45 Years, 45 Days: Love Canal, The Truth Seeps Out

For the next 45 days, we'll be celebrating Reason's 45th anniversary by releasing a story a day from the archives—one for each year of the magazine's history. See the full list here.

Writing in Reason's February 1981 issue, Eric Zuesse exposes the truth about one of the most notorious environmental catastrophe stories of the time: Love Canal. Here's a snippet:

You're about to be untricked. If you believe that the guilty party in the Love Canal tragedy is the Hooker Chemicals & Plastics Corporation, which the Justice Department is suing, rather than the Niagara Falls Board of Education, which bought the dump from Hooker in 1953; or if you believe that Michael Brown's famous book that has become the popular authority on the whole mess, Laying Waste: The Poisoning of America by Toxic Chemicals, sets out the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth about Love Canal, then you've been snookered. In fact, as I'm going to show, hardly ever has there been a more blatant example of Big Brother successfully hiding the skeletons in his closet or of a gullible investigative reporter and compliant major media going along with the cover-up so that a bunch of bureaucrats can pass the buck to some bewildered private interest. The irony is that the target of this particular smear, Hooker Chemicals, may very well have botched others of its many chemical dumps, but not Love Canal, the very site that has brought the company so much adverse publicity and a flood of government and private lawsuits.