It’s almost a cliché: the leaking oil drum, the sludge pool, the child splashing in a river laced with mercury and industrial solvents. Sadly, environmental damage isn’t just a matter for moralizing editorials and Hollywood yarns. It’s a real, physical threat, as Massachusetts families from Woburn to Ashland to Pittsfield can, and sometimes do, testify in court. Boston University School of Public Health professor Richard Clapp has made it his life’s goal to combat the things that get dumped in the night.

“I would give Massachusetts a B-minus,” says Clapp, referring to the state’s overall grade on environmental wellness. It’s well-known that Massachusetts is home to 30 Superfund sites, places so contaminated by hazardous waste that they’ve made the EPA’s “most wanted” list.

Clapp is doing what he can to educate people about such dangers. He teaches courses on environmental epidemiology (“Finding an association between an exposure and an outcome,” like between toxic chemical spills and local cancer rates), and he works with citizens’ groups throughout the region, helping them address their environmental concerns.

“My work is to listen to communities and see what’s on their minds, and to get students involved in that kind of work,” he says.

Links between contaminants and disease can be hard to prove.

“There are circumstances where we have learned from community studies,” says Clapp, citing the Woburn case familiar from A Civil Action, “although it’s often easier to establish connections with workplace studies,” because employees often are exposed to high concentrations of just a few contaminants.

Clapp ran the Massachusetts Cancer Registry in the 1980s when Ashland was first identified as having a potential cancer cluster—state research last May suggested that people already at risk for cancer raised their risk by playing in certain contaminated ponds.

A native of Lewiston, Maine, Clapp grew up near the dirty waters of the Androscoggin River. “We had a general awareness of the contamination from the paper mills and the textile industry,” he says, which led his mother to warn him not to eat the river’s fish. The situation has improved since. “Today, they say you can eat one fish per year from it.”

It was as an undergraduate at Dartmouth College that Clapp’s love of nature began to blossom. “We used to go hiking in the White Mountains, in these beautiful mountains and streams,” he says. “We wanted to keep them that way.”

At work, he still wears the practical fleece jacket of an outdoorsman, even if
aging knees now prevent him from clambering over rocks in the company of the
Appalachian Mountain Club.

But Clapp is no wild-eyed idealist. Over the course of a career that’s see-sawed between government and academia, Clapp has worked on everything from organizing childhood lead poisoning prevention programs to advising on the federal Agent Orange Act, which led to compensation for Vietnam War veterans who developed cancer from exposure to Agent Orange. He considers the passage of that bill one of his proudest moments.

“We don’t have to dump toxic stuff in our environment, so let’s not do it,” is Clapp’s philosophy. “Every day I get calls from people who are distraught. I have to ask them questions like, ‘Did your children play on that playground?’ ”

While chemical dumping has long been Clapp’s particular bugbear, he knows that the future holds a much graver challenge.

“Carbon emissions and global climate change is the environmental issue of this century,” he says. “We’ve got a real disaster with overproduction of greenhouse gases.”

But he doesn’t think that the future is all melting icecaps and apocalypse. There’s a precedent to believe that something can yet be done.

“In the 1980s, we identified ozone depletion,” Clapp says. “Through years of concerted efforts, including the Montreal Protocols, we turned it around.” International cooperation, decisive legislative acts, the compliance of the business community—they’re not just the stuff of fairy tales. The ozone problem, in Clapp’s view, has been addressed.

Today’s students, says Clapp, give him hope that solutions will, one day, be implemented. “Global warming is on people’s minds,” he says. “The citizenry is becoming more aware.”

This article was excerpted with permission from the June 5, 2006, edition of the Boston Globe.