Solastalgia redux

 May 12, 2022

Six years ago, my last experiment in blogging was about the Flint Water Crisis. I think the passage of time has nearly made us forget how awful and panicked that time made us feel. I think the passage of time has left us open to attempts to make us forget. 

I called the blog Solastalgia, U.S.A. The word Solastalgia was coined by an Australian poet-philosopher and environmental lecturer. Solastalgia describes his feeling of living in Australian coal country, a generalized feeling of nostalgia for a landscape of solace that no longer exists.

This philosopher, Glenn Albrecht, dug himself into a bit of a hole here, but one of the best kind of holes, to be fair. His neologism “Solastalgia” was so powerful a description of the negative emotions associated with climate change that he has since spent most of his time searching for positive solutions, producing many words of small wonders, but none sufficient to offset the massive gulf he opened up in consciousness with the word solastalgia. Many sparkling words like “eutierria” have tumbled bright and shining into the shadowy chasm of the fantastic ecstatic weighty terror of of the word solastalgia. Much worse fates have befallen men than to conceptualize a wonderful need that then needs to be ministered to.

But we need to let Albrecht struggle on in his noble task, and get to the business of noting what has happened in Flint since I left off, which was right around when it entered into the courts. 

Three issues have since developed into a throbbing need to be mentioned. As the cases continue to meander and stall in the courts and no one can really be found to be properly blamed for what is starting to appear like a total failure of our government system, its time to listen to reason once again. 

Point number one: The Emergency Manager most responsible for the Flint Water Crisis is Edward Kurtz, not Darnell Earley.  Never forget that the Flint Water Crisis would never have happened if Public Act 4, the Emergency Manager law, hadn’t taken public decision-making power out of the hands and out of sight of people and their elected representatives. Why that is, is that the Emergency Manager overseeing Flint in 2013 signed the executive order switching Flint to the bacterial Flint river water, and the City Council and Mayor’s office couldn’t do anything to oppose it, because of Public Act 4. The river water was so bacterial that the standard cleaning agents had to be pumped in in great volumes, causing the pipes themselves, which were made out of lead, to corrode.

The Emergency Manager who signed that order was Edward Kurtz, not the later Emergency Manager, Darnell Earley, who has taken a lot of blame from those emphasizing the Emergency Manager angle, nor anyone else. It’s almost like everyone but Kurtz is taking blame for it. Edward Kurtz is an old, rich, elite power broker type, who is buddy-buddy with former Governor John Engler and so on. Darnell Earley is a budget slasher, but a just a company man. I’m just an innocent bystander in this, but I haven’t not been paying attention, and I didn’t not see a rich white guy do a crime that harmed thousands, and a black guy take the fall for it. No matter how blind someone is to the race aspect of this tragedy that happened in a city where people of color are a majority, but white folks still have most of the money and power, this remains true: Ed Kurtz’s signature is on the document approving the switch to the Flint River Water. I don’t see any other EM’s signature on that document. Why haven’t I heard Ed Kurtz’s name in connection with this authorizing document, that he signed? 

Who is this squeeb and why is he squirming out of culpability for this, in context of 1) P.A. 4, 2) His signature on the causal document and 3) his increasingly transparent efforts to evade or diminish the effect of questioning him? I’m sure there is stuff I don’t know. It just seems that the courts haven’t seemed to act on this thing that I know, and that raises the question: do they know?

Point number two: A Covid-19 related moratorium on paying the water bill is one thing, but forgiveness for Flint residents on the basis of their water supply being poisoned is another thing: that needs to happen. We were rightfully outraged years ago about Flint residents forced into still paying for water that came out of the tap poisoned with lead. It seemed that everyone relaxed a bit about that when Covid-19 related moratoriums and monetary support rolled in, but, now as those supports are set to expire, there is a danger that people forget that support is due to Flint residents for the water that was poisoned, and not only because everyone is going through a Covid-19 lockdown. There was a a time, if I remember correctly, when Flint residents were threatened by the government over non-payment of their water bills during the time when their tap water exceeded the legal limit for lead by several multiples of it. The situation has gotten better but it hasn’t gotten fixed. It is still absurd for anyone to pay for water that they can’t use as water. 

Point number 3: Lianne Shekter-Smith, a state official who “no longer has a job” over this Flint Water Crisis, wants her job back. This is a strange story. She was one of the rather hapless respondents to the initial citizen complaints on another less-known part of the Flint Water Crisis saga - a saga of government ineptitude and racialized disregard for the poor if not outright racial malice and class oppression. The mismanagement of the Flint water system by the Emergency Managers caused not only the lead poisoning of Flint’s citizens but also the largest Legionnaires Disease outbreak in decades. When this was brought to the attention of Ms. Shekter-Smith, she downplayed and minimized it. That’s what I remember associated with her name in this Flint Water ordeal. Somehow during the court proceedings she feels that she was scapegoated. I can’t say for sure what she feels scapegoated for, but she can’t claim she was scapegoated for this Legionnaires Disease fiasco, wherein her response was full of delay and prevarication. Anyway, she wants her job back. It’s a sad state of affairs if after the poisoning of an entire city and years of court proceedings, very little actually changes except for the name of the government department that Ms. Shekter-Smith wants to go back to work for, again. If anything the poor and working class have gotten it even worse after years of government response and mismanagement of that response to the Flint Water Crisis. The rebranded MDEQ is equally incapable of regulating Enbridge Line 5 which goes through two Great Lakes; no one significant has gotten nabbed for wrongdoing during the Flint Water crisis; and Public Act 4 is still on the books, creating more Emergency Managers to mismanage other vulnerable Michigan cities.

I wonder sometimes if all this focus on the rich, famous and powerful, even on their misdeeds, engenders support for them more than the warranted disdain, approbation, and shame on them. No viable change can happen without institutional support, but for reasons before my time and beyond my acquiescence, those institutions are populated by people who leech off the goodwill of the people who most need them. The circumstance where it is so rare to find a wise man in a position of institutional power might make for gripping human drama but it fails at taking care of people. I’m an idealist. Those who deserve power are often those who refuse it. But the absence of quality representation in our institutions is evidence that we’re not continuing on far enough in the process that leads to good governance and appreciation for the spirit of the laws. We’re getting to a certain point and we’re saying “don’t worry about it.” 

We have to hold the line at a certain point, and also admit that there are multiple angles to attack this problem. If there is a lesson from this Flint Water Crisis to be learned by those who never want anything like this to happen again, it is that we should examine causes of a problem and not symptoms. P.A. 4 and the unaccountable Emergency Managers caused the Flint Water Crisis. Too many found the process of fucking up on such an epic scale “interesting and not tragic. Flint was a case where nothing bad had to happen. If not for P.A. 4 and Kurtz’s signing off on the disastrous decision to switch the city drinking water to river water, nothing subsequent would have happened. P.A. 4 should have been opposed and Emergency Managers should have never been appointed. Sometimes harm is preventable, sometimes it can be minimized, and sometimes it is necessary. This was clearly a case where harm could have been prevented. It was not a time for process stories. 

Just to close with a note that I never would have thought a reasonable man living in a sane society would have to make: in the insane and vain attempt to make a process story out of this tragedy, some people got so hung up on the idea of making this a “shocking” and “sensational” story about “what’s in your drinking water.” They got so hung up on all the “stuff” that’s “in” drinking water, to the ultimate benefit of the water privateers that have caused these same type of crises in other U.S. cities, including Indianapolis. I can’t be remiss in my duty to remind people about that not-so-casual denouement to the movie “The Big Short”, where we read that one of the same guys that bet against the housing market before the 2010 crash is now “investing” in water as a “commodity” - as if it ever was; as if that wasn’t unethical to the extreme. These aren’t good guys - strange to have to say that Veolia, and so on, aren’t a company of good guys and aren’t doing good deeds. And “corrosion control” didn’t cause the lead crisis. The anti-science guys had a field day with spreading that confusion. It was because the Flint River water was so bacterial, and so much cleaning agent had to be put in the water, that caused those cleaning agents to erode the lead pipes. Switching to the river as a source of water caused the crisis: this was an entirely preventable harm.