| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 96.1

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 96.1 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Love Canal Revisited: Race, Class, and Gender in Environmental Activism. By Elizabeth D. Blum. (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2008. xiv, 194 pp. $34.95, ISBN 978-0-7006-1560-5.)

Love Canal Revisited tells of a signature moment in the history of American environmentalism: the crisis over chemical pollution for the residents of Love Canal, a neighborhood in Niagara Falls, New York, in the late 1970s and early 1980s. The short story of this community is well known: residents of this lower-middle-class community discovered chemicals leaching into their basements and forming puddles in their yards. Children came down with rare cancers and genetic anomalies. In response, a group of neighborhood parents, primarily women and led by Lois Gibbs, a mother, uncovered that the area had been a toxic waste site in the first half of the twentieth century for the Hooker Chemical Company. After numerous demonstrations, trips to Albany, hostage takings, lawn burnings, and political actions, the residents' Love Canal Homeowners Association (LCHA) forced the state to buy up polluted properties and move residents to new homes. The federal and state governments were forced to begin massive environmental cleanups by dredging tons of toxic muck. The story is a touchstone of the modern environmental movement because it is an early harbinger of the effort in the 1980s and 1990s to hold huge corporations accountable for polluting communities. It is often told through a feminist lens, identifying Gibbs and other women of Love Canal as the backbone of the movement.

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