Leadership Quote by William Hamilton

The line lands like a polite cough in the middle of a toxic spill: a politician performing innocence while pointing at something everyone has trained themselves not to see. "Nice communities" is the loaded phrase. It turns a place into a brand - safe, orderly, property-valued - and then treats that brand as evidence of moral behavior. Effluents, meanwhile, is technocratic language for something viscerally disgusting. The sentence depends on that dissonance: gentility on the surface, sewage underneath.

Hamilton's "I simply can't believe" is less disbelief than strategy. It's the rhetoric of plausible deniability, the tone a public figure uses when the facts are inconvenient but still politically survivable. By framing pollution as incompatible with "niceness", he implicitly suggests that blame must lie elsewhere: an outsider industry, a neighboring jurisdiction, a few bad actors. The subtext is exoneration-by-aesthetic. If a community looks respectable, it gets presumed innocent.

Contextually, this is the kind of line that surfaces when environmental harm collides with local identity: suburban towns, tourist districts, "good schools" places that see themselves as consumers of nature, not producers of waste. The intent is to protect that self-image - and, by extension, the local tax base and voter coalition - from the stigma of accountability. It's a tidy example of how environmental politics gets derailed: not through denial of science, but through denial of character.