Episode 4 // The Pine River Stories: ‘Tombstone Town’ shows us that the fight is worthwhile


Carrie La Seur, 
FLOW Legal Director — 

Like most history, the story of central Michigan’s Pine River includes some unpleasant chapters. Jane Keon is the author of a recent one. Her 2015 book Tombstone Town is a dispatch from the frontlines of the fight for a livable planet. The tombstone of the title is real – meant to warn future generations of what we left for them. It reads:

WARNING 
DO NOT ENTER

This fenced area was the site 
of a chemical plant. The ground contains
chemicals which may be toxic or hazardous and
also contains low level radioactive  waste.
The area has been capped and secured.

TRESPASSING
STRICTLY PROHIBITED

This is a memoir about the first 16 years (1998-2013) of the Pine River Superfund Citizen Task Force in St. Louis, Michigan, just downstream from Alma. FLOW receives regular calls from Michiganders who want more effective cleanup of toxic contamination than they’re getting from the companies and agencies responsible. The same corporate greed and reckless disregard for human life are playing out in communities across the country and around the world. Keon, who led the local fight for environmental justice in Gratiot County, writes with the moral clarity and righteous anger that this moment demands. She also writes about hopelessness.

When I read the announcement in our local newspaper that EPA would meet with the public to discuss the levels of DDT found in the sediment of the Pine River, it seemed pointless to go. The EPA would do whatever it decided to do, no matter what people in the community said. That had been our past experience in dealing with (EPA) when Velsicol Chemical Corporation quit production in 1978 and was allowed to leave town without cleaning up the river.

This book is about not only St. Louis, but the insidious ways pollution seeps into the fabric of a community, how it erodes not just the health of the land and its people, but also the bonds of trust and the sense of shared responsibility that hold a society together. Keon shows us how the powerful – corporations and the politicians who submit to their demands – use fear, misinformation, and most of all endless delay to divide communities and prevent meaningful action, as toxins accumulate in soil and water.

The details of DDT poisoning and radioactive leakage are stark and unsettling. We see the robins dying on the lawns, their bodies riddled with toxins, and we feel the grief of a community witnessing the slow poisoning of its own nest.

It’s not a perfect book, and Keon isn’t a perfect person. She describes personal squabbles and turf fights among allies, the sort of internal politics anyone who’s been part of an advocacy campaign can describe in painful detail. This is the hardest part of grassroots activism: fighting your own side. It’s demoralizing, self-defeating, and one hundred percent part of the drill. Knowing that it’s unavoidable doesn’t make it easier.

But despite the community’s predictable setbacks, Tombstone Town is a story about successful resistance. The courage of ordinary people who refuse to be silenced, who stand up to the polluters and demand a better future for their children, will always be inspiring. Keon and her neighbors in and around St. Louis organized, educated themselves, and fought back. They understood that the fight for environmental justice is not just local but global, with the fate of future generations at stake.

Tombstone Town is part of a genre of books and films about grassroots fights against toxic contamination, from A Civil Action by Jonathan Harr to Wastelands by Corbin Addison and the film Erin Brockovich, reminders that we’re not powerless in the face of environmental destruction. We can organize, we can resist, and we can demand and accomplish change. For all of us who believe that a just and sustainable future is

still possible and care about the health of our planet and the future of our communities, Tombstone Town is a handbook.

Keon’s call to action also evokes the public trust doctrine, FLOW’s guiding principle.

We’re all stewards of this earth, responsible for its well-being and our own. Anyone who has ever felt a deep connection to a place, who has witnessed the destruction of the natural world, and who dares hope for a better future will find resonance here. In the spirit of Wendell Berry, Keon reminds us that the fight for the land is a fight for our own souls, a fight for the very essence of what it means to be human.

And let’s be clear: this is not just about saving the planet. It’s about saving ourselves. As Keon so eloquently reminds us, we’re all connected – to the land, each other, and the generations after us. We have a moral obligation to leave them a healthy, just world. Tombstone Town shows us that the fight is worthwhile.


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