Widening the Circle of Influence

Although known as “Mr. Clean” for his longtime environmental advocacy, Edmund Muskie had little knowledge of the American hazardous waste grid until 1978. A congressional sponsor of the landmark Clean Air and Clean Water Acts, the senator from Maine epitomized environmental politics. In fact, a few months before the Love Canal crisis unfolded, Muskie proposed yet another federal environmental law: a “comprehensive scheme to assure full protection of our national resources” in the wake of oil drilling disasters, tanker spills and toxic train derailments. Yet Muskie soon realized that his plan omitted something important: hazardous waste dumps. Love Canal had illuminated the toxic perils many Americans faced in their own neighborhoods. With an EPA study showing that tens of thousands of old toxic sites had yet to be contained, it was clear that the everyday landscape of homes, playgrounds, and schools needed environmental protection too. “In our society,” Muskie told an interviewer in the late 1970s, ...we are discovering almost every day, in almost every day’s newspaper, new hazards that have been released into the atmosphere over the period of our industrial revolution. [They] suddenly crop up in Love Canal, up in New York State … to create enormous hazards to public health, property values, to people. So we are constantly dealing with problems that [we] were not anticipating, which suddenly create almost insoluble problems for people and communities … [A]ll of these poisons and toxic materials were buried in landfill sites here, there, and elsewhere and sadly begin leaking in underground water, or into lakes and rivers, streams[,] only to rise up to hit people in the face with disease, with cancer, declining property values so on.... For Muskie, Love Canal was revelatory. It showed that federal law lagged behind the mounting problem of hazardous waste. After hearing Love Canal residents’ testimony, he believed that the time had come for a national statute governing toxic waste remediation—what he would refer to as a “clean land” law.