Word: toxication
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...great toxic-waste mess oozed its way into the nation's consciousness, and its conscience, a little more than five years ago. "An environmental emergency," declared the Surgeon General in 1980. "A ticking time bomb primed to go off," warned the Environmental Protection Agency. The reaction was typically all-American: Congress created a grand-sounding "Superfund," a $1.6 billion, five-year crash program designed to clean up thousands of leaking dumps that were threatening to contaminate much of the nation's underground water supplies...
Meanwhile, fears about toxic wastes continue to grow. Each day more and more communities discover that they are living near dumps or atop ground that has been contaminated by chemicals whose once strange names and initials--dioxin, vinyl chloride, PBB and PCB, as well as such familiar toxins as lead, mercury and arsenic--have become household synonyms for mysterious and deadly poisons. "The problem is worse than it was five years ago," contends New Jersey Democrat James Florio, who as a Congressman from one of the most seriously contaminated states became the key author of the 1980 Superfund...
...growing awareness of the vast scope of the toxic-waste problem has bred much public anguish but precious little remedial action. The Office of Technology Assessment, a research arm of Congress, contends that there may be at least 10,000 hazardous-waste sites in the U.S. that pose a serious threat to public health and that should be given priority in any national cleanup. The cost, OTA estimates, could easily reach $100 billion, or more than $1,000 per U.S. household. Eventually, predicts the General Acccounting Office, which also does studies for Congress, more than 378,000 waste sites...
...poll taken last month for TIME by Yankelovich, Skelly & White, Inc., shows that 79% of Americans say that "not enough" has been done to clean up toxic-waste sites. More surprising, when asked, "Would you be willing to pay higher state and local taxes to fund cleanup programs in your area," 64% answered yes (34% said no, 2% were unsure...
...literature to Marx's social engineering, psychoanalysis cut the classics to fit the couch, and professors of English gave their essays titles like "The Entropy of the Imagination." Today words like process, systems, positive and negative are plugged into common discourse like so many microchips. The result can be toxic to the imagination and mother tongue...