:Love Canal Revisited: Race, Class, and Gender in Environmental Activism

Abstract

Elizabeth D. Blum's book is a short, well-written account of one of the emblematic environmental disputes in recent historical memory. She complicates what we think we already know about how Lois Gibbs single-handedly and courageously sought relocation for her family and community away from the chemicals seeping from the old Hooker Chemical and Plastics Corporation site in Niagara Falls, New York, fighting both big business and government along the way to victory. In widening the narrative from heroic individualism to situating the events in their historical context (both in the 1970s in the wake of social movements and within the history of the region), Blum sheds light on the complex dynamics of race, class, and gender in this conflict. She begins with a contemporary dispute over what to do with the Love Canal site, as most current local residents oppose attempts to mark its significance through a museum or even a plaque. For Blum, this refusal comes as no surprise, given the contentiousness of the dispute itself. She focuses on white working-class women, of whom Lois Gibbs was the emblem in her capacity as the leader of the Love Canal Homeowners Association (LCHA). Gibbs was a housewife who linked her son's illness to the chemicals buried by the Hooker Corporation, which had sold the polluted land to the local school board for one dollar. After a long, complex struggle against the local and federal governments, LCHA successfully achieved relocation for its families, and the federal Superfund Act (the Comprehensive Environmental Response, Compensation, and Liability Act, 1980) was passed. In 1988, Hooker's successor organization was found responsible for the contamination and ordered to pay a large settlement. Thus, Love Canal represents many things: an example of local women taking on the power structure and winning; the need for the passage of federal environmental legislation; the political and cultural moment defined by distrust in the wake of Richard Nixon's resignation; and the rise of the anti-toxics and environmental justice movements that flourished in the 1980s.