Love Canal Revisited: Race, Class, and Gender in Environmental Activism (review)

Love Canal Revisited utilizes a "snapshot" method to interrogate the rhetoric of "representative facets of the Love Canal saga" (3). In this spare, but original, approach to understanding a contentious environmental episode, Blum has three purposes: to expose how the activism of the Love Canal area residents empowered "marginalized populations"—women, African Americans, and the working class—to insert their ideas and needs into public view; to demonstrate that environmental activism surrounding Love Canal illuminates "different segments of the population absorb[ing] the ideas, goals, and attitudes of other social movements" (2); and to situate Love Canal into the context of twentieth-century environmentalism. The book is organized into three central chapters, focused, individually, on gender, race, and class and bracketed by a chapter on the area's history and a chapter on the historical implications of these social constructions for Love Canal.

The snapshot approach has strengths and weaknesses. This method allows Blum to delve into the social consciousness of specific activists. Combining archival sources and oral interviews that she conducted in 2001 and 2002, Blum masterfully allows the participants to speak for themselves, thereby uncovering the social perspectives of their arguments and actions. The working-class women of the Love Canal Homeowners Association (LCHA) were clearly influenced by the second-wave feminist movement. One among them, Lois Gibbs, divulged that she "supported what [feminists] wanted, in reference to equal pay for equal jobs," though she claimed not to be a feminist because she and her compatriots were defending roles, as wives and mothers, that she believed to be devalued by feminism (48).

Similarly, racism and the civil rights movement influenced African American responses. Predominantly renters, African Americans felt that an organization focused on "homeowners" marginalized them both in intent and actuality. Hence, they reached beyond the neighborhood for help from the NAACP. When middle-class, nonresident environmentalists entered the fray, their preferred tactic of working through the system clashed with the confrontational tactics of the LCHA.

Blum's snapshot approach manages to isolate two gendered constants across the social divides. Women almost exclusively argued for the health of their children and families, whereas men stressed the economic losses that they suffered in the ecological disaster. But all groups based their arguments on their rights as citizens.

The snapshot approach, however, has shortcomings. It cannot delve deeply into the complications and potential contradictions of the activists themselves. Gibbs proclaimed that as wives and mothers, women were not subordinate to their husbands (48), but her husband's resentment of her public activities led to their divorce. Moreover, given that Gibbs has remained engaged in environmental issues extending well beyond immediate concerns for her children's health, expanded civic consciousness has apparently superseded the earlier maternalist rhetoric that Blum uses to characterize women's activism. The snapshot method also relegates historical analysis almost to an afterthought, separated from the main body of material.

Despite these caveats, Blum's book provides scholars of several disciplines not only with a novel way to reassess Love Canal itself but also a way to uncover the intersection of environmental activism with social perspectives.