ors became the alternative to sitting outside or gardening amid the smelly,
grinding din. The resurgence of porches in new suburban developments
during the s changed not a thing.
tThe revolutionary introduction of mostly petroleum-based chemicals
that sustained both the so-called Green Revolution and the endless Ameri-
can lawn has simultaneously placed much of the globe in grave peril. Dur-
ing the late s, the world’s press reported the discovery of irresponsibly
dumped and buried chemicals in Love Canal, near Niagara Falls, New York.
Residents of the community, unaware of what lay beneath their homes,
suffered extraordinary rates of multiple cancers. Survivors abandoned the
place. About the same time, in tiny Times Beach, Missouri, officials sprayed
an oil concoction on roads to hold down dust. The formula included dioxin,
a toxic by-product of the incineration of chlorinated wastes that is easily
absorbed into animal (including human) tissue. Times Beach was aban-
doned, too. Halfway around the northern hemisphere, in November ,
firefighters at the Sandoz chemical plant in Basel-Schweizerhalle, Switzer-
land, extinguished a warehouse blaze by flushing between ten and thirty
metric tons of agrichemicals—fertilizers, fungicides, pesticides, and her-
bicides—into the Rhine River. The great river quickly flushed itself suffi-
ciently to restore downstream drinking water to service; but the eel popu-
lation was nearly exterminated, and many other surviving fishes starved in
the spill’s aftermath because the chemical scourge had killed the micro-
organisms that constitute the bottom of the food chain. The upper Rhine,
particularly, was for years in painful recovery. Two years before the big
Sandoz spill, in yet another hemisphere, the worst known chemical dis-
aster had occurred. In Bhopal, India, an American (Union Carbide) plant
engaged in producing an intermediate compound in the refining of both
pesticides and herbicides exploded and leaked the substance over workers
and townspeople. Three thousand, eight hundred people died, and an esti-
mated , fell ill in what a witness termed ‘‘one vast gas chamber.’’^24
In —the year after Bhopal—another Union Carbide plant leaked,
this one in Institute, West Virginia, near Charleston, albeit with far less
catastrophic results. The Institute incident roused the U.S. Congress to
order the Environmental Protection Agency () to develop a Toxic Re-
lease Inventory of more than chemicals, to include not only chemi-
cal properties but precise locations of their productions. For those not al-
ready aware that the South was (and remains) home to some of the dirtiest
and most dangerous industries, the Toxic Release Inventory detailed and