Abstract
Abstract
The Flint water crisis occurs at a time when local and global social justice struggles seek to restore the rights of the individual through collective action. This article moves beyond traditional environmental justice arguments of race and class or even debating the rights and wrongs of the Flint water crisis to a more nuanced understanding of ongoing environmental toxic contamination in an age of increased risks, uncertainties, and biopolitics. As the Flint story unfolded in Congressional testimony, legislative hearings, and the media, the public learned of clandestine deals that resulted in the state-sanctioned heavy metal poison contamination of thousands. The Flint water crisis is representative of a form of violent assault against the citizen's health, civic trust, and personhood. Because technological disasters, including those that result in toxic contamination, tend to disrupt or permanently damage the social fabric of the communities where they occur, it is important that we understand how to restore a sense of community facilitation, the repair of social and cultural bonds. This article is not designed to bring forth new revelations of guilt or innocence. Rather, the article advances the environmental justice literature by bridging the knowledge gap in therapeutic justice in corrosive communities. It proposes a framework to serve as a catalyst for healing in a community suffering from toxic uncertainty caused by a shift from policies based on a reliance on rights-based politics to a more ominous notion of decision making rooted in biopolitics.
What we are dealing with in this new technology of power is not exactly society (or at least not the social body, as defined by the jurists), nor is it the individual body. It is a new body, a multiple body, a body with so many heads that, while they might not be infinite in number, cannot necessarily be counted. Biopolitics deals with the population, with the population as a political problem, as a problem that is at once scientific and political, as a biological problem and as power's problem.
Environmental Justice demands that public policy be based on mutual respect and justice for all peoples, free from any form of discrimination or bias
Biopolitics and the Corrosive Community in Flint, Michigan
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I think that one of the greatest transformations political right underwent in the nineteenth century was precisely that, I wouldn't say exactly sovereignty's old right—to take life or let live—was replaced, but it came to be complemented by a new right which does not erase the old right but which does penetrate it, permeate it. This is the right, or rather precisely the opposite right. It is the power to “make” live and “let” die. The right of sovereignty was the right to take life or let live. And then this new right is established: the right to make live and to let die. 3
In other words, biopolitics is regarded as the interaction between biology and politics where a person's biological makeup predisposes them to a host of risks. The Michigan governor's decision to replace locally elected officials represents this new era of political modernity, wherein elected leaders are replaced by technocrats. The traditional sovereignty of the state has a new form of technocratic-autonomy power over the lives of people with the authority to make life enhancing or life-threatening decisions. According to Giroux, 4 “… biopolitics implies that sovereignty has moved away from disciplinary technologies in which power is defined by the right to take life and impose death toward a form of biopower that replaces the power to dispense fear and death ‘with that of a power to foster life—or disallow it to the point of death…’.” 5 The series of decisions impacting the Flint water supply are biopolitical in nature in that politics dictated normal biological means of existence for the residents of Flint. Fiscal constraint, not the lives of the young nor other vulnerable persons, served as the impetus for the decision to change the water supply that also served as a vehicle for neglecting public's safety. The City of Flint knowingly used an infrastructure that would enhance exposure to lead when the water, intended for human consumption and household use, passed through the pipe containing corrosives such as trihalomethanes, a chlorine by-product. As Stone 6 highlights:
Michigan Governor Rick Snyder has been tough on “waste” and is a big fan of restructuring, having controversially set up a system of emergency managers to oversee troubled communities in lieu of locally elected officials. One of the latest victims of this process is Flint, Michigan, a rust-belt ruin, financially distressed since the decline of its auto industry.
In April, 2014, Flint's state-appointed emergency manager changed the city's water supply from Detroit's Lake Huron treated water with anticorrosives to water from Flint River, 7 in a poorly thought out cost-saving maneuver. They did not add anticorrosives to the Flint system, as that would have cost $100/day.
This series of decisions is rooted in politicoeconomic technocracies of power without a regard to the fiduciary responsibilities by such emergency managers appointed to serve the communities they govern placing the interests that prioritized saving money over the health and safety of the community's residents. 8
In the case of the toxic exposures in Flint, social scientific literature highlights that communities tend to respond in either a therapeutic or a corrosive manner. As noted by Miller et al., 9 a therapeutic community response is typically associated with natural disasters such as earthquakes, floods, or tornadoes. Therapeutic communities typically display “[h]igh levels of mutual helping often intensely materialize, and previous community conflicts and race, ethnic, and social class barriers appear temporarily to fade away.” 10 The uncontrollable nature and the perception that the natural disaster is an “act of God” 11 leave survivors with no one to ascribe blame. In Flint, replacement of unsafe infrastructure and clean up procedures allows for some psychoemotional closure to take place. It is no one person, institution, or group of persons or group of institutions' actual fault; communities tend to come together and foster a sense of common mutual aid and comfort to others impacted one way or another by this natural disaster. Essentially, a corrosive community is characterized by social disruption, a lack of consensus about environmental degradation, and general uncertainty. Moreover, it is more likely to emerge after a technological disaster. 12 Victims of toxic exposure environmental disasters are oftentimes trapped in a chaotic, nonlinear, and extended trauma rooted in the production of fear of ongoing health consequences. As noted by Scott et al., 13 “Perceived loss of control leads the public to lose trust in regulatory agencies, government, and officials because citizens regard such disasters as emanating from the failure of these actors and agencies to do the job entrusted to them. 14 ” Damage to the bonds of social trust continues when secrecy and nontransparency create long-term uncertainty. Community residents are faced with the essential questions: Who did it? Why did this happen? The ongoing issues and concerns with toxic contamination are often never forgotten and have numerous social and psychological impacts. Places are no longer safe and a constant sense of fear and alertness becomes the new normal. Not knowing and uncertainty regarding the person or persons responsible for the human-induced disaster promote a state of paranoia and uncertainty. A sense of constantly looking over ones shoulder develops among survivors. Lack of trust and a need to affix blame emerge. 15 Unfortunately for the residents of Flint, officials have prioritized economic austerity over public and environmental health. Furthermore, tensions rise among different communities within a given society. These catastrophes are routinely followed with lasting disputes and litigation concerning allocation of fault for the calamity and the issues revolving around restitution arrangements. 16 Neighbors and friends who once lived in harmony may no longer trust elected officials, leaders, or each other after an exposure event because of the perceptions of benefits, or magnitude of loss in the aftermath of toxic exposure is related to what Bell 17 cites as a form of “community anomie,” which causes residents to distrust one another and withdraw from collective life.
This article moves beyond debating intent of biopolitical action, but rather seeks to develop a preliminary conceptual framework for a dialogue that leads to overcoming the broken fiduciary trust between citizens and their government who failed to discharge their responsibilities in protecting the safety of the water supply of Flint, thus failing to protect the health of families and citizens of Flint. Not all frameworks can satisfy all audiences. Most frameworks provide an operationally relevant rubric for envisioning getting past the immediate situation and coping with the future, this article seeks to identify the broken relationships and their constituent elements and organize diagnostic and prescriptive techniques that provide the most general set of variables relevant for understanding the trauma caused by toxic contamination.
Efforts to Reduce Lead and Contamination
Lead contamination of drinking water poses a significant public health issue because of its neurological damage caused by low levels of lead exposure. The first major initiative in the United States to control lead in drinking water was the “Federal Lead Ban,” a set of Amendments to the Safe Drinking Water Act, signed into law in December 1986,18,19 and in 1988, the Lead Contamination Control Act (LCCA) 20 was passed to assist schools in implementing measures to test for and reduce lead contamination in drinking water from water coolers and other sources. The Act required the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to publish a guidance document and testing protocol to assist schools in determining the source and extent of lead contamination in their drinking water. The Act required the EPA to identify and publish a list of brands and models of water coolers that contained lead, including those with lead-lined tanks. The LCCA also imposed civil and criminal penalties on the manufacture and sale of lead-containing water coolers. It also directed the Consumer Product Safety Commission to issue an order requiring water cooler manufacturers and importers to repair, replace, or provide refunds for water coolers containing lead-lined tanks. 21
Notwithstanding all of the information, legislation, and guidelines promulgated over the past few decades, we fail to use the information to make informed policy decisions that relate to reduced lead exposure. Richardson 22 further notes that “[t]echnological advances and educational programs proven to reduce the perpetuation of exposure fail to be aggressively implemented in the urban centers where lead is concentrated… Federal and state legislation is in place that prescribes notification criteria, fines for property owners that fail to remove lead and screening protocols for medical personnel.” It is clear that “…if present enforcement patterns are permitted to continue, the health and educational costs of childhood lead poisoning are not apt to diminish, but rather increase”. 23
The Need to Identify and Address Risks Equitably in Flint
According to Beck,
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“Risk may be defined as a systematic way of dealing with hazards and insecurities induced and introduced by modernization itself. Risk, as opposed to other dangers, has consequences which relate to the threatening force of modernization….” However, the consequences of modernization are bound up with a variety of social, economic, political, and cultural factors that impact their communication to various stakeholders. Funtowicz and Ravetz
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suggest five categories, originally intended to help researchers understand how risks and uncertainties are communicated when uncertainties are not clearly defined and are modified and presented here to illustrate the complex nature of identifying the distribution of risks and uncertainties in the aftermath of toxic contamination:
General situational uncertainty—it characterizes a specific circumstance that should be faced at the moment. It results from different aspects, in particular from informative inadequacy on decisions that have to be taken, and can have a variable intensity. Legal-moral uncertainty—it is connected with the possible consequences of the decision that will or will not be taken. The possibility to be prosecuted for a particular action or any way to face one's own sense of guilt in case of a negative evolution influences decisions… Social uncertainty—it is caused by the degree of cohesion or of conflict, in a community and by the level of integration with institutions. Institutional uncertainty—it results from a scarce ability to communicate, comprehend, or collaborate among the different organisms, especially public institutions, that have to manage a problem, and it is enhanced by the traditional jealousy, competition, and secrecy of some bureaucracies. Uncertainties determined by rights or interests of property and privacy—they are the consequences of regulations that control the possibility to divulgate or hide information, any concerned citizens, professionals, enterprises, organizations and institutions.
A framework for addressing contamination and the future possibilities of lead contamination proposed to help the stakeholders of Flint must fit their own particular circumstances. Any framework should be based on the clearly identified risks and assumptions that communities themselves are best able to identify, prioritize, and make value judgments with regard to which functions and resources matter most when addressing the ongoing problems associated with the toxic contamination. Communities, with the appropriate resources, are better equipped than outsiders to determine the course of action for their unique situation.
Healing, Environmental Justice, and Environmental Toxins: Ongoing Restoration
The Flint water crisis is unique in that all of the major institutions, actors, and victims are alive (or are to be born) and they live within the same space and time. So, when discussing questions of justice and criminality, the causal linkages and documentation are clear, which is not typical in cases of environmental crimes. Most environmental crimes are oftentimes considered indirect crimes because many evolve over decades and start years before harm can be established, they also have many social actors, and, what happens oftentimes with environmental crimes, there is no clear single offender. With criminal charges pending against Mike Glasgow, Flint city's laboratory and water quality supervisor, Mike Prysby, a Michigan Department of Environmental Quality official, and Stephen Busch, the Lansing district coordinator for the DEQ's Office of Drinking Water and Municipal Assistance, the process of healing can begin, but the repercussions are far from over. If these men are convicted of the felony charges against them, they could spend substantial time in prison, but here again, the community will be far from healing. As White 26 reminds us, adjudicating environmental crimes require a court to make difficult but important value judgments that more traditional crimes do not:
[H]ow do we deal with harms that we cannot see or smell, as with some forms of toxic pollution and courts will also often find themselves asking “[w]ho or what is the victim?” Further, the complex nature of ecological “cause and effect” may mean that the effects of environmental harm may not be fully realized until years, or even generations, later. It has long been understood that environmental offenses are unique in that they may “directly affect our health today or the health of untold generations to come.” 27
The issues represented in Flint bring forth a range of new kinds of social and psychological problems that require the courts to not only resolve disputed issues of fact but also to attempt to solve a variety of human problems that are responsible for bringing the case to court. 28 Because of the unique situation in Flint, the courts and the community have a window of opportunity to go beyond addressing the immediate dispute and charges (Table 1); they also have an opportunity to help the individuals and the community effectively deal with ongoing problems associated with toxic contamination.
All persons charged are innocent until proven guilty in a court of law. In no way does this listing or any part of this article prescribe innocence or guilt to individual actors. Further information regarding the charges can be found at:
In light of biopolitical considerations of lead poisoning risks, it is important to consider who bears the risks for decisions made without social consent of those governed, to identify how risks and uncertainty, with their associated costs, are distributed throughout communities, and address the restorative responsibility link between the public and private spheres. Ultimately, accountability for biopolitical risk decision making and the restoration of human health and environment (where possible) must be presented, namely, Does the society or the individual pay for the costs of on-going health and social consequences, cleaning up, recovery of public goods and critical infrastructure replacement when individuals acting in the name of the state advance the goals of approved austerity plans to the detriment of the citizens?
Because the decisions made today will either enable or constrain options later, new processes are needed to maximize stakeholders input to incorporate a critical examination of past and present and how this influences present and future policy decisions. 29
At the foundation of the process to heal and move forward is to reestablish trust and confidence that the officials will be able to address the problems and rebuild the civic bonds between citizens and their government. Four guiding principles are designed to reinvite the citizens of Flint back into the process of governance, which was taken from them by the governor's executive manager's appointment and removal of Flint's elected officials, and help bring transparency, confidence, and legitimacy to a process many find skeptical.
Guiding principle 1, full acknowledgment of the long-term medical, social, cultural, political, economic, and civic trust impacts
The State of Michigan must be able to fully acknowledge the history and biopolitical decision-making process and its consequences associated with the water crisis. Accepting responsibility and making a public acknowledgment are difficult with ongoing investigations; however, without this critical step, it will be difficult for the affected community to begin the healing process. Furthermore, this guiding principle notes that indictments, testimonies, and findings of guilt do not initiate the community healing processes. In fact, litigation, such as the Exxon Valdez Oil Spill or the BP Gulf Oil Spill, unleashed years of protracted litigation. Rather a community acknowledgment and government accountability where progress assessments are ongoing and there is active civic participation in rebuilding efforts substantially help to restore trust in the government that the city needs to function effectively.
Guiding principle 2, reflexive inclusivity
Because the governor's appointment of an executive manager excluded the people in Flint, the community must become a part of the decision to move forward, and they must be involved in a reflexively inclusive way. As cited by Miller and Rivera, 30 reflexive inclusion differs from traditional constituent management or appointed constituent management through state government takeovers in that reflexive inclusion combines both constituent affairs with a more active role in the total development of policies. A reflexively inclusive conceptualization of the fiduciary role government officials have involves the development of a critical appreciation of the public sphere's history, ethnic-gender composition, and culture in relation to past and present power relationships that motivate unintended negative consequences that can compromise the integrity of the road to the rebuilding of trust. This may be difficult due to governmental antilocal rural bias, but aggressive attempts must be made to seek stakeholder support.
Guiding principle 3, recognize restorative justice as a part of environmental justice in environmental crime cases
In the American judicial system, environmental crimes are adjudicated in both the civil and criminal legal systems. And although the courts are able to award damages, fine, or imprison the wrongdoer(s), the court systems do not always seek to address reparative outcomes in a more holistic manner. 31 I maintain that the judicial system and the legislative process must recognize the need to be responsive to the social fabric often torn in the wake of toxic contamination. The United Nations puts forth five assumptions for restorative justice (1) the response to the crime should repair as much as possible the harm suffered by the victims, (2) offenders should be brought to understand that their behavior is not acceptable and that it had serious real consequences for the victim and the community, (3) offenders can and should accept responsibility for their actions, (4) victims should have an opportunity to express their needs and to participate in determining the best way for the offender to make reparations, and (5) the community has a responsibility to contribute to this process. 32 Among many other positive outcomes, these assumptions seek to support victims by giving them a voice in the resolution process, repairing the relationships damaged by the crime and identifying restorative, forward-looking outcomes. 33
Guiding principle 4, recognize environmental health justice as a part of environmental justice in environmental justice
As proposed by Masuada et al., 34 environmental health justice is a three-fold process for enabling groups to reorient economic, health, and environmental systems in ways that address historical and present-day discrimination and ensure (1) equity at all jurisdictional levels in the distribution of environmental hazards and amenities, (2) access to information and meaningful participation in decisions that influence the optimal conditions for health and well-being, and (3) recognition of and respect for the diversity of people and their experiences in communities traditionally marginalized from mainstream environmental discourse. 35 An environmental health justice approach brings those often excluded from environmental decision making into the scope of constructing scientifically rigorous and socially relevant knowledge to legitimate community environmental justice efforts. An environmental health justice approach would, therefore, seek to level the playing field in terms of whose knowledge “counts” in policy decisions that affect disenfranchised communities.
Conclusion: the Shift From Biopolitics to Inclusive Decision Making
The integration of an acknowledgment of past and current social injustices, reflexive inclusivity, restorative justice, and environmental health promotion provides a framework to ensure that all citizens share in the balance between responsible decision making, environmental risks, and human development. The water crisis of Flint represents an opportunity to extend principles of restoration and healing to a broader environmental context 36 by allowing for “… a systematic response to wrongdoing that emphasizes healing the wounds of victims, offenders and communities caused or revealed by the criminal behavior…[which] is a valued-based approach to responding to wrongdoing and conflict, with a balanced focus on the offender, victim, and community…[by transforming the] wrongdoing by healing the harm, particularly to relationships, that is created by harmful behavior.” 37 In the pursuit of a higher quality of life for the citizens of Flint, principles and priorities to redress ongoing legacies of environmental discrimination, and to promote environmental governance demand a more informed citizenry. Moreover, a recognition of guiding principles must be agreed upon by government leaders and community stakeholders to help reflect sound governance in an age of cost cuttings and government savings to promote an environmentally just society.
Footnotes
Author Disclosure Statement
No competing financial interests exist.