Our Toxic Harvest

A seven-year mystery about the contamination of well water in Walkerton, Ontario, was solved for me in Elizabeth Brubaker’s very first paragraph. I recall good media reports when it happened in 2000 about the livestock operations that were a possible source of the bacteria that caused illness and death to citizens of the town. Yet the livestock operations faded from view as the public inquiry turned the spotlight on government inspections. Brubaker’s treatise on agricultural pollution begins with a paradoxical finding of the Walkerton Inquiry—that pollution of wells came from manure that had been spread on farm fields in accordance with provincial regulations.

Greener Pastures: Decentralizing the Regulation of Agricultural Pollution targets exactly these regulations, which Brubaker argues emphasize procedures rather than outcomes. The Walkerton Inquiry’s finding about the source of the E. coli highlights a bureaucratic hazard familiar in many...