Todd Brewster & Peter Jennings by The Century for Young People: 1961-1999: Changing America Read Free Book Online Page A

out of my own circumstances. I needed to space my children, so I worked on [reproductive] choice. I needed child care in order to work, so I worked on child care. I needed a better job, so I worked on creating good work for women. It wasn’t about a national movement. It was simply something that was happening to me, to my friends, to my community. That was feminism.
    Arguments over the future of the environment, like the battles over feminism, occupied Americans more and more in the 1970s. Once it had seemed as though there was no limit to America’s material progress. Factories had produced an endless stream of products. The land had produced enough food to feed the country and export the surplus around the world. But the image of the earth seen from the Apollo XI moon landing had given Americans a new perspective, one of a vulnerable planet that had been contaminated by people and industry.
    Many Americans began to question their way of life: Was mass consumption morally right? They also began to question science: Had technologybeen exploiting natural resources without considering the consequences? Americans looked around and noticed what they had done to their own country: pollution, toxic-waste dumps, poisoned rivers, and endangered species.
    In March 1979 the nation’s attention was riveted on a nuclear power plant in Pennsylvania: Three Mile Island. A nuclear accident had brought the plant dangerously close to a meltdown. The sense of science gone awry filled people’s minds with frightening images of birth defects and cancers. There was a growing belief that American prosperity was risking the health of the earth itself.
    Lois Gibbs, who was born in 1951, personally suffered the consequences of the industrial machine. She and her family lived in Love Canal, a small town in upstate New York where people mysteriously began to get sick.
    W hen I moved to Love Canal, in 1972, I felt I had achieved the American dream: I had a husband with a good job, a healthy one-year-old child, a station wagon, and my very first house, which even had a picket fence. I was living in a thriving community directly across from the mighty Niagara River. Everything in Love Canal seemed to be meant for families. We felt it was just the perfect neighborhood.
    Then my son, Michael, got very sick. When we moved into our house, he was one year old and perfectly healthy. Then he developed skin problems, asthma, epilepsy, a liver problem, an immune system problem, and a urinary tract disorder. When I asked the pediatrician what was going on, he told me, “You just must be an unlucky mother with a sickly child.” My second child, Melissa, who was conceived and born at Love Canal, at first seemed to be perfectly healthy. Then one Friday I noticed bruises on her body. On Saturday the bruises were larger. And by Sunday the bruises on my little girl’s body were the size of saucers. She looked like a child abuse victim! I took her to the pediatrician, but he didn’t know what was wrong. He just took a blood test and sent us home. Later that afternoon he called and said, “Mrs. Gibbs, I believe your daughter has leukemia.” We had no family history of any of these types of illnesses. It just didn’t make any sense to me why my kids were so sick.
    Around that time articles started appearing in the
Niagara Falls Gazette
that talked about hazardous waste in dump sites all across the city of Niagara Falls. Then I read one article that talked about a dump next to the Ninety-ninth Street Elementary School,where my son attended kindergarten. In this article they listed the chemicals that were buried there and what could result from exposure to these chemicals. I literally checked off every single one of my children’s diseases and said to myself, “Oh, my God. It’s not that I am an unlucky mother. My children are being poisoned.” I couldn’t believe that somebody would build a school next to a dump