Spring 1999
The Need for Civic Action
by Gary Cohen and Nancy Evans
Many years passed since the drinking water wells in Woburn Mass. were contaminated. In one sense, the tragedy stands as a singular event. In an average middle class town, seven children died from leukemia due to toxic chemicals in their drinking water. The story, captured in Jonathan Harr’s book, Civil Action, is a major motion picture.
In another sense, Woburn has become a familiar script that reads something like this: Multi-billion dollar company poisons community. People get sick and die. Corporation denies the problem as long as possible, using its money to outlast desperate families seeking justice. When loss of the court case looks likely, corporation settles for an undisclosed sum in exchange for silence and a waiver of future liability.
This has been reported over the years in Love Canal, Bhopal and in the bodies of DES daughters. Corporation names differ, but the outcomes are similar. Human lives are just the cost of doing business. The world goes on. After the damage is done, corporations crank up their public relations machines to project an image that ”bring good things to life.”
[Eds. Note: It has also been reported here in Silicon Valley birthplace of the high-tech industry and home to more Superfund sites than any other area in the US. Waste solvents at Fairchild Semiconductor contaminated the drinking water supply of the Los Posaos neighborhood of San Jose, resulting in a cluster of birth defects and a rise in miscarriages. That Fairchild plant is now gone, replaced with a Lucky Food store. IBM, National Semiconductor, Intel and AMD and other companies also contaminated groundwater .)
But what gets lost in the public’s consciousness is the ubiquity of the chemical assault in communities across the US. There are hundreds of Woburns where communities living next to chemical companies, computer companies, paper mills, military bases, medical waste incinerators and toxic dumps suffer from an array of diseases related to their toxic exposure. When residents seek some kind of justice from these exposures they are stymied by a compromised regulatory system that regularly protects corporate interests rather than public health.
No place escapes this toxic nightmare. Children are the most vulnerable to this toxic assault since their rapidly developing systems are more sensitive to those chemicals. Cancer now kills more children under fourteen than any other disease.
As a society we are conducting an uncontrolled chemical experiment on our children and future generations. While the chemical industry continues to tout the safety of its products, every child born in this country harbors a host of toxic chemicals in his/her body. This is a profound violation of basic human rights and the sanctity of life.
We don’t need more Woburns to convince us we have a problem with toxic chemicals and a regulatory justice system that offers neither effective regulation nor justice. We simply the need the political will to directly challenge the polluting companies and the government agencies that protect them.
Excerpted from Rachel’s Environment and Health Weekly #635, by the Environmental Research Foundation. Visit www.civilactive.com for the story of groundwater contamination. Check the info and maps showing groundwater contamination in Silicon Valley
Gary Cohen is the National Co-coorindator of Health Care Without Harm. Nancy Evans is the Executive Vice-President of the Breast Cancer Fund.
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