Toxic Contamination and Communities: Using an Ecological-Symbolic Perspective to Theorize Response Contingencies

Abstract

The ecological-symbolic perspective posits that community response to toxic contarnination is shaped by both the nature of the environmental disruption and the interpretive frames through which those disruptions are apprehended. Full utilization of this perspective has been hampered by the deterministic underpinnings of the current chronic technological disaster model, which presents local conflict as a virtually inevitable outcome of these events. We draw upon the more contingent framing of the ecologicalsymbolic perspective to analyze the experiences of two communities that displayed consensual response patterns. We identify ecological and organizational factors that facilitated an interpretive framing of "limited danger".Complex problems associated with technological hazards have risen to increasing prominence in the decades since World War I1 (Cutter 1993). Such technically based disasters confront community residents with unprecedented dilemmas (Kroll-Smith, Couch, and Marshall 1997; Kroll-Smith 1995). Reflecting on the reactions to such crises, researchers have reported a convergence toward a community response pattern that William R. Freudenburg and Timothy R. Jones (1991) have labeled "the corrosive community" and that Kai Erikson (1994) has attributed to "a new species of trouble." Inherent in this second designation is the idea that toxic, contamination constitutes a disruption of biospheric processes profoundly different from anything that has preceded it in human history. In communities confronted by this "new trouble," the "ties that bind" neighbors, families, and friends become unglued, setting in motion a pattern of intracommunity conflict (Freudenburg 1997). ~ ~~~Direct all correspondences to Valerie Gunter,

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