In the spring of 1978, citizens of Love Canal, a suburban
development in Niagara Falls, NY, began protesting against the
leaking toxic waste dump - a sixteen acre site containing 100,000
barrels of chemical waste - upon which their homes, elementary
school, and backyards stood. The Love Canal citizens' movement
represented a different brand of environmental reform. Rather than
focusing on resource conservation and preservation of natural
spaces, Love Canal reformers advocated environmental justice. By
the early 1980s, hundreds of local activists (many of them
self-described "housewives-turned-activists") had forced two
important initiatives from politicians and business leaders:
government relocation of Love Canal families and
government/industry remediation of the dump itself. Love Canal
activists also spurred passage of the Superfund law at the federal
level, "Right to Know" statutes at the state level, and a wave of
copycat citizen-environmentalist groups in communities across the
country (so-called NIMBYs: "Not In My Backyard" environmentalists).
Nearly thirty years after making international headlines, Love
Canal remains a watchword of hazardous waste reform and one of the
most significant environmental disasters in American history. In
this book, Richard S. Newman examines this oft-told event within
the wider context of the landscape through five centuries. He
begins with the conflicts that erupted between the resident
Iroquois and French explorer Rene Lasalles' commercial development
schemes in the Niagara Falls region. During the 18th and 19th
century, the Love Canal landscape was transformed by successive
generations of European and American entrepreneurs and
industrialists. Love's Canal was the dream of William Love, a
developer who in 1893 planned a massive industrial metropolis to be
carved out of the Niagara region's lush farmland, capped by an
artificial river with a waterfall higher than Niagara Falls. His
scheme failed but not before digging of the canal had begun. The
scheme attracted the interest of famous conservationists like John
Muir, Theodore Roosevelt, and John Burroughs, who argued for
preserving the falls from commercial and industrial overuse. Yet
throughout the twentieth century the area supported massive
industrial growth, including that of the Hooker Electrochemical
Corporation, the company that dumped industrial chemicals into the
abandoned Love Canal site. As the company grew, its efforts to
handle disposal of its hazardous waste led to development of a new
process of "in-ground disposal." Only by considering Love Canal
land-use and alteration through successive stages of
commercialization, industrialization, deindustrialization, and
technological innovation can we understand the road to a hazardous
waste nightmare in the 1970s-and the global environmental justice
movement it sparked. A portrait of a charged landscape and the
people who have continually redefined its meaning, this book will
look at local land-use from long-term perspective.
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