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Opinion | Superfund designation shows Michigan must focus on prevention thinking
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The Environmental Protection Agency declared earlier this month that the Gelman Plume polluting Ann Arbor’s groundwater will be on the Superfund National Priorities list. This means that the water contaminated with 1,4 dioxane, a chemical the EPA labels as “likely to be a carcinogenic,” will be eligible for federal funding to support the clean up efforts.
Adding one more Superfund site to Michigan’s list of more than 60, taxpayers are left wondering: why can’t we invest our public dollars in preventing these harms rather than spending millions — and sometimes billions — cleaning up the mess afterwards?
This question points to the set of rules we use and public investments we make in our communities, and across our state and country, to help create healthy and thriving communities. In the example of the Gelman Plume and many other environmental disasters, the set of rules we have favor the corporations and their profits, rather than prioritizing the health and well-being of humans.
The Superfund site came about because Gelman Sciences was dumping its wastewater into the ground, and that wastewater had 1,4 dioxane in it. After excessive dioxane was discovered in the groundwater, the state of Michigan sued Gelman Sciences to compel it to clean up the mess. But the judge ruled in favor of Gelman Sciences in 1991.
The Ann Arbor News reported at the time that the judge determined, with the exception of two small unauthorized spills, “all of Gelman’s releases of the solvent were performed under state issued permits.” In other words, harming the environment was perfectly legal under the rules we had.
So many of our environmental disasters happen this way. It’s not laws that are broken, but rather lax policies that prioritize profit over healthy people and a healthy planet.
While the Gelman Plume impacts Ann Arbor, a relatively wealthy, white, and educated city in Michigan, most Superfund sites across the state are in areas with a relative lack of political power.
No community is immune to environmental contaminations, but wealthy white communities are often able to mobilize dollars and political power to ensure that these contaminants are “not in my backyard.” Poor and marginalized neighborhoods are sometimes called “sacrifice zones” because politicians and corporations are willing to sacrifice the health and well-being of populations that live there. For example, the 48217 zip code, a predominantly Black and low-income area of Detroit, is known as the most polluted community in Michigan and has higher rates of asthma, cancer and heart disease.
Right now, we have lax policies that harm residents and our taxpayers pay huge sums to clean up the toxic mess. On top of that, taxpayers often cover the health care and social services costs for people who were harmed. What if we took a different approach, one where we invested our public dollars in preventing environmental disasters and other harms from happening in the first place?
This is at the core of prevention thinking in policymaking. Prevention thinking urges us to orient our policies and budgets towards things that prevent harms from happening in the first place. It draws on an idea from public health called “primary prevention.”
In public health, we ideally don’t want to focus all of our energy on treating someone’s cancer, diabetes, or other illness. What we really want to do is prevent someone from getting sick in the first place!
The same idea can be applied broadly to our public policies. Prevention thinking allows us to focus on what people need to thrive and be healthy and invest heavily in those areas. It also demands that we address the root causes of what is harming us. And finally, the people most affected should be partners in determining the investments and rules that shape their lives. The people that live in those “sacrifice zones” need to co-create the solutions and policies rather than have them forced upon them by outsiders.
Getting a Superfund site designation is great news for Ann Arbor residents. Now, let’s tackle the root causes of environmental contamination and other societal harms and adopt policies that will prevent them before they ever happen.
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