“Water is life.”
That is the phrase that has reached across the world these past few months. Water is life. That is the phrase that the members of the Standing Rock Sioux tribe and their supporters have been pressing upon everybody that will listen. This is because the Dakota Access Pipeline was (and could still be) being built through their sacred land — land that has had a long history of turmoil with the government.
In January of 2016, DAPL was green-lit — it was predicted to be fully functioning by the end of the year. There wasn’t much outcry at this time — why would there be? We didn’t know about the route, the hazards, or the blatant disregard for the land they’d be infringing on. Fast forward to December. The water protectors have been protesting for about four months — and legal action was taken a month before that. They have endured being pelted with concussion grenades, shot at with water cannons and rubber bullets, and teargassed by police during their protests. And it was not until early December when the Army Corps of Engineers decided to look for an alternate route. This decision has been a long time coming for the Standing Rock Sioux, and is a victory in this long, long war.
Now, let’s take a trip across the Midwest to Flint, Michigan, where the citizens have gone without safe, clean water for 854 days and counting. Flint has had its water contaminated with high levels of lead since August of 2014 (researchers confirmed the contamination almost a year later, in September of 2015.) In January 2015, a state of emergency was declared due to the water crisis — after fecal coliform bacterium and total coliform bacterium had been found, which can be indicators of E. Coli and other disease-causing organisms in the water. The water crisis also has a possible link to a Legionnaire’s disease outbreak, which caused serious illness and 10 deaths. Now, Michigan officials are delivering bottled water to families whose filters have not been checked or cleared for safety, but that’s not a permanent fix — Little Miss Flint, the young girl who wrote a letter to President Obama about the crisis and prompted a visit from him, continues to bring awareness to what’s going on, tweeting about how many bottles of water it took to cook Thanksgiving dinner (144) or a picture of her sitting next to piles of packages of bottled water. On December 10, the U.S. Senate passed an aid package of $120 million to Flint for “replacing water pipes and other infrastructure improvements, [public] health to track the impacts of lead, [and to] forgive previous drinking water loans” according to a local news station in Flint. However, the package still has to be approved by the President, and the citizens of Flint still don’t have access to clean water.
These two cases of slow government intervention in regards to human rights violations can be boiled down to environmental racism. It is patently clear that race and poverty played, and are playing, massive roles in why these situations have been handled in the way that they have been.
Standing Rock is a Native American reservation that is predominantly, if not entirely, comprised of people of color and 38.6% of the citizens in the same county are in poverty. Flint’s population is 65.4% minority, 56.6% African American, and 40% on or below the poverty line, according to the U.S. census.
While obviously race and poverty levels are not completely the cause of the speed or way that these events have been addressed, they very much have played a role in it. In a statement from the NAACP, a representative said, “Would more have been done, and at a much faster pace, if nearly 40 percent of Flint residents were not living below the poverty line? The answer is unequivocally yes.”
In addition to that, Democratic U.S. Rep. Dan Kildee stated, “While it might not be intentional, there’s this implicit bias against older cities — particularly older cities with poverty (and) majority-minority communities.”
Standing Rock is a bit more blatant in the environmental racism — the Dakota Access Pipeline was originally supposed to go cross a river north of Bismarck, but was rerouted because the citizens of Bismarck did not want their source of water to be contaminated by any potential oil leaks or spills from the pipeline. After their complaints, the pipeline was rerouted south of Bismarck and just upstream of the Standing Rock Reservation.
Now, the North Dakota Public Service Commission, or PSC, denied any allegations of environmental racism, citing instead the fact that that route was “never included in the proposed route submitted to the PSC” due to potentials for leaks. However, pairing this reroute with the horrendous police brutality that the Standing Rock Sioux tribal members and other water protectors have been facing, as well as past incidences of profit coming before indigenous peoples’ needs, the pattern has become quite clear. The underprivileged, underrepresented, and silenced people of this country have been and are being taken advantage of.
Their sufferings come through a denial of the most basic human need: safe, clean water. Water sustains life on this planet; without it, people perish. In the United States, a country founded on principles of equality and liberty, no one should have to worry about the water they are drinking. But the DAPL and the situation in Flint demonstrate that poverty and race affect access to the most fundamental needs. Seventy percent of the Earth’s surface is covered by water, but if you are poor and nonwhite, safe water is out of reach for you. Water is life, and water tells us a great deal about life, especially regarding environmental racism and its impact.
Originally posted at thelittlehawk.com
