By Tom Perkins for Planet Detroit.
Broadcast version by Mark Richardson for Michigan News Connection with support from the Solutions Journalism Network

During the early 1970s, Michigan enacted a bold set of environmental laws that helped form an unprecedented check on the nation's industrial heartland. The state's water and air quality standards went beyond the minimum set by federal law, and it became a leader in managing natural resources and protecting wetlands.

But it wouldn't last long.

The 1990 election of Gov. John Engler ushered in a new era of deregulation, and, for the next several decades, governors and a largely GOP-controlled Legislature shredded environmental protections while defunding and gutting the state's regulatory agencies.

The sustained assault hobbled regulators, who are now often unwilling or unable to hold polluters accountable, and the results are in - Flint's water is poisoned, dangerous air pollution chokes Detroit, and PFAS-contaminated water is killing residents, among other environmental crises.

But now Michigan's polluters face a new kind of check. A loose coalition of environmental attorneys and activists are increasingly confronting industry with a multi-pronged approach - suing to force companies to follow the law, stepping in during the permitting process and waging campaigns to raise awareness of corporate misdeeds.

They're de facto regulators, and their strategy is undeniably effective. They've forced the closure of the toxic incinerator near Midtown, tripped up Nestle as it attempted to seize the state's water, pushed utilities like DTE Energy toward clean energy and taken on industrial polluters in and around southwest Detroit.

These groups see themselves as a last line of defense when there isn't the "political will or appetite to protect the environment," said Nick Schroek, director of the University of Detroit Mercy's environmental law clinic.

"Going forward, we'll likely see more litigation from public interest groups, and that's partly because of a failure of our government, both state and federal, to evolve and add additional environmental protections that were needed in the face of changing circumstances," he said.

The rise has been accompanied by a new focus on environmental justice issues in low income communities that bear the brunt of industries' wrongdoing and political indifference. A new generation of activists from Detroit and other cities has risen, increasingly working with long-established environmental groups (many of whom are new to environmental justice issues) to pressure policymakers.

In recent years, they mounted what is essentially a vigorous public relations campaign that outed Marathon as a local corporate villain. While activists have fought the incinerator since its planning stages, an uptick in public pressure in recent years was critical in forcing its closure, said Nick Leonard, director of the Great Lakes Environmental Law Center.

In the absence of meaningful government oversight, activists are "doing the accountability work for the regulatory system," said Michelle Martinez, acting executive director of the Michigan Environmental Justice Coalition.

"They're the scientists, they're the regulators, they're the checks and balances of a broken system," she said. "They're taking on a David and Goliath fight in almost every single case, whether it's Marathon Oil, or FCA or the Detroit incinerator - you have fights against multibillion dollar fossil fuel corporations that have the lockdown on the political system."

But while citizen and public-interest lawsuits provide the public with a valuable weapon in battles with polluters, ultimately the war can only be won with a robust regulatory apparatus. Last-line-of-defense legal cases brought by residents "are not going to get us where we need to be," on encompassing issues like climate change, Schroeck said.

"We're sort of nipping around the edges of really, really complicated complex issues ... and there needs to be systematic statewide and nationwide efforts, rather than piecemeal litigation," he added. "To solve issues like chemical contamination across the state, there needs to be a uniform approach."

'A hurdle to economic growth'

The deep cuts to the Michigan Department of Environmental Quality in the 20 years that preceded the Flint Water crisis clearly illustrates how defunding regulators can spark environmental disasters that take and destroy lives.

During the early 1990's, Engler weakened the DEQ (now EGLE) by taking a more direct oversight of the agency and enacting deep budget and staff cuts. Gov. Jennifer Granholm next slashed the budget by nearly $100 million, and a 2010 EPA audit of the DEQ found that $300,000 in cuts to the Drinking Water Program had a "significant impact" on the agency's ability to monitor water.

Gov. Rick Snyder's administration pushed an extreme "business-first" philosophy in the DEQ that was summed up by Dan Wyant, the agency's first director, in a 2010 Crain's interview: "It's true we'd like to have more resources, but it's important that we get the economy back on track first. The DEQ can be a part of that by not being a hurdle to economic growth."

By the time the Flint water crisis started poisoning residents, the agency's staff and funding had been cut by around 20% since 2001. The attack on regulators here mirrored that playing out nationally as conservatives began to argue that "environmental protection was something that was somehow at odds with a healthy economy," Schroeck said. But he noted that history repeatedly shows how this approach leads to environmental disasters, like Flint.

"We saw the crippling of our environmental regulators and it was really impossible for them to do their job," Schroek said. "The way these laws are supposed to be designed is that we have a government regulator that's there to protect the public's health, and to be a counterweight to the very powerful corporate interests."

Even if the regulatory agencies were enforcing laws during recent decades, a series of Republican attorney generals largely were uninterested in prosecuting polluters, though that's changed since Dana Nessel's 2018 election. Soon after taking office, Nessel challenged Enbridge's dangerous Line 5 plans and later filed a first-of-its-kind suit against PFAS manufacturers.

Meanwhile, the state's GOP-controlled Legislature in recent years passed "polluter panel" bills that gave industry the power to override new environmental rules. The same group was behind the 2018 lame duck assault on the environment in which it eliminated protections for a vast swath of the state's wetlands, loosened regulations around toxic fracking waste, approved the controversial Line 5 plans, and more.

In 2017, as Flint residents continued suffering and living without clean water, GOP legislative leadership sent an astonishing letter to Snyder that called for less environmental oversight.

"While we can appreciate the role of the DEQ, we see a pattern of unreasonable overreach when it comes to implementation and enforcement of laws and regulations that is alarming, and it seems that this concern has become more evident over the last couple of years," it read.

Courts as a last resort

With the state failing to protect the environment, public-interest attorneys can turn to the courts.

They typically use one of several tools.They can file a citizen suit in federal court under the Clean Air or Clean Water acts and ask a judge to order polluters to get in compliance with federal law. That's the approach attorneys have taken with the incinerator, US Steel and other air polluters around Southwest Detroit.

Alternatively, they can sue in Michigan Circuit Court under the Michigan Environmental Protection Act of 1970, and ask a judge to declare a polluter a public nuisance. That approach is less common because plaintiffs can't recoup legal costs.

Another legal remedy is intervening in DTE Energy and other utilities' rate cases. A range of activists have successfully pressured regulators to force companies to limit rate increases and close coal plants, among other wins.

Meanwhile, activists are paying closer attention to the permitting process and making sure residents' voices are heard

One example this year was eastside residents living near the FCA plant who pressured EGLE to require FCA to install pollution controls as the factory expanded. Although EGLE ultimately ignored residents' demands, Gregg Newsom, a Detroit People's Platform organizer, highlighted it as an example of the community making regulators hear more than just the industry's voice.

'It's a life and death situation'

Until recent years, Southwest Detroit's Marathon Oil refinery polluted with near-carte blanche, spewing carcinogens while pumping out hundreds of tons of greenhouse gases annually, plaguing residential neighbors with respiratory disease and other ailments. The coke dust it piled on the Detroit River's shores blew across the region, dusting neighboring properties with the toxic substance.

But Marathon no longer operates with impunity. A coalition of neighborhood residents-turned-environmental activists have partnered with EJ groups and attorneys to confront the threat and hold Marathon to account.

Over the last four years, they forced Detroit policymakers to take a stand against Marathon and require it to cover loose piles of toxic coke dust piled on the Detroit River's banks. A year later, state regulators forced the company to install air filtration systems in a nearby school and provide real time air quality data.

Though litigation is ongoing, the wins are a sign of a shifting tide, and Martinez called it "a testament to the power of organizing" that's increasingly common in communities of color facing an outsize burden of pollution and climate change. During the last 10-15 years, the ranks of activists in these communities has swelled.

"When I came back to Detroit 12 years ago ... I could count with my right hand how many environmental justice activists there were in the city. In 2020? There are dozens of climate justice, environmental justice groups, organizations, hundreds, if not thousands, of people who are well informed, skilled and ready to make change."

Community involvement is critical, said Darryl Eley Jordan, senior organizer with the East Michigan Environmental Action Council (EMEAC), because residents drum up support in their own impacted neighborhoods in a way that outside groups, like lawyers, journalists and the established advocacy groups often can't.

Jordan highlighted EMEAC's outreach in neighborhoods around the incinerator, which helped locate residents who suffered from its toxic emissions.

"It takes people in the community to help others understand these issues in a language that they understand - that's how we build some power and keep politicians in line and responsive to our needs," Jordan said.

Meanwhile, established environmental groups are increasingly working with residents in impacted communities to determine priorities. Sierra Club attorney Elena Saxonhouse noted that the group now takes a "bottom up" approach in deciding which issues to tackle.

"[We] listen to what the communities we're working in want and go from there - it's not all top down. You can't just tell people 'you should care about coal plants,'" she said.

Martinez welcomes the new commitment of organizations like the Sierra Club to valuing the voices of the residents living these battles in their daily lives.

"The writing is on the wall, and it has perhaps not hit middle and upper- income white America in the same way," Martinez said. "The commitment to justice and to a cleaner, healthier environment belongs to those who breathe toxic air every day, because it's a life and death situation. It's not just a hobby or a pet interest."

Indiana environmental advocates are facing uncertainties following the election.

Changes in federal leadership could shift key environmental protections, creating questions for state policies on coal ash and water quality.

Sam Carpenter, executive director of the Hoosier Environmental Council, noted federal regulations, like those from the Environmental Protection Agency, have helped Indiana manage environmental challenges, including addressing unlined coal ash pits contaminating groundwater. With shifting federal priorities, there is a question of what will happen to the protections.

"The EPA had recently come out with guidelines that require those to be cleaned up," Carpenter pointed out. "There are similar things with coal-fired power plants where we still rely quite a bit on our coal power generation which is dirty."

Carpenter argued the plants are costly and harmful to health and the climate. Supporters of reduced regulation argue scaling back federal oversight could ease economic pressures on Indiana's coal industry and reduce costs for energy providers.

Carpenter expressed concern over Indiana's legislative stance, emphasizing a need for strong regulations to protect the well-being of Hoosiers and natural resources in the state amid increased development.

"What we need to think about is protection of our health, protection of our water, of our natural assets," Carpenter emphasized. "In our statehouse there is a real concern about regulation. We rely on some protection for natural resources."

Despite the challenges, Carpenter urged residents to stay hopeful and engaged, stressing involvement is a powerful antidote to despair. He assured supporters the council would keep pushing for clean energy, water quality improvements and partnerships across political lines to secure a healthier environment.


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Hispanic families who fish to put food on the table are disproportionately affected by mercury, which accumulates in seafood in Southern California.

Surveys at 10 piers in Los Angeles and Orange counties found 60% of the anglers were Latino and native Spanish speakers, and 78% of them were fishing to feed their families.

Sofia Barboza, ocean manager for the Hispanic Access Foundation, said the families are exposed to toxins in fish from polluted waters.

"We found that Hispanic anglers in California are actually ingesting an average of 13.9 micrograms of mercury per day via fish consumption that they had caught in local waters," Barboza reported. "This is double the amount of mercury that has been determined as safe by the EPA."

Fish with high mercury levels have also been found in the Bay Area, the Central Coast near Humboldt and Deer Creek. A newly-released report from the foundation about Latinos in U.S. fisheries found 5% of Latinos in California, or about 785,000 people, work in the agricultural, forestry, fishing, hunting and mining sectors. But no research yet exists to determine how many Latinos are in commercial fishing.

Barboza suggested the warning signs about pollution at the piers, as well as government websites, should be translated into Spanish.

"Even though 28% of the California population speaks Spanish, the California Fish and Wildlife Department fishing regulations are not provided in Spanish on their website," Barboza pointed out. "Something we would like to see moving forward."

The report also recommends stronger oversight of commercial fishing companies hiring Hispanic migrant workers on H2B visas to ensure they receive fair wages, safe working conditions and access to safe housing.

By Angela Dennis and Adam Mahoney for Capital B News.
Broadcast version by Shanteya Hudson for North Carolina News Service reporting for the Rural News Network-Public News Service Collaboration

Robert Thomas' home is still standing after the coffee-colored floodwaters of Hurricane Helene rushed through his community, but everything that made up his life has been swept away.

Thirteen days after Helene first made landfall in the U.S., it is known that at least 230 people died during the storm's surge, with hundreds of people still unaccounted for. While the Federal Emergency Management Agency ultimately sent out more than 7,000 employees and thousands of volunteers poured into the region with tons of food, clothes, water, and other supplies, it still took days for aid to reach some people - particularly Black low-income people, the elderly, and those living with disabilities.

"There's always a major disparity," said Thomas, who remains without electricity or clean water, but has already been denied aid from the Federal Emergency Management Agency because his home didn't receive any physical flood or wind damage.

"You see which communities get up and running quicker," he said. Within two days of the catastrophic storm, he said he noticed utility workers restoring power in the majority white and wealthy areas of Asheville.

He, like most people who've been on social media over the past two weeks, quickly saw conspiracy theories about how the federal government was planning, or not planning, to respond to the storm.

Helene's devastation far exceeded most people's predictions, pointing to why it took FEMA time to get to some of the hardest hit areas such as western North Carolina and Augusta, Georgia. Most residents Capital B spoke to ultimately applauded the federal response to the storm. Yet, it is in those long days between the storm's destruction and when people can get back to their lives where stories that fuel political discontent - and in Hurricane Helene's case, political disinformation - can take root.

The social media platform X has helped fuel a firestorm of conspiracies and politically charged lies, which may have severe implications for the election. Some conspiracy theories, mainly pushed by right-wing actors, claim that FEMA abandoned some parts of North Carolina so that the Biden administration could mine lithium there for electric vehicles; that FEMA ran out of money because the Biden administration has diverted disaster funds to new arriving migrants; and that the government was bulldozing communities to cover up bodies left behind by the storm. Even North Carolina Lt. Gov Mark Robinson - the current Republican gubernatorial nominee - pushed disinformation online about recovery efforts and days later skipped a vote on hurricane relief support for a second time.

Some Black residents in Asheville and Augusta told Capital B that they don't have electricity and elections are the last thing on their minds. Asheville is about 11.2% Black and Augusta is 60% Black. In Georgia, the voter registration deadline has already passed, and in North Carolina, it is just a day away, on Oct. 11. After storms, communities usually have fewer in-person voting polls, and more mail-in ballots are lost or destroyed. And those who originally planned to vote feel like they won't have enough time or access to information to cast an educated vote.

"It is absolutely a reality that voter turnout is going to decline because at this point, everybody is so discombobulated and distracted, who is really going to want to go to a damn poll at this point when you don't have a house?" said Falasha Talbert, a mother of 10 and small-business owner in Augusta.

Typically, Black voter participation in North Carolina and Georgia is above the national average for Black voters, but based on a series of studies, there is an expectation that voting in the impacted regions will decline by around 10%. Augusta's Richmond County was just one of two eastern Georgia counties impacted by the storm that turned blue in 2020. Likewise, Asheville's Buncombe County was the only storm-impacted western North Carolina county outside Charlotte that went Democrat.

As Hurricane Milton causes destruction across Florida, advocates are calling on Gov. Ron DeSantis to heed what has already been seen across the region. "It is unreasonable to expect people to focus on registering to vote with multiple storms wreaking havoc," a coalition of community groups wrote to DeSantis.

"People are tired"

However, as right-wing talking points have infiltrated the disaster recovery ecosystem, it may be backfiring for Republicans - particularly because of Project 2025's vision to "defund" FEMA. After storms, elections can become more competitive if a candidate leans more anti-environment.

"FEMA has helped some people, even if they didn't help me," said Thomas, who has been assisting in relief efforts as well as voter registration in Asheville.

"But I wouldn't say that they need to be disbanded just because I didn't get what I needed from them, and [Hurricane Helene] shows the need of FEMA. So, [former President Donald Trump] talking about disbanding FEMA, and me being in a situation where I need FEMA, pushes him further away."

Thomas, 37, is a staunch supporter of Black reparations - the need for which he said has been made only more clear after Hurricane Helene's impact, but has also contributed to a lack of enthusiasm for the upcoming election because no major candidate has a reparations plan.

In Asheville, immediately after the storm hit, Keynon Lake turned his nonprofit group's headquarters into a resource distribution center. Over the week since, he and other community activists have distributed 10 to 15 passenger vans worth of water, food, and cleaning supplies every day to Black and brown victims, including those in nursing homes.

"We are still digging through the rubble and trying to find a way out," said Lake, the founder of My Daddy Taught Me That. Other places routinely hit by hurricanes like Florida and Louisiana have well-oiled response ecosystems, he said, but North Carolina's has been piecemeal.

"Everyone is in survival mode and a mental lull to where it's like, 'I can't even take a shower today, so why would I be talking about next month, about politics. I don't know if people will get back there before the election."

Tomiko Ambrose Murray, a political organizer in Asheville, laid it out plainly.

"We are trying to figure out how to get Black folks to participate in the election; I think there can be a narrative that Black people don't care about climate change, and that's just false," she said.

But, "people here are sleep-deprived, aren't able to work their jobs, don't have money, or maybe possibly having been denied by FEMA, No electricity, no water, you know, those kinds of things, not being able to shower."

"And so people are on the front lines trying to support their communities. Connect people with what they need, and they're exhausted, and it's been like day after day after day. People are tired."

The exhaustion and fatigue last long after the storm and can shape how people view the government for the rest of their lives. Just ask Hurricane Katrina survivors.

Talbert says the fallout of Helene has also made racial inequities more prominent in eastern Georgia. The day after the storm, she said she had to wait hours just to get snacks from the gas station because there were no full service grocery stores within accessible distance of her majority-Black community. As people struggled to get food and gas because of price-gouging, chaos ensued. She witnessed a shooting, as well as a woman that was beginning to give birth in a car because the hospital was inaccessible.

"There was no plan in place for this, and it was obvious," she said. Talbert said she believes the aftermath of the storm, in addition to both Democrats and Republicans not being proactive in the community before the storm, will make it easy to ignore the election.

The false promise of a "climate haven"

As much of western North Carolina slept in the early morning hours of Sept. 27, Hurricane Helene had done the unimaginable by overtopping rivers in the mountain region.

Last year, Asheville ranked second in the country for the most move-ins from new residents compared with residents moving out. A lot of the growth, residents and researchers have explained, was due to the city's designation as a "climate haven" for its mild temperatures, low wildfire and drought risk, and its distance - 300 miles - from the coast, and the storms and sea level rise that brings.

In the area around Asheville, rain swelled the watershed that twists and turns for almost 1,000 square miles, running water off the natural mountainous terrain into the paved and quickly growing city of 95,000. Because the situation developed overnight, Lisa Whittenburg, a mother of three, had no time to evacuate. At more than 400 miles wide, Helene was the third-widest storm in recorded history. Even as the storm battered Florida and Georgia the night before, most residents in the area had no idea of the storm's historic length and ability to turn Asheville into a raging river. There was nowhere for the water to go but up.

After watching the floodwaters rise and swallow the first two floors of her apartment complex in the early hours of Hurricane Helene, Whittenburg accepted her fate: "It got to the point where I had just accepted it, like, 'God it is your will. If I'm not supposed to be here, I won't be.'"

So, by early morning, the family and more than a dozen other residents sat trapped on the third floor of their subsidized housing complex. There wasn't much up there with them outside of an inflatable air mattress that the family brought up in their quick thinking as they evacuated their apartment. One issue: there wasn't a pump. It did not stop Whittenburg's adult daughter Cynia from using all her might to blow up the mattress with her mouth.

"'Mama, we getting out of here,'" Whittenburg recalled her daughter saying.

But Whittenburg wanted to take her chances on the roof. She didn't know what was in the floodwaters, which are known to be full of toxins, sewage, and bacteria, and she thought to herself, "I'm gonna sink, right?" So, she waited, even as the waters threw a tractor-trailer into her apartment complex and the stilts it stood on began to crack.

Two weeks later, she is still fighting for more concrete answers from FEMA. She applied for funding and said she was approved, but the total amount and details have been confusing. Whittenburg said she no longer has anywhere to stay with electricity in the area. Sleeping or staying in her apartment, filled with muck and debris, is akin to staying in "quick sand."

"I just need to be somewhere where things are functioning," Whittenburg explained as she was packing up to leave Asheville to stay with her sister in Greensboro, North Carolina, on Tuesday. "People like me don't have anything. ... I've never had to do nothing like this before."


This story was originally produced by Angela Dennis and Adam Mahoney of Capital B News as part of the Rural News Network, an initiative of the Institute for Nonprofit News (INN), supporting more than 475 independent, nonprofit news organizations.