Cynthia Hooper
The Last Mill
2017
Running time: 4 minutes
California’s last pulp mill stands at the center of Humboldt Bay, and remains this lovely and isolated region’s most conspicuous and majestic architectural feature. This mill has had at least seven different owners in its 50-year history, and in 2008 was abruptly and permanently shuttered during the last global downturn in the price of pulp for paper. Its final operator (the China-based company Lee & Man) left behind a legacy of industrial contamination not exclusively of its own making—including three million gallons of caustic chemicals, twenty thousand gallons of acids and corrosive sludge, along with PCBs, dioxins, lead, and asbestos both entombed in debris piles and under the ground. In 2013, the EPA came to the rescue and gave the site its Superfund status, so the worst of these toxins have since been removed.
The Humboldt Bay Harbor District (a local public agency) now owns the mill, and is working to restore it as a center for oyster culture, legal cannabis cultivation, wood pellet manufacture, and other value-added manufacturing scenarios to relocalize this region’s now largely outsourced economy. As a part of this effort, the mill’s stately old smoke stack will soon be demolished—an enduring and obdurate cenotaph for this region’s inexorably diminishing industrial era.