Love Canal is one of the first environmental disasters to provoke serious thought about the practice of energy consumption and how it affects humans. The occurrence of the Love Canal disaster is a symbol of only one of the myriad affects of our culture of consumption. It is a vehicle in which industry, energy politics, human necessity and technology can be shown to have direct links to many aspects of life, including health, real estate, waste storage, environmental concern of toxic waste, the role of the government, and the ethical responsibility that industry has beyond the economic marker of cold cash.
The intensity of the Love Canal situation was a hallmark that invited much debate concerning what the proper course of action was and how the solutions should be implemented. Blame was debated for years, and the ethics of both the government and the chemical corporations were called upon to defend themselves for their participation in the Love Canal incident. In the course of events, families were uprooted and moved, increases in deformities and cancer were rampant, and the health of the inhabitants of "Love Canal" became a worry, especially for the mothers in the neighborhood who were noticing the pattern of ill health. In fact it was the neighborhood association of mothers and women that called in the corporations and the government to expose the situation.
Some say that it was Hooker (now Occidental) that is to blame for the waste being left to be contaminated. Others say it is the school board, who built on the ground while knowing that it had been filled with toxic waste. When you connect seemingly separate practices like buying food and driving to work, however, the fault seems to lie in the dominant ideology in our culture that cheap is the only way to do something, regardless of the effects on society, the environment, and human health. The use of "cheap energy" at Niagara Falls promoted a surge of industry and has contaminated areas in the surrounding area, most obviously, the Love Canal area. The harnessing of Niagara falls for power is a symbol of the power that man would like to exert over nature. All of our energy practices are used because they make life convenient for us, or so we all naively believe, never having lived without it. Yet most of the problems of pollution come from our flagrant use of energy without regard for the alternatives or desire for compromise. We consume the cheap fossil fuel, and the desire to change our life style depends on if we can afford it or not. Most everything is put into a value of $. The underlying aspects of what we are doing are often hidden from us, however.
Most of our fuel goes back into industry, to make all the gadgets that we conveniently use and then throw away when it runs out or when a newer model comes along. There are currently more cars than there are driver's licenses, in the US.. The non-use of alternative fuels is caused by many factors. The foremost is that most of the fuel industry money is invested in the oil, gas and coal. Industry and a changeover would be extremely costly for the industry. Development is then very select, without any sense of urgency. Our consumption practices have changed slightly, with the introduction of "environmental products", that have hailed from nature's finest, yet most food and products still undergo vast amounts of refining. On the bag of doritos a list steeped in chemical jargon goes unnoticed and conveniently masks the ingredients and the processes that have "refined" the dorito. Why we accept the conditions of our environment so complacently is a puzzle to be pieced together through Niagara Falls and the Love Canal incident. We often allow the power players to dictate the knowledge that we accept as true. If the connections between the consumption of products and their production is made clear then perhaps as a society we can avoid incidents like Love Canal, and can truly consider western society to be great, endowed with wisdom and foresight.