Draft:Michael Harold Brown

Michael Harold Brown is a Catholic author/journalist/speaker/and website owner in the United States. As a secular journalist, Mr. Brown exposed the Love Canal environmental toxic waste crisis in his hometown of Niagara Falls, New York, writing dozens of articles, for which he was nominated for three Pulitzer prizes. The Love Canal crisis created many controversies. His work appeared in publications such as The Atlantic Monthly, The New York Times Magazine, Reader's Digest, Science Digest, Discover, New York, Saturday Review, Rolling Stone, Family Weekly, and others. His college lecture circuit tour on toxic contamination spurred the creation of many local activist groups in the 1980s. A cover story in the Atlantic won him the Sidney Hillman Award.

Early life
Brown was born March 5, 1952, in Niagara Falls, New York, and attended Fordham University in the Bronx, New York, where he worked on the school newspaper, The Ram and graduated in 1975 with a major in print journalism.

Career
Brown started as a general assignment reporter for the Binghamton Press & Sun-Bulletin , where, on April 7, 1975, he published the longest article in that newspaper's 153-year history, He Turns Tables on Physics, focusing on a teacher named Phil Jordan who was forced from the school (in Spencer, New York) because of his "psychic" demonstrations.

Two years later, Brown returned to the Niagara Gazette as a reporter covering the towns of Lewiston and Porter, where he became intrigued with the issue of toxic chemical waste disposal. This arose due to the existence in those towns of a company called Chem-Trol (later SCA) that was bringing in the most toxic compounds from around the nation and burying them in "secure landfills" at a wooded area near Lake Ontario, sparking the toxic-waste awareness in Western New York.

Love canal
Assured by the county health department and its commissioner that Love Canal was not a health risk, Brown nevertheless began making regular phone calls after hearing an engineer say that someone would have to "dig in there and take a good look." At the time, the Hooker Company (now owned by Occidental Petroleum) was the largest employer in the area, with thousands of employees in more than a dozen countries.

Soon, Brown learned of unusual and severe skin problems and other ailments -- symptoms that he soon found were identical to those caused by tetradioxin, known by some as the most poisonous chemical ever synthesized and the cause of a myriad of illnesses, including a serious skin disorder, "chloracne", that involved more than just the skin.

In May of 1978, Brown reviewed a memo from Environmental Protection Agency office in Rochester which stated that tests already conducted by the state suggested "a serious threat to health and welfare." In the canal, the effluents went beyond solvents like benzene and trichlorethylene and included dozens of highly toxic chlorinated hydrocarbons used for pesticides, herbicides, and plastics, including C-56 (a building block for the now-banned pesticide Mirex) and TCP, or 2,4,6-trichlorophenol, which Brown learned virtually always carried, as an unwanted byproduct, tetrachlorodibenzoparadioxin, TCDD or "dioxin" for short. The burial of trichlorophenol at Love Canal was proven later in 1978 when a source from a remedial chemical company called Brown to inform him and Hooker confirmed it. Soon, dioxin itself was detected. The resultant news stunned officials and the nation.

With confirmation from the NY State Health Department, there indeed seemed to be an abnormal prevalence of miscarriages and birth defects alongside Love Canal. The state health commissioner, Dr. Joseph Whalen, declared an unprecedented health emergency, the first such emergency in American history. Brown collected sump-pump samples from a neighborhood a mile from the worst-hit section and had them analyzed, along with logging state air sample results.

The declaration of a health emergency was made on August 2, 1978, and led to massive national publicity, including on The New York Times front page and all three news networks (NBC, CBS, and ABC). Angry residents filled the streets, demanding evacuation, which soon was to come for 237 households. President Jimmy Carter also declared a federal health emergency. The Times had the reporter, Donald G. McNeil, in Niagara Falls. Lois Gibbs, who lived several blocks from the canal but was very concerned about what she was reading formed a formal homeowners association and worked full-time and tirelessly helped keep the matter before the local media. Brown learned, through private testing, that the chemicals were in areas away from the official zone of evacuation and also that other dumps threatened a tributary of the Niagara River and the city's water treatment plant. Brown's investigation continued through 1978 and early 1979. He expanded his investigation nationwide in a book released at the end of 1979 called  'Laying Waste: The Poisoning of America by Toxic Chemicals', which was published by the Pantheon division of Random House and drew extensive publicity around the nation including Today, Nightline, and McNeil-Lehrer. The book was excerpted or adapted in the Atlantic Monthly (cover story) ], The New York Times Magazine (three times, Reader's Digest , New York,  Family Weekly, and other national publications. . The issue of toxic chemical wastes had been established. Released in 2024, the PBS documentary, Poisoned Ground: The Tragedy at Love Canal, continues to call forth a reminder of the fight for the health and safety of our families.

Publishing career
Brown, beginning in 1984, also authored books on the Mafia, Greenpeace, toxic air pollution, and paleoanthropology (The Search for Eve) and an article for Science Digest on pollution of the entire Mississippi and another article exposing fast-food frying techniques, causing the major ones to shift practices away from use of beef tallow. Along with other national articles he spoke for ten years on the college lecture circuit for the Royce-Carlton Agency.

In later years, Brown pursued spiritual writing full time with appearances on The Joan Rivers Show, Sally Jesse Raphael, Mother Angelica, TBN, and "Ancient Prophecies." He wrote his first Catholic book, Witness, on a Ukrainian martyr-mystic named Josyp Terelya, and a second, on apparitions of the Virgin Mary since 1830, called  'The Final Hour ', a Catholic bestseller, followed by many books on the afterlife, spiritual warfare, devotion, healing, prophecy, and other spiritual topics, including the Catholic bestsellers After Life, The Other Side, and  What You Take To Heaven. He also penned a supernatural Christian novel and an article on psychokinesis for The Atlantic. He has visited more than thirty alleged apparition sites in various parts of the world and has spoken in more than a hundred cities, including at many churches, on Catholic mysticism. In 2000, Brown and wife Lisa launched a Christian-Catholic news/commentary/and aggregate website, Spirit Daily.com.

Personal life
On October 30, 1993, Brown married Lisa Bassani, 33, in Albany, New York, where she was employed as a legislative assistant and researcher for New York State Senator Roy Goodman of Manhattan. They have three children, Elizabeth, Joseph, and Mary Rose. He and wife Lisa now live near St. Augustine, Florida.

Publications

 * PK: A Report on Psychokinesis (SteinberBooks, 1977)
 * Laying Waste: The Poisoning of America By Toxic Chemicals (Pantheon, 1979)
 * Marked To Die (Simon & Schuster, 1984)
 * The Toxic Cloud (HarperCollins, 1989)
 * The Greenpeace Story (Dorling Kindersley, 1989)
 * The Search For Eve  (HarperCollins, 1990)
 * Witness (Faith Publishing, 1991)
 * The Final Hour (Faith Publishing, 1992)
 * Prayer of the Warrior (Faith Publishing, 1993)
 * The Bridge To Heaven (Marian Communications, 1993)
 * The Trumpet of Gabriel (Faith Publishing, 1994)
 * Secrets of the Eucharist (Faith Publishing, 1996)
 * The Day Will Come (Servant Publication, 1996)
 * After Life (Faith Publishing, 1997)
 * The Last Secret (Servant Publication, 1998)
 * Seven Days With Mary (Faith Publication, 1998)
 * Sent To Earth (Queenship, 2000)
 * The Best of Spirit Daily (Queenship, 2002)
 * The God of Miracles (Queenship, 2005)
 * Tower of Light (Spirit Daily Publishing, 2007)
 * The Other Side (Spirit Daily Publishing, 2008)
 * The Seven (Spirit Daily Publishing, 2009)
 * The Spirits Around Us (Spirit Daily Publishing, 2010)
 * A Life of Blessings (Spirit Daily Publishing, 2012)
 * Fear of Fire (Spirit Daily Publishing, 2013)
 * What You Take To Heaven (Spirit Daily Publishing, 2014)
 * The God of Healing (Spirit Daily Publishing, 2015)
 * Where the Cross Stands (Spirit Daily Publishing, 2017)
 * Lying Wonders, Strangest Things (Spirit Daily Publishing, 2019)
 * Future Events (Spirit Daily Publishing, 2023)