[an orange character is driving a bulldozer, facing a house]
I am going to bulldoze your house
[a yellow character is shocked]
[yellow asks politely, hands clasped]
Could you please not do that?
[orange, pushing the bulldozer's controls, answers]
NO!
[yellow walks away from their house, looking dismayed]
Well, I guess I tried to do everything I could
Too bad
[orange smiles smugly as they bulldoze yellow's house]
https://thebad.website/comic/respectable_resistance
That's one extreme of the story. The other extreme is that he'd been doing it, along with every other business in that area, for years, because there's nothing out there. It's just sand and rock for miles in all directions. There's nothing to contaminate because nothing lives there.
The only reason he got involved in anything is because he was told it wasn't going to cost him any money. He shows up and starts filling out the paperwork and it doesn't say what he was told; it says he has to pay (souces differ) something like $6K-20K for an easement so he can dig up city property to access the sewer line to connect to it. He doesn't sign that paper. Instead, he gets up and walks away from the table, leaving behind the paperwork he'd already filled out, which included his application to connect to city utilities. Since he filled out the application, they file it, process it, and approve it, which is what "allows" city hall to start levying fines against him for non-compliance.
Every other business in that area continued to do the exact same thing as him, but only he was being fined for it. What's more, if he'd just stayed home that day and never signed anything, there'd be nothing anyone could do about it.
He knew he didn't understand the system, so he didn't want anything to do with it. Against his better judgement, he tried to comply. He started off acting in good faith. When he found out the other party wasn't, he walked away from the deal. He should have taken every piece of paper with his signature on it with him, but he didn't because he didn't understand how the system works.
He thought that since he didn't sign everything, that meant none of it was any good. When he got the letters from city hall about the fines, he did what he'd done with all the mail from city hall for years: threw it in the trash.
A city government, trying to expand its power and control, absued the system to extort money from someone who wanted nothing to do with them. If city hall had just left him, and well enough, alone, everything that followed could have been avoided.