Flint: Why We Still Need Grassroots Environmental Activism

In most every town in America, a small group of volunteers attend public utilities commission meetings. They review plans to build new roads. They ask for environmental impact statements. They threaten to sue when the reports are incomplete. Their work is often dull, repetitive, and filled with neologisms and jargon. They are generally despised by the agencies they hold accountable. There is little glory in the work.

These are the grassroots environmental activists who defined the 20th century environmental movement. Without them, it’s a good bet that the road you’ll drive on today might be in the middle of a wetland. It’s absolutely certain that the water you’re drinking would face a similarly tragic circumstance as the water in Flint, Michigan without their steadfast efforts.

This is the activism championed by the Sierra Club, the nation’s oldest and largest grassroots environmental group. Gray-bearded men, moms wearing Eileen Fisher clothing, penniless adventurers and student activists all working together to make sure that the bureaucracies established to protect the common good do their jobs.

In the late 1960s and early 1970s the Sierra Club helped pass a raft of environmental laws like the National Environmental Protection Act, the Clean Water Act and the Clean Air Act. These laws are the basis for this grassroots activism, and provide legal mechanisms and regulatory expectations that local agencies must follow.

In Flint, these activists were pushed aside by an emergency manager empowered to disregard public process in order to pursue reckless cost-cutting. But it’s too easy to just blame the emergency manager. In the last fifteen years locally-focused grassroots activism has declined radically in proportion to the growth of global environmental activism. The entire environmental movement turned itself to fight the existential challenge of climate change. In the 1970s environmentalists in the U.S. were focused on the burning Cuyahoga River in Ohio. In 2015 environmentalists were focused on the Paris climate conference.

Now that the tide is turning and it seems clear that the response to climate change is serious, it’s time to turn our eyes back to the gears of our towns and neighborhoods. We need to re-dedicate ourselves to ensuring that the basic building blocks of ecological protection are defended and strengthened. Do you know the name of your local public utility commissioner? Have you read the consumer confidence report on your local water system? Are you a member of the Sierra Club or another locally-focused environmental organization? Think and act globally, but don’t forget your local environment as well.