Future generations need to continue fighting for the environment, famed environmentalist Lois Marie Gibbs told a sparsely filled auditorium of mostly graduate students, professors and local activists at the Boston University Medical Campus Wednesday.
The presentation, ‘Love Canal, 25 Years Later,’ focused on her experiences fighting the chemical industry, particularly her 1978 effort to organize the residents of Love Canal, N.Y., in demanding to be relocated away from a dump containing 20,000 tons of toxic chemicals.
She said 56 percent of children born in Love Canal around 1978 including her two children had birth defects, and many people credit Gibbs with ushering in the modern environmentalist movement.
‘When you smelled chemicals, you smelled a good economy,’ Gibbs said of her early days in Love Canal.
But when numerous accounts of birth defects and disease surfaced, Gibbs organized health studies and became skeptical of the chemical industry.
‘It was called useless housewife data,’ she said. ‘We were believed to be a random cluster of genetically defective women.’
Gibbs attributed that sentiment of uselessness to politics.
‘They did not want to make the association between birth defects and low level exposure to chemicals … because if they did, there were 50,000 other sites across the country that were deemed similar to Love Canal, and they thought they would have to evacuate the communities around these sites,’ she said. ‘So their answer was [to] deny the problem.’
Ultimately, Gibbs and 900 community members achieved the right to relocate with compensation. But she insisted that the problem continues today, afflicting mostly low-income and minority communities.
‘Since Love Canal, what we’ve found is also very deliberate and very intentional,’ Gibbs said. ‘Communities who are of color communities that are working class or poor are communities who are more often targeted for these facilities.’
To fight the chemical industry, Gibbs founded and directs the Center for Health, Environment and Justice, which helps grassroots environmental groups organize and disseminate information.
‘We need to move away from the question of how much harm can the human population endure, to how to avoid harm,’ she said.
Her group is credited with closing more than 1,500 incinerators and more than 1,000 landfills.
Gibbs seemed surprisingly reserved in criticizing President Bush’s environmental stewardship, noting only that he is ‘awful.’ Under Bush administration pressure, the Environmental Protection Agency recently changed regulations that let more than 50 power plants avoid litigation for violating emissions standards standards that Gibbs fights to enforce and promote. But Gibbs said she believes the fight is more effective locally.
‘Systemic change happens at the town and local level,’ she said. ‘There are not nearly enough people to go out and work with families [to] talk about how you do health studies.’
Gibbs said her job pays with personal satisfaction.
‘It doesn’t pay much, but it’s the most rewarding work that can be done,’ she said.
Sharon Coleman, a School of Public Health student, said Gibbs was ‘wonderful, inspirational and gave a great message to grassroots groups.’
The event coincided with the development of the School of Public Health’s website www.bu.edu/lovecanal, which recounts the history and lessons of the Love Canal incident.
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