ABSTRACT
This introduction presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book describes the lifestyle impacts of toxic exposure. It discusses the five lifescape changes resulting from toxic exposure. The book reviews the cumulative family impacts of contamination, highlighting individual and relational impacts as well as effects on children. It also describes how toxic victims are disabled or rendered powerless by the institutional and expert context of an exposure incident. The book explains how citizens regain power through grassroots organizations. It examines the rational basis for community resistance to stigmatized and hazardous facilities and the overall societal impacts of environmental turbulence. The book addresses some of the significant health consequences of toxic exposure that have received comparatively less recognition than such dreaded diseases as cancer. These impacts are the social and psychological effects caused by both residential toxic exposure and the social response it engenders.
