Barney Lamm could make a heck of a shore lunch.

Flour-dusted pickerel fillets were fried in bacon fat, served up alongside pork and beans. Bannock would have been the standard supporting staple, but on this day, back in 1975, Swedish flatbread was served instead.

There was no campfire at hand, because rather than cooking up the shore lunch on a fishing trip from his Ball Lake Lodge, Lamm was cooking in Winnipeg, in the summer, where he should not have been.

That same summer, in August, a story appeared in People magazine under the headline, “In Canada, a Family Wages War Against a Threatened New Minimata.”

“Hell,” Lamm told reporter Sally Moore, “I didn’t even know what mercury was.”

In the spring of 1970, the Lamms — Barney and his wife, Marion — were notified that Ball Lake had been contaminated by effluent from the Dryden Chemicals plant 160 kilometres upstream. “That’s all we were told,” Lamm told People magazine, “not how dangerous it was to eat the fish or what we should do. They said the problem would disappear within three months. So we closed the camp and started asking, ‘What’s mercury?’ ”

It’s stunning that we are still talking abut this, but here we are. Star reporters Jayme Poisson and David Bruser have resurfaced the tragedy of Grassy Narrows, a four-decades-long catastrophe of government ineptitude and industrial waste mismanagement that traces the mercury contamination flowing through the English-Wabigoon River system and into Ball Lake.

It’s a faint bit of corporate history now, but the 1960s were years of intense consolidation in the pulp and paper industry, with British newspaper groups entwining with pulp and paper producers. The Reed Paper Group, based in the U.K. with operations in Australia, Norway, and Italy, announced in 1963 that it was switching some of its operations to lower-cost Canada. Through a series of Byzantine manoeuvres Reed represented the Daily Mirror Group, with its mass circulation dailies and 25 printing plants.

Through Dominion Tar, Argus Corp. purchased Howard Smith Paper Mills. We know that company now as Domtar, but its beginnings in the early 1900s lay in the extraction of coal tar, the byproducts of which included aniline dyes. In Toms RiverToms River, the Pulitzer Prize winning exposé of cancer-causing effluent from chemical dye plants in New Jersey, author Dan Fagin concludes that coal tar was, arguably, the first large-scale industrial waste.

Pulp and paper created its own environmental burdens, to which Barney Lamm, a millionaire bush pilot, was oblivious.

The chemical process of treating pulp requires both chlorine and sodium hydroxide, extracted from rock salt. As far back as the late 1800s, these chlor-alkali plants adopted an electrolytic extraction method in which mercury was the key element. These chemical plants would sit near the mills, creating industrial complexes that created gallons of contaminated waste water, which were meant to be contained and treated.

So, together, Dryden Paper and Dryden Chemicals, which had 60,000- and 90,000-gallon settling tanks for the mercury-contaminated effluent, was one of many operations feeding the hugely profitable newspaper industry of the 1960s. Between March 1962 and April 1970, Dryden Chemicals released untreated mercury-contaminated effluent back into the Wabigoon.

Bacteria converts mercury into methylmercury. Highly toxic, persistent and bioaccumulative, the methylmercury will concentrate in fish tissue, the very fish that made for livelihoods for commercial fishermen, the very fish that caused Barney Lamm, a man devoted to the north, to set up a fly-in camp and hire more than 70 Ojibwa from Grassy Narrows.

So Barney Lamm shut down his business.

It’s quite the story. He told People magazine that government officials were of zero help. “They had the results of testing fish for mercury but wouldn’t release them,” he said then.

In fact, 1970 was a late wake-up call for George Kerr, Ontario’s energy and resources minister. The presence of mercury had already been found in wastewater runoff to the St. Clair River from Dow Chemical’s chlor-alkali plant in Sarnia. In the spring of 1970, Kerr issued anti-pollution orders for six chlor-alkali plants, including Dryden’s.

Lamm took the more aggressive route. He sued Dryden Chemicals and its sister company Dryden Paper. Both companies were then owned by Reed Paper. Lamm also hired a Norwegian student to do his own testing, revealing highly elevated mercury counts in fish.

Some in the region saw their economic future threatened by Lamm going on the offence against Reed Paper and went on the offence against Lamm himself.

The Marion Lamm Mercury Collection, an archive of the Lamms efforts, is now housed at Harvard University. In the biographical précis, it says the Lamms and their daughters suffered “slanderous threats, accusations and taunts,” causing them to sell their Kenora house and move farther west.

In the fall of 1977 Barney Lamm was informed by the Kenora District Camp Owners Association that he had been removed as a director. “Barney, we feel your problem is with the polluter and if you seek litigation, we wish you well,” the letter said. “But bad publicity which you have helped to create is not in the best interest of KDCA and Northern Ontario.”

If Barney Lamm were alive today, he would say he had the best interests of the people of Grassy Narrows at heart. And the fish.

He died 14 years ago, almost to the day. What would he think upon hearing that the Grassy Narrows story is not yet fully told? It seemed only fitting, this Canada Day weekend, that we reread his chapter in it.