Settlements against Allied were reduced from $13.2 million to $5.2 million (after they gave $8 million to an environmental group), but the costs of cleaning up the James, were anyone to undertake that task, would run into the hundreds of millions. Ward Transformer Company of Raleigh, N.C., who spread PCB's by night across the Carolina countryside and was unlucky enough to get caught. But the EPA and OSHA don't command prestige either. Love Canal residents, fed up with a dilatory EPA, refused to let two EPA officials leave a meeting and briefly held them until police arrived and tempers cooled. Not only is the regulatory process ponderously slow but the agencies have lost credence by going so far to fill loop-- holes that their guidelines are easily cast by industry as monuments to specificity and inflexibility; the OSHA cowboy wears kneepads and a hardhat. This irrefutable flaw allows industry to focus on the occasional regulatory absurdity and appeal to the free-enterprise, Marlboro spirit without ever having to address the very real question of whether industry is willing to protect workers and citizens of its own volition. People outraged by industry yet disaffected with the bureaucratic solution become either morosely acquiescent, philosophical, or they organize. Community organizations and citizen action groups are growing in constituency and influence, and not only have they January 1981 RAIN Page 13 fought polluters and pushed for environmental legislation, but several national groups have brought suit against the EPA for failing to fulfill its mandate. As anger and frustration grow in this country, and as the federal government and industry seem more in collusion, we can expect greater numbers of people to challenge the system. In a speech last January, Thomas F. Williams of the EPA suggested that such impatience is caused by a myopia shared by those "who enjoy the music of the environmental movement, but do not pay much attention to the lyrics .. ." ... if it were that simple, perhaps a few students could gather key hostages from industry and government and hold them until the last abandoned dumpsites were cleaned up and all the provisions of RCRA were implemented, and that would be that. It is, of course, not that simple. But to those more musically inclined it might be just the thing. The lyrics are complicated but the problem is quite simple. These corporations, driven almost solely by profit, are destroying a world we all share. And trying to stop them through proper channels is maddening because they have such a firm grip on the entire process. Government regulators try to do battle as if they were the home team, accommodating and boyishly competitive hosts to a game they think is theirs when actually it's an away game and the corporations not only built the grandstands and run the concessions, but wrote all the rules. It would be unwise to give up on Congress and the regulators, but the strength of the environmental movement, especially in regard to toxics, will be public pressure. Hazardous substances are becoming a key environmental issue and support is strongest where people are actually threatened. No one wants to live by a chemical dump. Although industry complains that this makes it impossible to deal with the massive volumes of hazardous waste generated cont.---
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