It's my own personal belief that a lot of these problems are deliberately ignored because the corporations operating in the specific areas have no personal (that's not exactly the right word to use, but it will suffice I suppose) attachment to the place where they operate. I don't think that telling companies they have to operate in a certain way, a way that a) goes contrary to their current desires/practices/interests b) prevents them from, in their opinion, optimizing their profits (which does run contrary to their mission statement - acting in the financial interests of their shareholders). In what may be an oversimplification, environmental legislation tends to hamper straightforward profiteering, mostly because it prevents straightforward rape-and-run massive short-term profit techniques. An extreme example of this is the mining industry in Montana.

State legislation requires mining companies to place a multimillion damage deposit whenever mines are being started, because mining is a dirty, dirty buisness and not all companies are willing to clean it up. One example is the case of Pegasus Gold, a mining company that operated (and still operates under the name Apollo Gold) in the 90's that practices pretty much what I'm talking about. They found a poor gold mine, in a time of poor economic value for gold, and used incredibly harmful practices. Pegasus practiced Heap Leaching, something typically done on tailings and to extract the miniscule amounts of gold from low-grade ores, although in this case, most of the actual gold came from applying this method. When the company could no longer support itself, its board of directors voted themselves a bonus exceed one million dollars each, a move immediately followed by filing for bankruptcy and left the bill for cleaning up to the state of Montana and its residents. I would go out on a limb and say that each one of them would conclude that their actions are merely 'good business'

In spite of that, what would be more effective is changing the playing field so that it benefits the company to not harm their environment. This is, again, personal opinion, but it's also the hallmark of good leadership: get a group of people to do what you want because they want to. If you change the playing field so that it's in a company's best interest to maintain where it works and accept a lower rate of profit for long-term sustainibility rather than rewarding its short-term profiteering, then we'll start to see the effective environmental changes being made. Of course, don't ask me how to do this.