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Book Review
| Uneasy Alchemy: Citizens and Experts in Louisiana's Chemical Corridor Disputes. By Barbara L. Allen. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2003. xiii + 21 pp. Illustrations, maps, notes, bibliography, index. Cloth $55.00, paper $22.00.
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| Cancer Alley, an eighty-five mile stretch of the Mississippi River in Louisiana containing more than 130 chemical plants and petroleum processors in combination with unemployment, illiteracy, and poverty, is one of the best-known loci in the landscape of the environmental justice movement. The region has been the site of several major legal and political environmental battles. |
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Now science studies scholar Barbara Allen has produced an ethnographic study of Cancer Alley—Uneasy Alchemy: Citizens and Experts in Louisiana's Chemical Corridor Disputes. Uneasy Alchemy has a solid methodological foundation. By attending public hearings and interviewing dozens people in five categories—general residents, activist residents, experts (in science, law, and economics), government officials, and chemical company representatives—Allen has mapped the many and varied narratives of experience in Cancer Alley. Allen puts Sandra Harding's "strong objectivity" argument to good use. Using strong objectivity as a lens through which to view citizen-expert alliances, she shows why official science (as produced by corporations and government agencies) is "weak or incomplete at its very foundation." Allen adopts a new paradigm for understanding the dynamics of community environmentalism, arguing that identities coalesce by sharing experiences, creating new networks of stories, and revising the view of an unjust present and a promising future. |
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By applying a rigorous methodology to extensive research, Allen constructs a vivid portrait of the evolution of environmental justice awareness. Through the interviews, she reveals how citizens perceived that there were serious problems with the places where they lived and worked but they lacked the knowledge of environmental science and policy to express their concerns. |
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In the course of Allen's penetrating analysis, environmental science is transformed from an objective and authoritative institution to an additional source of narratives about the landscapes and people of Cancer Alley. Scientific arguments are no less freighted with biases than the narratives produced by activists and residents. In one of the most compelling chapters, "Constructing Health," Allen profiles several activist-experts who are women trained in science who have built their research agendas around the health concerns of the residents of Cancer Alley. Moreover, they have taken the additional step to reach out to area residents and train them in the process and language of environmental science. Thus, concerned residents have become better equipped to question corporate and government claims regarding environmental health. |
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Uneasy Alchemy should appeal to environmental historians interested in the environmental justice movement. Available in paperback, it will provide a valuable addition to any course in environmental history that seeks to explore issues of race, class, gender, and environmental science. Methodologically rigorous and thoroughly researched, Barbara Allen's book gives environmental historians a valuable case study of one of the best known sites in the evolution of environmental justice that simultaneously reveals the complexities of the movement while rendering them comprehensible. |
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Frederick R. Davis is an assistant professor of history at Florida State University. He studies the history of environmental health and conservation biology. |
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