Overview of my Project
The focus of this website is the exploitation that US citizens face because of the relationship governmental and business corporations have with natural resources that meet the People’s needs. For my analysis, I focus on Flint, Michigan because of the national attention it received and hundred years of exploitation at the hands of a business corporation that led to the Flint Water Crisis.
With this website, I want to explore the true nature of the US and the US Constitution and how governmental and business corporation interact has led to the exploitation of natural resources we are seeing all across the country in the United States’ most vulnerable communities. I also want to explore what solutions could look like.
Focus of the Problem
Today, only 12% of the world lives in water-secure countries (UN, 2023). The United States is one of the water-secure countries. Within the U.S., however, even though the US has enough water to meet the needs of its residents, “widespread inequalities in access to clean water and sanitization infrastructure undermine human health, and ongoing climate change presents new threats to water security.” According to the Health Policy Brief, “two million people are without running water and basic indoor plumbing, and more than sixty million people receive drinking water from systems that are out of compliance with the Safe Water Drinking Act of 1974 or from unregulated private wells.” This accounts for 18.7 percent of the US population.
In 2014, the nation first heard of the water crisis in Flint, Michigan. All across our national news stations, Americans witnessed the children in Flint hold up containers filled with the brown water that came from the tap. Told that because of budget cuts, government officials switched the water source from Detroit’s system to the Flint River. This switch resulted in elevated lead levels and consequently, the lead poisoning of the people of Flint. We then learned that the people of Flint had been experiencing side effects from drinking the water and these health issues had been overlooked or ignored for over a year. Overall, we learned of this as a one-off tragedy that happened in an underserved, minority-majority community. It was not.
We live in a time where it is easy to feel like there isn’t much we can do to change the trajectory of these massive issues that can and will directly affect all of us while being told that we live in a democratic society and that with our votes, we have the agency to change the terms of the (implicit) social contracts we’ve made with our government. The almost contradictory nature of this dynamic begs the question: how much power do we as individuals and grassroots communities actually create change? How much does our government actually work for us? How does it work against us? Why? How responsive are our societal power structures to the advocacy efforts of individuals and communities? What is the power of an individual voter? What does this dynamic look like when discussing our basic human needs? If our basic human needs and rights are of no concern to these systems, what do we owe these systems? To summarize, what does it look like to advocate for your basic human rights in the United States? (the central question/thesis)
- Main ideas of each paragraph/section:
- The nature of US institutions
- The state of our natural resources because of how they get allocated
- The need for natural resources, specifically water, amongst the people on the land (to include US citizens, non-citizens, indigenous groups that don’t identify with the “American” identity, etc.)
- The nature of protest in America
As for sources, I am going to look at data concerning US water resources and allocation. I am going to look at how advocacy groups are advocating for people and communities that do not have access to clean or any water. I am going to look at historical documents that contextualize the history of building US institutions. Finally, I am going to look at resources that explain the history of protest in America.
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