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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, £8.95, ISBN 0393 313 190). From Love Canal to Three Mile Island to Grassy Narrows, Erikson says, the poison is just the beginning.