Love Canal Down the Memory Hole: New at Reason

A new book on the Love Canal again ignores the contribution of Eric Zuesse’s 1981 Reason reporting on the issue.

David Henderson writes:

Ask any American born before 1960 for an example of corporate greed resulting in environmental disaster and the odds are good that he or she will name Love Canal. Love Canal, for readers who don’t know, is a neighborhood in the city of Niagara Falls, N.Y. that was once a chemical waste dump. The dump became a major news story in the late 1970s, including sensational articles in the Niagara Falls Gazette by registered nurse turned reporter Michael Brown, who would later write the book Laying Waste: The Poisoning of America by Toxic Chemicals (Pantheon, 1980). The incident led to passage of the so-called Superfund legislation of 1980, which imposed a tax on petroleum and chemical companies to generate revenue for government-directed cleanup of toxic chemical sites.

But the real story of Love Canal isn’t the “corporate guys: bad; government guys and community activists: good” tale that many people believe. In its February 1981 issue, Reason magazine published an exhaustive, fact-filled, 13,000-word article on Love Canal written by independent investigative reporter Eric Zuesse. The article dramatically recast many of the characters in Brown’s reports, including Brown himself. I

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