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Too Dirty: Water and Pollution

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Water, Crime and Security in the Twenty-First Century

Part of the book series: Critical Criminological Perspectives ((CCRP))

Abstract

Most countries will impose restrictions on the discharge of pollutants into water and, in particular, will set standards for the quality of drinking water. Of course, whether these restrictions are applied with any rigour and whether these standards are met raise the kind of questions with which this book is concerned. We start here with the issue of pollution of water because it tends to be the most common water concern, crime or harm of which people are aware: often, although not always (as we will discuss below in the context of Flint, Michigan), polluted water looks, tastes or smells foul. Of course, for many people across the world, the greater issue is access to water in the face of drought—thirst and related starvation—and in such circumstances, polluted water is consumed on the basis that dirty water is better than no water at all. In other instances, water pollution leads to issues of water scarcity: a region may rely on a specific water body and when it becomes polluted, access to clean freshwater becomes frustrated (see generally Smith 2015).Our point is that while water pollution and access to clean water are often conceptualized as separate problems with different socioeconomics and geopolitics, this is not always necessarily the case (McClanahan et al. 2015).We shall discuss these circumstances and the issues related to health and inequalities in a later chapter. For now, back to pollution—and to the different ways in which it occurs—not always so easily detectable as might be assumed—as well as the different ways in which it is responded to, for purposes of prevention and prosecution of polluters.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Freedom Industries later revealed that a second coal-processing compound, a mixture of polyglycol ethers known as PPH, had leaked and contaminated Charleston’s water system (Barrett 2014; Osnos 2014: 40).

  2. 2.

    Gold mining can have other adverse impacts. Consider, for example, the recent economic collapse in Venezuela has led thousands of people—mostly from urban areas—to leave their homes to work in illegal gold mines. The water pits are a breeding ground for mosquitos that carry malaria. When those who have been infected return to the cities, they pass the disease on to others. (Although malaria is often debilitating and can be fatal, it is easily treatable with proper medication; Venezuela’s economic woes, however, have meant that there is little medicine available or fumigation.) According to Venezuelan doctors, in the first six months of 2016, malaria cases rose 72 per cent—to a total of 125,000 (Casey 2016). This is an astounding figure for the country that was the first in the world to be certified by the World Health Organization (in 1961) for eradicating malaria in its most populated areas. Venezuela’s inability to contain the malaria outbreak means that it is posing a threat to neighbouring countries—most notably Brazil.

    In a very different context, ‘mine murders’ for cash have become somewhat of a cottage industry in southwestern China. Buckley (2016) reports that ‘[a]s China’s regulators have clamped down on mine safety, driving down the number of accidents, the stricter regulation has perversely encouraged some mine operators to hide fatalities and pay off victims’ families, increasing the incentive to carry out [killings]’.

  3. 3.

    In the United States, there are approximately 500,000 abandoned, inactive, unreclaimed mines. According to the EPA, ‘mining pollutes approximately 40 percent of the headwaters of Western watersheds and that cleaning up these mines may cost American taxpayers more than $50 billion’ (Lachelt 2015: A21; see also Editorial 2015).

  4. 4.

    In February 2017, US President Donald J. Trump struck down the Obama administration’s attempt to regulate surface mining wastes on the grounds that by sparing coal companies the expense of cleaning up debris (and permitting them to dump it into streams and mountain hollows), he was saving ‘many thousands of jobs’. Critics questioned this job-saving measure, pointing out that, based on official estimates, ‘the rules, while helping the environment, would in fact cost very few jobs—260 on average a year offset by almost the same number of jobs for people hired to comply with the rules’ (Editorial 2017).

  5. 5.

    As the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) explains, ‘[u]nder Michigan law, the state has the power to take complete control of financially struggling school districts, cities and counties by appointing so-called “emergency managers” given vast, unchecked powers. Any decision made by duly elected officials can be overruled by one of these appointed emergency managers, resulting in a direct assault on the fundamental right to democratic representation’ (ACLU 2016: 35). Similarly, Campbell and colleagues (2016) assert that ‘[h]aving a state-appointed emergency manager in charge took away the normal communication the City of Flint might have had with its residents and constituents’. For an overview of the law, see Adams (2013).

  6. 6.

    In June 2012, officials in Flint began exploring whether the city could save money from switching from its then-current provider, the Detroit Water and Sewerage Department. The city determined that it could save $200 million over 25 years by building its own pipeline to connect to the Karegnondi Water Authority, but that until the pipeline was operational, it would need an interim source of water. Thus, it turned to the Flint River, which had been the city’s main water source until the 1960s. Flint River water starting flowing to the city on 25 April 2014. For an excellent chronology of the crisis, see Kennedy (2016); see also Dickson (2016a).

  7. 7.

    Lead can cause developmental delays, learning disabilities and other health problems in children as well as kidney ailments in adults (see, e.g., AP 2016a, b; Blanc 2016; Campbell et al. 2016; Carroll 2016; Ellis 2016; Helsel 2016; Karoub 2016; Kristof 2016; Reed 2016; Suh 2016). For an illustrated explanation of how lead adversely impacts the brain functioning of children, see Ireland and Palmer (2016). For a discussion of lead poisoning of children in the US outside of Flint, see Hohn (2016), Kristof (2016), Ludden (2016), Reed (2016), Wines and Schwartz (2016), Wines et al. (2016); see generally Corley (2016), Delaney (2016), Suh (2016). Kristof (2016) observes that ‘[t]oday the continuing poisoning of half a million American children is tolerated partly because the victims are often low-income children of color’.

  8. 8.

    In the United States, the distinction between an ‘emergency order’ and a ‘federal disaster declaration’, which is meant for natural disasters, such as earthquakes, floods, hurricanes and wildfires, reflects the nature and extent of the financial, legal and operational resources given by the federal government to a state or local government (see Martin (2016) for an overview). Reflecting on the request by Governor Snyder for a ‘federal disaster declaration’, Martin (2016) asked, ‘[w]hat should the federal government do when the state and the local governments intensify the severity and magnitude of a crisis? And what should be done when the crisis is human-made?’ (emphasis in original).

  9. 9.

    In the United States, the federal government has the primary responsibility and authority for environmental regulation pertaining to issues such as water quality management, but it relies on the several states to implement programmes and regulation. States, in turn, have primary authority over water quantity (see, e.g., Eberhard et al. 2017; Skelding 2017), but this distinction can become blurred in cases of federal water projects or where there are links between water quality and water quantity. For a discussion of how authority and responsibility for water managements in the United States differs from that of Australia and France, see Eberhard et al. (2017: 459–60). For a discussion of water pollution management in China at the federal (or central), state (or provincial), county and municipal governmental levels, see Huang and Xu (2017).

  10. 10.

    Although such factors may be present in civil cases, it is exceptionally rare for criminal cases not to include them. Criminal prosecutions for wetland violations are highly unusual. According to Wittenberg (2017), the US EPA’s environmental crimes database for ‘dredge-and-fill’ violations reveals that since the founding of the agency’s Office of Criminal Enforcement in 1982, fewer than 50 cases resulted in guilty pleas or convictions. Wittenberg (2017) explains that ‘[w]etland violations are less likely to be pursued criminally because convincing juries that ditching and filling are crimes, or that defendants knew they were violating the law, can be difficult’.

  11. 11.

    In his discussion of the conditions that have contributed to the water privatization trend in the United States, Arnold (2009: 793–94) notes that ‘all suppliers of public drinking water have had to comply with increasingly stringent federal requirements for drinking water quality under the Safe Drinking Water Act’, while at the same time ‘operational costs for public water supply systems have increased with growing public demand for water, decreasing supplies of readily available inexpensive water, and environmental constraints on water exploitation’ (footnotes omitted). We return to the issue of water privatization in Chapter 5.

  12. 12.

    As Arnold (2009: 809–10) notes, ‘[l]arge-scale extraction of groundwater for bottled water contributes to over-pumping of aquifers, resulting in depletion of the aquifer, increased contamination, salt water intrusion in coastal areas, harm to surface water systems connected to groundwater, interference with biological and hydrologic processes, and social harm to local communities’ (footnote omitted). That said, we acknowledge that bottled water is sometimes a necessity, as in the case of Flint, described earlier, where high levels of lead found in the city’s water supply forced residents to drink, bathe and cook with bottled water (see Keneally 2016). Similarly, Morales (2017) reports that ‘[m]ore than one-third of Navajo Nation—which is the size of West Virginia—doesn’t have running water’ and that schools on the Navajo Nation have incurred large expenses for bottled water, while Galway (2016), in her study of inadequate access to safe and reliable drinking among First Nations peoples in Canada—and the frequency of drinking water advisories for First Nations communities—writes that ‘[w]hena boil water advisory is issued, community members are advised to boil water for one minute prior to use including drinking water, for ice, brushing teeth, food preparation, infant formulas etc. In cases where water cannot be boiled, community members are directed to disinfect the water using household bleach, or to purchase commercially packaged water’ (footnotes omitted). But we would also point out that branded bottled water can become contaminated as was the case, for example, in June 2015, when Niagara Bottling, a leading private-label water bottling company in the United States, reported the presence of E. coli bacteria in its products (Sundberg 2015).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. School of Justice Studies College of Justice and Safety, Eastern Kentucky University, Richmond, KY, USA

    Avi Brisman & Bill McClanahan

  2. School of Justice Faculty of Law, Queensland University of Technology, Brisbane, QLD, Australia

    Avi Brisman, Nigel South & Reece Walters

  3. Newcastle Law School Faculty of Business and Law, University of Newcastle, Callaghan, NSW, Australia

    Avi Brisman

  4. Department of Sociology, University of Essex, Colchester, Essex, UK

    Nigel South

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  1. Avi Brisman
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  2. Bill McClanahan
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  3. Nigel South
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  4. Reece Walters
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Brisman, A., McClanahan, B., South, N., Walters, R. (2018). Too Dirty: Water and Pollution. In: Water, Crime and Security in the Twenty-First Century. Critical Criminological Perspectives. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-52986-2_2

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-52986-2_2

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  • Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, London

  • Print ISBN: 978-1-137-52985-5

  • Online ISBN: 978-1-137-52986-2

  • eBook Packages: Law and CriminologyLaw and Criminology (R0)

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