March 17th 2009

Thirty-one years ago, community members of Niagara, NY discovered that their schools and homes rested upon a dumping site for the chemicals of industry. That is to say, they had a feeling of its presence all along; it wasn’t until enough public pressure coerced the New York State Department of Health into performing and publishing a health study of the region. Several decades past, Hooker Chemical Co. had used the canal connecting the upper and lower Niagara river-Love Canal-for its waste. After the canal was filled, the Board of Education bought the land for one dollar and constructed an elementary school nearby. Neighborhoods grew around the school zone, and decades later residents began to speculate as to what caused the odors and surfacing liquids around their homes.

When the New York State Department of Health published its study in 1978, it found patterns of reproductive problems in women, toxic contamination in the air and water, PCBs, birth defects in children, all in proximity to the canal. With enough community pressure, the state evacuated and relocated the nearby 239 families. It built a fence around the region and marked the outside territory as hospitable. The community had done its own research, lived and empirical, and knew otherwise. Volunteer scientists helped the community assemble and present data and health survey results; the state government rejected it as “useless housewife data” (CHEJ). Discarding the information meant discarding the acknowledgement of common miscarriages, birth defects, urinary tract disorders, epilepsy. The disease clusters made sense, so much so that the public outside of Love Canal began to acknowledge the patterns too. Two years later, President Carter had to react, and the entire community was evacuated and relocated.

Love Canal became one of those images of environmental activism. Last year marked its thirtieth anniversary, the celebrated subject of many a magazine and newspaper. Many saw the disaster at Love Canal as the beginning of grassroots activism, America’s exposure to and fight against toxic contamination. This year marks its thirty-first anniversary; with another year past, what has the nation learned? In another nine years from now, newspapers will celebrate “40 years after Love Canal”-another decade, another lesson. But really, what was Love Canal? What did we gain?

The technical term today is community-based participatory research, heralded as the solution to environmental and health dilemmas. Involve the community in the process, they say, and the result is empowerment and democratic solutions. Teach a man to fish and he will eat forever. I find it hard to resist too. But Love Canal isn’t some artifact in the past, despite what authorities say. People continue to ask why their children are suspiciously getting cancer. Low-income neighborhoods are still predominantly located near industrial sites. Native communities in the American West still fight for basic control over water and resources.

Just because we mark an anniversary doesn’t mean we’ve actually learned a lesson.

At Love Canal, the community knew there was something wrong in their neighborhood. They didn’t have the official statistics, just the lived experience and concern for their families. Only once the state was pushed enough did they send in for a certified study. Today, thirty-one years later, the work and concerns of these communities continues to be rejected at the high levels of research and policy. Just “useless housewife data”, they reply.