Margaret Heffernan: The dangers of "willful blindness"

Gayla Benefield was just doing her job -- until she uncovered an awful secret about her hometown that meant its mortality rate was 80 times higher than anywhere else in the U.S. But when she...

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In the northwest corner of the United States,right up near the Canadian border,there's a little town called Libby, Montana,and it's surrounded by pine trees and lakesand just amazing wildlifeand these enormous trees that scream up into the sky.And in there is a little town called Libby,which I visited, which feels kind of lonely,a little isolated.And in Libby, Montana, there's a rather unusual womannamed Gayla Benefield.She always felt a little bit of an outsider,although she's been there almost all her life,a woman of Russian extraction.She told me when she went to school,she was the only girl who ever choseto do mechanical drawing.Later in life, she got a job going house to housereading utility meters -- gas meters, electricity meters....