Lois Marie Conn Gibbs
Personal Information
Born: 1951
Country of Birth: USA
Nationality: USA
Ethnicity: White
Education
high school diploma
""Well, at first I didn't do anything but cry because that’s usually what you do when you don’t know what to do, and then I got angry because I went to the school board and said, “move my child from the school, it’s on a dump, he’s sick”. And the school board said, “if we move Michael Gibbs from the school, we have to move all 407 children, we’re not about to do that because of one irate hysterical housewife”. And I’m thinking, like, it’s alright to be irate and hysterical when someone’s holding a gun to your child’s head. We had chemicals in our house, in our air, in our backyard, in our school. Everywhere. And they said that they were going to do nothing! So I began by putting together a petition to circulate around the neighborhood to close the school. You wouldn’t think that you’d need to do that hen you have a school on a dump and children are sick, that someone might come close the school and move the children, but it didn’t happen." (loe.org); " And so we began organizing, and we got people involved, and we did our own house study, and it was amazing. We found 56 percent of our children were born with birth defects. 56 percent with three ears, double rows of teeth, extra fingers, extra toes, mentally retarded, It was just awful. House after house after house would just tell us these horrible diseases, and when we presented it to the state health department and said, “look what we found”, they said it was useless housewife data collected by people with a vested interest in the outcome. And I’m always amazed because - now I’ve been doing this for 35 years - an industry releases a report, BP, Exxon, whatever industry, their reports are always scientifically valid, and almost gospel if you will, and ours is just “useless housewife data”. How come they don’t have a vested interest when BP’s looking at the oil spill? Nobody said anything like that to them." (loe.org); "[We] stood together and had a united goal. You can do that for any issue. If people would participate in democracy, we could change the world in ways that are not even imaginable right now." (thecooldown.com); "
— Lois Marie Conn Gibbs
Professional Life
Field of Study: Environmental Activist
Institution/Corporation: Center for Health, Environment & Justice (CHEJ)
Degrees & Memberships: Honorary Degrees: Haverford College (2006); Green Mountain College (2009); Medaille College (2010); Tufts University (2013); SUNY Cortland College
Awards & Achievements
Awards: 1990 Goldman Environmental Prize; 1998 5th Annual Heinz Award in Environmental Sector; 1999 John Gardner Leadership Award, Independent Sector; 1991 Top 10 Who Made a Difference Honor Roll; 2007 Business Ethics Network Individual Achievement Award for Outstanding Contribution to Corporate Ethics; 2008 Green Corps Environmental Leadership Award
Achievements: 1978 started the Love Canal Parents Movement; was a primary organizer of the Love Canal Homeowners Association who brought wide public attention to the environmental crisis in Love Canal; her actions resulted in the evacuation of 833 families; founded the non-profit Clearinghouse for Hazardous Waste in 1981 to help train and support local activists with their environmental work which was subsequently renamed the Center for Health, Environment, and Justice (CHEJ); has authored several books about the Love Canal story and the effects of toxic waste with the most quoted being "Love Canal. My story" written with Murray Levine and published in 1982 & 2 others-"Dying from Dioxin" (1995) & "Love Canal The Story Continues" (1998); her story was dramatized in the 1982 made-for-TV movie Lois Gibbs: the Love Canal Story, in which she was played by Marsha Mason*
did not have many hobbies and activities as a child & her favorite pastime was sewing
activism began in 1978 when she discovered her 5-year-old-son's school was built on a toxic waste dump site in Niagara Falls New York & he had epilepsy , urinary tract, and respiratory problems
when she began protesting the inaction of the NYS Health Department even her own mother believed she wouldn't succeed & told her “you’re forgetting you’re just a housewife with a high school education."
President Jimmy Carter mentioned Gibbs as the key grassroots leader in the Love Canal movement during 1980
her efforts led to the creation of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency's Comprehensive Environmental Response, Compensation and Liability Act, or Superfund, which is used to locate and clean up toxic waste sites throughout the United States
1981, as a single mother of two children, she left Niagara Falls with $10,000 and relocated to the Washington, D.C. area
is now known as the "mother of Superfund"
in 1980 the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) released its study showing that residents exhibited chromosomal damage and angry Love Canal residents took two EPA representatives hostage
was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize in 2003
CHEJ is responsible for a number of successful campaigns, including the McToxics Campaign of 1987 that put an end to fast food restaurants’ use of Styrofoam packaging, the Stop Dioxin Campaign of 1995 that reduced dioxin emissions by 90%, and the PVC Campaign of 2004 that exposed to the public the health hazards of PVC (polyvinyl chloride) and convinced businesses such as Microsoft to use safer materials in their packaging and products