Environment International 30 (2004) 871 872

www.elsevier.com/locate/envint

Book review
From Love Canal to Environmental Justice: The Politics
of Hazardous Waste on the Canada U.S. Border
Thomas H. Fletcher. Ontario, Canada: Broadview Press,
Ltd; 2003. 239 pp. (ISBN 1-55111-434-8); soft cover.
Since Love Canal, matters of environmental policy and
politics have increasingly integrated issues of social justice.
Despite this, there remain strong disparities between the
perspectives of communities, governments, and industry
over ways to approach hazardous waste and other environmental conflicts. Fletcher explores and integrates these
differing perceptions and uses the theoretical frameworks
of distributive and procedural equity to analyze a series of
recent North American case studies in order to provide a
greater understanding of the environmental justice implications of hazardous waste.
Dividing his work into three parts: themes, viewpoints,
and interpretations, Fletcher uses archival research and
interviews to guide readers through the complex issues that
have shaped environmental policy in both the US and
Canada, providing a theoretical framework with which to
analyze and interpret recent waste facility siting disputes,
and concluding with some proposed directions for environmental policy.
Part one consists of three chapters that discuss the
interrelationship of hazardous waste and environmental
justice. Fletcher outlines the debate surrounding initial
and continued decisions to promote hazardous waste management over pollution prevention, calling attention to the
lack of current government incentives to encourage industry to reduce volume or toxicity of waste in addition to
increased community opposition to hazardous waste facilities. Chapter one provides an overview of hazardous waste
laws and regulations in the US and Canada, highlighting
the important influence of the Love Canal crisis on environmental policy-making and noting that the international
trade route between the US and Canada is one of the least
regulated for hazardous waste. In chapter two, Fletcher uses
Becks notion of risk society, which suggests that concerns
over chemical and nuclear hazards will begin to predominate over economic concerns, to introduce a discussion of
theories of social justice and emphasize how the problem of
hazardous waste intersects with environmental justice
issues. This conceptual work is supported, in chapter three,
by an empirical review of the distributive equity dimensions of hazardous waste and toxic releases. Fletcher
reveals that in the US, while there remains some debate
over geographic units of analysis and the definition of
doi:10.1016/j.envint.2004.02.005

comparison groups, race seems to be a better predictor of

facility siting location than socioeconomic status. Despite
this, he argues for the need to move beyond issues of
distributive and procedural equity towards a more systemic
perspective that embraces the principles of industrial
ecology and seeks to restructure the existing legal and
regulatory frameworks, promoting pollution prevention
over existing end-of-pipe solutions.
The second part of the book, divided into the border
regions of Niagara in chapter four and Detroit and Sarnia in
chapter five, provides an analysis of the authors fieldwork
on 10 proposed facility siting cases conducted since the
early 1980s. Using an interpretive case study approach,
Fletcher investigates the relationship between hazardous
waste facilities and environmental justice by reviewing
and comparing these Canadian and American facility siting
disputes in terms of three factors that siting boards are
legally required to address: defining facility need, deciding
facility size and type, and promoting fairness in facility
siting. In both chapters, Fletcher demonstrates the extreme
costs associated with the siting boards assessment and
facility location decision-making process, made increasingly
complex by the progressively more organized community
opposition groups. Despite this input from multiple stakeholders, Fletcher points out that, particularly in regards to
the New York and Ontario cases, community concerns over
fairness issues were not considered a sufficient basis for
rejection of proposed waste facilities.
This is made more evident in chapters six and seven of
part three as Fletcher synthesizes the material, comparing
each of the case studies in terms of distributive and
procedural equity considerations and evaluating the extent
to which the concerns of various stakeholders were considered in the facility siting proceedings. In chapter six,
Fletcher reviews the spatial, social, cumulative and intergenerational equity aspects of the Michigan, New York, and
Ontario case studies and notes how a fundamental commitment to capacity assurance constrains the move towards
pollution prevention initiatives. This concept is further
expounded in the final chapter, which illustrates that a
fair distribution of hazardous waste must necessarily
include both a greater emphasis on the distributive and
procedural dimensions of pollution in addition to government regulations that spur innovative approaches towards
waste reduction.
Fletchers work provides a useful overview of the
interdependence of hazardous waste, environmental justice,
and the wider sociocultural-economic system in which

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Book review

decision-making processes operate. While Fletcher is clearly advocating the importance of a more sustainable approach towards hazardous waste that moves beyond
capacity assurance and new waste facilities towards a
focus on pollution prevention, his use of a standardized
theoretical framework and systematic case study approach
provides a sound structure that reinforces his argument.
Fletchers work is an important addition to a growing body
of literature which contends that as industrial accountability and transparency become an increasingly important part
of our society, policymakers need to recognize the benefits

associated with a proactive approach towards hazardous

waste that provides incentives for the adoption of waste
reduction techniques and expands the role of pollution
prevention.

Deena M. Murphy-Medley
Psychology Department, North Carolina State University,
Box 7801, Raleigh, NC 27695-7081, USA
E-mail address: dmurphymedley@aol.com
Tel.: +1-919-515-3237; fax: +1-919-515-1716