Clean the Mill: Environmental Protest in Post-industrial Nova Scotia

• Main Author: Thompson, Peter
• Format: Text
• Language: unknown
• Published: Marshall Digital Scholar 2015
• Subjects: appalachian_studies; environmental_ecological; Canada; Newfoundland
• Online Access: https://mds.marshall.edu/asa_conference/2015/full/281

This paper will examine connections between Atlantic Canada and Appalachia, two political or cultural regions that are linked together through grography (the Appalachian mountain range stretches north into Newfoundland) and through a shared history of resource extraction. I will specifically look at the 2014 social media campaign that focused on the environmental record of Northern Pulp Mill in Pictou, Nova Scotia. Like many parts of Appalachia, northern Nova Scotia struggles to reconcile the impact of the post-industrial era and to balance the desire to create well-paying jobs with the environmental concerns that come along with activities like surface mining and pulping. In Canada’s national imaginary, regions such as Pictou County are positioned as “sacrifice zones” – to use Rebecca Scott’s phrase from her work on Mountain Top Removal mining in the Appalachian coalfield – that suffer environmental and health-related consequences of resource extraction and eventually experience things like economic depression, increased levels of drug addiction, and outmigration in the post-industrial era. Although concerns around the economy and job-creation have often overshadowed environmental protests in this region, the case of Northern Pulp is an exception to this trend. This paper will examine the role of musicians, the national media, celebrities such as Erin Brockovitch, and images of the mill site in fuelling this movement.