This story about Carol Van Strum and her work with others fighting pesticide spraying in Lincoln County, Oregon was publish by the Community Environmental Legal Defense Fund (CELDF) on December 6th, 2018.
— It’s been 35 years since Carol Van Strum first published “A Bitter Fog,” the Christopher Award winning book telling the story of a “harmless” herbicide first sprayed over her family farm in 1975.
Her family members became ill. Farm animals and area wildlife died or gave birth to deformed offspring. Her Lincoln County, Oregon, neighbors had similar experiences, including frequent miscarriages of their own pregnancies.
Efforts to get answers as the casualties mounted were stymied by the timber companies, the herbicide makers, and federal agencies like the U.S. Forest Service, the USDA, and the EPA. Residents discovered they’d been sprayed with variations of Agent Orange – which Congress had ultimately banned for use in Viet Nam because of the health effects. That didn’t halt its use in Oregon, however, and while the government collected data on the effects of the chemicals on animals and humans, residents engaged in a decades-long battle to halt the practice.
They were partly successful, getting the U.S. Forest Service to halt aerial herbicide spraying in 1984. That ban did nothing to halt aerial spraying over corporately owned timberlands or state forests.
Ultimately, Van Strum and her neighbors began partnering with CELDF and realized there was a way to combat regulatory agencies that would and could do nothing to prevent any harm, since their job is to permit the harm, and simply limit the amount of harm that will be allowed. MORE…