Between early 2015 and mid-2017, a narrative of environmental injustice that eventually escalated to a federal state of emergency publicly unfolded in the city of Flint, Mich. Headlines accused officials of depraved indifference if not deliberate poisoning, and the public continues to question if lead exposure during the crisis has contributed to a recent decline in reading proficiency scores in Michigan.
The crisis, which has mostly faded from national headlines, is by some measures far from resolved. Flint residents continue to replace city water with bottled water for drinking and bathing. Meanwhile, Michigan pours an estimated $22,000 per day into funding bottled water consumption, even though leading researchers involved in the crisis management maintain that the water now meets EPA lead standards. Furthermore, the lead pipes that, combined with improperly treated water, led to the crisis are not expected to be fully replaced until 2019.
The damage, however, is even more far-reaching than the environment, public health, and test scores. For communities, activists, and experts, the Flint water crisis has also reinforced a burgeoning lack of trust in governmental environmental regulation to provide genuine environmental protection and justice. The decline of these institutions has led these interest groups to seek out alternative modes of governing environmental discourse. However, a philosophical divide has arisen between the various Flint actors on how to accomplish their common objectives realistically, sustainably, and justly.
The Crisis
The problems in Flint began in April 2014, when the city switched from purchasing water treated by the Detroit Water and Sewage Department to building its own pipeline connected to a cheaper water source: the nearby Flint River. Just one month later, Flint residents began complaining about the smell, color, and hardness of the new water, even though it purportedly met all standards. By February 2015, residents like Lee Anne Walters reported skin reactions to their now heavily discolored water. A series of tests confirmed that iron was causing the discoloration, but even more worryingly, the tests detected lead, orders of magnitude above safe levels.
Months of inaction and unconvincing reassurance by Flint emergency management and water officials finally broke when Walters received a draft EPA report from an EPA employee detailing the extent of the contamination in her tap water. According to that report, Walters’ water could have qualified as hazardous material for the amount of lead present in it. The EPA and the Michigan Department of Environmental Quality, the local agency that had neglected to notify the residents of their poisonous water, remained unresponsive, or even dismissive — an EPA spokesperson characterized the employee who had sent Walters the report, Miguel del Toral, as a “rogue employee.”
After several more attempts at acquiring governmental acknowledgement of the problem, Walters eventually took matters into her own hands. She reached out to Professor Marc Edwards at Virginia Tech, an expert on water corrosion in plumbing who previously worked to expose a similar cover-up of severe lead contamination in Washington, D.C in the 2000s.
From Institutional Misconduct to Public Mistrust
After spending nearly a decade in research, activism, and testimony before Congress around the D.C. water crisis, there was a certain inevitability for Edwards in the phone call from Walters. “We knew a Flint was going to happen,” Edwards said in an interview with HPR. “We’d been preparing for this day because we knew it was going to happen.” Edwards attributes his involvement in these crises to his fundamental duty as a citizen and human coupled with his profession: “We acted [upon] the first canon of civil engineering: thou shalt protect the public welfare.” Edwards and his team at Virginia Tech quickly became the face of new, trustworthy researchers in Flint during the crisis.
In the wake of Flint, Edwards places culpability squarely on institutional misconduct rife throughout government agencies, rendering them no longer deserving of public trust. “That’s basically the story of the D.C. and Flint water crises: these were crimes perpetrated by government agencies. The environmental policemen became the environmental criminals,” Edwards explained. He views his role in these situations as one akin to a whistleblower—one who is loyal to the truth above all else, including institutions.
Yanna Lambrinidou, a self-identified anthropologist by training, also began questioning her trust in government institutions after becoming involved in the D.C. crisis. In the intervening years, she co-taught an “ethics in engineering” course at Virginia Tech with Edwards. Lambrinidou now works full-time as an environmental activist and advisor for water regulation related to the Lead and Copper Rule, a federal regulation that sets standards for the presence of lead and copper in public water. “In both the D.C. crisis and the Flint crisis, … [the] EPA was not only complicit but actually very much helped create the crisis,” Lambrinidou told the HPR. These agencies take “a stance of willing and intentional ignorance around the issues” to avoid developing adequately constructive public health protective regulations.
What’s Stopping Them?
Paul Moorcroft, Head Tutor of the Environmental Science and Public Policy undergraduate concentration at Harvard, sees the institutional reticence in the scientific realm as naïveté, but he optimistically observes growing awareness in the current political climate. The ESPP concentration, which Moorcroft describes as an interdisciplinary or transdisciplinary field of study, aims to equip its students to address the complexity and multiple dimensions of environmental problems.
Scientific disinterest in the political or social realm, Moorcroft told HPR in an interview, was really just a longtime “[assumption] that the ways knowledge gets transferred [to policy] are effective,” when in fact there is a disconnect between knowledge produced by scientists and its subsequent implementation. For him, it was through his own work on climate change and forest ecosystems that he realized science and policy were inseparable: “You have to really get into the ways in which science gets used in decision-making, learning about the decision-making processes, and thinking about how can you better facilitate more up-to-date science influencing those processes.”
Activists at the interface of that decision-making process like Lambrinidou and Edwards diagnose the source of trouble deep within the institutions. For Lambrinidou, the conscious, if unwilling, industry-specific negligence is a symptom of troubled power dynamics. Citing the open secret of collusion between the EPA and the water utilities industry, Lambrinidou describes the EPA as “being held hostage” by the industry they are attempting to regulate, known as “regulatory capture.” Subsequently, the EPA’s power to create and enforce public health-protective legislation like the Lead and Copper Rule is significantly weakened.
Lambrinidou also charges the so-called experts of the medical, public health, and environmental health establishments with creating a knowledge hierarchy that does not consider lead in water as a serious form of lead exposure. This deliberate ignorance by the arbiters of the discourse is only confirmed by the negligence, if not blatant dishonesty, of government agencies like the CDC and the EPA during the D.C. and Flint water crises.
For Edwards, the decision-making is shaped by power in a different sense, through what he calls “perverse incentives” within institutions that are focused on self-perpetuation over public good. Invoking David Lewis, an EPA scientist and whistleblower during the ‘90s, Edwards argues that “scientists in these agencies have pressures to find results that promote agency policies.” The D.C. and Flint crises were instances where such institutional pressures had tangible human ramifications that drew public attention.
Furthermore, according to Edwards, the reluctance of scientists to stand up for the truth in these cases is bred into the scientific ethical rhetoric — or lack thereof. He considers science and academia to be willfully blind to the need to engage ethically. Students and current practitioners of science are not adequately equipped with how to behave ethically as a scientist and as a member of society, thus they more easily fall prey to the perverse institutional pressures of funding, fame, and publications. Edwards says scientists today without ethics are no better than used car salesmen: “The public has correctly sensed that we’re in this for ourselves … and the public exists merely to pay our salaries and to keep our institutions afloat.”
Shifting Institutional Paradigms
These deep-seated institutional flaws and weaknesses have created a power vacuum over the public discourse, and activists have yet to come up with a consensus on how to fill it. The ongoing aftermath of the Flint crisis has offered clues into possible routes, though they involve potentially incompatible paradigm shifts.
Moorcroft believes that the system may be self-correcting, perhaps through legal means. “Particularly in the context of the [United States], litigation is a very important way in which — especially these days — environmental issues are being addressed,” he said. The Obama era of environmental regulation recognized that it would be virtually impossible to pass new legislation; instead, environmental initiatives were executed by legally reinterpreting existing statutes. Furthermore, Moorcroft surmises that based on the employment trends of ESPP degree-holders, industries may begin to self-regulate on environmental issues.
For Edwards and Lambrinidou, nothing short of a complete paradigm shift will ameliorate the problem, though they embody a growing rift in exactly what that shift should be. Edwards, whose website Flintwaterstudy.org was the whistleblowing public interface of the Flint crisis management, believes that change could retain existing structures but with a revised rewards system. The new system would preserve the sanctity of objectivity in science by incentivizing those loyal to the truth — like del Toral — to remain so because they can retain their jobs even when the truths are ugly. “At the end of the day, when you’ve selected for a certain subset of skills” –– namely loyalty to the institution above the truth — “why are you surprised when there’s unethical behavior? When there’s no one left who’s ethical to answer the call of something like Flint?” Edwards views Flintwaterstudy.org as the strategy that was necessary to win the “asymmetrical science war,” rather than what he terms “science anarchy” and “postmodern social justice” — what Lambrinidou might refer to more flatteringly as grassroots activism.
At the heart of the matter for Lambrinidou is the power imbalance, and any sustainable change would redistribute the power by redistributing knowledge to the actual stakeholders of these crises. Only people on the ground have enough at stake to enact meaningful change, and such a route would enfranchise those usually excluded and marginalized by the current discourse led by the expert class. Lambrinidou contended, “any expert intervention in a community in crisis ought to consider how power will be given to individuals in the community so that they can take on new positions that establish themselves as credible and powerful voices that are there to bring change.”
Lambrinidou was careful to distance herself from Flintwaterstudy.org and its expert-directed strategy. She takes issue with the “imposition of solutions” of expert-led discourse “when the people are still suffering profoundly and are kept out of the negotiation tables.” In her view, the management of the Flint crisis was just another turn in a cycle of marginalization and disenfranchisement without due empowerment.
In return, Edwards singles out Lambrinidou’s democratizing methodology as inappropriately sought social justice. “They don’t seem to understand that social justice is subjective and something that’s unscientific, and that we decide those messy problems with politics and democracy.”
Despite their criticisms and the perceived inertia, all three are optimistic that change is on the horizon, perhaps through internal self-correcting forces. Edwards retains some hope for future generations that “are feeling all kinds of angst” about these institutional injustices, though they wield a double-edged sword as both the “greatest hope” but also “most likely to be led astray.” Moorcroft predicts that the current trend towards scientific and political collaboration will “certainly continuing for the time being,” and Lambrinidou is inclined to agree: “We haven’t yet as a society been interested in confronting the harm” perpetrated by our institutions, but “I don’t think there will be silence forever.”
Image Credit: Flickr/US Department of Agriculture