Matt Damon, an actor and water conservationist, weighed in on the ongoing water crisis in Flint, Mich., Sunday, and put most of the blame on the state’s embattled governor.
“At the very least he should resign. At the very least,” Damon said of Michigan Gov. Rick Snyder. “Listen, everybody’s entitled to a fair trial in the United States of America, but that man should get one. And soon. That’s just my personal opinion.”
“The Martian” star has made providing clean water to those without it his passion project. In 2009, he merged his nonprofit H2O Africa with Gary White’s WaterPartners to form Water.org, an organization dedicated to, according to its website, “break[ing] down the barriers between people and access to safe water and sanitation.”
He and White were discussing the Flint situation with The Daily Beast at the Sundance Film Festival while promoting Water.Org’s “Buy a Lady a Drink” campaign, a team-up with Stella Artois to raise awareness of the disproportionate number of women (compared to men) without access to clean water.
“In terms of the work that we do, to see it happening in Flint, every parent in America feels it on a visceral, deep level, because we ask the question, ‘What if that was my child?'” said Damon. “It’s unconscionable in Flint, and it’s unconscionable that 663 million people around the world are dealing with that every day in the developing world. Those are the communities we interact with, and that’s the mission of Water.org: to end that suffering for those children, and those parents.”
Some politicians, including Democratic presidential front-runner Hillary Clinton, have said that race has played a role in the Flint crisis.
“I’ll tell you what, if the kids in a rich suburb of Detroit had been drinking contaminated water and being bathed in it, there would’ve been action,” Clinton said at the last Democratic presidential debate earlier in January.
Damon did not directly say that the crisis betrayed a racial bias, but he did call the water crisis in Flint and similar ones around the world “huge systemic injustices.”
“My sincere hope for our country and our world is that this greater connectivity is going to lead to a greater empathy and an awakening to the plight of our fellow citizens,” he said. “These are huge systemic injustices we’re talking about that hopefully everybody is waking up to. The question then is, what do we do about it? It will be interesting to see where we go from here.”
