Return to Love Canal. Hundreds of families were evacuated 20 years ago from the site of the worst chemical waste disaster in American history. Now that it's been cleaned up, is it possible to get them to come back?

In the case of the Love Canal area of Niagara Falls, residents' bitterness, distrust, and fatalistic attitude toward pollution -- rather than a fear of hazardous waste -- may guarantee that the neighborhood will never recover, according to Andrew Hoffman, SMG assistant professor of organizational behavior, who studies corporate environmental strategies and is investigating whether the area can be restored.

Although the Niagara Falls area is home to many chemical companies, Hoffman found that they -- including Occidental Petroleum, the company responsible for the pollution disaster -- are accepted as a fact of life, and major employers. "What they do, by and large, is taken in stride," he notes. Instead, many residents reserve their wrath for the "hysterical" activists and the media, which hasn't reported on revitalization efforts.

Hoffman found that no factor -- whether government safety reports, "clean" homes selling below market prices, Occidental's community relations campaign, or continued activism -- was as important to rehabilitation as residents' personal threshold of risk. Some residents dismiss the cleanup efforts as "just silly," noting their neighborhood was no more polluted than others in the area. "Now we just have a fence around it," says one resident.

"It's similar to the risk assessments we all do when we choose, for example, to smoke or drive without seat belts. Perceptions of safety are very individual," Hoffman says.

Yet while one local official notes that "people can rationalize anything," Hoffman wonders if those who choose to return to Love Canal -- or who never left -- fully realize the implications of that decision. Without any definitive scientific assessment, he notes, people's perceptions of risk become rooted in comparative experiences rather than hard facts. As one longtime resident says, "People who have worked here all their lives see nothing. But the people who have moved away have something to compare it to and see the problem."

Getting baby boomers to launch an exercise program. Senior astronaut John Glenn is the spokesperson for a new publication designed to get Americans over 50 into a regular exercise program. According to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, lack of exercise and poor diet together were found to be the second largest underlying cause of death in the United States in 1990. "By 2030, 20 percent of Americans -- 80 million people -- will be 65 and older. If they're out of shape, we might have a public health crisis," says Alan Jette, dean of Sargent College.

Jette and Roger Fielding, SAR assistant professor of health sciences, are part of a national education campaign by the National Institute on Aging (NIA) for keeping fit after 50. The campaign features the NIA's new book, Exercise: A Guide from the National Institute on Aging, to which Jette and Fielding contributed.

Society expects older people to be inactive, Jette says, and a lifetime of poor exercise habits is hard to change. Studies show that two-thirds of older adults don't engage in regular physical activity, so the NIA has an uphill battle, according to Jette. "It's a special problem for women of this generation, who may not have been athletic in their younger days," he adds. Lack of time, previous injury, and fear that exercise will cause new injuries all contribute to a decline in activity.

"This new book emphasizes why exercise later in life is safe and important and why inactivity is dangerous," says Jette. "Most important, it provides practical illustrations and examples of what types of exercise older people can do. Regular exercise could make the difference between an individual -- or a society -- that ages well and one that doesn't."