Patricia Arquette is set to star in, direct, and executive produce the limited series “Love Canal” currently in development at Showtime, Variety has learned exclusively.
The series is based on the upcoming documentary “The Canal” by Will Battersby and upcoming book by journalist Keith O’Brien entitled “Paradise Falls.”
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Photo credit: Riccardo Vimercati; Colette Burson
Category: News Archive
The year 2021 marks the 40thth anniversary of the Center for Health, Environment & Justice. The Love Canal community’s efforts in 1978 successfully won the relocation of 900 working class families away from a leaking toxic waste dump and awoke a nation to the hazards of toxic chemicals in our environment. Overcoming powerful resistance from government and a multi-billion dollar company, Occidental Petroleum, this grassroots effort demonstrated how ordinary people can gain power through joining together to win their struggle. Love Canal sparked a new nationwide social justice movement concerned with links between health problems and the environment. Hand-in-hand with these concerns are questions about the rights of corporations to increase their profits through decisions that sacrifice the health of innocent families and the environment.
The Meaning of Environmentalism Has Expanded—A New Grassroots Environmental Health Movement
Traditional environmentalism in America has centered, in general, around protecting the natural environment through laws and regulations. Newer grassroots efforts, however, are as much about protecting public health as the environment. These efforts value the basic human right to have clean air, water, food and soil along with preserving our nation’s natural resources. The grassroots leadership believes systemic change comes from the bottom up—people plus organization equals strength—the strength to influence policy and win protection of these basic rights, and the strength to counteract the money and pressure corporations bring to bear on elected representatives to oppose or weaken protective laws. As a result, the grassroots strategy is to build a stronghold at the local and state levels that can trickle up to influence federal-level representatives and national policies.
Another distinction between the two movements is their contrasting approaches on achieving the same overarching goals of protecting the environment and public health:
Traditional environmentalism is focused on regulations and regulatory controls. It therefore inevitably winds up debating how many parts per million of chemical X can be in wastewater that is released into a river without killing off downstream fish populations?
Today’s grassroots efforts are focused on prevention. Grassroots leaders are asking “Why do we allow chemical X in wastewater to be discharged into our rivers when non-toxic alternatives exist?”
Neither approach is right or wrong, or is superior to the other. The overarching goal of protecting the environment and all living things is the same for both segments of the environmental movement. When operating on a parallel path, the two approaches together can make significant progress in protecting the environment and public health.
Who Represents the Grassroots Environmental Health Movement Today?
The grassroots environmental movement has a long history of success. One of its most important achievements has been building a broad and diversified base of support that includes: Workers, people of color, faith-based organizations, rural and urban families, and indigenous peoples living in today’s society whose lives have been affected by environmental issues. Parent-teacher organizations, doctors, nurses, and other health professionals working to transform the health care industry’s disposal of potentially harmful substances; people who make their living fishing or depend upon fish as a primary food in their diets and other people from all walks of life.
SAN JACINTO, Texas – In October of 2017 Environmental Protection Agency Administrator, Scott Pruitt ordered the complete clean-up of the San Jacinto River Waste Pits.
“To witness the threat, the danger that this site poses to the community in person makes a difference and the difference it makes is urgency,” said Pruitt at the time.
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Photo Credit: Mark Mulligan/Houston Chronicle
In the aftermath of Hurricane Ida, Healthy Gulf documented the damage in Cancer Alley, Port Fourchon and Lafourche, Terrebonne, Plaquemines and Jefferson Parishes in Louisiana. On two flights provided by SouthWings, Healthy Gulf documented the catastrophic damage to the communities and industries that bore the brunt of Hurricane Ida’s wrath.
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Photo Credit: Healthy Gulf, flight provided by SouthWings.org
The Ohio Department of Transportation plans to stop purchasing a deicer made from processed brine drawn from oil and gas wells.
The department made the call after the Ohio-made deicer product, AquaSalina, became the subject of House Bill 282. The bill would allow the product to be sold to the general public and remove a requirement that users pay a $50 fee to the Ohio Department of Natural Resources and report where every gallon gets spread.
ODOT did not cite the bill or environmental concerns for its decision to stop buying the product.
“We only need additives when pavement temperatures get extremely cold, which is fortunately the exception, not the rule,” said ODOT spokesman Matt Bruning. “Also, there are a lot more approved products on the market these days, so we have more options to choose from.”
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Photo credit: Columbus Dispatch File Photo
About two thirds of Louisiana industrial sites with toxic chemicals lie in the path of Hurricane Ida, a storm with the potential to batter or flood refineries, storage tanks and other infrastructure that can release oil and other harmful liquids and gases into communities and the environment.
A Times-Picayune | New Orleans Advocate analysis of industrial data and Ida’s predicted route through the state indicates 590 sites that produce or store toxic chemicals are in harm’s way. Almost 380 of them are within 50 miles of the coast, putting them at particular risk from storm surge, strong winds and heavy rain, according to the analysis of sites listed in the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s Toxics Release Inventory.
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Photo Credit: Travis Spradling
Whistleblowers say the US Environmental Protection Agency has been falsifying dangerous new chemicals’ risk assessments in an effort to make the compounds appear safe and quickly approve them for commercial use.
Over the past five years, the EPA has not rejected any new chemicals submitted by industry despite agency scientists flagging dozens of compounds for high toxicity. Four EPA whistleblowers and industry watchdogs say a revolving door between the agency and chemical companies is to blame, and that the program’s management has been “captured by industry”. The charges are supported by emails, documents and additional records that were provided to the Guardian.
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Photo Credit: Andrew Kelly/Reuters
The company behind the controversial Keystone XL project that President Joe Biden effectively killed on his first day of office had an oil spill record “worse than the national average” over a five-year period thanks to two major spills, according to a Government Accountability Office report published Monday.
The two spills from the Keystone pipelines dumped a combined 12,000 barrels of oil in the Dakotas even as operator TC Energy was planning to expand that pipeline with its proposed Keystone XL project, which would have tripled the amount of crude the pipeline system would carry from Canada into the United States. Biden revoked the permit necessary to allow Keystone XL to cross the U.S.-Canada border, essentially killing the project in a bid to demonstrate his climate bona fides. TC Energy is now in court seeking $15 billion from the U.S. government for the cancellation.
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Photo Credit: Andrew Burton/Getty Images
Dozens of large trucks rumble hourly toward a large waste-to-energy incinerator operated by Covanta at the edge of a neighborhood in Chester City’s West End.
Other trucks take a fork in the road and head to a sewage sludge incinerator operated by Delcora. A pile of scrap metal from a recycling facility juts high over back yards. Along the rail line that runs alongside the community, freight cars clack by, or stop and idle behind the homes.
Glance up, and you can see the smokestacks of the Marcus Hook Industrial Complex a mile or so in the distance.
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Photo Credit: Jonathan Wilson
Thirty acres of desolate land stretch across the heart of Uniontown, Ohio, a vast expanse of grass, trees, and scruffy vegetation no one can use because a toxic stew of nearly one hundred deadly contaminants festers beneath its surface. Enclosed by chain-link fencing and warning signs, the Industrial Excess Landfill (IEL) is one of more than thirteen hundred hazardous Superfund sites on the Environmental Protection Agency’s National Priorities List.
While open, IEL’s broad swath of customers ranged from Akron City Hospital to the National Guard, but, according to the EPA, the waste came primarily from the rubber industry: Firestone, General Tire, Goodrich, and Goodyear in nearby Akron, the Rubber Capital of the World.
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Photo Credit: John Harper/cleveland.com