This past Sunday, the New York Times published an investigative report on gross failures by the EPA to enforce the Clean Water Act. Charles Duhigg, the article’s author, describes pouring through EPA’s database on chemical contamination of water sources and the subsequent failure to take action against polluters. I’ll give you one example.

Since 2004, coal companies near a West Virginia town have injected almost two billion gallons of coal waste into the ground. Ninety-three percent of that amount contained contaminants such as nickel, beryllium, chromium, and arsenic in excess of standards sets under the Clean Water Act. The result is that the town’s drinking water supply is undrinkable. What happened to these companies? Nothing.

According to the Times, this is not unusual.

What the Times’ uncovered is really a vestige of the Bush administration—from which no one in their right mind could expect compassion and protection of our health. Lisa Jackson, the Obama administration’s EPA Administrator, talks in the article as though she intends to increase enforcement activity.

You’ll forgive me for turning up the volume on this alarm, but it makes me see two huge problems.

First, the problem isn’t that polluters dump chemicals beyond the regulatory limit. The problem is that they use technologies that produce wastes that are toxic to life and, since they are also unusable in any other process, are simply thrown away in the most cost effective way possible—cost effective from the disposing company’s perspective. Those polluters are going to fight tooth and nail to avoid spending money on technologies that aren’t poisonous. They’re certainly going to fight to stay in business, as is the case with coal companies.

The theory is that taking regulatory actions against polluters will cause them to use less polluting technologies. Does anyone except academic economists think that businesses won’t spend money on politics in order to avoid what they believe to be the greater expense of developing non-toxic technologies? A case in point is the pass that coal companies got in the legislation alleged to introduce controls over greenhouse gas emissions.

So the first problem is the who and the why of technology decisions.

The second problem is that there are many chemicals we should be worried about that aren’t covered by the Clean Water Act or its companion Safe Drinking Water Act. Since they’re not covered, these chemicals can’t be regulated either poorly or vigorously. I’m thinking in particular of endocrine disruptors from products such as pesticides that many people believe are causing real havoc with children’s development and the increased risk of those children suffering from chronic illness as adults.

I’m sure that many of the people who work for those polluting companies are very nice. I’m sure that the regulators who try very hard to enforce the regulations to control our collective poisoning are very sincere and dedicated. But, basically, as we’ve seen with quite a few of the issues managed by this new and progressive administration, money talks.

It seems overwhelming. It is overwhelming. But it is not hopeless. The hope comes from staying informed and alert and doing the next thing.

We call such things the art of self care. They consist of individual choices we can make to reduce our exposure to toxins—for example, adding end-of-the-pipe water purification systems to make sure our drinking water is safe. That’s something you can do right now. We’ve discussed it on this show. But self care restricted to individual protection threatens to devolve into what Andrew Szasz calls an inverted quarantine—closing yourself off from the source of the threat and finding solutions in allegedly clean products.

The art of self care also includes what we do together. Making trouble for polluters is one way. Another is by building the wide range of capacities that constitute real health. It’s creating opportunities for physical fitness and access to nutrient dense foods and the cooperation we need for a safe and supportive physical and social environment. It is the care of the self, yours and ours, that will enable us to rip the heart out of corporations that are poisoning us.