Flint Fights Back: Environmental Justice and Democracy in the Flint Water Crisis by Benjamin J. Pauli (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: Flint Fights Back: Environmental Justice and Democracy in the Flint Water Crisis by Benjamin J. Pauli Michelle Wilde Anderson Benjamin J. Pauli. Flint Fights Back: Environmental Justice and Democracy in the Flint Water Crisis. Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press, 2019. Pp. 432. Bibliography. Black and white illustrations. Index. Notes. Tables. Cloth: $95.00. "What made the [Flint water] crisis distinctive, what made it especially egregious," writes Benjamin J. Pauli, "was not just how badly residents were harmed, but how they were harmed." (32) Activists stressed—and Pauli compellingly argues—that unsafe water flowed from their taps not just because of technical failures to manage city operations nor because of Flint's overall history of disinvestment and racial segregation. Instead, residents were "poisoned by policy." The decision to suspend local democracy, made in the name of fiscal restraint, enabled a reckless disregard for residents' health and safety. That history "eroded trust in the political system in ways that were every bit as poisonous as the water." (99) From his vantage point both as a professor of social science at Kettering University and as an activist, Pauli's book on the Flint water crisis marks an important historical record of one of the most significant environmental justice battles in US history. With humility and painstaking care, the book records the causes, costs, harms, and mitigation of the city's water problems from 2011 to 2018. Pauli describes his research as "ethnographic immersion," which is reflected in his various roles as a social scientist, a resident and parent in Flint, an activist and volunteer, and a citizen servant on local public commissions. Pauli offers a fine-grained look at the federal, state, local, and private actors who left "fingerprints" on the decisions that created and sustained a dangerous water supply, demonstrating a keen (and practical) understanding of the state emergency manager law that put a state appointee in charge of Flint's government, including its water system. Pauli argues that the crisis was not just driven by smaller process failures within government. The suspension of local democracy broke lines of communication and accountability between the people and the state. "[T]he problem in Flint," he writes, "was not just that government failed in its protective function—'they' didn't keep us safe—but that it failed in its representative function—'they' didn't listen to us and act on our concerns." (130) State officials and "experts," along with outside journalists, branded resident concerns about the safety of their tap water as "hysteria" or even a "hoax." Activists had to fight to elevate words like "crisis," "disaster," and "emergency," as well as to insist on the scientific accuracy of "lead poisoning"—as opposed to the understated term "lead exposure"—to describe the effects on children. (35-38) We see in stark relief how activists had to overcome (mostly by overpowering) the derision and deafness of state officials. [End Page 138] In Pauli's careful, chronological telling, even the word "activists" is not a static concept viewed in hindsight, as if citizen leaders sprung to life fully formed. Instead, we see how ordinary residents with no political experience took one step at a time to act on their hardships—the chunks of hair lost by children, adults, and pets; the rashes breaking out from baths and pool parties; and the worrisome fatigue and behavioral changes they saw in their children. Through information-sharing networks on social media, protests, activist groups, the recruitment of outside expertise, and meticulous citizen science, they took hundreds of small measures to transform private injuries into political action. Activists not only had to learn how to investigate and collect data on water safety but also had to find lines of accountability in their new and opaque system of government. In his introduction, Pauli respectfully surfaces critiques of local environmental justice battles, which argue that geographically limited histories get in the way of seeing the structural forces common across locales. But he is too mild at asserting how his book demonstrates the limits of that critique. The history of the Flint water crisis is valuable for the sake of that important city's own history, for the sake of Michigan's...