Lois Gibbs: How to Be a Citizen-Activist

The following conversation with Lois Gibbs is an excerpt from the new book Building the Green Economy: Success Stories from the Grassroots (PoliPointPress, 2007) by Kevin Danaher, Shannon Biggs, and Jason Mark. You can read more about the book here.

In 1978, Lois Marie Gibbs was a 27-year-old housewife in the working class town of Niagara Falls, New York. When she learned that her neighborhood had been built on top of 20,000 tons of toxic chemicals, she became an environmental activist overnight, and soon organized her community into the Love Canal Homeowners Association. After a three-year battle, Gibbs and her allies succeeded in relocating 900 families away from the site. The nationally prominent campaign led to the creation of the U.S. EPA Superfund program, which identifies and cleans up toxic sites. For the past 25 years, Gibbs has been the director of the Center for Health and Environmental Justice.

Q: When you first uncovered the Love Canal scandal, you didn't have a history of activism. What was the most challenging leap for you to become a citizen-activist?

LG: The most challenging thing was not understanding how you do that. And actually trusting. There are two levels of trust. One is that if there's a problem, government would do something, all you need to do is ask. It really made me mad when they didn't. And second, I always thought that the corporations were responsible. It was a chemical city and a chemical world. They fed our families; they paid for our mortgages. The smell of chemicals meant the smell of a good economy. And we were brainwashed by them. So when I learned that both of them couldn't care less about us -- and in fact the government decided that it was OK to harm us -- that was when I got angry. We just took to anger. It wasn't conscious strategic thinking or anything like that. It was like, "How dare they! How dare they say we are not worth saving!"

Q: How did you in that day-to-day work develop your own skills as a leader and an organizer?

LG: I developed them as I went along, by the seat of my pants. I worked with a lot of local community people who also had never organized around anything. We were the Vietnam generation, so we knew about campus organizing. But for the most part, the community itself was not college educated, so we weren't really involved in it; we were at the sidelines of it. One of the things the women did -- it was mostly ladies -- was we organized like households. We gave different people different responsibilities, like what you do in your household: You cut the grass, you wash the dishes, you set the table. And we held them accountable. We used a lot of our skills as homemakers to run the organization, and it was actually pretty good. What didn't happen was we didn't become a top-heavy organization. I think it really strengthened our organizing in ways that helped us to win this fight.

Q: How did that kind of organizing make you stronger?

LG: I was a spokesperson that was identified in the media. But if I were hit by a bus, the group would still move forward. Every decision that we made was democratic. So we had different groups who would present something and it was either voted up or voted down. It wasn't done in a small little room; it was literally done in a room of 500 people. Everybody had a voice, everybody had a vote. It was disallowed to make fun or mock or to be negative about somebody's idea. ... We also knew that communication was really important, so we took something out of the electoral world of organizing. We set up block captains. It was the block captains' job to talk to the community folks on their block, invite them to meetings, collect dues, squelch rumors that were not true. The block captains also made sure that the people got to the meetings. That was kind of cool because we would have smaller meetings with the block captains before we had larger meetings with the community to figure out what's going on out there, what people's concerns are. We really had our fingers on the pulse at all times, and that was pretty remarkable.