Love Canal

After 4 years of meticulous research, Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring was published in September of 1962. The book created a sensation and alerted the world to the dangers of pesticides in the environment and, more important, how vulnerable the environment was to human interactions and interventions. On August 2, 1978, Love Canal, a small community near Niagara Falls, New York, appeared in a front-page story of the New York Times. The story revealed in a practical manner the dangers that Carson warned of in 1962. The story described the actions of the Hooker Chemical Company from 1942 to 1953 in dumping more than 21,000 tons of industrial hazardous wastes into Love Canal. The article addressed the number of birth defects in children and other disease-related ...