Page 3 of 5 pages 
Now place in Michigan is more than eight miles from a lake; the state has more coastline than Florida or California. It's been an environmentally savvy place since the 1890s, when lumber companies finished stripping its white pine forests (partly to rebuild Chicago after the Great Fire).
About that time, Herbert Dow came to central Michigan, drawn by the salt brine marshes. Dow was a 24-year-old chemist, a slim young entrepreneur in the Horatio Alger mode, with a Teddy Roosevelt moustache and a fondness for solitary exercise like wood-chopping. Dow had invented a method of electrocharging brine water, extracting bromine for photographic emulsion and chlorine for bleach.
Dow believed in making use of waste. Many Dow Chemical Company products came from leftover brine derivatives: soldering flux, Epsom salts, carbon tetrachloride, dyes, pesticides, agricultural sprays, and aspirin. Dow began making plastic in the 1930s, and sold its first consumer product in 1953: Saran Wrap. In '44 Dow chemists invented Styrofoam (an insulation plastic); the burgeoning styrene family, whence polystyrene and clamshells come, also has its roots in Midland. As with most U.S. companies, World War II dramatically boosted Dow's business: Saran Wrap was first used to keep American military equipment dust-free.
The traditional Dow got its first jolt during the Vietnam War, when protests targeted the company as napalm profiteers. Dow's executives replied, in effect, "Blame the military, not us --- we merely sell one of napalm's ingredients." They stopped selling even that in 1969, but the baby-killer image persisted --- helping prod the antagonistic Dow into existence.
The "learning Dow" may have been born during a speech given by then Chairman Carl Gerstacker in 1966, at a water-pollution conference convened in the aftermath of Rachel Carson's Silent Spring. Gerstacker said that CEOs probably didn't know how much pollution their companies were producing (a suspicion borne out with the Community Right-to-Know Law of 1986). He tentatively implied that most CEOs didn't care, and proposed three measures which most companies haven't adopted even now: sharing knowledge on pollution control, reducing waste at the source, and enlisting the help of everyone in a factory. Soon afterwards, Dow began its "product stewardship" program, refusing to sell industrial products unless buyers met their safety and environmental standards.
In 1969, a Dow-owned chlorinated waste pit flooded onto a Louisiana grazing area. When cattle died, the resulting lawsuit "was the beginning," says Jerry Martin, Dow's director of U.S. environmental affairs, "of our commitment that we weren't going to put that stuff in the ground anymore." During the next decade Dow began phasing out of landfills and deep-well injection storage (where wastes are plunged one or two miles down into the salt-water aquifers).
Twenty years later, they had comparatively few Love Canal-type sites to clean up. (For instance, there is no Superfund site in Midland.)
Ironically, Dow had been the most vehement major chemical company lobbying against Superfund. The antagonistic Dow gained dominance around 1974, spurred by the company's fiercely anti-regulation new CEO, Paul Oreffice. In one celebrated 1978 case, some frustrated EPA staffers hired a pilot to take aerial photographs of Midland smokestacks for a Clean Air Act survey. The chemical company sued the EPA for trying to learn its trade secrets. "I think by and large," Jerry Martin says, "we thought we were doing the right thing environmentally. There was an internal belief that what we did was our business and nobody else's."
The antagonistic Dow began to feel the effects of the ill will in the late 1970s. Cancer complaints from exposure to herbicides --- particularly 2,4,5-T and 2,4-D, as well as Agent Orange, which is a mixture of both of them --- began to hit the courts and newspapers. One chronology of Dow-related health scares between 1974 and 1983, privately compiled by a former privately compiled by a former Michigan Department of Natural Resources staffer, takes up three single-spaced pages. A group representing 4000 Vietnam veterans took a $180million Agent Orange settlement in 1984. A community in Globe, Arizona, claiming that Forest Service spraying of 2,4,5-T had triggered miscarriages and illnesses, fought Dow in court for eleven years. The company settled, admitting no liability, in 1981. A similar spraying case in the Alsea Valley in Oregon triggered a federal prohibition of 2,4,5-T. Dow sued the EPA over the prohibition, and finally dropped the suit in 1983.
Inevitably, the concern reached Midland. In 1978, Dow scientists found traces of dioxin (a chemical family of chlorine-based contaminants which included the toxic substance in Agent Orange) in the Tittabawassee River, which flows through midland into Lake Michigan. Larry Fink, an analyst at the Michigan Department of Natural Resources (DNR), checked local cancer statistics and found they had increased during the 1970s to four times the national rate. Fink tried to block a Dow water-disposal permit until a complete epidemiology could be performed. (As is happens, the epidemiology came out only this February. It found no abnormal illness rates --- a question we'll return to.) Meanwhile, other activists matched records of spills from Dow brine wells against local cancer complaints, instigating controversies over dioxin in the groundwater. Finally, in 1982, an EPA staffer leaked the fact that Dow had critiqued an EPA report before publication. This triggered a Congressional investigation. TV cameras descended on Midland.