Revisiting Love Canal

On New Jersey's Newark Bay, millions of urban blacks, Hispanics and Portuguese Americans watch as a nightmarish page from the history of industrial pollution resurfaces near their homes. Their plight offers a lesson to the nation and the world.

Newark Bay's disturbing sense of déjà vu stems from 1978, when the blue-collar community of Love Canal, N.Y, saw its children sicken at a terrifying rate and learned that its homes were built beside a toxic waste dump. Residents pleaded for government help, but aid was slow in coming. Polluter Hooker Chemical stalled the regulatory machinery. Its lawyers denied the science that linked deadly waste to dying children, and the company avoided full payment for cleanup until 1995.

To assure that Love Canal would never happen again, Congress passed the Superfund Law in 1980 -- landmark federal legislation meant to make polluters pay for the harm they do.

Fast forward to Newark Bay, November 2003. Three conservation organizations announce plans to sue polluter Tierra Solutions within 90 days, for what the groups say is the worst case of in-water dioxin pollution in the United States -- maybe the world.

Jump ahead to Friday, Feb. 13, 2004. The groups -- NY/NJ Baykeeper, Hackensack Riverkeeper and the Natural Resources Defense Council -- find the toxic and legal legacy of Love Canal lapping at their doorstep.

Three days before the citizen suit is to take effect, the Bush EPA rushes in. It pre-empts the suit, shuts out the citizens and after more than a decade of inaction, cuts a deal with the polluter, allowing Tierra to conduct its own Newark Bay study. As one enraged activist put it, the decision is akin to "letting a pedophile investigate child abuse at a preschool."

A Dangerous Precedent

"I'm outraged," said Baykeeper Andy Willner, a party to the suit. "I have little faith in EPA's ability to oversee a fair evaluation of the Bay, and no faith at all in Occidental's compliance with this order. Occidental's only reason for signing with EPA is to avoid the citizen suit and delay the clean up."

"This sets a dangerous precedent," said Hackensack Riverkeeper Bill Sheehan, another plaintiff. "The EPA's action sends a chilling message to citizens who want to protect their right to a clean environment, and protect their children from polluters."

"I have no faith that [the contamination] will be remediated," NRDC attorney Jen Danis said flatly to the Associated Press, offering as proof an earlier 10-year Passaic River study run by the polluter that produced nothing but smoke.

As Willner and Sheehan note, there's more than coincidence linking Love Canal with Newark Bay. Both Hooker Chemical and Tierra Solutions, it turns out, are subsidiaries of the same hydra-headed monster: Occidental Petroleum, one of the planet's most heinous polluters.

In a just world, the bad press and bad karma generated by Love Canal should have bankrupted Occidental. Instead the company learned from history and thrives. With $9 billion in annual sales and 27 percent growth last year, it profits by a strategy common to transnational corporations since the Reagan era. It donates to electable politicians from both parties and gets huge returns on investment, no matter who wins. The company is among the top 15 contributors to federal election campaigns, giving more than $1.5 billion between 1995 and 2000.

The political favors Occidental gains from these gifts keep it well subsidized by government -- and insulated from prosecution for harm done to the environment and public health in the United States and globally.

Witness Democratic Vice President Al Gore, who forged strong financial ties to Occidental decades ago. In 1996, Gore paid back the company, brokering a deal to sell it the federally owned Elk Hill Oil Field in California -- the biggest turnover of U.S. public lands to a private corporation ever. Paradoxically, as Gore quietly tripled the size of Occidental's U.S. oil reserve, he lashed out against the "terrifying prospect" of fossil fuel-caused global warming.