War for clean water access is one of the dystopian precursors to the “Mad Max” trilogy. But in reality, accessing clean water is serious business—and a growing field of litigation.
Although Flint is where headlines were being made this year, the truth is the problem is much more widespread; Philadelphia, Seattle, Chicago. The truth is, the next Flint seems like it could be anywhere, although metropolitan areas—with their old, decaying pipes—aren’t typically the most heavily impacted communities.
A huge amount of the country’s substandard drinking water exists in seemingly invisible rural areas. Which isn’t surprising, considering that environmental injustice disproportionately affects low-income and minority folks. And as Shawn Collins writes on Pollution Law Watch, the lack of access to clean water can present in ways that many U.S. citizens take for granted:
For example, the drought in California. The water shortage it has caused is nothing short of frightening. Not enough water to grow crops, or put out fires. Not enough water to pipe to communities. If the drought is not resolved soon—and no one thinks it will be—then California families will find other places to live. They will conclude that, without water, it is just not safe to live in California anymore. And so the state that everyone once wanted to live in will be a state that many will want to leave. For their own safety.
Another example are the water supplies throughout the United States that today are badly contaminated by years of industrial chemical dumping. These are millennia-old aquifers flowing underground, which, for as long as there have been humans on the planet, have supplied them life-giving water. But, over the last 100 years, polluting companies have badly damaged these aquifers by dumping millions of gallons of toxins, and allowing them to seep ever deeper into the ground, until they render the water in the aquifer unusable. Some of these aquifers can be cleaned up—but it will take decades, typically. Some aquifers, for all practical purposes, will never be cleaned up. I have worked as a lawyer for many hundreds of families who were devastated to learn that their aquifer had been taken from them by chemical contamination. They had to find another way to try to get clean water. It is a horrible betrayal of what they thought it meant to be an American.
As Collins notes on his blog, this is the reality of water for 1.1 billion people worldwide. That’s why in 2010 the United Nations declared people had a right to water and sanitation. The only problem with that is that without an international body that can enforce that right, the human right to water relies largely on the activity and implementation of national courts.
Which is what makes the case popping up in California so crucial. The Golden State—the first and only to legally declare that every human being has a “right to safe, clean, affordable, and accessible water for human consumption, cooking, and sanitary purposes—initially made their declaration as a symbolic measure, but provided key provisions calling for the state to recognize the “new” right when establishing new regulations. In doing so they filled in a gap that the Constitution couldn’t have foreseen (it’s not like Flint or indoor plumbing were around when the Bill of Rights was being drafted), as Politico writes:
Matheny Tract, an unincorporated community outside the city of Tulare (pop.: 61,000), is not a household word in California—or even Tulare, about two miles away. Yet Matheny is about to make history of a sort: It will be the first community to receive better water under SB88, the most significant piece of legislation thus far to be framed by the Human Right to Water bill.
The new law gives the state authority to order cities to consolidate their water systems with poor unincorporated neighbors stuck with tainted water—in this case, meaning their water will soon be supplied by nearby Tulare. So in the next few weeks, the beleaguered residents of Matheney are due to receive the same clean water that people a couple of miles away for the most part have never had to think twice about.
An identical law has been introduced in Michigan, where class-action attorneys have descended on Flint—part of a 15-bill package of legislation that also deals with billing, service shut-offs and other affordability issues. But those bills are still stuck in committee. So, for now, California is the lone front in America where this radical expansion of human rights is advancing, albeit slowly, and raising the question of whether “rights” might someday improve communities in a way that their governments have failed to do.
California, home to the richest agricultural area and semi-frequent droughts, makes sense as the initial site of water’s evolution from, as Politico puts it “a utility or civic amenity” to a right. But, as clearly evidenced in places like Flint, Mich.; Hoosick Valley, N.Y.; and Jackson, Miss. it’s time for the tide to turn across the country too. The United States’ opposition to the UN law is stark, especially as communities across the country test their water with bated breath. As climate change starts to make droughts more frequent, it’s time the U.S. let the right to clean water flow freely.