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Last night former Vice President Joe Biden handily won the Michigan primary, defeating Senator Bernie Sanders and amassing 53 delegates to Sanders 35. As of writing this last night Biden also claimed Idaho, Mississippi, and Missouri while Washington State and North Dakota had not fully reported their votes. Michigan was arguably the most important state […]
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Whether it is drinking water in Michigan, floodwaters in Missouri and Mississippi, or dams versus salmon in Washington and Idaho, or wastewater from fracking in North Dakota — clean water is an issue that runs through the primaries that are taking place today.
Why This Matters: The two remaining Democratic candidates have not had a chance to discuss these important water issues in the debates thus far.
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When she was 8-years-old, Mari Copeny wrote a letter to President Obama, asking him to meet with her and a group of people coming to Washington D.C. to watch congressional hearings on the Flint water crisis. He responded with a letter announcing that instead, he was coming to Flint to ensure the people there receive […]
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Last week, Senators Kamala Harris and Kirsten Gillibrand made safe drinking water a key environmental plank in their campaigns.
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The NY Times published a blistering exposé yesterday, in which it reported that “more than 300 public water systems in California serve unsafe drinking water, according to public compliance data compiled by the California State Water Resources Control Board” with “more than one million Californians exposed to unsafe water each year, according to public health officials.”
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“Fixing” Flint is going to have to be part of a broader strategy to provide economic relief to other cities like it. In the same way that we must help former coal towns, our nation owes the people of industrial towns a helping hand for all that they’ve given our country.
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Yesterday we wrote about how the people responsible for the Flint water crisis have not yet been held accountable. Partially because justice has not been brought to the city, a new Democratic governor (Gretchen Whitmer) was elected last fall and just last week announced a broad commitment to environmental issues including environmental justice.
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As we wrote yesterday, what happened in Flint to cause water contamination at such a mass scale was a failure at many levels of government. However, despite this systematic failure, Flint’s residents deserve for the people who willingly (or even criminally) stood by when they knew something was wrong to be held accountable.
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The Flint Water Crisis is one of the most blatant instances of environmental injustice in recent years. It was a failure at many levels of governance, full of complexities and ongoing litigation yet to date, no lasting solution has been offered to Flint’s residents. We want to take this week to take a deeper dive […]
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Last Week we wrote about the detriment that road salt can have on waterways, plants, and animals and how runoff is causing dead zones in lakes. It turns out that the story doesn’t stop there and all that salt is actually reacting with soil and water pipes to form toxic substances that can poison drinking water and harm the environment. The Revelator recently published an article examining a report published last month that found that not only is salinity increasing in many surface waters, but when you add salt to the environment it can mobilize heavy metals, nutrient pollution and other contaminants that are combining to create new “chemical cocktails” in rivers, streams, and reservoirs.
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