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Thesis ID: CBB001561582

Recipe for Disaster: Chemical Wastes, Community Activists, and Public Health at Love Canal, 1945--2000 (2005)

Michigan State University
Fine, Lisa M.
Publication date: 2005
Language: English

Publication Date: 2005
Edition Details: Advisor: Fine, Lisa M.
Physical Details: 339 pp.

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Public health Environmentalism Political activists and activism Medicine and government Environmental pollution Chemical pollution 20th century, late United States

Love Canal, one of the best-known environmental disasters of the late-twentieth century, represents a signal event in American history. The short and standard version of events begins in 1978, when residents of a suburban neighborhood in Niagara Falls, New York, learned that they lived near a chemical disposal site containing approximately 22,000 tons of hazardous wastes. They organized, fought state and federal officials, and won permanent relocation from the area. This commonly accepted account, known simply as Love Canal, encapsulates a mythic American story: aggrieved, honest citizens fight big government and business to protect their families and homes. In the process, Love Canal became a script for certain kinds of environmental activism, with women as essential participants. The story of health and environmental activism in Niagara Falls, however, involves many more actors and stretches chronologically into the 1990s. Using Niagara Falls as a case study, this dissertation project examines women's grassroots activism within Niagara Falls and the interface with a variety of "experts"---governmental, scientific, and medical---in battles over definitions of risk, the importance of professional knowledge, and public perceptions of Niagara Falls; community members' involvement demonstrated citizen agency and women's alternative activism as these groups affected policy decisions regarding the environment and public health. Niagara Falls itself becomes a metaphor for the American experience, as activists overcame their disappointment with public officials, disbelief in science and disappointment in the democratic process. At the beginning of the twentieth century, Niagara Falls seemed poised to combine a healthy, thriving chemical industry with the pristine natural beauty of the falls. The LaSalle neighborhood within Niagara Falls promised working- and middle class families in the 1950s, 60s and 70s the opportunity to buy their own homes and participate in the "American Dream." After the discovery of the buried wastes, residents faced economic and medical uncertainty. Other events within American society---the Vietnam War, student democracy movement, women's movement, and Watergate scandal---framed the discovery of the community's toxic threat. Love Canal activists effectively used "local knowledge" to challenge the collected authority of the assorted experts, and effectively change public policy decisions. This Love Canal case study illuminates broader issues of risk, citizen participation, and state obligations within American society, as Love Canal residents presented a variety of arguments to justify relocation from the contaminated site. Community activism demonstrated the mixed legacy of America's postwar social movements, showing ordinary citizen empowerment, continuing racism, and the tensions over the growing uncertainty of scientific knowledge and authority. As such, Love Canal activism challenges the assumption of the decline of social activism with the end of the Vietnam war, and suggests that social movements took on new forms and concentrated on different issues in their interactions to the state.

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Description Cited in Diss. Abstr. Int. A 66/09 (2006): 3431. UMI pub. no. 3189665.

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