A Hazardous Inquiry: The Rashomon Effect at Love Canal

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Review: A Hazardous Inquiry: The Rashomon Effect at Love Canal By Allan Mazur Reviewed by Mary Beth Fortunato Brigham Young University,USA Mazur, Allan. A Hazardous Inquiry: The Rashomon Effect at Love Canal. Harvard University Press. Cambridge, Massachusetts, and London, England 1998. 272pp. US$27.00, hardcover. ISBN 0674748336. A Hazardous Inquiry: The Rashomon Effect at Love Canal uniquely relays the facts of Love Canal from the perspectives of the key players. Located in Niagara Falls, NY, Love Canal, now infamous in the environmental community, was an empty canal, used as a chemical disposal site in the 1940s and 50s. After hazardous chemicals were dumped in the canal, it was filled in and given to the city of Niagara Falls by Hooker Chemical Company. The city used the land to build housing and an elementary school. By the late 1970s, hazardous chemicals were leaking from the canal and rising to the surface. Families were evacuated from the area in 1978, and by 1980, Love Canal (formerly known as the LaSalle region of Niagara Falls) was considered a national emergency by President Jimmy Carter. Allan Mazur borrows from the structure of the classic Japanese film Rashoman, as he attempts to come to some resolution about what actually occurred at Love Canal by allowing those individuals involved to tell their side of the story. Hooker Chemical Company (the party that buried the chemicals), the Niagara Falls Board of Education (the party that built on it), Lois Gibbs (housewife turned environmental activist), local reporter Michael Brown, and homeowners read and approved Mazur’s versions of what they told him. Mazur acts as a mediator of sorts, taking the accounts that he hears and reconciling them. Mazur comments that reality is in the mind of the beholder (p. 5). As outsiders of Love Canal, we are left to discriminate between separate realities and to decide how factual each of these realties is. This leaves us bogged down in an irresolvable morass of claims and counterclaims (p.5). Can Mazur’s objectivity free us from the irresolvable morass of Love Canal? In Rashoman, a woodcutter attempts to give an objective account of what really happened between a bandit, samurai, and the wife of the samurai. His account is accepted as the most truthful account, because he is an outsider and appears to have nothing at stake. Later, we discover that the woodcutter found and kept the woman’s expensive dagger, so his account is not as pure as we first believe. Greed or want does not drive Mazur, but he is driven by his belief that there is an ultimate truth, and this drive could be his weakness.