Special to the Star Tribune
Just because you're paranoid about the environment doesn't mean they're not out to poison you. So we learn in spellbinding, horrific detail in Andrew Schneider and David McCumber's "An Air That Kills," a jeremiad that does for the still-immediate peril of asbestos what Ralph Nader's "Unsafe at Any Speed" did for the Corvair.
Of course, that sports car could simply be pulled out of production. Yet where does one even begin to deal with the ongoing fallout of generations worth of systemic, unregulated poisoning of our country by an industry that churned out uncountable tons of fibers of mass destruction, in a business most people wrongly think was brought to its knees around the time young Dubya was pledging Skull and Bones at Yale?
Schneider (winner of two Pulitzer Prizes) and McCumber center their exposé on Libby, a small town in the northwest corner of Montana that was mined from the 1920s to 1990 for asbestos-laden vermiculite ore, known commercially as Zonolite. W.R. Grace & Co., which bought the mine in 1963 and ramped up production, hid the risks of the toxic dust that by 1969 was being released into Libby's air at the rate of 2 1/2 tons a day.
It would be bad enough if the astronomical fatality rates of asbestos-related cancers had been localized in Libby. Unfortunately, Grace had sent billions of pounds of its tainted ore to more than 750 processing plants throughout North America, including two in Minneapolis; it's estimated that between 15 million and 35 million homes remain insulated with the product that the company always contended wasn't hazardous. Minneapolis alone received more than 192 million pounds of the poison over the years.
Schneider and McCumber pile conspiracy upon conspiracy, and if their evidence wasn't so compelling, one would think they were talking of Dealey Plaza and gunmen on the grassy knoll. Yet here it all is, up to and including the Bush White House blocking the Environmental Protection Agency's declaration of a public-health emergency in April 2002, as well as the attached warning to millions of citizens that they still might be exposed.
The authors wisely focus not just on deciphering the meaning of the wealth of related secret corporate and governmental memos they unearthed, but on the faces, names and particulars of the suffering. Take Les Skramstad, who worked at Grace's Libby mine for just three years in the 1950s, and got hit with asbestosis in 1995.
"It's hard to sleep when your lungs aren't pliable enough to breathe in the air needed to live," they write. Les's wife "Norita gets even less sleep worrying about him. When he finally lies still, she lies there listening to hear that he's still breathing. His breaths are so shallow that she can barely feel his chest rise."
As to why he refuses bottled help, he tells the authors: "Dragging a tank of air behind you is like admitting that you're dying. Everybody I know who started on oxygen died a few months later. It's like giving in to Grace and saying 'yeah, you killed another one.' "
It gets worse. Yet despite the revulsion one feels reading of the calculated destruction of a once-beautiful town that now makes Love Canal seem like a pristine Big Sur, Schneider and McCumber have woven a galvanizing, human tale as entrancing as it is loathsome.
Minneapolis author Neal Karlen's sixth book, "Unchosen," a religious memoir about returning to faith, will be published in October.