The Love Canal Disaster
In the third unit we studied disasters, focusing especially on the blurred boundary between natural and man-made disaster. You should now be familiar with what natural disasters are, the implications of applying that term to an event, different ways of interpreting disasters, the various human and environmental ramifications of disaster, and how different people have responded to different disasters in different places and at different times.
For this assignment, you will study the Love Canal disaster. In the 1940’s a strange smell enveloped the area around the Love Canal near Niagara Falls. Residents also began to notice an odd seepage leaking into their yards and people began to fall ill. In addition, many women began to have miscarriages and give birth to babies with birth defects. Upon inspection, it was discovered that there was over 21,000 tons of toxic industrial waste buried below the surface of the town by a local company. You should formulate an argument with the following question in mind: Was this disaster “natural”, “man-made”, or a hydrid of both? You should draw on and cite at least three primary sources and at least three secondary sources.
In no way are you bound by the above prompt. While you are more than welcome to frame your argument as a response to that question, you are also encouraged to use the prompt simply as a starting point for thinking critically about your chosen disaster. Feel free to make as creative an argument as you’d like, so long as you support your reasoning with firm evidence.
To help you get started constructing your argument, think about some of the following questions: What makes this event a “disaster”?; How did contemporaries make sense of and react to this disaster?; How widely did this disaster reverberate? Locally? Nationally? Globally? In other words, what were the ramifications of this disaster?; What was the human, cultural, societal, economic, and political response?; How have historians (and other scholars) understood this disaster? Do you agree with them?; What can this disaster teach us more generally about disaster response?