Hydronarratives: The Confluence of Water and Environmental Justice

Regulations, the law, and power dynamics

Would one law being passed make the difference between clean and toxic water? Not quite. A journal about the safety of water in Arizona amid rising arsenic readings suggests that such law already exists. The journal said, “Though the law provides for civil and criminal penalties [for EPA or similar agencies], rarely do states move to formal sanctions. Instead, a series of warning letters, visits, or telephone calls is used to remind drinking water suppliers of regulatory obligations.” Therefore, our hands do seem tied when it comes to solutions. Because the solution is already written – just ignored. The change we all want is legally written, however not demanded. It doesn’t appear to be a top priority. It makes it seem to the laymen that the problem’s nonexistent. The law recognizes the standards that the water must be kept to, therefore the fault seems to be on the enforcement agency. Should fines be issued out left and right whenever the water treatment center facilities have an accident? Or if the water has slightly too many contaminants? Perhaps. For an influx of fines and penalties to occur among real substantial change, the slow violence must be officially recognized further and brought to light first. In Rob Nixon’s eponymous book about what he calls slow violence, he describes that if ecological violence occurs to an underprivileged group of people without legal or financial means to represent themselves, then the problem is essentially invisible. Hazardous water has been accepted as an unfortunate reality of living in low income communities that it’s often forgotten the measures that can be taken to mitigate it. But why are low income communities an epicenter for drinking water disasters? And does the demographic lessen the urgency to solve the crisis?

The legal world is a nasty place – seemingly. The unfortunate fact is that nobody is completely honest or transparent when they have to worry about what they say. A Yale Law review pointed out that there’s often a dilemma between a public defender advocating for their client, or shilling out for a judge who signs his/her paychecks. Or that oftentimes public defenders treat their job like a joke because their client isn’t paying them. Although public defenders aren’t immediately relevant to the topic of water contamination, the same philosophy we see here applies to water contamination and the lawmaking surrounding it. The problem is that everybody is way too concerned about who’s either signing their paychecks or paying them under the table. Their loyalty is called into question. Money has the power to be an alternate, more enticing motivator than the duty of keeping Americans safe. Therefore it’s no surprise that lots of the progress to making water safer by eliminating carcinogens is stopped in its tracks by people more concerned with how much money they’re making. And since nobody but the government itself holds the government to these standards, it’s likely to remain this way for a long time. It’s similar to the concept of terra-nullius and the (lousy) justification for removing people from their own land by strong-arming the notion that it isn’t occupied. What terra-nullius has in common with this legislature is that in both cases, the powerful figures in government assume unimportance of the factors that stand in their way. Whether it’s a tribe that’s been there for lifetimes, or concrete evidence of the toxicity of certain substances, both essentially are ignored amid subsequent land conquest or continuation of not banning known toxic chemicals.

The fifth amendment promises one with a defense attorney – not a prosecuting attorney to defend someone’s call for justice. Access to attorneys is one thing, and access to a good one is another. Something far more expensive as well. According to the National Center for Access to Justice, there’s .6 civil attorneys for every ten thousand people living in poverty in the United States. Even assuming that the impoverished were the sole focus of civil lawyers, there would not be enough to go around. Additionally, the impoverished are not the sole focus of civil lawyers, despite what the name “civil lawyer” may make one assume. They aren’t even the primary demographic. Like most goods and services, the better ones usually come with a significant price tag that’s impossible to pay for many Americans. This outlook breeds a systemic learned helplessness in Americans experiencing trouble that gets ignored by the people meant to help them. After enough time, fighting for yourself and community is no longer part of the norm, which is a disaster. If enough problems go unsolved for too long, the people suffering develop an understanding that they can’t do anything to help their disposition. Over time these problems continue to grow and compound until somebody defies it. Interestingly, I see this mirroring the situation that the EPA repeatedly finds themselves in. If they attempt to ban carcinogens, it often fails at the hand of the corporation backed Toxic Substance Control Act from 1976.

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