It makes me blush to say it, but in an OpEd article of mine in the New York Times in late ‘79, the editor there cut out a slashing comment I had made in a preliminary draft, calling Hooker’s actions at Love Canal "criminal." I’ve learned since then to be more circumspect about the truthfulness of what I read (and write!) in the papers. There genuinely are big corporate criminals, and the public’s outrage at this, and at their frequent success, is good and healthy–but only if one can still keep one’s eyeglasses clean when approaching the facts of each particular case. But that’s hard to do.
It hasn’t helped that Hooker, and its parent Occidental Petroleum Corporation, have met the public relations challenge of Love Canal with a practically unbroken string of catastrophically bad decisions. At first, when the story was strictly a local one, before Love Canal had hit the national press in the summer of 1978,
Hooker’s response was to stonewall. The company refused to provide even basic information requested by both the homeowners and the local news reporters. After Love Canal exploded across the nation’s front pages during the first half of 1979, cracks started appearing in Hooker’s stonewall, but this change got under way too slowly and too late.
In the summer of 1980 the company published a booklet, Love Canal: The Facts, which for the first time presented Hooker’s detailed public defense against the accusations that were now being hurled at the firm from every corner. Most of the damage to the company had already been done, however. Michael Brown and Lois Gibbs had made their starring appearances on the network TV talk shows, and the ghastly pictures of Love Canal’s chemical oozings had finished their sensational runs on the nightly news shows–with prominent mention of the fact that the Canal had once been a Hooker dump.
Even now, the response of Hooker and Occidental remains strictly defensive. Having permitted the Love Canal spark to ignite a conflagration that (according to present Wall Street estimates) has burned off a half-billion dollars’ worth of Occidental Petroleum stock value, the best that Hooker and its parent firm can come up with is still a meek squeak: "We didn’t do it." Hooker has not sued Michael Brown and his book publisher, Random House, for libel; to the public, this means that Hooker must be guilty.
When I asked Hooker’s PR department why the company isn’t challenging in a court of law the allegations by Brown and others, I was told, in effect, that that was a matter for the legal department–and that none of Hooker’s lawyers was talking to any reporters. Then, on November 3, 1 phoned Occidental Petroleum, which referred me to Philip Wallach Associates, the parent corporation’s public relations counsel. Mr. Wallach told me that it was he who had advised Occidental not to file a libel suit against Michael Brown and Random House, because "to do so would only have given the book free publicity." When I asked Mr. Wallach, "But isn’t it sometimes the case that the best defense is a good offense?" he agreed with me that this was so. And when I further inquired why he was more concerned about preventing some negative publicity for Brown’s book than he was about giving his own bloodied corporate client some desperately needed positive exposure–and especially increased credibility–he told me, "Well, you have a point there. I suppose maybe I should reconsider." That’s where the matter now stands. To think that $500 million of a corporation’s stock value can hang on decisions made in such a manner!
Can more Love Canals happen? There’s no reason why not. Niagara Falls is not the only town that’s been gungho on technology without concern for consequences. This kind of attitude may still prevail there; it certainly can be found elsewhere, and Love Canal may well turn out to have been just the opening battle in a long hot war between the present and the future.
Despite the popular myth that Love Canal is the result of a single corporation’s greed and heartlessness, the actual explanation is far more complex. It’s clear to anyone who digs into this matter that Hooker may well have been the only party to the affair to behave responsibly. Hooker chose an exceptionally fine chemical dumpsite; it ceded the dump to the School Board under circumstances in which the threat of condemnation was real and the reality of condemnation was already under way for adjoining properties; it warned the School Board that the chemicals could kill and insisted that the Board pass this warning on to any subsequent owner of the property; it urged the Board not to construct the school or any other buildings directly over the Canal; it protested the prospect of any subsurface construction on the Canal.
These warnings were repeatedly ignored, however, by the governmental bodies involved in desecrating this chemical tomb: the School Board itself, the City Planning Board, the city engineer, and the state Department of Transportation. In addition, other governmental agencies have been busy spreading misinformation about the Canal: the Niagara County Health Department, the state Department of Health, the US Environmental Protection Agency, and the US Department of Justice.
Despite all these nefarious governmental involvements, nothing has happened up to the present time to reduce the likelihood of similar governmental crimes being committed in the future. Even if the new federal legislation on waste dumps, the RCRA, proves effective against corporate violators, it could never be effective against governmental bodies. Just on the outside chance that an RCRA suit might someday be filed against a town, school board, or other public agency, what would be the probability that any governmental criminals would be penalized? No matter how guilty they might be, it is the taxpayers who would end up paying the tab on any resulting fines, and it is unlikely that any government bureaucrat would be imprisoned, even if his crimes included the deaths of innocent victims.
When the Justice Department and the EPA joined the fray in December 1979 with their suit against Hooker, they were tacitly acting to protect the interests of all the governmental agencies that throughout the years seem clearly to have produced the Love Canal mess. The federal authorities could instead have chosen to file charges against those governmental bodies, but this would have made some important New York State politicians unhappy during an election year–and New York was a crucial state for Carter. With the press and the homeowners screaming, the federal government apparently felt compelled to "do something" about the matter, and Hooker turned out to be the most suitable punching bag under the circumstances.
The federal attorneys must certainly have seen much of the evidence that I’ve presented here and so must have known how shoddy their case against Hooker really was, yet they slogged through their legal mire and came up with the obligatory political document. If instead they’d sued the governmental agencies, that would have made considerable news but even more considerable political enemies. It would also have deflated the Michael Brown bubble, but why do that when it could be exploited, since Brown had conveniently placed blame upon the same scapegoat that the politicians now found so suitable?
Perhaps because of the visibility of what went wrong at Love Canal, even if there has been little attempt to understand how it went wrong, there is an increased public awareness that in environmental matters the future doesn’t take care of itself. But that would not alone prevent future Love Canals. It would not get at any of the fundamental structural problems that aided and abetted the environmental disaster.
At the very least, governmental criminals should not be protected from paying the price for their actions. And when businesses share in the blame, they too should be hotly pursued for every ounce of damage to persons and property. If nothing else, that’s the protection that should be afforded citizens by a proper system of property rights, whereby you may do what you will with your property and what is in it and on it, so long as it does not infringe on my rights to my life, my liberty, and my property.
Certainly the worst thing we could do would be to hand to the corporate world some of the same kind of protection from responsibility that we’ve allowed government officials. Yet, ironically, one of the hottest new items from Congress–the recently passed "superfund" legislation for cleaning up toxic chemicals in the environment–will serve, in part, to lessen the risks of mismanagement on the part of individual firms involved in disposing of toxic chemical wastes.
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|6.21.10 @ 12:05AM|#
many years ago, I saw a pictorial in a magazine on Love Canal and was completely blown away when i saw the pix of empty houses, food half eaten, baby clothes on lines, family pictures and toys, etc just laying there intoxic animation......the silence of those photos was earth shattering.
I wrote passionately about this and other issues in college and have thought about lois gibbs and all the others who had to livr through this.
I finally -after 20 years visited the site and was overwhelemed by the reverance i felt for those who actually lived in this development_the odd fire hydrant, the fenced in areas, the weed infested sidewalks that families ran, walked and fell on, the paved circular entrances to where homes and families started their dreams..the occ wheeping willow and maple tree planted for pleasure now look foreign and harmful.I only hope that the families were compensated well and that they were able to move on to a new life and be healthy of body and spirit.for me, all these years later, it was overwheleming.
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