When Joy Horowitz was a student at Beverly Hills High School in the ‘70s, 90210 wasn’t yet a universal code for glitz and glamour. Sure, it was easy enough to spot the child actor from Lassie skateboarding, or Groucho Marx at the pharmacy, or Walt Disney at Roxbury Park, but otherwise, ‘Beverly’ resembled any other high school in America, with its cheerleaders and nerds, madrigal singers and Earth Day organizers, dorky math teachers and toughs sneaking cigarettes. But there was one glaring difference: a tall oil derrick squatting on the football field, its pump jacks bobbing up and down like chickens pecking at corn-studded dirt.

The derrick, hidden behind panels of psychedelic flowers painted by terminally ill children (with some help from the god of irony), was part of the landscape for so long that no one paid it any mind. Each year, the oil company paid a 5 percent royalty fee—in other words, millions of dollars—to the school system and neighborhood residents, including Horowitz’s own family. Most people accepted it as an unequivocal good. 

Until 300 former Beverly students got cancer.

In her new book, Parts Per Million, high on emotional appeal, intrigue, and extrapolation, Horowitz leaves no stone unturned. She exposes the complicated struggle between Big Oil and Big Lawsuits: Outraged parents send around petitions that many, refusing to believe, refuse to sign. A “neutral” expert gets fired when it’s revealed that her husband was an oil consultant. Lawyers “privilege” information. Erin Brockovich gets involved. (“It’s just butt-ass wrong,” says Brockovich, movingly, of the oil well.) Under the aegis of outspoken Persian soccer moms, race enters the picture. More cancers sprout. 

Over a four-year period, Horowitz stitches together a story from excruciatingly annotated interviews with hundreds of alumni, government officials, activists, geologists, cancer patients, doctors, air-flow experts, and lawyers.

Sure, this book is about whether or not the oil wells under Beverly High caused more than a thousand cancers. But what it’s really about is greed—the oil company’s, the school system’s, the plaintiffs’, the lawyers’.  It’s about how, nearly always, the winner in the American legal system is the party that pours out enough money to outlast the other, and just how much is spent in extenuated litigation. In this tale, every time court was summoned, $10,000 in lawyers’ fees were spent per hour.

The story is also about how much attention we should—or shouldn’t—pay to the ever more relevant issue of industrial contaminants. It’s about what happens when the burden of proof shifts from industry to government. And, when government shies away, the burden falls to a group of individuals, whom Horowitz calls, lovingly, “wacko soccer moms,” committed together by outrage, fear and loss. 

Horowitz’s most interesting chapter, aside from the chilling transcriptions of conversations with her old high school teachers (“I’m getting tired of funerals, frankly,” says one), is the one in which she explores the myth that science is an objective discipline immune from market forces. “Environmental science has turned into a kind of warfare,” she notes, drawing parallels to tobacco industry research. Horowitz accuses the scientists working on this case of behaving like lawyers, working for whomever is willing to pay them the most: “The search for the truth in science and the truth in the courtroom are two completely different endeavors, defined by different standards of proof.” 

Although the book implicitly addresses the consequences we may now be facing for our greed, Horowitz regrettably refrains from making conclusions that stretch beyond Beverly Hills High. Casting a wider net would have moved the book from exhaustive case study towards greater relevance.

Above all, Horowitz’s biggest frustration is that so far, no one has figured out “the full extent of contamination and what effects it has had on the health of the people—except for a plaintiffs’ law firm looking to win its case,” she writes resignedly. Scientific evidence is purchased and potted and parried with. The lawyers knock down each others’ straw men. Sure, one day, the judge will rule, one side will pay, the other receive. But, as quips one dying man, “the case will be settled but the truth won’t be.” 

Posted on Jul 26, 2007 at 2:00 PM
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