ABSTRACT
In 1997 and 1999, respectively, Lois Gibbs and Sandra Steingraber participated in the Caroline Werner Gannett Lecture Series at the Rochester Institute of Technology exploring environment and citizenship. Gibbs, the founder and director of the Center for Health, Environment and Justice, was thrust into environmental consciousness in 1978 from her quiet neighborhood near Niagara Falls, NY, when she learned that her son’s elementary school sat atop a toxic dump covering 21, 000 tons of chemical waste. The attempted cover-up of the dangers at the Love Canal propelled Gibbs into confrontational activism with local, state, and federal officials that finally resulted in the relocation of 833 families. Gibbs’ work as a citizen activist with the Love Canal Homeowners Association eventually led to the formation of the Environmental Protection Agency’s Superfund. Her narrative of the experience, first published as Love Canal: My Story in 1982 was reissued as Love Canal: The Story Continues in 1998.1
Steingraber’s role as an environmental activist began with her own examination of possible connections between the bladder cancer she had endured as a young woman and the plains of central Illinois where she grew up. A biologist and poet, Steingraber (1997) elaborated a human rights approach to disease, especially cancer, in her award winning book, Living Downstream: An
Ecologist Looks at Cancer and the Environment, in which she brought together data on toxic releases and U.S. Cancer registries. Serving on President Clinton’s National Action Plan on Breast Cancer she was internationally recognized for her work on the relationship between illness and environment and won a wide spectrum of accolades. In 1997, Ms. magazine named her “woman of the year,” in 1998 she received the Altman Award for “the inspiring and poetic use of science to elucidate the causes of cancer,” and in 1999 the Sierra Club deemed her “the new Rachel Carson” (Steingraber, 2002).
