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Cassandra Kuyvenhoven, Industrial Disasters, Toxic Waste, and Community Impact: Health Effects and Environmental Justice Struggles around the Globe By Francis O. Adeola Lexington Books. 2012. 306 pages. $44.99 paperback, $95.00 hardback, Social Forces, Volume 94, Issue 3, March 2016, Page e72, https://doi.org/10.1093/sf/sou042
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In Industrial Disasters, Toxic Waste, and Community Impact, Adeola seeks to apply sociological theories of risk as a means of discussing the threats to human and animal health posed by hazardous wastes and industrial disasters. Adeola follows the physical impacts and potential health outcomes in communities that have experienced toxic waste releases or disasters in the past century. From Love Canal, New York, to Chernobyl, Ukraine, the book explores how wastes and disasters can disproportionately affect individuals living in risky or hazardous landscapes, focusing specifically on low-income populations. The four-part book describes the history of toxic waste sites and catastrophic disasters using well-known case studies like Three Mile Island, Pennsylvania, the Bhopal disaster in India, and the Exxon Valdez oil spill in Alaska. The second part of the book identifies electronic waste or “e-waste” as an emerging environmental concern on local, national, regional, and global scales. Adeola discusses the human health risks from exposure to toxic substances, like Persistent Organic Pollutants (POPs), in electronic devices. The third part of the text focuses specifically on communities “contaminated” by anthropogenic disasters (Koko, Nigeria, the Gulf of Mexico, and Fukushima Daiichi, Japan). The final part culminates in a discussion about critical environmental justice movements.