The Postwar Pollution Boom

• Main Author: Langston, Nancy
• Format: Book Part
• Language: unknown
• Published: Yale University Press 2017
• Subjects: Thunder Bay; anishina*; First Nations
• Online Access: http://dx.doi.org/10.12987/yale/9780300212983.003.0003

For fifty years, paper towns along Lake Superior boomed: Marathon, Terrace Bay, Thunder Bay, Ontonagon, Munising. But the human and environmental costs of intensive pulp production began to emerge soon after World War II. Anishinaabe communities were displaced from forests, suffering intense poverty and social displacement. First Nations communities in Grassy Narrows, Ontario, suffered mercury poisoning from the chlor-alkali plants needed for paper bleaching. Dioxin and PCBs created poison legacies that still confound the region. The paper and pulp industry brought three decades of economic growth that benefited many—but certainly not all—of the people living in the Lake Superior basin. Yet the pollution legacies from that boom era have persisted far longer than the economic benefits.