Clean Water for Texas
By: Mohammed S Yusuf
Tags: Water, Green New Deal, Austin, Texas, Environmental Issues

Keeping Texas’s Water Clean is a Texas-sized Task

Environmental issues are some of the most urgent and important parts of our society right now. Coming together in a timely manner in order to protect our natural environment should be on every person’s agenda, regardless of age, nationality, religion, socio-economic status, or political affiliations. One of these issues local to Texas is the water quality, and more specifically, corporations violating permits and environmental laws by polluting natural water sources without receiving any pushback from local government agencies. In order to preserve the natural water sources that local populations and wildlife depend on, the EPA must become stricter on corporations repeatedly polluting these sources, and particularly TCEQ must stop turning a blind eye to these large corporations. In order to make these changes, our constituency, not just in Texas, but in the U.S. as a whole needs to come together to vote in politicians like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez who support environmental regulation and enforcing these policies in a way that will force our leaders to keep our water clean.

Between January of 2016 and September of 2017, oil giant Ineos USA violated their permit to dump wastewater into Chocolate Bayou 8 times. The facility had been found to only be in compliance two-thirds of the time in the last 3 years. In response to this, TCEQ (Texas Commission on Environmental Quality) has not issued a single fine. In fact, a Texas Observer article titled “Too Big to Fine, Too Small to Fight Back” written by Naveena Sadasivam details how TCEQ targeted a small gas station owner for bookkeeping errors while allowing Citgo to release more than 50,000 pounds of hydrogen cyanide in the air. Not only is the amount of pollution that large corporations release worrying, but the lack of regulation and oversight by the committees that were put into place for that reason presents an additional challenging problem.

Texas has actually made attempts to rectify the water situation seriously going back as far as 1945, when legislation was passed that authorized the Texas Department of Health to enforce drinking water standards for public water supply systems. Following a fire on the Cuyahoga River in Ohio, the Clean Water Act was passed into federal law in 1972. The national goal was to eliminate the discharging of pollutants into waterways by 1985, a goal that has still yet to be reached. While these attempts can sometimes gain traction, meaningful enforcement often doesn’t occur against larger corporations. A report detailing the EPA’s fines also supports the claim that this issue can sometimes be political. A report done by the Observer noted that the EPA collected 60 percent less in fines during the first 6 months of the Trump administration compared to the Obama, Bush, and Clinton administrations. If that wasn’t problematic enough, the Trump administration has also proposed cutting the EPA’s civil enforcement budget by 30.4 million dollars in 2019. This reinforces the idea that political affiliations have a genuine interest in continuing the pollution that is ruining America’s clean water supply.

These aren’t just problems for the small counties that the pollution occurs in. Some of these sources of water can provide water to large metropolitan areas that can support upwards of a million people. But more than that, setting a precedent that allows corporations to just factor in the fines they receive as a cost of doing business is detrimental to the environment. The only way to ensure that corporations don’t continue to violate the environmental regulations are to enforce a fine that either prevents them from doing business, or enforcing a large enough fine that it doesn’t make polluting financially viable anymore.

There are a number of problems however. Many constituents of local counties and even bigger metropolitan areas might feel as though their vote doesn’t count, a problem that many organizations and individuals tried to address in the 2020 election. But electing strong officials are important because they can pave the way for future politicians to stand up to these corporations. Setting forth clear legislation that regulates lobbying will have an incredibly long lasting effect on politicians ability to fight against large corporations without fear of reactionary action like pulling funding or support from politicians campaigns. A change now can have an impact long beyond 1 election cycle!

There are also personal challenges that many face with taking action against these corporations. Some people don’t connect with their environment much, or feel like they are a part of the larger environment around them, and that’s something I had the chance to speak to my close friend about. He didn’t seem to understand the separation between what we often refer to as nature, and our place in and around it. And that led me to an idea that I think is applicable to a number of concepts, and that is natural is an idea that is created by us, and is also up to us to define it’s borders. In certain contexts, it can be useful to reserve nature to things outside of man’s influence, for example when separating a body of water that was created by man from a natural body of water when talking about things like dealing with infestations and various harmful species “invading” local water sources. But on a broader scale, we should refrain from seeing ourselves as separate from our environment. In writing about this field report I’ve found that it can be very easy to separate ourselves from nature which I feel in certain situations lead me to believe that I had less of a stake in the natural world around me. But another interesting unintended research piece brought up a great point to change that kind of thinking. In a recently watched Vsauce video (cited below) titled “How Many Things Are There?” I learned that if you took put every human alive in the same space that area would be tiny, unable to even fill up a small part of the Grand Canyon. This fact was important to understand because it shows that while we may have a greater influence on the world around us than possibly any animal before us, we are tiny in comparison to the world at large, and feeling disconnected or unaffected by nature is simply an illusion. We are just as subject to the world around us as we ever are, and even as we explore greater frontiers beyond our planet we still interact with the natural forces as much as we ever have, and in some cases more.

And all this is to say that no matter what your take on the environment, politics, climate change, or your place in nature is, one thing we can all agree on is we need clean water. And the only way to keep our water clean is together.

Works Cited

Sadasivam, N. (2019, April 20). Dirtying the Waters: Texas Ranks First in Violating Water Pollution Rules. Retrieved October 04, 2020, from https://www.texasobserver.org/dirtying-the-waters-texas-ranks-first-in-violating-water-rules/

Sadasivam, N. (2020, February 05). Too Big to Fine, Too Small to Fight Back. Retrieved October 04, 2020, from https://www.texasobserver.org/too-big-to-fine-too-small-to-fight-back/

Aid and International Development Forum (AIDF). (n.d.). 5 Reasons Why Everyone Needs Clean Drinking Water. Retrieved October 04, 2020, from http://www.aidforum.org/topics/health-and-wash/5-reasons-why-everyone-needs-clean-drinking-water/

History of the TCEQ and Its Predecessor Agencies. (n.d.). Retrieved October 04, 2020, from https://www.tceq.texas.gov/agency/organization/tceqhistory.html

Richard Burroughs (1999) When Stakeholders Choose: Process, Knowledge, and Motivation in Water Quality Decisions, Society & Natural Resources, 12:8, 797–809, DOI: 10.1080/089419299279326

EPA Awards State of Texas Over $3.7 Million to Manage Water Pollution. (2019, August 22). Retrieved October 04, 2020, from https://www.epa.gov/newsreleases/epa-awards-state-texas-over-37-million-manage-water-pollution

Collier, K. (2018, March 15). Report: Major Texas industrial facilities rank first nationally in illegal water pollution. Retrieved October 04, 2020, from https://www.texastribune.org/2018/03/15/report-texas-industrial-facilities-rank-first-illegal-water-pollution/