Elizabeth May, Sierra Club of Canada

Elizabeth May is the executive director of the Sierra Club of Canada and a lifelong environmental activist. She is also a lawyer, educator, writer, and mother. Her most recent book, coauthored with fellow Canadian activist Maude Barlow, is Frederick Street: Life and Death on Canada's Love Canal.

I never really found the time today to do the handful of things I had to do. Like return the phone call from the lawyer for the gypsum mine we sued (they've agreed to an out-of-court settlement which has neat features that we cannot announce until I get through to the lawyer). Or revise the "Report Card on Species at Risk" that we are doing in collaboration with other environmental groups in Canada.

The surprise of the day was a call from a worried resident of Sydney, Nova Scotia, where Canada's largest toxic waste site sits in the middle of the city, oozing a cancerous mixture of PAHs, arsenic, PCBs, and nasty heavy metals. The Tar Ponds, as the spot is known, is actually an estuary, open to the sea. Over decades of steel-making with no pollution controls and the baking of dirty coal to produce coke, the estuary filled up with PAH-contaminated tarry muck -- 700,000 tons of it, of which 45,000 have the added plus of PCB contamination from direct dumping. Upstream from the estuary lie 125 acres contaminated to depths of 80 feet. This area is known as the coke ovens site and was, as the name suggests, where the coal was baked in ovens, releasing vile gasses and dumping tarry toxic waste. All around the coke ovens and tar ponds are homes -- hundreds of homes, in a community of 35,000 people. Despite years of promises, and two failed cleanup attempts, the whole mess sits there, allowing 10,000 tons a year of tarry sludge to migrate into Sydney Harbor beyond.

Meanwhile the local homes have arsenic leaching into basements. Cancer rates in the area are through the roof -- birth defects, multiple sclerosis, Alzheimer's, too. And no level of government has been prepared to relocate the community. Canada has no "Superfund" program. We don't even have an inventory of the toxic waste sites that no one is cleaning up. (I have just coauthored a book on the issue with Maude Barlow, called Frederick Street: Life and Death on Canada's Love Canal.)<

So, I've been -- and Sierra Club of Canada has been -- working with community residents trying to force a relocation and an accelerated timetable for cleanup. The government has created a "citizens committee" with three levels of government and local residents called the Joint Action Group (JAG). The JAG has been tasked with the job of identifying cleanup technologies. They are also supposed to ensure community pre-approval of disturbances on the coke ovens site. Moving and disturbing materials on the site caused serious health problems in 1998, and residents were given no prior warning.

So today's call reported that disturbances were happening again, with digging on the coke ovens site as part of the ongoing study process. As it turned out, no significant amount of material was being removed. They were drilling for core samples to expand understanding of exactly where the hot spots are within the area -- a process that has been long overdue.

However, verifying what had happened and confirming details relayed by anxious residents occupied most of the day, while other matters stacked up like airplanes over O'Hare. Throw in a series of interviews with applicants for our biodiversity campaign director position, a conference call on a government draft for performing environmental assessment of trade negotiations, and it is little wonder there's a lawyer from a big firm in Toronto wondering why I never returned today's first important call.

As Scarlett said, "Tomorrow's another day ..."