Pollution Wars

A lawsuit that turns tables

For more than a decade outraged environmentalists have marched countless companies into court on charges that they are polluting nature. But a corporation has turned the tables and sued the environmentalists for libel. One year ago, Rick Webb, 31, coordinator of West Virginia Mountain Stream Monitors Project, an environmental group, charged in his sporadically produced newsletter that the strip-mine operation of the D.L.M. Coal Corp. of Buckhannon, W. Va., had "destroyed" seven miles of trout streams on the Buckhannon River as a result of sulfuric acid and iron poisoning. Webb's complaint helped result in a federal inspection and a pollution study of land near the mines by the Environmental Protection Agency.

Though firms normally are reluctant to challenge such allegations in court because the cases can result in bad publicity, D.L.M. decided to fight. Last month it filed a $200,000 libel suit charging that Webb's account was "totally false and untrue, defamatory and libelous, intentionally and maliciously published."

Webb claims he is not dismayed by the suit, saying, "It has spotlighted the problem better than we ever could have done." Some businessmen, though, feel that the case will have a sobering effect on environmental activists.

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