Editor’s note: This is one in a continuing series of educational columns about fostering environmental stewardship and leadership coordinated by ACES – The Alliance of Climate and Environmental Stewards.
In the 1970s, after many decades of cover-up, the magnitude of accumulating industrial toxic waste became impossible to hide as high levels of poisonous fumes and liquid waste seeped from landfills, fouling our air and poisoning our drinking water and as mounds of plastic and everyday human trash washed up onto our beaches and piled up along roadsides.
On Aug. 1, 1978, the problem exploded into the public awareness with The New York Times headlines revealing an Environmental Protection Agency report declaring residents of Love Canal, Niagara Falls, New York, as victims of chemical toxins at a site labeled as “Quite simply one of the most appalling environmental tragedies in American history.”
The Love Canal housing development was built on an industrial hazardous waste dump site previously owned and operated by Hooker Chemical Company. In 1953, Hooker covered the site with earth, declared it safe, and sold it to the city of Niagara Falls for one dollar.
In the late 1950s, the site was developed as affordable working-class housing and included 100 units and one school. The Love Canal dream development soon became the poster child of the horrors of industrial waste pollution as inhabitants developed cancers and various skin and raspatory maladies and suffered horrible birth defects and miscarriages.
Fast upon the heels of The New York Times reporting, President Jimmy Carter declared Love Canal a national disaster. In December 1980, Congress followed by enacting the Comprehensive Environmental Response Compensation and Liability Act (CERCLA), aka the Superfund ACT.
The town of Niagara Falls and EPA filed suits against Hooker, who settled in the amount of $98 million and another $129 million settlement to EPA. Justice, to some small extent, prevailed. Kudos to the New York Times, the EPA, President Carter, and Congress. However, the story’s heroes are the Love Canal residents whose organized, tenacious, and unrelenting pressure gained EPA’s attention.
A similar scenario unraveled in 1996, when in the town of Hinckley, Calif., the never-quit clerk of movie fame, Erin Brockovich, brought a suit against Pacific Gas and Electric (PG&E) accusing PG&E of knowingly poisoning the town water with the carcinogen hexavalent chromium.
In this David vs. Goliath legal battle David won! PG&E settled for $333 million, up to that time, the largest direct-action lawsuit settlement ever paid in the USA. Hinckley’s lesson? Well-organized local action gets governmental action and legislative remedy.
Since Hinkley, other self-inflicted wounds have joined the list: the innumerable impacts of climate change; massive habitat and biodiversity losses; waves of plastic waste pollution in our waters, lands, and bodies; and now the dramatic weakening of our democratic protective institutions.
These four horsemen of the apocalypse rise to put us on notice. But we are not unarmed. Love Canal and Hinckley and all that has happened between and since are a compendium of lessons to learn and remember. With a case-by-case approach, the problem is unsolvable. Solution requires correction at the source – examining our assumption that humans were put here in dominion over nature.
Prudence suggests consultation with Indigenous neighbors who live on every watershed within our Gulf of Maine bioregion and whose ancestry reaches back 10,000 years. Over that time, they got it right! In 400 years or so years we brought it to near collapse. We might ask them, “How did your people do it?”
Possibly by having respect for the environment, Mother Nature, as they did, the answers will follow and thereby so will solutions. Combining the best of Indigenous wisdom with the best of our science could pave the path to harmony. This requires some humility, listening and learning. Yes, this is a big idea. So is it a big problem we face. Should we face this big problem with a small idea?
If we begin with our own communities, collaboratively, and build out from there we can make a difference. “What is not started today is never finished tomorrow.” – Johann Wolfgang von Goethe.
John Terry, Ph.D., is president of the Gulf of Maine Institute and may be contacted at jterry4@mac.com.
ACES believes everyone can make a big difference together. Team members invite you to stay updated on environmental matters by subscribing to our monthly newsletter via the “Subscribe to Updates” link on ACES’ website – https://www.aces-alliance.org/. Please consider joining our community of stewards committed to make every Earth Day by contacting acesnewburyport@gmail.com.