ismajor accomplishments include asphalt parking lots throughout the New Yorkmetro area, paved roads in and out of city parks, and development of JonesBeach, now the most polluted, dirty, overcrowded piece of shoreline in theNortheast. In Stewart Udall's book The Quiet Crisis, the former Secretary ofthe Interior lavishes praise on Moses. The JFK cabinet member calls JonesBeach "an imaginative solution ... (the) supreme answer to the ever-presentproblems of overcrowding" [Udall 163-4]. JFK's introduction to the bookprovides this foreboding passage: "Each generation must deal anew with theraiders, with the scramble to use public resources for private profit, andwith the tendency to prefer short-run profits to long-run necessities. Thecrisis may be quiet, but it is urgent" [Udall xii]. Oddly, the subject oflandfills is never broached in Udall's book; in 1963, the issue was, infact, a non-issue.A modern state-of-the-art sanitary landfill is a graveyard for garbage,where deposited wastes are compacted, spread in thin layers, and covereddaily with clay or synthetic foam. The modern landfill is lined withmultiple, impermeable layers of clay, sand, and plastic before any garbageis deposited. This liner prevents liquids, called leachates, frompercolating into the groundwater. Leachates result from rain water mixingwith fluids in the garbage, making a highly toxic "juice" containing inks,heavy metals, and other poisonous compounds. Ideally, leachates are pumpedup from collection points along the bottom of the landfill and eithershipped to liquid waste disposal points or re-introduced into the upperlayers of garbage, to resume the cycle. Unfortunately, most landfills haveno such pumping system [Miller 527].Until the formation of the Environmental Protection Agency by Nixon in 1970,there were virtually no regulations governing the construction, operation,and closure of landfills. As a result, 85 percent of all landfills extant inthis country are unl...
