Love Canal
When one thinks about an environmental disaster, the image of a large explosion in a highly industrial area comes to mind. Such is not the case in the Love Canal emergency. Unlike most environmental disasters, the events of Niagara Falls's Love Canal weren't characterized by a known and uncontrollable moment of impact. It developed over a period of several decades, since the effects of leaching chemicals is uncertain and slow in development and the visual effects are very limited. This disaster could have been identified earlier or later for as far as the rest of the world was concerned there was no emergency until the authorities made it public. The importance of Love Canal is that acknowledging the danger that existed made the country and world aware of the hazards of abandoned toxic waste disposal sites.
The events that led up to President Jimmy Carter and the New York Department of Health declaring Love Canal the nation's first federal emergency for a nonnatural environmental disaster extend all the way back to the 1890s when the entrepreneur William T. Love wanted to build a canal to supply power to a utopian industrial community called Model City (Deegan 329). However, Love's dreams were crushed with the discovery of alternating electrical current which enabled manufacturing plants to be located further away from their sources of energy. Yet, Niagara Falls still became a center of chemical manufacturing due to the large amount of cheap electrical energy available. One of the chemical companies that was attracted to the area was Hooker Electrochemical Company (now a division of Occidental Petroleum Corporation), who in 1942, with the permission of the Niagara Power and Development Company began using the a...
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...the safety risk is worth assuming and that is something that each individual has to decide for themselves. In the meantime, it is up to companies, like Occidental/Hooker and the government, like the EPA or Department of Health to maintain safe production limits and methods of disposal, so that another such environmental disaster won't take place in the future.
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From 1937 to 1947, General Anastasio Somoza Garçia is in power and begins the start of a brutal family dictatorship funded by the U.S essentially making Nicaragua a more U.S. influenced nation, informally of course. In June of 1945, Nicaragua was recognized as a charter member of the United Nations and become the fir...
People in the northern United States during the early nineteenth century wanted to rapidly industrialize and increase the amount of money they were making. The Erie Canal they believed was a great way to reduce the distance and time of shipping goods to the west. They also realized that the canal would probably increase their markets, which would mean a larger profit. The problem with all of this was how people had to destroy parts of nature in order for this to happen. Nathaniel Hawthorne, a prominent writer during the time, described the canal as “too rapid, unthinking advance of progress.” (57) Hawthorne and his supporters were very upset to see how forests and swamps were being destroyed and ruined in order t...
In the 1930’s before the Love Canal area was turned into neighborhoods, the Hooker Chemical Company purchased the area and used it as a burial site for 20,000 metric tons of chemicals. In 1953 the Hooker Chemical Company sold the land to the Niagara Falls Board of Education for $1.00. There was a stipulation in the deed, which stated that if anyone incurred physical harm or death because of their buried wastes, they would not be responsible. Shortly after, the land changed hands yet again and this time home building began directly adjacent to the canal. Families who bought homes here were unaware of the waste buried in their backyards.
Then the documentary tackles Puget Sound. The Duwamish River is the largest hot spot in the nation. In 2001, the Duwamish River was classified as a “Super Fund” site. This is given to a site that will receive federal assistance for clean up. But yet, it may be too late. Puget Sound in contaminated with PCP, lead and mercury. The threat comes from the giant industrial polluters of old and from chemicals in consumers’ face creams, deodorants, prescription medicines and household cleaners that find their way into sewers, storm drains, eventually into America’s waterways and drinking water.
Throughout literature, especially in Milton’s time, the gender disparity between men and women has been unfairly defined: men are reasonable and therefore should lead, while women are passionate and thus should be led. However, these roles have often been misinterpreted, and have resulted in the idea that only men are reason manifest, while only women are passion incarnate. For example, in The Life and Loves of a She-Devil, Bobbo is rational in his approach to solving problems – count everything in monetary value – while Ruth often cries and evokes great emotion when facing struggles (Weldon, 20-24). However, Milton does not support this conventional idea of gender roles, as oftentimes Eve takes on Adam’s role as the voice of reason in sustaining the Garden of Eden, and vice versa. In Paradise Lost, Milton refutes the hieratical construct of gender inequality, by reversing the roles of Adam and Eve in terms of reason and passion, and instead prop...
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That Milton's Paradise Lost is unsurpassed--and hardly equaled--in English literature is generally accepted by critics and scholars. Whether it may have serious flaws, however, and what they may be, is less certain, for it is here that opinion varies. Of particular interest to some is the allegory of Sin and Death (II. 648-883). Robert C. Fox wonders that it has not been the subject of much more critical discussion, asking "Is it that Milton's readers are puzzled by this episode and, unable to explain its significance, prefer to pass it over in silence? Or do they regard it as so obvious in meaning that no interpretive remarks are necessary?" ("The Allegory" 354). Whatever the answer to Fox's query, his point is well taken; in a survey of the bibliography of the Modern Language Association from 1950-1980, fewer than twenty references specifically devoted to this allegory can be located, and many of these, rather than pursuing the question of its appropriateness and/or its importance within the total work, simply investigate its tradition and sources.
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