During the 1970s, violent binge drinking on the Grassy Narrows reserve killed dozens of Ojibwa Indians. The reason? Mercury from a paper mill had poisoned their river and fishing had been banned. Their society collapsed. What price environmental protection? Maybe the mercury would have been a lesser poison. Their story comes from Kai Erikson’s A New Species of Trouble: The Human Experience of Modern Disaster (W.W. Norton, 拢8.95, ISBN 0393 313 190). From Love Canal to Three Mile Island to Grassy Narrows, Erikson says, the poison is just the beginning.
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