NY Times, Sept. 1, 2020
Her Town Depended on the Mill. Was It Also Making the Residents Sick?
By Emily Cooke
MILL TOWN
Reckoning With What Remains
By Kerri Arsenault
Illustrated. 354 pp. St. Martin’s Press. $27.99.
In 1981, a doctor in a small mill town in Maine read a study suggesting
that prostate and colon cancers in his community were nearly double the
national average. Spooked, he brought the research to the board of
directors at the local hospital; they ignored it. A few years later, a
survey conducted by the Maine Department of Health suggested that the
town, Rumford, had an especially high incidence of cancer, aplastic
anemia and lung disease. The state epidemiologist insisted that the data
were inconclusive. In 1991, a TV news series christened the area “Cancer
Valley” because of the number of people there who had been diagnosed
with a rare form of lymphoma. Doc Martin, as the local doctor was known,
got a call from the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute in Boston. Why, the
institute wanted to know, were “all these kids with cancer” coming from
Rumford?
Martin believed the high cancer rate was caused by dioxin produced by
the paper mill. (Dioxin, the generic name for a family of 75 related
compounds, is an unintentional byproduct of the paper bleaching
process.) For the rest of his life, Martin toiled to bring attention to
the problem. He shared his concerns with his fellow residents, wrote
editorials, implored officials at the mill and the hospital to
investigate, and appealed to local, state and federal legislators. In
the end, his career was demolished. The I.R.S., the state board of
medicine, the state Medicaid program and Medicare all audited him; his
bank told him he was unwelcome; and the Rumford Hospital terminated his
affiliation. Then he died of cancer, too.
In “Mill Town: Reckoning With What Remains,” Kerri Arsenault documents
Doc Martin’s passionate and largely fruitless attempts to expose the
mill’s role in making his patients sick, along with the efforts of a
handful of other residents and scientists who also tried, over the
years, to hold the company to account, even as its owners denied
responsibility. Arsenault grew up in Mexico, a small town adjacent to
Rumford, and she structures the book as a memoir, interweaving the story
of the mill with her personal history and that of her Acadian family,
who have lived in the area for generations. (Acadia was a French colony
that spanned eastern Canada’s Maritime Provinces and parts of Maine. In
1755, during the French and Indian War, the British expelled the
Acadians from the region in what is now considered an ethnic cleansing.)
Arsenault’s narrative follows the path of her research, beginning with
her interest in her family’s genealogy and branching out into
explorations of the area’s social and environmental plight.
Much of the book’s substance comes from interviews Arsenault conducted
with residents. From the elderly Dot Bernard, she learns of the mill’s
preference for hiring old men to work in the bleach room: “At first,”
Bernard explains, “I thought the mill hired the older guys due to their
experience or because it was a special job.” But the real reason,
Bernard believes, was that the company didn’t want to care for “young
guys who got sick”; it was cheaper to hire the aged, who’d retire soon
and die shortly after. Arsenault’s grandfather worked in the bleach
room; he died of metastatic stomach cancer not long after he retired.
Bernard herself had cancer for more than 11 years; she died before
Arsenault’s book was finished. When Arsenault asks why she never spoke
publicly about her observations, the old woman says she didn’t want to
cause problems.
“Mill Town” is preoccupied with a poisonous irony: Rumford’s citizens
live and work in a place that makes them unwell, yet they cling to their
jobs with prideful obstinacy, ignoring patterns of illness, swallowing
the mill’s denials and accepting their lot with a collective shrug that
Arsenault, once she learns the extent of the cancer and the mill’s
likely responsibility for it, finds mysterious and troubling. Why had
her family, her friends, her acquaintances been so incurious, so
passive, about the jobs on which they depended? She doesn’t spare
herself from the accusation of complicity: Why had it taken her so long
to wake up?
Yet, as she soon realizes, the answer to her questions is bound up in
their very formulation. Rumford relies wholly on the mill. Few have
questioned the bargain that asked them to trade physical health for
economic well-being because nobody has a choice about whether to accept
it. The residents’ adversary is too powerful, their need too great. The
founder of the Rumford mill, Hugh Chisholm, also co-founded
International Paper, which remains the largest paper company in the
world. (The Rumford mill has had multiple owners over the years; it was
purchased two years ago by ND Paper, a subsidiary of the Chinese
conglomerate Nine Dragons.)
The scale of the problem and of the potential malfeasance could not be
grander or more terrifying. Toward the end of the book, Arsenault
interviews Stephen Lester, the science director at the Center for
Health, Environment and Justice, about dioxin. Why, she asks, did nobody
seem concerned about the pollutant, when everything she found indicated
it was a “critical health issue”? The Environmental Protection Agency
doesn’t even list it as a carcinogen. Lester explains that the E.P.A.
had performed two studies on dioxin: a cancer risk assessment and one
that dealt with other health risks. The former was damning: It
determined that “exposure to any amount of dioxin increased the risks of
getting cancer,” Arsenault writes. But the agency published these
findings only in draft form; when, years later, it released the
non-cancer risk assessment, it announced that the cancer risk study was
still being finalized. In Lester’s account, the agency has no intention
of publishing it. Doing so would be far too explosive: “If the E.P.A.
used cancer risk rate data to determine how much dioxin would be allowed
in food,” he tells Arsenault, “you wouldn’t be able to buy a McDonald’s
hamburger” — nearly all animal products, in other words, contain levels
exceeding what would be deemed acceptable.
Is the E.P.A.’s failure to publish the study a smoking gun? Arsenault
claims she can’t really say. Because there are so many factors to
consider, including other environmental triggers and people’s behavior
and family histories, it’s nearly impossible to establish a causal
relationship between the mill’s pollution and the incidence of cancer in
Rumford. Arsenault comments repeatedly on the intractability of her
material. Over the decades, numerous scientific studies in the area were
abandoned. She could find no centralized storehouse of data. The
evidence she could track down rarely appeared definitive. The book’s
penultimate chapter finds her hunkered down in a basement room at the
Maine Department of Environmental Protection, frantically scanning a
pile of ancient and disorganized files.
By trade neither a scientist nor a science journalist, Arsenault is
candid about her difficulties in making sense of her subject: “There’s
no end to what I don’t know, can’t know, can’t translate, won’t ever
have the time or capacity to understand,” she laments. But while she
questions her wisdom in embarking on the project, she seems never to
question the shape of the project itself. Casting her handicap as a
virtue, she implies that her struggles demonstrate how hard it is for an
ordinary citizen to access reliable information about environmental
standards or corporate practices. Furthermore, as she makes clear, her
ambition is not merely to reveal facts; she is concerned with human
suffering: “How to chart that?”
Arsenault is nothing if not an earnest writer. Yet the stakes are so
high that this murkiness about her task — Is she an investigative
journalist or a memoirist? And whose story, exactly, is she telling? —
is unfortunate. Not treating the book as purely investigatory means she
doesn’t have to establish anything definite. Not treating it as pure
memoir means she can abandon character and drama as it suits her. I
don’t fault her for getting diverted by her family tree, by the
illnesses of her neighbors. Their trials deserve to be known. But a
story rived by cover-ups and uncertainty is only further muddled by
meditations on the uncertain nature of storytelling. We’ll just have to
wait for the exposé containing incontrovertible evidence that leads to
the lawsuit that finally brings about change.
Emily Cooke is editorial director of The New Republic.
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