Community Mobilization for Environmental Problems: How a Grassro ...

with a partially built trench a mile long, 50 feet wide, and 10 feet deep. It remained untouched until Hooker Chemical purchased the land for the disposal of toxic chemical waste produced by the bourgeoning petrochemical industry during and after World War II. From 1946 to 1954, Hooker disposed of 21,000 tons of hazardous waste in the canal. It was not until 1954, when the city of Niagara Falls purchased the land, that the buried waste came imminently closer to becoming a public health threat.

In an effort to provide more suburban housing for the post–World War II baby-boom population, city leaders in Niagara Falls purchased the land with plans to construct modest middle-class housing and a public elementary school there. Producing the infrastructure required to meet such construction needs involved building roads, sewers, and other underground structures—thereby disrupting the previously buried waste. Even though residents began complaining of strange colors and smells in the soil as early as the late 1950s, it was not until the mid-1970s that Love Canal, as it became known, emerged as a public health problem.

Throughout the 1970s, residents in the Love Canal neighborhood more frequently voiced concern over strange substances in the soil surrounding their homes, schools, and playgrounds. An investigation in collaboration with a local newspaper reporter, Mike Brown, and the tireless efforts of residents, with Lois Gibbs leading the charge, pushed the federal government to announce an emergency evacuation of the community in 1978. With this declaration, Love Canal became synonymous with the grassroots community toxics movement and with the struggle for safety from environmental contamination. Although this is a relatively straightforward account of what occurred at Love Canal, the history of this case is anything but simple (See Fowlkes & Miller, 1987; Gibbs, 1998; Robinson, 2002). The struggle to establish credibility on the issue of the health effects of chemical exposure is something still contested in recent studies (Davis, 2007).