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Book Review
| Forging a Common Bond: Labor and Environmental Activism during the BASF Lockout. By Timothy J. Minchin. (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2003. xii, 233 pp. $55.00, ISBN 0-8130-2580-X.)"Lord, We're Just Trying to Save Your Water": Environmental Activism and Dissent in the Appalachian South. By Suzanne Marshall. (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2002. xxii, 343 pp. $55.00, ISBN 0-8130-2567-2.)
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| In American culture, nature is near synonymous with natural resources. The exploitation of earth's bounties, a veritable cultural imperative and the sustenance of American growth, translates into profits for corporations and jobs for the working class. Corporations consequently have been allowed to exploit, destroy, and often pollute at will, while working people have suffered the impact of environmental degradation more than most others. The rethinking of the environmental context of human existence by working people is the common historical development that links these noteworthy books. |
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Both represent examinations of environmental politics and community-based activism in the last decades of the twentieth century. The authors' research depends heavily on government and corporate documents and oral interviews, and, although their style is rote storytelling (and the copy editing sloppy), the reading is steady. |
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Timothy J. Minchin examines the protracted labor lockout at the BASF (Badische Anilin- & Soda-Fabrik) chemical plant in Geismar, Louisiana, in the late 1980s. Challenging a new contract with reduced benefits and pay, members of the Oil, Chemical, and Atomic Workers International Union faced heavy odds in an anti-union era created largely by President Ronald Reagan's firing of thirteen thousand striking air traffic controllers in 1981. The BASF dispute lasted more than five years, making it one of the longest labor disputes in American history. |
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More noteworthy, however, is the coalition that formed to defeat the lockout. Pursuing traditional forms of labor protest, the union exercised little leverage until it joined forces with environmental groups. The alliance required that union workers overcome their traditional suspicion of environmentalists, whom corporations portrayed as shrill anti-capitalists. Environmentalists, nevertheless, raised the environmental consciousness of the workers, who as residents of eastern Louisiana lived in the middle of a virtual petrochemical sewer. The coalition launched a sophisticated corporate campaign that warned against a homegrown Bhopal disaster. The union paid for an Interstate highway billboard that described BASF as the "gateway to cancer alley" (p. 103), and workers joined Greenpeace on a Toxic March. Drawing international attention, the campaign worried corporate heads in Germany, and the lockout was lifted. By the mid-1990s, BASF had achieved a 97 percent reduction in emissions and earned an environmental leadership award. |
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Across the region from Louisiana, parallel events in environmental justice unfolded in the Appalachian South. Approaching that saga with scholarly and humanist passion, Suzanne Marshall has organized her book around three case studies set in the woodlands of northwest Georgia and northeast Alabama. Since World War II, the quality of life there had been left to the devices of lumber and manufacturing industries, both aided by growth-oriented bureaucrats. By the 1980s, locals had unwittingly traded away natural beauty, recreational opportunities, and public health for clear-cutting, polluted waterways, and strip mining. Twelve of the twenty-six counties in the United States with the greatest percentage of polluted rivers and streams were located in Georgia. |
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