This article by Genevieve Belmaker appeared in Mongabay, March 14th, 2018.
Longtime environmental activist Carol Van Strum is now also the recipient of a prestigious environmental protection award for her decades of work. Strum was awarded the international David Brower Lifetime Achievement Award for outstanding environmental and social justice work on March 1, 2018.
Van Strum is the author of “A Bitter Fog,” which tells the story of the fight she helped lead against aerial spraying of Agent Orange and other herbicides in the Five Rivers, Oregon, area in the 1970s and ’80s. After a long legal battle, aerial pesticide spraying on federal forests was banned. Although the ban was rescinded, the work by Van Strum and others contributed to a new national forest policy that favors selective harvests without herbicides. She has also authored three other books and continued her activism and legal work in the defense of the environment.
Van Strum’s massive collection of documents showing fraudulent studies and false data used for poisonous industrial products was digitized and put online under the moniker of the Poison Papers.
Last year Van Strum got involved in another legal battle in to uphold the first American voter-approved ban on aerial pesticide spraying in Lincoln County, Oregon. The Lincoln County Community Rights group is up against a lawsuit from the timber industry to reverse the vote. Van Strum is supporting their efforts through the Community Environmental Legal Defense Fund.
Mongabay, where Van Strum previously worked as an editor, caught up with her by email. MORE…