Times Beach, a former summer resort town for citizens of St. Louis, Missouri, was evacuated due to the EPA’s discovery of large amounts of toxic dioxin in the soil.
Corroded chemical drums from WR Grace and Company were discovered leaking trichloroethylene and perchloroethylene into the town’s water supply, causing childhood leukemia in several cases.
Love Canal was placed on EPA’s National Priorities List in 1981 to receive federal cleanup aid. The Niagara Falls School District built communities on soil contaminated by long-term toxic waste from the Hooker Chemical Company, causing miscarriages of children and birth defects decades after the dumpsite was closed.
Silent Spring describes the harmful effects of pesticides on the environment, and is widely credited with helping launch the environmental movement.
Carson’s Silent Spring: A Reader’s Guide provides an in-depth analysis and contextualization of Silent Spring. It also surveys the lasting impact the text has had on the environmentalist movement in the last fifty years.
Our Stolen Future examines the ways that certain synthetic chemicals interfere with hormones in humans and wildlife, especially in the development of the fetus in the womb.
The Centralia mine fire in Centralia, Pennsylvania is a massive underground fire that has been burning for more than 50 years. Beginning in 1962, it has since driven away all but ten (as of 2012) residents.
Discovered as an insecticide by Swiss chemist Paul Hermann Müller in 1939, DDT is used to fight typhus and malaria during WWII; it is approved for public insecticide use by the FDA in 1945.
The Bhopal chemical disaster on 3 December 1984 was the most tragic chemical disaster in history. Over 500,000 people were exposed to the toxic gas methyl isocyanate leaking from the tanks at Union Carbide Corporation’s (UCC) pesticide plant, many of whom died instantly or of the consequences. People living in the Bhopal area still suffer from toxic water and ground contamination today ; there is a very high number of aborts and disabled children. The company responsible for the incident never took full responsibility.
The film documents Sandra Steingraber’s travels across North America, during which the ecologist and writer works toward breaking the silence over cancer and its environmental links.
