Analyze

Residents of Love Canal, in the Niagara Falls region of Western New York, were alerted to signs of a toxic waste crisis involving the lethal chemical byproduct dioxin in the late 1970s. Residents learned about the crisis through news media, community activism and research, and their own visceral experiences – they could smell noxious fumes, noticed black sludge seeping into their basements, and saw children falling ill. Activists and academics carried out community-based research to survey the area in an effort to understand the extent of the hazard and its effects – data that they saw as missing, at the time – in turn generating evidence of changes in health and pregnancy abnormalities. In doing so, members of the community aimed to hold corporate and government stakeholders accountable to evacuate residents, organize remediation, and strengthen scientific studies and interventions to care for residents. Regional health authorities, however, dismissed community-based studies as “useless housewife data”. Activists responded by scrutinizing government and scientific studies, critiquing a lack of ecological validity and trustworthiness. Residents and community groups’ advocacy contributed to their exercise of epistemic authority, the creation of archival records and initiatives tracking the crisis over the last five decades, and wider public attention to Love Canal and other sites like it.

Image Description and Source: "Map showing distribution of symptoms believed to be caused by Love Canal pollutants," Digital Collections - University at Buffalo Libraries, May 1982.

Shankar, Saguna. 2023. "What's the Use of Data? Epistemic Authority and Environmental Injustice at Love Canal." In 4S Paraconference X EiJ: Building a Global Record, curated by Misria Shaik Ali. Kim Fortun, Phillio Baum and Prerna Srigyvan. Annual Meeting of the Society for Social Studies of Science. Honolulu, Hawaiti, Nov 8-11.

Roughly a third of the above-ground nuclear blasts in Earth’s history have taken place on the coral reefs of the Pacific Ocean. In my paper for this conference, I argue that the US approach to weapons testing at Bikini and Enewetak atolls in the Marshall Islands drew on a long tradition of scientific visitors treating such coral formations as though they were indistinguishable from one another. I also show how this logic was subverted when the displaced islanders of Enewetak atoll mounted a successful legal challenge in the early 1970s to a US Air Force plan to continue using the reef as a site for “cratering” experiments with conventional explosives. This act of local resistance forced scientists to abandon the older conceit that atolls were interchangeable, and instead to argue that the weapons testing had transformed Enewetak from a literal “control atoll” (during the initial US blasts at Bikini) into a unique artefact of forty-three nuclear detonations. It is apt to recall this episode here in Honolulu, not only because this archipelago has also been a site of resistance to weapons testing by the U.S. military but moreover because the specific coral-cratering experiments that were blocked at Enewetak ended up being pursued on the reef of Hawai‘i Island instead.

Sponsel, Alistar. 2023. "Coral reefs of the Pacific Ocean, Marshall Island (Bikini and Enewetak Atoll) and Hawai'i." In 4S Paraconference X EiJ: Building a Global Record, curated by Misria Shaik Ali, Kim Fortun, Phillip Baum and Prerna Srigyan. Annual Meeting of the Society of Social Studies of Science. Honolulu, Hawai'i, Nov 8-11.

The policy is a program funded by the EPA called C.A.R.E. (Community Action for a Renewed Environment). The aim of this program is to build the public voice in environmental matters, and to give access to different sources of information from the community.