A Civil Action (1998) and Water Rights

 

 

Ultimately, in A Civil Action Attorney Jan Schlichtmann (John Travolta) and his law firm settle with both Grace and Beatrice, but Schlichtmann also sends his case files to the EPA, including a report from a worker who witnessed the cleanup that proves toxic waste had been dumped in the city’s water supply, and the EPA forces both Grace and Beatrice to pay 69.4 million dollars in cleanup costs because both companies violated the Clean Water Act.

According to a summary of the Clean Water Act from the EPA, “the Clean Water Act (CWA) establishes the basic structure for regulating discharges of pollutants into the waters of the United States and regulating quality standards for surface waters,” but not groundwater sources. Based on this 1972 Clean Water Act, the EPA “has implemented pollution control programs such as setting wastewater standards for industry” and “set water quality standards for all contaminants in surface waters,” making it illegal to “discharge any pollutant from a point source into navigable waters, unless a permit was obtained.” 

The Clean Water Act helps control one important element of the riparian doctrine, ensuring that downstream water uses are not adversely affected by those upstream. The Clean Water Act and the EPA monitoring it become integral agents in A Civil Action and the actual court case it inspired.

Water Rights and Film: A Civil Action (1998)

 

In A Civil Action (1998), the “reasonable use” of water is under question. The film explores whether or not those who used the same water source as does a leather tanning company were adversely affected by the company’s water use. 

Although the film primarily centers on Jan Schlichtmann’s (John Travolta) failed attempts to sue both Beatrice and W.R. Grace, he ultimately proves that the tannery these companies manage dumped silicone and trichloroethylene (TCE), toxic waste that contaminated a town’s water supply and caused multiple cancers in its townspeople. 

The film traces attorney Schlichtmann’s investigation into a case that revolves around a woman whose son had died of leukemia two years before, along with more than a dozen other townspeople. The city’s drinking water is blamed, but the townspeople seem unaware of the source of this water pollution. 

It is Schlichtmann who discovers a tannery connected with W.R. Grace dumping toxins into the river beside the factory. When he learns representatives of Beatrice Foods and W.R. Grace are culpable and have big pockets, a lawsuit begins. Schlichtmann’s investigation is meant to determine that silicone and trichloroethylene (TCE) were dumped into the water supply by the tannery and causing the cancers in townspeople.

U.S. Feature Films and the Riparian Doctrine

 

 

Water has been considered a natural right around in the world and treated as a usufructuary right for thousands of years. Such a right gives temporary possession and enjoyment to those who use water, as long as that use does not cause damage or change it. According to this perspective, water can be used but not owned. The Riparian Doctrine clarifies this natural right. As economist Zachary Donohew explains, because water is typically seen as a usufructuary right, rivers and streams cannot be owned but their water can be accessed by those who live and work beside their banks (90). 

Although current riparian principles draw on private ownership to define reasonable water use, the doctrine primarily applies to public riparian lands, as activist Vandana Shiva notes in her discussion of communal water use in Colorado’s Rio Grande Valley (27). The Riparian Doctrine still prevails in much of the Eastern United States because water is much more abundant there than in the Western states, but it also serves as a guiding principle for community rights and water democracies in India (Shiva 29), which hold that “Water is a commons…. It cannot be owned as private property and sold as a commodity” (36). 

Both fictional features and documentaries with water at their center draw on the tenets of the Riparian Doctrine. Westerns such as The Ballad of Cable Hogue (1970) emphasize riparian principles, especially in relation to the Desert Land Act, but contemporary feature films also draw on riparian ideals, which, in these cases, are in conflict with the Clean Water Act and its roots in human approaches to ecology.

Water Rights and Genre Film

 

Water rights also connect explicitly with human approaches to ecology that not only draw on riparian rights and the appropriative doctrine, but also helped to foster the EPA’s Clean Water Act of 1972. For example, Ellen Swallow Richards explains how human approaches to ecology encourage the right to water, explaining “In common law, water is held to be a gift of nature to man for use by all, and therefore not to be diverted from its natural channels for the pleasure or profit of any one to the exclusion of the rest” (Air, Water, and Food 57). But for Richards, it was not enough to ensure water was available. That water must also be clean, asserting, “A city or town is under strict obligation to furnish a safe supply of water as it is to provide safe roads” (59). For Richards, everyone should have access to water free of contaminants or “objectionable substances, mineral and organic” (61) because it is “a necessary condition of life” (67). 

Perhaps because water is both abundant and necessary, it serves as a protagonist in films from the silent era to the present. Water rights take different roles in contemporary feature films. Floods take the center in silent films such as Victor Fleming’s When the Clouds Roll By (1919), New Deal features, such as Our Daily Bread (1934), and contemporary features such as Michael Polish’s Northfork (2003). Drought, on the other hand, serves as the protagonist in features from the John Ford epic Grapes of Wrath (1940) and contemporary documentaries, including Jim Burroughs’ Water Wars (2009). 

All of these films, however, draw on environmental history and environmental law, paving the way for films that are at least partially based on America’s sometimes conflicting views of water rights, views almost always grounded in the nineteenth-century American drive for progress. Although this connection to environmental law is most explicitly illustrated by the documentary Tapped (2009) and an animated feature, Rango (2010), it reaches the mainstream in more subtle and powerful ways in Quantum of Solace, an unlikely rhetorical film that not only demonstrates the dangers of commodifying water but also offers solutions that look back to earlier historical visions of water as a right.