By Shea Howell
Shortly after Mother’s Day, three Nestle semi-trucks will roll into Flint with free bottled water. Between Mother’s Day and Labor day Nestle will donate 100,000 bottles a week to three service centers where people can pick up the bottled water. The Mayor of Flint has graciously thanked the company for its “willingness to help the people of Flint.”
…it would rank at the bottom of the world for urban access to clean water. The preface to current crisis was written in 2013 when the Governor-appointed emergency manager authorized Flint’s switch from a safe water source to a less expensive one. In the spring of 2014, the city started drawing water for household consumption from the highly polluted Flint River. According to the Virginia Tech scientists who first exposed the public health crisis in 2015, the levels of lead and other pollutants in the tap water made it unsafe for consumption, even after filtering.
By Lucy Rodina
Is it ethical to let a river run dry?
Is it ethical to have clean drinking water in Vancouver and hundreds of boil water advisories in Indigenous communities all across Canada?
Is it ethical to take away water from rural areas to quench the thirst of ever growing cities?
Try to think about a river and ethics together. These two words do not fit together easily because we tend to separate the world of the “natural” from that of the “ethical.”
