"Not me!" you think; but check yourself: When I say "dredging," does a big clamshell digger dripping wet sludge pop into your head? Have you caught yourself about to say things like "Let nature clean the Hudson," or even, "All those PCBs are buried safely down in layers of sediment?" Yeah! I almost caught myself doing it the other day. Me, who considers himself a scientist and an all around pretty logical guy!

So the question is: "Who is at fault for this deadening of our critical thinking skills?" Now a lot of you are going to say GE is. Well, you are wrong. GE is not the wrongdoer in this issue—we are. We let ourselves just adsorb a set of obviously stilted images and statistics in a vacuum without bothering to take a few minutes to question whether it could be anything more than window-dressing. Shame on us.

Yes, GE spent hundreds of millions of dollars on Madison Avenue’s best minds, spin doctors, and television time. But can we in any reasonable way expect them not to when literally a billion dollars is at stake? When McDonald’s puts together a catchy jingle and shows prime time spots of their Big Mac, does anyone think they want to sell you a burger because it’s what you need? No. They want to sell it to you because it makes them money. So McD’s tries to sway your opinion—they advertise. It’s called profit motive, and it is an integral part of capitalism.

Why should we hold GE to any different standard? They don’t want to shell out a billion dollars plus, so they advertise and try to sway opinion. There is nothing unexpected there. If someone tried to charge you $1000 for something, wouldn’t you at least try to talk them down?

And just like ads for the Big Mac don’t tell you it’s loaded with fat or that it rarely looks like the picture on TV, the GE ads don’t tell you that many PCBs are liquid at river temperature or that spring runoff and storms tend to stir the stuff up from the bottom. They really have no obligation to, and you can’t ask them to shoot themselves in the foot for no reason.

So if we can’t blame GE for this, why must we blame ourselves? Because we’re adults. Even more so, because we’ve spent time educating ourselves and deliberately increasing our critical thinking skills. So, why didn’t we ask ourselves "Hey, they can’t really plan to use clamshells, can they?" or "If biphenyls cause chronic health problems and a whole slew of halogenated compounds cause chronic health problems, what are the chances chlorinated biphenyls are actually not a danger?" We’re not children right? If we routinely stop and ask ourselves "How much fat is in that burger?" why haven’t we asked ourselves, "How low have the levels dropped in the worst parts of the river? Is that why we can’t just eat the fish?"