Water activism and Elmira, Ontario's water crisis

What is it about?

Complete with big business, poisoned water, political red tape, a whistle blower, and a doggedly persistent group of local residents, this article on water activism in Elmira, Ontario, will be of interest to academics and non-academics alike. In 1989, a small group of citizens came together over a shared concern about an application by Uniroyal Chemicals Ltd. to install a hazardous waste incinerator at its Elmira location. Shortly after the group's first meeting, however, a random Ministry of the Environment test found alarmingly high levels of the carcinogenic chemical by-product Nitrosodimethylamine in the aquifers providing Elmira with its drinking water. The test results triggered the immediate closure of two of Elmira's six wells and caused the group to shift its focus to the emergent water crisis. Referred to by some as Canada's Love Canal, the chemical contamination in critical sites in Elmira is such that the groundwater is still undrinkable, some 26 years later. In this article, I relate the story of community-based water activism in Elmira, based on a series of semi-structured key informant interviews and an analysis of archival newspaper coverage. From this oral history, I draw questions, implications and insights for community-based activism in other contexts and for scholarship on social movement activism in general.

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Why is it important?

I think this article is important because it reveals lessons of value to concerned citizens, environmentalists, organizers, and social movement scholars. For those interested in practice, I describe the ways in which grassroots community members organized themselves and took action in this context. At a theoretical level, in this paper explore how activist subjectivity formation and political opportunity interact to generate the conditions for action.

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