Editorial Comment: Water

Is water a human right, as the UN General Assembly declared in 2010? Or is that "an extreme solution," as Nestlé CEO Peter Brabeck-Letmathe famously declared in 2005 when he suggested that water is a "foodstuff," that "like any other foodstuff … should have a market value?" The video of his declaration, which he has said has been taken out of context, surfaced during the water crisis in Flint, Michigan. The fact that Nestlé pays $200 a year to pump over a million gallons out of Osceola County, Michigan fueled public outrage.

When José Casas came to teach playwriting at the University of Michigan three years ago, we found ourselves talking furiously about Flint. We both felt strongly that the stories of the people of Flint needed to be told. "Please do this," I told him, "I'll be your dramaturg." José had already thought about how he would go about this monumental task and began traveling to Flint to talk to anyone who was willing to share their story. People told him about the emergency manager, assigned to the city by Governor Snyder against the wishes of the people of Michigan, who had rejected the emergency manager law a few years earlier. They told him about how they knew switching to the Flint River as a water source for the city was a bad idea. They told him they knew something was wrong with the water, no matter what the officials at the Michigan Department of Environmental Quality were telling them. They told him about their children suffering from lead poisoning as the state ignored them. They told them about their histories, their dreams, their fears. José's play Flint premiered here last year, a reminder to us of the importance of our relationship to water, the politics of water quality, and the ethical responsibilities of the scientists who have access to the facts. It also highlighted the roles of artists and scholars who engage with water issues to pose compelling questions about our relationship to water. It reminded us that water shapes who we are.

When I first thought about this special issue, I was tempted to subtitle it "Precious Bodily Fluids" as an homage to General Ripper's observation in Dr. Strangelove: "Water is the source of all life. Seven-tenths of this earth's surface is water. Why, do you realize that 70 percent of you is water? And as human beings, you and I need fresh, pure water to replenish our precious bodily fluids." Stanley Kubrick's film goes on to deploy Ripper's paranoia over Communist infiltration as the "the most monstrously conceived and dangerous communist plot we have ever had to face" in the form of fluoridation to contaminate our "precious bodily fluids"—an allusion used to great effect in Paula Vogel's The Baltimore Waltz as subtextual resonance with the far-right preoccupation with contamination by AIDS, the new post-communist threat of the 1980s and '90s. However the paranoia is used politically, the permeability and interconnectedness of fluids, membranes, cultures, and borders can be cause for celebration, but also grave concern.

As we march (fly, run, swim) into the twenty-first century, this permeability continues to make headlines as refugees of climate and war risk their lives crossing deserts and oceans to find themselves adrift in a hostile sea of xenophobia. The Great Pacific Garbage Patch continues to grow, and current estimates have it at 1.6 million square kilometers and containing 80,000 tons of plastic, a virtual island of its own. Port cities that have stood as palimpsests of human cultural exchange are in danger of sinking into the water, leaving whole areas in places like New Orleans and Venice empty of their residents. In the case of cities like Flint, a city very much like my own hometown—industrial centers where the factories have closed leaving the city with vacant lots—water utilities are unsustainable and the water infrastructure is in danger of neglect. PFAS, dioxane, methanol, and other industrial chemicals threaten our groundwater. In 2016, Water Protectors, Indigenous people from several nations who sought to protect tribal water...