Cleaning up the environment
is a complex matter of central concern to many Americans. So David
Armstrong's sweeping four-part series on environmental injustice
looked at the issue from several different perspectives -- the
federal government as polluter, toxic legacies around the world,
the haphazard and often lax nature of environmental enforcement
in the U.S., and a case in Massachusetts where E.P.A. enforcement
went overboard. Armstrong's third front-page article in the series
ran on November 16, 1999. It was based in part on his analysis
of Justice Department data obtained by TRAC that documents a vast
disparity of the prosecution of matters around the United States
when one of 25 different statutes was the main charge. Federal
officials in Maryland, for example, were found to have brought
almost seven times more cases in relation to population in the
past six years than those in Massachusetts.
