This audio interview with award-winning activist Carol Van Strum and Community Environmental Legal Defense Fund (CELDF) organizer Kai Huschke can be listened to on Jefferson Public Radio’s website. Listen to the 22 minute interview HERE.
A guest commentary by Community Rights US’s Curt Hubatch: Carol Van Strum’s extraordiary and award-winning actions as a public citizen started, she says, by an event. An event that many people, more than we would probably like to imagine experience, but think they lack the power to do anything about.
Carol, her family, the land she lives on, and the nonhuman creatures that live there were sprayed with agent orange. To make matters worse they were told it was harmless by those one would normally go to for help in our so-called democratic system. She quickly learned what the system is actually set up for to protect. Since then she’s been a fierce fighter in protecting her community from being poisoned. This 22 minute interview gives the listener insight into what turns people like Carol Van Strum into fierce fighters against corporate and government harms like aerial pesticide spraying.
In a sane society people like her wouldn’t be laughed at and demonized, but cherished and revered for their heroic actions in the face of what to many look as “it’s just the way things are.”
Carol Van Strum is not fond of pesticides. And that may be the understatement of a lifetime.
Van Strum fought the aerial spraying of pesticides on federal land in Lincoln County back in the 70s, and she’s continued the fight up to the present day.
Her work earned her the ire of the timber industry, and the recent awarding of a lifetime achievement award from the Public Interest Environmental Law Conference in Eugene.
She visits to talk about her efforts through the years. MORE…