THE EFFORT TO clean up the nation's contaminated hazardous waste sites began in the suburb of Niagara Falls, New York. There, over the course of more than a decade, a company called the Hooker Chemical Corporation buried twenty-two thousand tons of hazardous waste—in barrels and in liquid form—in a partially dug trench called Love Canal. Afterward, an elementary school, playground, and homes were built on top and along the border of the buried waste. The chemical dumping in Niagara Falls took place in the 1940s and early 1950s, and, by the 1970s, few if any of the residents living near the buried chemical waste site knew of its existence. People only discovered the contamination in the late 1970s when, among other things, they noticed an occasional bad smell in the neighborhood, and toxic contamination was found...