It wasn't a dark and stormy night when Douglas Gowan was called to investigate the deaths of livestock on a farm near Brofiscin Quarry in South Wales. Other than that, though, his story reads like a film noir script.
Brofiscin Quarry was a dump site for Monsanto between 1967 and 1974, and the waste chemicals they dumped there -- PCBs, mostly -- flowed from the quarry in brightly colored foaming streams into the local waterways. The contamination killed cattle and sheep and caused spontaneous abortion in livestock, and there's no telling what effect it may have had on the health of the human population. Monsanto was never made to clean up their act, and now, decades later, Brofiscin is one of the the most polluted places in the UK and Gowan is receiving death threats. From The Ecologist:
Gowan’s evidence was then released to Monsanto and Tony Morgan. That’s when he started to receive threatening phone calls and menacing callers at his home, and experiencing break-ins that left him fearful for his personal safety. ‘You won’t live to testify’; ‘You’re the last surviving witness’ he was told; ‘Don’t you feel vulnerable?’ he was asked.Industry lied and paid their way out of the courts in the '70s, and they're doing it again now. Go and read the article. It's shameful, and infuriating, and scary, and it ought to be a work of fiction. Unfortunately, it isn't.