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Rebecca Altman and Kerri Arsenault will discuss their work about New England manufacturing and the environmental, political, and personal legacies it has left behind. They will be joined by Johnathan Berard, who is on the Governor’s state task force to address plastics.
Johnathan Berard is a policy analyst, community organizer, and activist with a focus on water resource management and conservation. He also specializes in environmental justice issues, sustainable development, collaborative governance and civic engagement, and political campaigns. His first job in high school was working on a tour boat on the Blackstone River that launched above the waterfall adjacent to the museum, a job from which he can draw a straight line to what he does today — which is this the is the Rhode Island State Director for Clean Water Action. He has been working for the last five years to strengthen chemical policy in Rhode Island, including passing in 2017 the second-strictest prohibition on organohalogens in flame retardants in the US.
Kerri Arsenault grew up in the rural working-class town of Mexico, Maine, where for over 100 years our community orbited around a paper mill that provided jobs for most people, including three generations of her family, which is the focus of her book, Mill Town: Reckoning with What Remains. She had a happy childhood, but years after she moved away, she realized the price she paid for that childhood. The price they all paid. The mill, while providing community, jobs, stability, also contributed to the destruction of the environment and their lives. Mill Town examines and interrogates the modern world and it contemporary conundrums: the rise and collapse of the working-class; the hazards of nostalgia and memory; the ambiguous nature of toxics and disease; and how the past affects our present-day lives. At the center of the narrative is this central question; who or what are we willing to sacrifice for our own survival?
Kerri is a book critic, book editor at Orion magazine, contributing editor at Literary Hub, and author of Mill Town: Reckoning with What Remains. Her work has appeared in the Paris Review Daily, NYRB, Freeman’s, the Boston Globe, and Air Mail.
Rebecca Altman’s forthcoming book, The Song of Styrene, contains an intimate story about a seemingly un-intimate thing: plastic. Plastics person to Rebecca, not only because her father made plastic, but because plastic is so embedded in our everyday lives, bodies, even used in life-saving medical devices. This intimacy, Rebecca writes, also stems from plastics’ connection with changing climate, water-borne legacy contaminants, and other far-reaching consequences wrought by petrochemical production. The systems integral to plastics are as complex a system as a human heart or her family tree. This marriage of petroleum with oil hurtles across history and family, science and emotion, macro and micro to produce something unmanageable, unrecyclable, and ultimately inextricable from our planet and our lives. Plastics are humankind’s legacy.
Rebecca holds a PhD in environmental sociology from Brown University. Recent essays have appeared in The Atlantic, Aeon Magazine and Orion Magazine, for whom she is currently guest-editing a special series on plastics. The Song of Styrene is her first book and is forthcoming from Scribner Books.