Reflections on World Water Day 2025: Guest Blog

2023 EPA Public Hearing in Chicago for the updated Federal Coal Ash Rule | Photo by Matthew Kaplan

Reflecting on World Water Day this year, it is difficult to ignore that our country is in dark times. Sweeping executive orders and mass firings of federal workers, including hundreds of staff at the Environmental Protection Agency, National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, and other environmental agencies, have left our region's common home, the Great Lakes watershed, vulnerable with little protection. 

The theme the government wants to follow lately is dismantling. These actions are uprooting everything that activists like me have been working tirelessly to safeguard our waterways and communities from pollutants that negatively affect our health and destroy our fragile ecosystem. This is an ecosystem that - for those in power who seem to have forgotten - keeps us, the human race, alive and well and our societal structure in balance!

This month, Governor Mike Braun issued two executive orders that further chip away at environmental justice regulations. The first order would disallow Indiana from adopting environmental regulations stricter than federal regulations, such as the Clean Air Act, Clean Water Act, and the Safe Drinking Water Act. With the second order, he deposed environmental justice as a “political agenda," stating decisions would only be made based on “sound science” and no statistics regarding race, ethnicity, or other socioeconomic factors would be used to create state policies. 

In my opinion, the governor and others fail to realize that environmental justice is and always will be a factor for many. A recent study published by the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health reaffirms what we already know about environmental justice: Communities of color and low-income groups in the U.S. are exposed to higher levels of pollution.

We know that historically, Black, Indigenous, Communities of Color (BIPOC) communities have borne the brunt of “development” and, for that, have suffered tremendous amounts of injustice in the name of enterprise. Numbers don’t lie! However, those in power deliberately refuse to acknowledge this, choosing the profit motive over the people's health. 

People in Lake Michigan facing East Chicago’s Indiana Harbor mills | Photo by Matthew Kaplan

As we endure this wave of deregulation, I am gravely concerned about communities like my own in Michigan City, Indiana. The city’s Westside neighborhood has a high concentration of citizens who identify as Black or Latinx and is situated between the NIPSCO Michigan City Generating Station coal-burning plant (due to come offline in 2028) and the soon-to-be decommissioned Indiana State Prison. Residents here have been exposed to toxic pollution for nearly a century. This plant has been at the forefront of environmental concerns recently, with the news that the status of the aging sea wall has been downgraded again with no safeguards from giving way and flooding coal ash pollution into Lake Michigan, the drinking water supply of more than 10 million people in the region. 

This administration’s decision to deliberately ignore social factors and people and organizations that are doing their best to help those affected is ignorant and willfully dismissive of the actual struggles of the American people. And for what? Progress? Economic development? Fighting back against a so-called “woke agenda”? When the world is treated as nothing more than a commodity to be exploited and its denizens, as rabble-rousers, ignored, that’s an absolutely dangerous sign. If this deregulation continues, it won’t be long before our communities see pollution like no other.

Should a coal ash crisis erupt in Lake Michigan, fish and other living creatures, both plant and animal, will soon have unbelievable amounts of toxins in their bodies. These populations will die off, leaving industries like the fishing industry in dire straits. The fish that survive somehow and get consumed throughout our region and the Midwest could harm countless over the years. This cycle could continue until, eventually, everything comes to a halt. 

Waves cresting the seawall at the Michigan City Generating Station | Photo by Timeless Aerial Photography

My words may sound extreme, but that’s only because I’ve seen such destruction happen in my own backyard. Locally, the Town of Pines had their water poisoned because NIPSCO dumped toxic coal ash waste from the Michigan City Generating Station through the town as “free yard and road fill” for decades, as well as disposing of it at a landfill that later became designated as an alternative superfund site, following years of citizen advocacy.

Further west, East Chicago, Indiana, faces its own crisis from lead contamination that sullied the soil and left the population dependent on bottled water. Citing the Department of Housing and Urban Development, who knew that the West Calumet Housing Complex was already contaminated from a defunct lead smelter, residents sued the East Chicago Housing Authority for housing discrimination. In 2016, residents were issued a notice that the complex, now designated as a superfund site, would be demolished because of the contamination, and they and their families were forced to vacate their homes, becoming environmental refugees in their own community. Today, residents are still fighting for justice.

Tragic events like the contamination of the Town of Pines and the West Calumet Housing Complex are omens of what can happen at a more macro scale. Now, they seem more like what will happen in the next four, maybe eight, years. The cards are out on the table. We can’t wait for a better hand…

Protect Our Lakes artwork by Kaitlyn Stancy | Photo by JTNWI

When will our government stop focusing on intangible threats and instead focus on those that are? When will it be enough for them to see what they’re doing is harming the populace they serve in their office? I don’t know. However, today, on World Water Day, despite the odds stacked against us, we can NOT allow ourselves to stop fighting. Water isn’t just a right. It’s essential to the survival of our communities. The human community. The human race. Those in power have forgotten that a healthy population is a productive population. A hydrated worker is an effective worker. 

But it is not narrowly for economic reasons that we must protect our waterways. Water, in every form, is part of our shared identity. It carried our ancestors to distant lands; it fed our crops as our earliest civilizations were born. They’ve helped us transport messages to families far away and have provided us with limitless avenues for exploration. To care for water is to care for humanity. Humanity must be first. I’ll never lose hope that one day, we will end that line of thinking. What good is it to be rich in dollars if your home and community are not rich in life?