I became an environmental lawyer because of the reckless way that Big Oil has been treating the American landscape for decades. My first big case was launched more than 20 years ago, after we learned that companies like Chevron were dumping tons of radioactive pipe and wastewater across rural Mississippi -- used, even, to construct school playgrounds. I brought cases in small towns in rural Kentucky where Ashland Oil had poisoned the Lee aquifer with its careless pollution. I never stopped to add up just how much radioactive and toxic goo that the oil giants were throwing back into the land, whether it was in open unlined pits or higher-tech methods where the waste is injected deep into the earth. I just knew it was a lot. Now the investigative reporters at ProPublica have done the math:
Over the past several decades, U.S. industries have injected more than 30 trillion gallons of toxic liquid deep into the earth, using broad expanses of the nation's geology as an invisible dumping ground.
No company would be allowed to pour such dangerous chemicals into the rivers or onto the soil. But until recently, scientists and environmental officials have assumed that deep layers of rock ...