Toxic Burn: The Grassroots Struggle Against the WTI Incinerator by Thomas Shevory (review)

SPRING 2009 87 BOOK REVIEWS local authorities, dominated the lives of the region’s poor for their own gain,” Kiffmeyer tells us in his conclusion. “Equally important , however, the fatal attacks on the antipoverty group in that county demonstrated how far dominant groups will go to prevent or influence change and just how unbalanced—socially, politically, and economically—the antagonistic forces of reform and regime maintenance are in Appalachia and the United States as a whole” (212). By 1970, the AVs were no longer a viable organization; yet the strong reaction of the powerful in Pike County against the Appalachian Volunteers reveals that their confrontational approach had posed a real threat. Kiffmeyer’s book makes an important contribution to our knowledge of the War on Poverty. It will be useful for undergraduates who often do not understand the complexity of President Johnson’s Great Society or the realities of rural poverty. This compelling story will also interest the general reader. Susan Youngblood Ashmore Oxford College of Emory University In the early 1980s, WTI, a joint venture between American and European companies, announced plans to build a toxic waste incinerator in East Liverpool, Ohio. In Toxic Burn, Thomas Shevory, a professor of politics at Ithaca College, aims to tell the story behind the construction of the incinerator, and opposition to it by local residents. Through five chapters, he describes the origins of toxic waste incinerators in the 1980s, the complicated corporate structure of WTI, the campaign by local citizens to prevent its operation, and the incinerator’s possible environmental impact. Shevory places the story of WTI within the history of deindustrialization in the Ohio Valley and the toxic waste crisis of the 1970s and 1980s. Local business and political leaders believed that the incinerator would help the region’s declining economy, while also addressing the national problem of toxic waste disposal. The incinerator’s owners originally said that waste burning would produce electrical power and thus attract “spinoff” industries to the East Liverpool area. But concerns about the plant’s toxic emissions were present from the moment it was proposed, and opposition grew over the course of the 1980s. It peaked in the early 1990s, when WTI’s opponents conducted a series of bold and nationally publicized protests. These were ultimately unsuccessful, and the incinerator opened and continues to operate. Toxic Burn is based on media reports, extensive legal documentation from numerous lawsuits, and Shevory’s own interviews with incinerator opponents Toxic Burn: The Grassroots Struggle Against the WTI Incinerator by Thomas Shevory 88 BOOK REVIEWS OHIO VALLEY HISTORY and WTI officials. But there is surprising little attention paid to the actual story of WTI’s opponents. Shevory places the WTI opposition within the environmental justice movement, which emerged in the 1980s as minority and disadvantaged communities began to protest what they believed was the inequitable siting of hazardous waste facilities in their communities . But of the five chapters that make up Toxic Burn, only one is devoted to telling the story of the WTI protestors. There is very little about their history—how the protest groups formed, what issues they focused on, their tactics and strategies. East Liverpool is introduced as the stereotypical , deindustrializing Ohio Valley town, but other than short profiles of two local activists, there is little on how and why local residents began to oppose the incinerator. For a book that is supposedly about grassroots resistance, it is surprisingly sparse about the grassroots. This lack of detail about the incinerator ’s opponents, the stated goal of the book, is only one of numerous problems. In general, it suffers from poor editing. Shevory mentions people and events but does not formally introduce them until pages, or chapters, later. He goes off on numerous tangents that have little to do with the actual story, and there are pages ofv often maddeningly complex technical and bureaucratic detail. For example, the bulk of chapter three is devoted to dissecting the various corporations that own shares of WTI. But in attempting to “peel the onion” of responsibility for the incinerator, Shevory only leaves the reader more confused. The appendix contains a series of charts that explain the facility’s complex ownership history...