In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

1 Darker Shades of Green: Love Canal, Toxic Autobiography, and American Environmental Writing Richard Newman Like a recurring nightmare, Robinson Kelly vividly recalls the toxic morning of July 16, 1979, when waves of polluted water poured down the Puerco River near Church Rock, New Mexico. “I didn’t know what was going on but it was an ugly feeling,” he told the Navajo Times at a rally commemorating the event. “I went to work and found out the dam broke.”The cracked dam, owned by United Nuclear Corporation, spewed ninety-four million gallons of mining refuse, including eleven hundred tons of uranium waste, along eighty miles of river way. It was “the single largest release of radioactive material in US history,” according to one estimate—far worse than Three Mile Island. Decades later, Kelly hoped his story would remind Americans that nuclear waste issues still plagued Indian country, endangering not only the land but also the people who never left it.1 At roughly the same time that hazardous waters flooded Kelly’s home, a woman thousands of miles away described a similar toxic experience. Anne Hillis, a young mother residing in the Love Canal neighborhood of Niagara Falls, New York, discovered that a dump containing over twenty thousand tons of caustic chemical residues sat just a few blocks from her house. “People of the area are on the verge of hysteria,” she wrote in spring 1979, months after state and federal emergency declarations had evacuated only a fraction of the neighborhood’s families. In a hard-hitting (though unpublished) memoir titled “Love Canal’s Contamination: The Poisoning of an American Family,” Hillis detailed her debilitating experiences inside the toxic zone—experiences that almost drove her insane. “When you live in hell,” she declared, “you have no fear of death! It’s the living that you fear.”2 As Kelly’s and Hillis’s narratives both illustrate, a new genre of US environmental writing emerged in the final decades of the twentieth century : toxic autobiography. Less concerned with natural landscapes and 22 Richard Newman wildlife preservation than previous generations of environmental works, toxic autobiography meditates on the personal, political, and historical meanings of the hazardous waste grid that developed in the United States following World War II. Inextricably linked to the cause of environmental justice, toxic autobiography has become a more prominent part of the media landscape in recent years. Yet despite slick Hollywood renditions of toxic tales (including movies like Erin Brockovich and A Civil Action), the story remains much the same for generations of toxic writers: they seek to uncover life on the environmental margins. Here, away from breathtaking views that dominate many nature preservation struggles (and hence, away from mainstream ideas of what constitutes environmentalism), toxic autobiographers offer disturbing portraits of incinerators that infect urban air, brownfields whose corroded infrastructure threatens nearby fields and streams, and hazardous waste dumps that litter struggling communities. This chapter examines toxic autobiography’s ascension as a distinct genre of environmental writing. Surveying some of the most significant work from the late 1970s to the present, I argue that toxic autobiography flows from a deep sense of crisis among marginalized groups of people—including working-class communities, ethnic and racial minorities , and women—that feel trapped in poisoned landscapes well beyond mainstream concern. Looking for ways to put hazardous waste issues on the nation’s political radar, they have turned to one of the oldest and most effective tools in global reform: personal narratives of suffering and pain. As a literary form dedicated to the truth telling of toxic experiences, the genre has allowed people separated by time, background, region, class, and ethnicity to see themselves as part of a common environmental cause. But to what end? As I seek to show, generations of toxic autobiography have impacted contemporary environmental politics in several ways. First, as a subset of ecocriticism, it has helped return environmentalism to its core values of literary outreach. Much like earlier generations of nature writers (who sought to preserve wild nature), toxic autobiographers have relied on storytelling to convey their outrage about environmental degradation within industrial culture and society. Second, toxic autobiography has contributed to national and global redefinitions of environmental reform as necessarily encompassing vernacular environments —the daily, and often polluted, landscapes where most people live, work, and raise families. For toxic writers (many of whom are women), the air, water, and land of our everyday environment must be protected no less than that of pristine nature...

Share