The Toxic History of The Love Canal

The Takeaway | May 25, 2016

Click on the 'Listen' button above to hear this interview.

As President Barack Obama visits Japan this week, he is not expected to address the U.S. military's toxic waste dumps around American bases in Okinawa. But as events like the lead crisis in Flint, Michigan have shown, man-made environmental disasters are common in the States too.

Perhaps no other community understands that as well as Love Canal, a working-class suburb of Niagara Falls. In the 1940s and 1950s, the Hooker Chemical Company dumped more than 20,000 tons of toxic waste into the ground of the Love Canal.

Love Canal residents had complained about health and environmental problems for years, but the protest movement led by women like Lois Gibbs (pictured above) reached a fever pitch in 1978. Activism eventually led to a national conversation about toxic waste sites and the passage of the Superfund legislation.

Click on the 'Listen' button above to hear historian Richard Newman discuss his new book about the disaster, "Love Canal: A Toxic History From Colonial Times To The Present."

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