“The Persistence of Our Water Pasts: The Flint Water Crisis and the Undone Work of Justice”

This talk examines the role of water injustice in shaping our temporal orientation toward water, drawing from the example of the Flint water crisis. As we approach the seven-year anniversary of the fateful switch of Flint’s water supply to the Flint River, it seems that many in the water world are ready to move on—if they haven’t already—believing they have learned the necessary lessons from Flint, believing that the problems are fixed and the crisis over, believing that it is time to move on to other “Flints” and focus on doing things better the next time. On the ground, however, residents continue to speak of justice undone, of the persistence of injustices at the root and the heart of the crisis, continuing to invoke the past and the perpetuation of past harm. Drawing from these resident perspectives, this talk argues that any discussion of our water futures must not elide or shortchange a full reckoning with the legacy of our water pasts.

Ben Pauli is an Assistant Professor of Social Science at Kettering University in Flint, Michigan, USA. He is the author of Flint Fights Back: Environmental Justice and Democracy in the Flint Water Crisis (MIT Press 2019), the president of the board of the Environmental Transformation Movement of Flint (etmflint.org), and a member of the Environmental Protection Agency's National Environmental Justice Advisory Council.

First of all, I just want to express my thanks to the Future Waters group and especially to Leila for the invitation. I’m happy to be with all of you—virtually, anyway. My one and only physical visit to UBC was a lifetime ago—way back in November 2019 (the good old days), when Leila and colleagues graciously hosted the Household Water Insecurity Experiences group. I hope to be back sooner than later—I am from the Pac NW originally, so it still feels like home to me.

So I’ve titled my talk today “The Persistence of Our Water Pasts: The Flint Water Crisis and the Undone Work of Justice.” In the amount of time available to me, I decided it would be foolish to try to give a general account of the Flint water crisis, or even of my own research on it or role in responding to it. I knew I’d have to thematize my remarks somehow, and as I was puzzling over how best to do that, it occurred to me that I would feel awkward giving a talk on “future waters” in Flint. Or at least I feel intuitively that I would. So I started to think about why that was, and what it might have to teach us. That got me thinking in a more general way about what enables us—some of us—to be oriented toward the future—thinking about who is in a position to imagine the future, plan the future, seek the future, and so on. Conversely, I started thinking about what it is that keeps some of us rooted in the present and the past, whether we’re talking about water or any number of other things.     

So Flint is in many ways a city caught between a storied past and an uncertain future. As you may know, it’s the birthplace of General Motors and the location of the famous 1936-7 sit-down strike that gave rise to the United Auto Workers. In the middle of the 20th century, when Flint residents enjoyed one of the highest standards of living in the world, good jobs and solid middle-class homes were plentiful, and the city had all the accoutrements you might expect—a zoo, an amusement park, thriving cultural institutions. There are many people around here who still remember those days with fondness, who don’t want the abandoned, blighted house across the street to be torn down because they remember what it used to be and imagine that with the right kind of investment it could be that way again. As for the factories, those are torn down now, but that hasn’t stopped people from dreaming, however vaguely, of the return of large-scale manufacturing. The idea that the way forward is to resurrect the past, in some sense, continues to hold its appeal in Flint in part because so many residents have not been sold on alternative visions of the city’s future. Flint has a master plan, adopted not so long ago, it has developers and foundations that are spending some real money. But not everyone sees a place for themselves in their version of Flint—in which the city’s ungovernable extremities are “shrunk” out of existence, in which resources are concentrated downtown, in which local cultural life is tailored to college students and suburbanites, in which many once-public things have become private, and in which employment is available mainly to those with “high-skills”—in a city whose public school system is actively collapsing.

Nevertheless, when I moved to Flint with my family in June 2015 there was at least some hope in the air. We wouldn’t have decided to make a life in a city that we thought didn’t have a future, that was dead or dying. As soon as we’d settled in, though, any sense of forward progress was abruptly quashed by the real and present danger of contaminated water. It seemed abrupt to us, anyway. In fact, some residents and activists had by that time already been speaking out for over a year about the water. They’d had a difficult time convincing not only officials but even many of their fellow residents of the water’s dangers—especially those who were the most future-oriented, the developers, the business owners, the ones who loved the idea of Flint becoming a “college town,” people who—understandably, perhaps—didn’t think Flint needed anything else to hold it back. But ultimately, even those with the rosiest outlooks and the least patience for roadblocks had to yield to the immediacy of the moment, when officials admitted, in the early fall, the existence of a serious public health threat from lead in water.

As we know all too well, when crisis strikes, life comes to a stop, plans are put on hold, our perspective tends to narrow to what is most immediately in front of us, the most pressing problems, the most urgent needs. In this case, that meant getting bottled water and filters to every resident of the city, making blood lead tests available, taking steps to stabilize the water system. For the activists who had been on the front lines of the struggle, it was also a moment of political Kairos, if I can put it that way, a window of opportunity when demands for reparations, restoration, and reform stood a chance of being heard.

Within that developing context, my own personal and professional focus shifted, too. When I moved to Flint, I did so with every intention of being part of the life of the community, but by the time water began to dominate the local headlines, I’d already found ways of making that happen, I wasn’t looking for a new issue to take on. And frankly I was one of the people who wasn’t sure at first that the water situation was the big deal some were making it out to be. Similarly, on a professional level, I certainly wasn’t in search of a research project—I had every intention of following the usual five-year tenure-track plan, taking my dissertation research—which had nothing whatever to do with water—and developing it into a book. So what changed? Firstly, I realized that this crisis, for better or worse, was going to be a turning point in the history of the city—there was no way of being part of the life of the community without helping to confront this stake that had been driven through the heart of it. Secondly, while I didn’t know much about water—the very existence of lead water pipes was news to me—I did know a little about social movements and politics, and what the water activists were up to was very interesting from that perspective—not only had they been instrumental in exposing the crisis, they were explicitly framing it as an outgrowth of a more fundamental crisis of democracy.

So as I began to find myself at water rallies and marches and meetings in early 2016, I also began thinking about whether there was something useful I could write about the role that these activists had played and their political analysis of the crisis, something that would in some sense be a contribution to the movement. If I had any kind of agenda on the research and writing side, that was about it. I needed to publish enough to keep my job and justify putting my other work aside, but the real hope was to do something that my fellow resident activists would see value in. The only kind of “research” I had any interest in doing within my own community was that which emerged organically out of non-academic motivations and commitments. There was no research program I was trying to advance. There was nothing, in particular, I was trying to prove. I didn’t have any favorite concepts or arguments that I was determined to apply to the crisis. My thinking was: let the language that people on the ground are actually using to describe the crisis be the starting point of any analysis. Let their actions in responding to the crisis be the center of the story. Only when that approach proves to be in some way inadequate do you consider going beyond it and bringing in other concepts and context.

And that brings me back to the theme of time. I’d like to think that my research no less than my activism was premised on being in the moment, as fully as possible, with the community, moving according to its rhythms and at its pace, accompanying it on its journey toward understanding and justice. What that involved, necessarily, was a willingness to get bogged down in the messiness and complexity of the situation. It meant operating on the community’s timeline, not on some arbitrary academic timeline. And we could also add the dimension of space here. This kind of work is intimate, close to home, it’s not necessarily something you’re looking to project out to the wider world except when there’s an especially good reason for doing so.

Now I know this might all sound a bit ironic coming from someone who did, after all, end up with a university press book on Flint that was written pretty quickly in the scheme of things. What I will say is that it did not feel quick at all. There’s sometimes a big difference between objective time and subjective time, especially when subjective time is so full—full of struggle, and complication, and cogitation. I felt very much caught in the stickiness of that time, slogging through it along with my comrades and colleagues, struggling many times just to keep up with fine-grain developments and process what was going on.

So perhaps you can imagine how it felt when I began to see people—lots of people, person after person, from pretty early on—begin to publish on Flint, writing in an authoritative-sounding register, but without having gotten stuck in the same way. Their intentions were often good, I think, and their analyses sometimes had something to offer. But at the end of the day, Flint was just a waystation for them—metaphorically, anyway, because most of them never came to Flint, or spoke with Flint residents. Flint was a way of making a point, it was a brief stop within the trajectory of a forward-looking research agenda.

I’m sure we’ve all done similar things—decided that we understand a case well enough to have learned its lessons, to be able to cite it with confidence, and to move on. What was new to me was watching it happen from inside the case, as it were, and realizing just how problematic it was. It wasn’t just that people, in their rush to opine about Flint and use it as an example of one thing or another got important details wrong—I mean, that happens. The deeper problem was the idea that it was possible or even easy to digest what happened in Flint, to sum it up in a neat little package to be casually referenced in a handy way. Sometimes I would read this work and think, ‘They haven’t had any of their own concepts and assumptions shaken up at all by what’s happened here, as if they can be applied easily and unproblematically.’ I just couldn’t identify with that. If there was anything that was clear to me, it was that the crisis was very difficult to “know,” and that academic frameworks and armchair analysis often paled in comparison to the rich and informed perspectives of residents themselves. It’s why I say in all seriousness in the introduction of my book that I consider the water activists here to be coauthors in some sense. I simply could not have done it without them.

In some ways, the epistemological attitude toward the water crisis I’ve been describing and critiquing—one which assumes the crisis to be knowable, accessible, even from well outside the community, able to be integrated smoothly into established conceptual frameworks, and so on—this attitude is not so different from certain “official” and “expert” attitudes that residents have had to contend with on the ground. Those who took charge of what I call the “official” response to the water crisis from late 2015 on have also tended to assume that the essence of the crisis is eminently knowable, and by extension, eminently solvable. Perhaps unsurprisingly, that attitude has been linked to a tendency to define the crisis much more narrowly than residents themselves, to make it sound much more manageable, particularly by focusing on system-wide lead levels. If you were to listen only to official characterizations of the crisis, you might not realize that to residents it was always much more than a lead-in-water crisis, even at the level of water quality. You probably wouldn’t realize that it began, chiefly, as a water affordability and accessibility crisis. You might not appreciate just how deep the institutional failure goes here, why residents are so skeptical that the institutions that caused the crisis can also be trusted to fix it. You probably wouldn’t gain a very nuanced view of the historical injustices that people came to see as wrapped up with the crisis.

If we’re sensitive to all of the texture the crisis has to those actually living it, it becomes considerably more difficult to determine what it would mean to bring the crisis to an “end,” to get to the point where it’s possible to move on and focus on the future. When you really marinate in the complexity of the harm and the difficulty that people have experienced and are experiencing here, you realize that the work of justice and healing is necessarily a long, slow, to some extent unending, process. Simply restoring confidence in water, and the trustworthiness of the institutions overseeing it is a long, slow process. And as long as we have not yet adequately addressed past harms, that process is as much backward-looking as it is forward-looking. It involves continuously calling to mind the harms of the past and the needs of the present, it means constant reminders of the damage that has not been repaired, of the justice that has not been done. For all of these reasons, the past continues to haunt us, to demand a fuller reckoning, and it cannot be exorcised by platitudes about the restored quality of the water.

And I think this helps to explain some of the conflicts we saw develop between those on the official side of the crisis response, and those on the grassroots side from 2016 on, as controversy erupted over whether the water was really safe, whether bottled water should still be provided, more generally, over whether residents had received all the assistance and accountability they could rightly expect from state and federal agencies. If you’re operating with the idea that the crisis is manageable, the problems fixable, your timeline for recovery is going to look a lot different from someone who has a more expansive understanding of the crisis. Officials and their allied experts were basically ready to call it a wrap by the end of 2016—they were talking about “Flint fatigue.” The community was not remotely ready to call it a wrap, and unfortunately, residents who continued to raise concerns and make demands started to get painted as unreasonable, stubborn, greedy, addicted to victimhood, and so forth. Their timeline for recovery, their whole temporal orientation, looked different because they had a different understanding of the crisis, to begin with.

It’s not that we haven’t made any progress over the past 5 years. In some areas, we’ve taken great strides (happy to talk about those). But in other respects, we haven’t even begun. I mentioned earlier how intrigued I was by Flint activists’ framing of the water crisis as an outgrowth of a crisis of democracy. Well, the law that inspired that analysis, Michigan’s emergency manager law, which enabled an appointee of the governor to make unilateral decisions about Flint’s water, is still on the books, totally unchanged in every aspect. It can and very well may be used again. What can it possibly mean for the crisis to be over if, from the perspective of the community, we haven’t even begun to address it at its root. And there are other examples.

So in closing, I’d like to suggest that to some extent it is a privilege to be able to focus on the future, to not be overly weighed down by the burdens of the past. Sometimes when the past tugs at us, we get annoyed, we want to shut it away in a closet or something. And sometimes, to be sure, there is such a thing as being too beholden to the past. But there often wisdom to be gained, I think, from those who resist the pull of the future, who refuse to let go—who keep directing our attention to the many ways in which justice has not been—and indeed may never be—done.

First Nations land acknowledegement

We acknowledge that the UBC Point Grey campus is situated on the traditional, ancestral and unceded territory of the xʷməθkʷəy̓əm (Musqueam) people.


UBC Crest The official logo of the University of British Columbia. Urgent Message An exclamation mark in a speech bubble. Caret An arrowhead indicating direction. Arrow An arrow indicating direction. Arrow in Circle An arrow indicating direction. Arrow in Circle An arrow indicating direction. Chats Two speech clouds. Facebook The logo for the Facebook social media service. Information The letter 'i' in a circle. Instagram The logo for the Instagram social media service. External Link An arrow entering a square. Linkedin The logo for the LinkedIn social media service. Location Pin A map location pin. Mail An envelope. Menu Three horizontal lines indicating a menu. Minus A minus sign. Telephone An antique telephone. Plus A plus symbol indicating more or the ability to add. Search A magnifying glass. Twitter The logo for the Twitter social media service. Youtube The logo for the YouTube video sharing service.