Books - Environment Love Canal

Product Description:
In 1978, Love Canal first hit the headlines as an entire community struggled with the fact that they were living on top of a toxic waste dump. Within weeks, a grassroots movement forced national decision-makers to evacuate the community. Yet, 20 years later, homes at Love Canal have been resold, and some 50,000 similar sites remain. In Love Canal: The Story Continues...., Gibbs gives the blow-by-blow account of how she and her follow residents first became aware of the health problems caused by 20,000 tons of toxic chemicals buried beneath the ground. She continues the saga beyond the 1981 relocation to include the 'containment' of the contamination, the habitability studies that led to the resettlement of abandoned houses, the success of New York State's lawsuit against the company responsible, and her founding of the Citizens Clearinghouse for Hazardous Waste-now the Center For Health, Environment and Justice. As people across North America remember the 20th anniversary of this notorious event, Love Canal: The Story Continues... will be of immense value to grassroots and community activists everywhere. Highly readable, the book will also appeal to a wide cross section, including public officials, policy makers, students and the general reader.



Customer Review: Gibbs' book an inspiring & accurate account:
As a native Western New Yorker who lived in suburban Buffalo during the Love Canal era, I found Gibbs' account both accurate and inspiring. (I'm also a Ph.D. historian and am a stickler for evidence.) This book demonstrates that even one person can make a difference -- a lesson we need to hear today more than ever. The evidence of Love Canal's danger to residents is overwhelming. The book to which another reviewer refers as counterevidence (The Skeptical Environmentalist) has been widely panned in the scientific and scholarly reviews such as the journal Science as a highly flawed book which used secondary sources out of context. I invite you to visit Love Canal the next time you are in Niagara Falls, and you will see (and smell) for yourself the physical evidence of the chemicals which bloop and seep in the areas covered by a massive clay cap right across from the elementary school -- like some terrible modern-day burial mound.

Currently the NY State Dept. of Health is conducting both a massive cancer cluster study and an autoimmune disease study in Western New York in the area codes downwind from Niagara Falls plant sites. The cancer clusters, which in some cases have shown an incidence well above average (60%+), may be linked to a combination of low-level ionizing radiation from a WWII Manhattan Project plant near Niagara Falls, along with decades of pollution. (The studies are ongoing.) A new toxic brownfield where residents are living has been discovered in Buffalo in the last year. In the last six months, retired employees seriously ill with heavy metal contamination have admitted to the illegal dumping of heavy metals and other toxic chemicals into the water source during the 1970s.

The fact is that hardworking families scrimped and saved to buy houses in an area that both the developer and the city knew was heavily contaminated by chemical pollutants. Lois Gibbs, a concerned mother and housewife with little education, realized that something was terribly wrong. Illness rates had skyrocketed, especially for childhood cancers. Foul-smelling chemicals pooled in the school playground and residential backyards; children's sneakers which came in contact partly dissolved as a result. Gibbs shared her concerns with her neighbors, and became a self-taught grassroots organizer in the process. She and her neighbors carried out the simple data collecting which the DoH refused to do. Armed with files of evidence, Gibbs lobbied local officials, the city, the state, and even the company for help for her neighborhood -- and she didn't give up until -- finally -- President Carter did the right thing and relocated those families to safety.

If you still think an individual can't make a difference in today's world, you need to read this book. It is truly inspiring.

Customer Review: Reminds us that citizens must remain diligent.:
Gibbs' book is important to the history of the grassroots environmental movement. It helps us understand where we came from and why it's so important to have programs like Superfund. It also reminds us that citizens must be diligent in their fight against polluting industry and the politicos who share their beds. While she often repeats herself, it's still a quick (and powerful) read.

Product Description:
Thirty years after the headlines, Love Canal remains synonymous with toxic waste.

When this neighborhood of Niagara Falls, New York, burst upon the nation's consciousness, the media focused on a working-class white woman named Lois Gibbs, who gained prominence as an activist fighting to save families from the poison buried beneath their homes. Her organization, the Love Canal Homeowners Association, challenged big government and big business-and ultimately won relocation. But as Elizabeth Blum now shows, the activists at Love Canal were a very diverse lot.

Blum reveals that more lurks beneath the surface of this story than most people realize-and more than mere toxins. She takes readers behind the headlines to show that others besides Gibbs played important roles and to examine how race, class, and gender influenced the way people-from African American women to middle class white Christian groups-experienced the crisis and became active at Love Canal.

Blum explores the often--rocky interracial relationships of the community, revealing how marginalized black women fought to be heard as they defined their environmental activism as an ongoing part of the civil rights struggle. And she examines how the middle-class Ecumenical Task Force--consisting of progressive, educated whites--helped to negotiate legal obstacles and to secure the means to relocate and compensate black residents.

Blum also demonstrates how the crisis challenged gender lines far beyond casting mothers in activist roles. Women of the LCHA may have rejected feminism because of its anti-family stance, but they staunchly believed in their rights. And the incident changed the lives of working-class men, who found their wives in the front lines rather than in the kitchen. In addition, male bureaucrats and politicians ran into significant opposition from groups of both men and women who pressed for greater emphasis on health rather than economics for solutions to the crisis.

No previous account of Love Canal has considered the plight of these other segments of the population. By doing so, Blum shows that environmental activism opens a window on broader social movements and ideas, such as civil rights and feminism. Her book moves the story of Love Canal well beyond its iconic legacy--the Superfund Act that makes polluters accountable--to highlight another vital legacy, one firmly rooted in race, class, and gender.



Customer Review: informational:
i have not read it but I work in the Environmental Justice field and really was too young and lived in the south and did not know much about Love Canal. Now I live in the north, know who Lois Gibbs is and much more about Environmental Justice, so by the looks of the book I know it will enlighten me and be and give me more information for my job.