"SOMETHING IN THE AMERICAN PSYCHE..."
Update on Love Canal
Do you remember Love Canal?
August 1, 1978: NIAGARA FALLS, N.Y.--Twenty five years after the Hooker Chemical Company stopped using the Love Canal here as an industrial dump, 82 different compounds, 11 of them suspected carcinogens, have been percolating upward through the soil, their drum containers rotting and leaching their contents into the backyards and basements of 100 homes and a public school built on the banks of the canal.
This tragedy is recorded in EPA archives and now updated by Substack writer Eric Coppolino in his recent interview with a mother who lost her son and later her husband to the toxicity of Love Canal. Luella Kenney remains an activist four decades later because she takes seriously the continuing need to warn people: despite clean-up, problems still remain.
Around minute 1:29:00 in the interview Eric references “something in the American psyche…” that can block one from accepting the idea that toxic tragedies can happen. Why is this? Are Americans unique in our tragic blind spot about toxicity? Why has the EU banned some industrial chemicals and required labelling on others when America has not? Do we just not want to hear things that require disrupting the way we live? Do we not believe our health can be damaged by toxins because our doctors seldom talk about them?
Living Well Locally began exploring toxicity in an earlier posts (here and here).
If you listen to the Kenney interview or read the accompanying article, you will hear that we still have trouble believing we could do such things to ourselves, that our homes and playgrounds and schools could possibly be contaminated, and that public health and regulatory agencies don’t have our backs 100% of the time.
Time and again, we learn the hard way that personal awareness is our surest way to safety, and that waiting for public health agencies to warn us about things other than salmonella and E.coli is not wise. Chemical fragrances and pesticides as endocrine disruptors, for example, are not on the government’s list for public warnings.
Personal awareness can also lead to civic action when needed. Like in Irvine, California, where a city resolution stopped the spraying of hazardous chemicals such as Roundup (glyphosate) and 2,4-D on public parks, playgrounds and streets; the city adopted an organic management policy instead.
“People think that because something is sold at Home Depot it’s safe to use. The eye-opener for me was discovering that the EPA’s job isn’t to ensure safety—but to decide what’s an acceptable risk. Big difference.”
Civic action is local action. Face-to-face interactions of neighbors with vested interests in the health of their families and community.
Living Well Locally envisions a time when local collective action to address (or prevent) environmental toxicity becomes the norm, when raising awareness in concert with our neighbors and local officials means that more Americans have erased the ‘tragic blind spot’ in our psyches about toxins, and that we stand vigilant against the preventable things that rob us of wellness.