Abstract
Water quality is a complex resource to analyze in the context of environmental justice, and so specific frameworks and proxies have been developed which in turn have become the basis for governmental regulations and compliance standards. A Critical Physical Geography approach applied to examples from small rural community water systems in Puerto Rico demonstrates how enacting environmental justice through water quality regulation can be counterproductive and even unjust, and reveals the risk in exporting regulations conceived for the United States to systems in its ecologically distinct territories. The case study leads to the conclusion that assessments of water quality and resulting disparities in access should be grounded in a critical understanding of biophysical and social processes.
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- 1.
A brief review of books, articles, and special issues on environmental justice from 1990 to 2008 can be found in Holifield, Porter and Walker (2011), and between 2009 and 2016 additional works have appeared. Examples of the latter include the International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health (Griffiths 2011; Chakraborty et al. 2016) and The Geographical Journal (Martin 2013). Since 2008, the Journal of Environmental Justice has published work on global issues of environmental justice.
- 2.
The SDWA is the federal law that establishes the standards for managing public water system for different sizes and water sources, except private wells. The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) defines a set of water quality standards, and together with state agencies enforces these standards.
- 3.
In the mainland United States, E. coli has been useful in identifying fecally contaminated water because pathogenic and non-pathogenic E. coli and many other pathogenic microorganisms have similar sources and thrive in similar environments. In contrast, especially in the tropics, non-pathogenic E. coli can be endemic, rather than from a fecal source. Its presence is common in pristine water sources in Puerto Rico.
- 4.
This work was supported in part by the National Science Foundation [grant #1151458] and the the National Institutes of Health [grant #P20 MD0006144]. Many thanks to the community members of non-PRASA systems for allowing us to visit their homes and water systems. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this chapter are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of any of the granting agencies.
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Arce-Nazario, J. (2018). The Science and Politics of Water Quality. In: Lave, R., Biermann, C., Lane, S. (eds) The Palgrave Handbook of Critical Physical Geography. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-71461-5_22
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