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was governor, she cut the state’s Department of Environmental Enforcement’s budget and allowed polluters to propose their own alternative if they could prove the state’s cleanup plan was too expensive. She ended unannounced inspections of polluters and suppressed state-agency reports that warned of high pollution levels. Perfect woman for the job at Bush’s EPA. It’s not just the orphan sites that are being abandoned here. Under the Superfund law, polluters are ordered to clean up their waste sites. If they fail, the EPA does the job—and then bills the company triple damages. That’s a dandy incentive, but it disappears when there’s no money for the feds to do the cleanup. “It’s a hollow threat,” says Spiegel. So Superfund-site cleanup is likely to stop not just at orphan sites but even where there are responsible parties.

“The cleanup at orphan sites has effectively been stopped,” said Spadoro. “The industries were paying a relatively small fee to clean up a problem they had created.” The mayor has been playing the game long enough to know that Bush’s promise to pay for Superfund cleanup out of general appropriations means nothing. The deficits, the recession, the tax cuts, and the wars have dried up the funds. Every year, he said, cities will be fighting for general-appropriations money to clean up their own sites. Spadoro may sue the EPA; the city’s legal department is looking into it. But even if Edison wins, that means some other site in New Jersey—the state with the highest number of Superfund sites and the nation’s highest cancer rate—loses.

Gail Horvath understands that. “I saw a woman on TV the other night,” she said. “She said she wanted her site cleaned up. I see her and I want to get greedy. I want my site cleaned up. But why am I against her? I don’t want to see someone else’s site not cleaned up because my site is.”

Spadoro, the pol, sees it as a straight payback. The chemical and waste-disposal industry guys, who helped pick up the tab for Bush’s campaign and convention, are getting what they paid for. Jersey is a state where watching patronage and political payoffs is a spectator sport, but Spadoro thinks payback politics should stop when lives are at stake. “I recognize that political payoffs happen. But there’s got to be some morality, some integrity. There’s got to be some decency in these things.”

Said Horvath, “You see this neighborhood? This is not sitting in President Bush’s backyard. It’s not in his yard. This is not happening in Christie Whitman’s house. If they had to live in my house, maybe they would make a different decision. Come live in my house, come live with my children. Then say there is not enough money to clean up the Superfund site behind my house.”

Political causes come into vogue and then pass from fashion. People are dying nowadays from fresh horrors—terrorism, anthrax, SARS, deranged kidnappers. Hey, toxic-waste dumps—that’s so ten minutes ago. The media and the public’s attention have moved on. No one has even considered putting toxic waste under Homeland Security laws. And you must admit, cancer is not a spectacular death. It could be decades before children who grew up around Arnie Livingston’s chemical dump get cancer. If they would just turn bright green in the meantime . . .

7.

Kill the Messenger

The solution is not to eliminate the federal role in protecting the environment. The solution is reform—reform that sets high standards.

—GOVERNOR GEORGE BUSH, AUGUST 2000

He fired the best and most decent man that ever worked at the EPA.

—MARIE FLICKINGER, APRIL 2002

“I had run out of hope.”

That’s how Marie Flickinger felt in 1992 after she learned that an EPA contractor was fixing to incinerate toxic sludge on the site of the abandoned Brio Refinery, right in the heart of her neighborhood. Flickinger, who had studied the cleanup plan up one side and down the other, was desperately worried about the threat to the elementary school, the hospital, and the junior-college campus nearby. The toxic sludge in the neighborhood was bad enough, she thought; how the hell