Mill Town by Kerri Arsenault

I really liked this book. It is a memoir about the toll an enormous paper mill reaped on the environment, the workforce, and inhabitants of Kerri Arsenault's home town of Mexico, Maine. As an environmental history, Mill Town provides an excellent source on the the harmful effects of large factories, chemicals, and toxic waste have on the interconnected human and natural world. It is one more reminder that these are not two separate spheres with nature as some sort of other world. As Rachel Carson demonstrated in Silent Spring sixty years ago, people and birds share the same fate. Mill Town discusses environmental policies, corporate denial, collusion between politics and industry, and waste disposal. Arsenault offers a deeply personal account of the agonizing death of her father, a lifetime mill worker. Mill Town chronicles how Arsenault pieced together the story of Mexico's cancer epidemic through interactions with family members, neighbors, townsfolk, and the historical records. It is part socio-economic history of the mill, the town, the rise of industry in the early twentieth century and its precipitous decline in the 1980s, intermingled with the story of the rise and fall of the working class and the effects of automation. Towards the end she examines how  her generational  cohort, those who graduated high school in the 1980s, split into two different groups: one who left Mexico, as she did, and another who remained in the town and even took one of the declining numbers of jobs at the mill. As a reader, I got the sense that the latter harbors considerable resentment towards the former for abandoning their town and leaving their own parents behind to be cared for by others. 

On another level this is a very compassionate story of "fly-over" country, the one that was totally left behind in the post-Cold War economic boom of the 1990s but still felt the vicious sting of the great recession, opioids (something mentioned but not explored), broken families, and declining home values, among other traumas. Only a page or two are devoted to the 2016 election, but it is clear that the author, while personally opposing Donald Trump, understands why many in her former home town cast their ballots for him. If one is unfamiliar with the America Arsenault describes than this empathetic exploration of it would be a good starting point.