee, and
community health advocate, is surprised it took this long for
prosecutors to announce the charges. Williams likened the failure to
respond to the water crisis in Flint to former President Trump’s
complete lack of response to the COVID-19 pandemic, which has now
caused over 446,600 deaths in the U.S. “It’s just negligence,”
she told _Truthout._

Williams said she hopes the charges might call attention to the
thousands
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of cities and towns across the U.S., like Memphis, where lead levels
are even higher than Flint’s. Williams has struggled to obtain data
on lead levels in Memphis, where in spite of priding itself on its
municipal water source — an underground aquifer the size of Lake
Michigan — city schools have shown lead levels in water flowing
through fountains, sinks and coolers, up to seven times higher than
the state’s official healthy limit of 20 parts per billion,
according to the
[[link removed]]_Commercial
Appeal_
[[link removed]],
which also characterized the lead crisis in Memphis as the “top
hazard
[[link removed]]”
facing children in the area. According to the Centers for Disease
Control and Prevention (CDC), no level of lead in the blood
[[link removed]] is
safe for children.

In 2019, Williams approached the Shelby County Health Department,
where she often went to seek information for health fairs, for more
information about lead levels in Memphis. After an employee provided
her with a map with census data suggesting children in the
majority-Black parts of the city showed lead levels five times higher
than those in ZIP codes in suburban (and whiter) East Memphis, she
pressed for more information, including an answer to why the city had
stopped publishing an annual epidemiology report, which used to
contain a section on lead levels, in 2016. According to the county
health department website
[[link removed]], a report on
Childhood Blood Level Poisoning is “coming soon.”

The potential for a criminal trial in the Flint case is cathartic for
organizers who have experienced the agony of ongoing health issues to
which it’s taken years to bring research and public attention.

At one visit, Williams was escorted out of the county health
department building by security guards. She says she has since been
denied access to county health department records, and for employment
and volunteer opportunities with the health department. “I get
labeled for just trying to get information,” Williams said. A
spokesperson for the Shelby County Health Department confirmed that
the county’s annual epidemiology reports have been delayed and the
school blood lead testing report is in progress, but declined to
provide an explanation, projected publication dates, or comment on
Williams’s alleged treatment by the department.

The struggle to obtain local and state health data from agencies
charged with regulating pollution also strikes a chord with Maria
Payan, a regional health organizer with the Socially Responsible
Agriculture Project. Payan was forced to move from a home in
Pennsylvania when a factory farm popped up
[[link removed]]
next door and began polluting the water with nitrates, an odorless
pollutant that causes blue baby syndrome and a slew of cancers. “I
am a fanatic on this stuff because I know what can happen,” she
said.

Payan says the potential for a criminal trial in the Flint case is
cathartic for organizers like her who have experienced the agony of
ongoing health issues to which it’s taken years to bring research
and public attention. In trying to track down data about polluting
facilities, Payan has repeatedly experienced gatekeeping and
gaslighting. She’s spent countless hours requesting public records,
only to find empty offices or be tacked with hundreds of dollars in
fees to access the public records. “It seems like [they’ve
forgotten] the people that they are supposed to actually represent,”
she said.

Julia Bernal is an alliance director with the Pueblo Action Alliance,
and a member of the Sandia Pueblo/Yuchi-Creek Nation. She says in her
work protecting the Greater Chaco region in New Mexico from fracking,
organizers targeted wrongdoings by federal agencies like the Bureau of
Land Management and the Bureau of Indian Affairs. But seeing the faces
of powerful people like former Governor Snyder being charged
personally in Flint, she says, is significant.

People who decide to enter public service, Bernal says, could stand to
remember that it’s intended to be just that: public service. “And
if your constituents for years have been protesting and have been
demanding action be done about this crisis, then you’re obviously
being complacent [about] the issue.”

The conditions that led public officials to believe cost-cutting
measures were more important than protecting the health of Flint
residents still exist in marginalized communities all over the
country.

And yet, even if former Governor Snyder spent the rest of his life in
prison for this, it wouldn’t solve the underlying issues that
allowed the Flint water crisis to happen in the first place, Casey
Rocheteau, communications coordinator for the Detroit Justice Center,
told_ Truthout_. The conditions that led public officials to believe
cost-cutting measures were more important than protecting the health
of Flint residents still exist, as does decrepit infrastructure in
marginalized communities all over the country.

The sensation of vindication in watching negligent officials be
subjected to the existing criminal justice system like average people
is understandable, Rocheteau said, particularly because it is so rare.
But we must be careful not to let that sensation function to justify
the system of racial capitalism that produced the Flint crisis in the
first place. “One of the greatest tricks our criminal punishment
system plays on us is making us believe that it is effective because
occasionally powerful people are incarcerated for their actions,”
Rocheteau added.

Perhaps a return in national attention to the Flint water crisis could
serve as a call to think further outside the box about the fundamental
nature of justice. “The stakes for environmental racism need to be
even higher than jail time,” Rocheteau said. “What if it was the
standard that any company responsible for major ecological devastation
was dissolved? Or that any politician colluding with or enabling
environmental destruction was no longer allowed to hold office?”
Other activists and attorneys have pointed to the importance of
restorative justice principles allowing impacted residents to have a
voice in determining how the harm done to them might best be repaired.

More accountability through litigation that requires corporations to
pay for the damage they’ve done could bring momentum to struggles
led by communities facing pollution and climate-related threats, like
Flint. Several state attorneys general, including now-Vice President
Kamala Harris, have brought similar suits against Big Oil companies.
Lauren DeRusha, water campaign director for the nonprofit Corporate
Accountability, explained that corporations have for decades
bankrolled politicians, interfered with policy and misled the public
about the truth of their role in fueling climate change and other
disasters. So litigating against them would be a logical element of a
just transition.

“It’s important for groups to remain in solidarity with each other
and amplify these fights. What happened in Flint will be a landmark
case for other actions that could happen elsewhere.”

These potential payments, known as “climate reparations,” could
begin to address the legacy of colonialism that’s resulted in
disproportionately subjecting low-income and communities of color to
pollution, long-time environmental advocate and former North America
director of the international climate action group 350.org, Tamara
Toles O’Laughlin, said recently on the podcast
[[link removed]]Hot Take
[[link removed]].
O’Laughlin explained that a system of climate reparations could also
go far in funding the expensive job of remediating the toxic sites and
pipes that a Green New Deal would tackle, not to mention the complete
overhaul of infrastructure needed to provide 100 percent clean energy
at a pace fast enough for a chance at dodging the most catastrophic
impacts of the climate crisis.

“We are not in a unique moment, we’re just in a place where
there’s time for real alignment,” O’Laughlin said.

In Flint, a federal judge has granted a preliminary approval for a
$641 million settlement fund
[[link removed]],
80 percent of which would go to children and young adults who were
under 18 during the water crisis. It would be the largest class-action
settlement in the state’s history, the _Detroit Free Press_ reports
[[link removed]],
combining payments from the state, McLaren hospitals and Rowe
Professional Services Co., which did engineering work during the
municipal water switch. Impacted residents can apply for a share of
the funds until March 29.

The remainder of Michigan officials facing charges have a pre-trial
hearing in February. As they watch the potential trial unfold,
organizers say they’ll simultaneously be looking to see how Biden
delivers on his most recent wave of environmental justice commitments
[[link removed]],
like creating a community notification program to allow easy access to
real-time data on environmental pollution and establishing an Office
of Environmental Justice within the U.S. Department of Justice. Those
programs, as well as a commitment to holding polluters accountable,
are outlined only in broad strokes in Biden’s latest executive
orders, but provide a fresh canvas for introducing a process that
could begin to repair a legacy of violations of the right to clean air
and water.

“It’s important for groups to remain in solidarity with each other
and amplify these fights,” Bernal said. “What happened in Flint
will be a landmark case for other actions that could happen
elsewhere.”

Copyright © Truthout. May not be reprinted without permission.
Reprinted with permission.

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_Leanna First-Arai is a freelance journalist who covers environmental
and climate (in)justice. Her work has appeared in Undark, Sierra
Magazine, Yes! Magazine, Outside Magazine, on New England Public Radio
and elsewhere. Follow her on Twitter: @FirstArai
[[link removed]]._

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