Synopses & Reviews
In the summer of 1978, residents 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 that anchored their neighborhood. Initially seeking evacuation, area activists soon found that they were engaged in a far larger battle over the meaning of America's industrial past and its environmental future. The Love Canal protest movement inaugurated the era of grassroots environmentalism, spawning new anti-toxics laws and new models of ecological protest.
Historian Richard S. Newman examines the Love Canal crisis through the area's broader landscape, detailing the way this ever-contentious region has been used, altered, and understood from the colonial era to the present day. Newman journeys into colonial battles between Native Americans and European settlers over land use, 19th century utopian city planning, the rise of the American chemical industry in the 20th century, the transformation of environmental activism in the 1970s, and the memory of environmental disasters in our own time.
In an era of hydrofracking and renewed concern about nuclear waste disposal, Love Canal remains relevant. It is only by starting at the very beginning of the site's environmental history that we can understand the road to a hazardous waste crisis in the 1970s-and to the global environmental justice movement it sparked.
About the Author
Richard S. Newman is the Edwin Wolf 2nd Director at The Library Company of Philadelphia. A native of Buffalo, New York, he specializes in abolitionism, Civil War society, and environmentalism in American history and culture. He is the co-editor of
The Palgrave Environmental Reader and the author of
The Transformation of American Abolitionism and
Freedom's Prophet: Bishop Richard Allen, the AME Church, and the Black Founding Fathers.
Table of Contents
Acknowledgments
Introduction Of Burial Mounds and Toxic Tombs
Part One Love Canal in the Era of Great Dreams
Ch 1 Developing Niagara, Developing Love Canal
Ch 2 Building Love's Canal
Ch 3 Master of the Chemical Machine
Ch 4 Worlds Collide at Love Canal
Part Two Love Canal in the Era of Environmentalism
Ch 5 The Problem at Love Canal
Ch 6 Growing Protest at Love Canal
Ch 7 Widening the Circle of Influence
Part Three Learning from Love Canal
Ch 8 Love Canal Lessons
Ch 9 Resettling Love Canal?
Epilogue Memory and Health at Love Canal
Notes
Bibliography
Index