Public reaction to toxic waste contamination: analysis of a social movement

In this article we explore citizen action against toxic waste as a social movement, emphasizing the unique challenges posed by the technological nature of the toxic waste issue. Unlike other contemporary health-related social movements such as the women's movement and anti-nuclear groups, the movement against toxic waste is not composed primarily of highly educated, upper-middle-class people who are motivated by global concerns. Toxic waste activists are typically working-class and lower-class people, politicized initially by perceptions of danger to the health of their families. However, awareness of global dangers and the larger political-economic issues related to toxic waste contamination is often emergent in the process of mobilization. The movement against toxic waste can be seen as part of a larger social trend toward increased public demand for a role in scientific and technological decision-making which challenges scientific criteria for assessing risk and experts' claim to technical knowledge. While toxic waste activism is better explained by European theorists' "new social movement theory" than by resource mobilization theory, the former theory does not account for the toxic waste movement's class composition. The necessity for developing a new theory of social movements that captures the complexities of toxic waste activism is discussed.