In the first two weeks of testimony, the plaintiffs' lawyers have established through Monsanto memorandums that the company was aware of the level of its discharges and that it at least partly understood the risks as early as the mid-1960's, if not earlier. But it did not begin improving pollution controls until 1970, a year before it stopped making PCB's in Anniston. The company continued to produce PCB's elsewhere until 1977, two years before the federal government banned them. Full article here, requires free registration.

I'm not really the environmentalist type, but my libertarian values are brought to the fore by this sort of thing. A large part of the public seems to think (liberals in particular) that in the libertarian world, we'd be living in an Ayn Randian universe, burning brown coal and experiencing acid rain on a daily basis, but I think they might have missed the point, possibly because of Atlas Shrugged.

Monsanto has profited from the destruction of large swaths of land, but the cost of this has not as yet been borne by them. In the libertarian ideal, one cannot rob people of use of their land without compensation, so I hope these people get something out of this.