Environmental Justice and a Century of Pollution

The water crisis of twenty fourteen was not Flint's first environmental disaster. It was, in some ways, the culmination of a century of environmental extraction that fell most heavily on the people who had the least power to resist it.

For decades, General Motors and its suppliers used the Flint River as an industrial drain. Oils, solvents, and heavy metals were discharged into the water. The river ran foul enough that fishing and swimming were severely restricted for most of the twentieth century. Federal cleanup efforts began in the nineteen eighties but continued for decades.

The geography of industrial pollution in Flint followed the geography of redlining. The neighborhoods closest to the foundries and the waste streams were the same neighborhoods where Black workers had been steered by discriminatory housing policy. The people breathing the foundry air and living near the industrial sites were predominantly the people who had been denied access to other neighborhoods.

Researchers studying Flint's environmental history have documented what they describe as a century of compounded environmental injustice. Lead was not new to Flint in twenty fourteen. Lead paint in older housing stock, lead-contaminated soil near industrial sites, and lead in the air from decades of industrial activity had already elevated exposure levels in Flint's poorest neighborhoods before the water switch.

The full picture of what long-term environmental exposure did to Flint's children, street by street, over the course of the twentieth century is not entirely known. The records here are incomplete, dispersed across agencies that often did not share data, and communities that often did not know they were being studied.

What is known is that the people who bore the costs of building one of the most profitable corporations in history also bore a disproportionate share of the environmental consequences of that production. That pattern held for a hundred years before anyone was criminally charged.