In 1986, a barge named the Khian Sea left the territorial waters of the United States and began looking for a place to dump its cargo: fourteen thousand tons of toxic incinerator ash from Philadelphia. The barge traveled to the Bahamas, the Dominican Republic, Honduras, Bermuda, Guinea- Bissau, and the Netherlands Antilles, but at each port its cargo was rejected. The environmental organization Green- peace had been telling potential recipients of the ash that the toxic cargo posed a threat to human health. Finally, unwitting officials in Haiti accepted the ash, which the ship’s crew had called “fertilizer,” and the waste was dumped onto a beach in the town of Gonaives. That same day, city officials learned of the scam and ordered the waste returned to the ship. But in the middle of the night, the Khian...