Toxic Times, Summer 1990

Toxic Times, Summer 1990

Object Lessons

In the summer of 1978, Lois Gibbs, a resident of the upstate New York community of Love Canal, discovered that her child’s elementary school was built on top of a chemical waste dump. Her kindergarten-age son had been suffering from frequent recurring illnesses, including liver disorders, epilepsy, asthma, and urinary issues. Mobilized by the suspicion that these circumstances were somehow interlinked, Gibbs formed the Love Canal Parents Movement. What began as a simple canvassing effort would later evolve into one of the nation’s best-known grassroots environmental campaigns.

Nearly a decade later, activists formed the National Toxics Campaign (NTC), an organization committed to supporting local environmental causes, similar to what Gibbs and the Love Canal community had accomplished, on a national scale. The NTC began publishing a newsletter called Toxic Times to disseminate the efforts of the campaigns. As Michael Stein, the newsletter’s former editor, said recently, these events were unfolding on a pre-Internet and predigital stage, so the newsletter was their primary means of sharing what was going on in local communities with a larger audience. “We were using super-old desktop-publishing software, the first version of Windows. It was painful and terrifying.”

Stein and his colleagues knew that photography would be central in the campaign against corporate and government polluters. The cover of the summer 1990 issue of Toxic Times shows Louisiana state senator Cleo Fields, NTC executive director lohn O’Connor, Reverend lesse lackson, and Earth Day 1990 CEO Denis Hayes standing at a Superfund site in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, all gathered for the Southern Toxics Tour, which worked to educate low-income minority communities on hazardous materials.

A multigenerational and multiracial effort, Toxic Times also fostered a network of image sharing; organizations mailed in pictures from all over the country to be published in the newsletter. The exchange became a way to highlight the specificities of local experiences as symptomatic of a national crisis. “What else was there to prove what was going on?” Stein said. “We came together to teach people how to run an environmental campaign and help build that social movement.”

The Editors