Environmental science should guide priorities, not serve as a selective rhetorical tool
As the Washington, D.C. region thaws this spring, the lead-up to America’s 250th birthday will bring renewed attention to the capital’s monuments, parks and waterways — symbols of national continuity and civic pride. Along the Potomac River, however, the thaw will also bring something else: the unmistakable stench of raw sewage.
Following a catastrophic failure in a major sewer line, hundreds of millions of gallons of untreated wastewater spilled into the river, making it one of the largest sewage releases in U.S. history. The environmental damage is immediate, visible and inescapable.
President Donald Trump announced that he would call in FEMA to assist with cleanup and response efforts — a move that should be applauded. Whatever one’s politics, federal intervention signals recognition that this is not a minor bureaucratic mishap but a major environmental crisis. In contrast, the governors of Maryland and Virginia and the mayor of Washington, D.C. — all Democrats, some with ambitions for higher office, who routinely champion aggressive climate policies — have been silent. For leaders who speak often about environmental justice and public health, their silence has been striking.
One might expect such a disaster, unfolding just miles from the seat of federal power, to dominate the national environmental conversation. Instead, it has struggled to break through the noise. There have been no sweeping reckonings about aging infrastructure, no sustained outrage cycles and no urgent moral declarations from the climate establishment.
“DC Water hired David Gadis in 2018, even though he was a senior executive at Veolia North America, an engineering firm that later paid $53 million to settle civil claims alleging it contributed to and prolonged Flint’s lead contamination disaster.”