interview with WholeCommunity.news, May 9, 2024

I'm Mark Robinowitz, an advocate against herbicides since the 1980s, first in relation to organic food and agriculture. Since moving to Oregon a quarter century ago I've been vocal about aerial herbicides over corporate clearcuts.

This weekend the group Oregon Wild is having 50th anniversary celebrations in Portland and Eugene. While I once celebrated their work to protect the remaining intact native old growth forests of cascadia, it's been sad to see their slow decline, culminating in an outrageous sellout deal they and a dozen other groups made with big timber in february 2020 to acquiesce to continued aerial herbiciding over corporate clearcuts. The Private Forest Accord was negotiated in such secrecy that not even all their employees knew what was going on, the one who lived in the rural coast range — next to aerial spray operations - quit in disgust when he saw what his bosses had agreed to. Since 2020, it's been difficult to find anyone who hasn't been paid to have an opinion for this deal — most environmentalists who do not work for these groups have had little to zero understanding of what was agreed to, and most are shocked when they learn about it. I did hear of a friend of a friend who thought the deal was positive, but he was very elderly, not focused on the details — apparently he liked the work that Oregon Wild did in its earlier, better days when it was the Oregon Natural Resources Council and his view was anything they support must be good. The gap between image and substance enables a lot of toxic politics, not just with environmental groups undermining their goals in pursuit of the myth of reasonableness and accommodation to power.

This story is a sad example of how efforts to protect ecology and public health can degrade over the decades, especially as public relations become more important than actual accomplishment.

Oregon Wild was formed as a courageous effort to protect the last old growth, a rare ecosystem that has some of the highest biomass density on the planet. Unfortunately political success, compromise, the need for continued funding and "collaboration" with the political party that runs Oregon has neutered this effort to the point the group — in alliance with a dozen others — made a grotesque example of "activist malpractice" by surrendering to the timber companies that have been liquidating forests and then wrecking biodiversity and health by spraying them with herbicides.

www.oregonmild.org links to more background about the forest accord.

Public vs. Private forestlands Oregon's forests are roughly divided between publicly owned and private lands. Most of the public forests are federally managed -- US Forest Service, with a minority run by the US Bureau of Land Management. State and local governments have a few percent of the total. Private forests are mostly owned by timber companies; the largest is Weyerhauser, which controls over a million acres. The remaining old growth forest is on the public lands, and nearly all environmentalist scrutiny focuses on those, but the majority of the logging -- and ALL of the aerial herbiciding -- is on the private, corporate forestland. Environmental groups have finally started to mention that deforestation causes climate change, but rarely hint that mitigating the damage would require allowing clearcut industrial forestland to grow back into old forest to sequester carbon and restore hydrology.

This article has four major sections:

• a background on aerial spraying of herbicides
• how spraying could be avoided through selective forestry instead of clearcuts
• more about the environmentalist deal with big timber
• and finally, examples of how more democracy and inclusion by these groups could result in authentic accomplishments that benefit human health and wildlands.
  

The abuse of aerial spraying of herbicides has been underway over Oregon forests for a half century. This started with spraying of Agent Orange, the notorious defoliant used in Vietnam to denude landscapes to make it easier for the US Air Force to target North Vietnamese soldiers and destroy crops as a population denial tactic. Agent Orange was a 50-50 mix of 2,4-dichlorophenoxyacetic acid and 2,4,5-trichlorophenoxyacetic acid.

In the 1970s and 1980s there arose significant citizens movements to end this abuse in Oregon that eventually achieved a ban on aerial herbiciding federal forests, specifically the Siuslaw National Forest in the coast range. This ban didn't apply to corporate owned clearcuts made by Weyerhauser, Roseburg, Seneca and the rest.

More recently, there has been a nascent movement to ban spraying over so-called industrial forestlands — where most of the logging and all of the herbiciding happens. Lane County has had several efforts, some in response to downwinder communities being exposed to the drift. Triangle Lake a decade ago. Eastern Lane county. The South Hills of Eugene. Cottage Grove. Southern Oregon. Several communities on the coast. This is not a complete list.

Some timber companies have been willing to tell their neighbors about their spray plans so that people can flee their homes to reduce their contamination. Others have ignored requests to at least disclose when spraying was about to happen.

Carol Van Strum, author of A Bitter Fog is probably the leading aerial spray opponent. She lives in the coast range near Waldport.

Barbara Kelley lived in rural Lane County, she was part of the first generation of aerial herbicide opponents. Her family farm got downwind spray drift which sickened her animals (and her kids).

I met her in 2002 during my involvement in the successful effort to stop the West Eugene Porkway. She had been the leader of that in the 1980s and 1990s, but after getting a 1990 federal approval withdrawn, she moved to the Portland area to be near her daughter.

Barbara told me that 2,4,5-T was banned by the Carter administration because 2,4-D was more heavily used - and therefore less of a sacrifice to the chemical companies to ban it. 2,4-D is still for sale at nearly every hardware and garden store to this day. The difference between 2,4-D and 2,4,5-T is just one extra chlorine atom on the benzene rings (which are made from petroleum byproducts).

Chlorinated hydrocarbons like 2,4-D, 2,4,5-T, DDT — dichlorodiphenyltrichloroethane — are a part of a large family of persistent poisons that are a huge part of what we call toxic waste. The carbon chlorine bond isn't found naturally in humans and it is the building block for many of the most noxious compounds that we've created. Unfortunately, our regulatory system that has arisen since the start of the environmental era - around 1970 - claims we should treat these thousands of chemicals as individual problems even though as a CLASS of chemicals they are all roughly similar. Not identical, but similar enough that they can be lumped together.

This isn't the view of radical environmentalists trying to destroy capitalism - it was actually the recommendation of a conservative Republican who chaired the US Canada International Joint Commission on the Great Lakes in 1991, during the first George Bush administration. The chair, Gordon Durnil, had been the head of the Indiana Republican Party - not normally a position where people express environmental views - but he looked at the data of toxic harms and realized our control systems were totally inadequate to address these problems.

The herbicide that's gotten the most media attention is trade named Round-Up, the chemical name is glyphosate. It's also massively used, but it's not a chlorinated compound and not as persistent years after it is applied.

Chlorinated compounds also include pesticides, the byproducts of white paper production, various solvents, and of course, PVC. Poly Vinyl Chloride is the largest use of chlorine in the country - about a third, I think. Drinking water disinfection is only about a percent, it's a trivial use compared to PVC, bleached paper and biocides.

In the years just before Covid there were increasing grassroots efforts to stop aerial spraying, especially after notable incidents where downwinders were egregiously contaminated. Citizens in Triangle Lake, in the coast range northwest of Eugene, were found to have herbicides in their urine from aerial spraying near their homes. The state claimed it was going to remedy the problem but despite years of meetings never did anything meaningful.

In 2015, State Rep. Holvey, who represents part of Eugene and Lane County, introduced a bill to ban aerial spraying. It was short and to the point: "pesticides may not be applied by aircraft." I was surprised that I couldn't find any environmental group to support it. Oregon League of Conservation Voters. Beyond Toxics. Oregon Environmental Council … these and more refused to touch it. Maybe they knew it was unlikely to pass - and it didn't - but if you don't advocate for something the odds it will happen are even lower. And passing something positive in the legislature can take several sessions, coupled with building public support to pressure legislators to support it.

Instead, groups like Beyond Toxics promoted better regulation of the spraying, not banning it They called for a couple hundred foot buffer between aerial sprays and rural residences or schools even though aerial spray can drift downwind for miles - especially since the helicopter rotors are giant fans that blow the spray offsite.

Various downwinders, including myself, asked Beyond Toxics and their allied groups for years to explain why they supported only buffers and not a ban. I was told at one point that the group needed to have a board meeting to determine their view - as if anyone who didn't want an end to aerial spraying should be on their board!

A more radical approach was initiated by the "community rights" movement to introduce ballot initiatives to ban spraying on a county level. These were better approaches than requiring buffers, but lacked legality since they were local efforts to tell the state what not to do.

The Lane County group collected enough signatures to get on the ballot, but was blocked because a county initiative can't supersede state law - and aerial spraying on corporate timberlands is a state permitted activity.

Lincoln County, on the coast, had a similar initiative which passed - barely - in 2017. The timber industry sued to overturn it but while their suit was in front of a judge, no aerial spraying happened in that county. The judge ruled the initiative was invalid … since county law can't tell the state what to do, just like state law can't tell the federal government what to do.

Around that time, Portland based environmental groups like Oregon Wild announced they were going to run a statewide ballot measure to regulate spraying. Some places would be protected from spraying and some would not, based on a complicated formula of whether an area had municipal drinking water supplies.

An activist in southern Oregon on a rural family forest plot had their family's drinking water supply poisoned by adjacent forest herbicide use, which might not have been stopped by the Oregon Wild ballot measure.

Asking the sponsors of this effort why they didn't just copy the phase out that had been done on federal lands in the 1980s resulted in angry words, not coherent explanations of their narrow choice.

Nevertheless, by 2020 the timber industry was scared of the Oregon Wild ballot measure, realizing that environmentalists might actually get their act together and restrict their activities.

So big timber and the foundation funded enviro groups crafted a deal behind closed doors, the Private Forest Accord — which also involved Oregon Wild withdrawing their initiative. Announced in February 2020, the agreement involved 13 timber companies and 13 environmental groups, brought together by then Governor Kate Brown. No downwinders were invited to participate or even told about the deal during negotiations. The grassroots groups seeking to ban aerial spraying were also excluded.

The accord even included language to penalize citizens who object to aerial spray, using vague terminology. Would illegal objections be limited to physically blocking a spray operation, or peaceful protest, or a letter to the editor of a newspaper? Penalties started at a thousand dollars for the first objection, followed by an increase to five thousand for subsequent offenses - with the objector considered guilty until proven innocent.

The accord also included a long list of incremental improvements and changes to the way clearcuts are managed on corporate timberland, overseen by the Oregon Department of Forestry. A detailed description is beyond this discussion, but it was another missed opportunity rooted in cowardice, to be polite. Selective forestry in the long run can be better for forest ecosystems, yield better timber for products, keep forest canopies intact in order to avoid opening up the soil to full sunlight and winter rain. Keeping soil protected would prevent the problems of blackberries and other invasive overrunning clearcuts, thus avoiding the weed problems that aerial (and ground based) spraying try to address.

There are examples of selective forestry throughout the region, but they're mostly family based forestlands and in a couple cases, non profit organizations such as Center for Rural Livelihoods in Cottage Grove, formerly known as Aprovecho Research Center.

We also have the problem of exporting raw logs that aren't even milled in local faciliites, a classic resource extraction problem that accelerates deforestation and increases unemployment even while the timber barons divert attention to environmentalists supposedly causing these problems.

A book published in 2023, Ghost Forest by Greg King - gregkingwriter.com - is a superb discussion of how this deforestation impacted the last of the redwood forests to our south. He got the archives of the Save the Redwoods League, a group set up a century ago by the timber barons to protect redwoods from protection. Most of the groves that have been preserved in parks are isolated remnants or near Highway 101, a beauty strip for tourists to admire but the ecosystem is 95% gone. The League initially opposed establishment of Redwood National Park in the 1960s and then protection of Headwaters grove in the 1990s — a bill in 1994 to protect the largest remaining old growth plus lots of buffer forest, some small old groves and money to pay out of work loggers to undo some of the damage passed in the House of Representatives with about 300 votes, but failed in the Senate after Senator Diane Feinstein, the Clinton Gore administration, the League, Sierra Club and others failed to support it. A few years later, the administration needed an environmental victory so they coughed up much more money to buy Headwaters, but with minimal buffer and no effort to employ out of work loggers to do restoration.

The League is reportedly stung by some of this criticism and says they are more engaged in restoration in the second growth that has been purchased (not through the Headwaters deal) as buffer for some of the core State and National Parks conservation areas. It would be nice for Oregon Wild and the other co-signers of the Private Forest Accord to also make efforts to improve their advocacy, demand an end to aerial spraying of herbicides and shifts away from clearcutting on corporate land toward practices that are designed to be more resilient for the destabilized climate era we are entering, in part caused by massive deforestation.

A major divide in our society is the political and cultural gap between urban liberals and rural conservatives, a dichotomy that isn't going to subside even if Trump fails to get another term. A coalition effort between environmental groups and downwinder communities in the countryside might make small steps toward building bridges. I wonder if some of the reticence by the environmental groups is based on not wanting to ally with constituencies that aren't their preferred people, especially since some of the groups, like Beyond Toxics, do good work when the pollution problems are strictly urban.

Ending aerial spraying on a statewide level would likely not take massive funds to outspend the industry, but it would require organizational cohesion. There are lots of grassroots activists all over west side Oregon who want aerial spraying banned, but the paid and paid off groups would probably need to play a positive role, too. For better or worse they have the public profile, the money, the organizational history and the responsibility to act, mobilize their members. These groups agreed in their deal with industry not to object to spraying through the year 2027 - but there's no financial penalty or other obligation that keeps them tied to weyerhaeuser and rose burg forest products until them. Perhaps a deeper problem is that given the state of oregon's domination by the political party these groups identify with, they'd have to stand up to the governor and the legislature - which has codified this agreement into state law - in order to take the moral position that aerial spraying of herbicides is a human rights abuse and should be a felony.

 

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"Because without the rain forests, we're going to have deserts. The food supply will dwindle. As a matter of fact, there's even the possibility that we're going to lose all kinds of valuable substances we know nothing about. Those rain forests have an incredible number of species of plants and animals that we know very little about. Some of them may produce chemicals of great pharmacological and medical importance. If properly cultivated, some of the plants might be new food sources. In addition to that, nothing produces the oxygen of the atmosphere with the same intensity that a forest does. Anything that substitutes for it will be producing less oxygen. We're going to be destroying our atmosphere, too."
-- Isaac Asimov

 

We should never forget that everything Adolf Hitler did in Germany was "legal"
— Martin Luther King Jr., Letter from the Birmingham Jail

• grassroots environmentalists want to ban aerial spraying, but County level initiatives failed (local law cannot determine State policy)
• enviro groups promote unenforceable buffers: 300 feet (NCAP), 500 feet (Oregon Wild, Beyond Toxics, OLCV, KS Wild, Cascadia Wildlands, et al.), even though helicopter sprays can drift for miles downwind
• February 2020 agreement between 13 timber companies and 13 environmental groups calls for 300 foot spray buffers for homes and schools, downwinders excluded from their deal, groups acquiesce to continued clearcutting that causes climate change
• a coalition of paid, urban environmentalists and volunteer "community rights" downwinders might mobilize enough support for a STATEWIDE AERIAL SPRAY BAN, but both sides would have to change tactics

 

On par with a foreign attack

www.registerguard.com/opinion/20200216/on-par-with-foreign-attack

On Feb. 10, [2020] Oregon's environmental establishment announced a truce with timber companies, accepting continued aerial spraying of poison and clearcuts in exchange for vague promises about better regulation of the abuse.

Unfortunately, the agreement's details show it is not cooperation and dialogue, but rather capitulation by the environmentalists to continued clearcutting and toxic spraying.

Some Oregon timber companies have sprayed poison from helicopters for a half century, sickening people and contaminating wildlife. In the 1980s, public pressure forced federal forests to stop this abuse but it continues on corporate forests. 

The agreement withdraws proposed environmental ballot measures for a 500-foot buffer around schools and homes, a meek, unenforceable approach considering copter rotors can blow sprays for miles. It also promises that those downwind will be notified they are going to be poisoned, a parody of democratic participation.

A simpler, effective approach would ban aerial spray. In the 1970s, lead in the air was reduced by banning it from gasoline, not creating complicated categories of when it can be used. Prevention is the only solution to pollution.

If a foreign country sprayed these poisons over Oregon we would consider it an attack.

Mark Robinowitz, Eugene

 

prevention: the only solution to pollution

In the 1970s, some Oregon timber companies started spraying powerful herbicides from the air over their clearcuts. Agent Orange, a cancer causing poison used to defoliate jungles in Vietnam, was dumped over Oregon forests to kill plants that supposedly interfered with regrowth of conifers such as Douglas Fir. But it wasn't only blackberries and maple trees killed ... humans downwind and downstream also suffered.

Rural downwinders led efforts to ban this abuse and stopped sprays over federal forests in the 1980s, but were unsuccessful at ending this on corporate timberlands.

 

In the 2010s, a new round of efforts to stop aerial sprays made significant progress at public awareness, but without tangible results at ending this abuse.

Citizens in Triangle Lake (in the Coast Range west of Eugene), had their urine tested by out-of-state laboratories and were found to have 2,4-D (part of Agent Orange) in their bodies. State and federal officials traveled to this tiny community, attended public meetings and ultimately did nothing about the problem. Other downwinders in Gold Beach and Rockaway (on the coast) were similarly ignored by the government.

Some foundation funded environmental groups, most notably Beyond Toxics in Eugene, lobbied the state legislature for better regulations, but no changes were enacted despite Democratic control of the legislature and the Governor. If it had been Republican politicians who facilitated continued spraying it is likely the environmental groups would have objected loudly.

Curiously, a bill to ban aerial spraying - House Bill 3123 - received no support from Democratic Party allied groups such as Beyond Toxics, Oregon Wild, Oregon League of Conservation Voters, Oregon Sierra Club, et al.

In 2015, when 3123 was still active, I attended a OLCV update on their legislative efforts (held at a church in Eugene). I passed out copies of 3123 to attendees, which the OLCV staff considered disruptive, not a worthy effort to support. OLCV's guest of honor that evening was then State Senator Chris Edwards (D-Timber, Junction City). After the event, I spoke with Sen. Edwards about spraying concerns and he said he had recently been invited to watch an aerial spray operation. While observing, the wind changed direction and he suddenly was downwind and breathed in herbicide. His personal experience did not translate into political support to protect citizens from this "chemical trespass."

 

After that (predicted) failure, grassroots activists in Lincoln and Lane Counties filed ballot initiative measures to prohibit aerial spraying. Lincoln County's effort was narrowly passed by the voters, but an appeal filed by timber interests nullified this result. Under Oregon law, State regulations supercede local efforts, so a county only effort cannot alter state policies.

Lane County's initiative gathered enough signatures to get on the ballot, but the courts blocked it from being voted on due to the local - state obstacles. Lane County's Commissioners declined to let it get on the ballot - and also refused to take a stand. In contrast, the County Commissioners voted 5 to 0 to urge an end to field burning in the Willamette Valley, which helped curtail that practice. Even the conservative Republicans on the Commission supported an end to being downwind. Unfortunately, the fact the timber industry has much more political and economic power than grass seed growers detered the County from saying it is past time to stop spraying.

The Lane County effort was sponsored by Freedom from Aerial Herbicides Alliance www.freedomfromaerialherbicides.org

 

for further reading:

https://theintercept.com/2017/07/26/chemical-industry-herbicide-poison-papers/
100,000 Pages of Chemical Industry Secrets Gathered Dust in an Oregon Barn for Decades -- Until Now
by Sharon Lerner, July 26, 2017

profile of Carol Van Strum, who has worked for decades to end the abuse of helicopter herbicides

 

ODF does not enforce existing stream protections, how could they enforce new (and inadequate) spray buffers?

corporate clearcut on state highway 34, just west of the ODF Philomath ODF office. photo taken while standing in the highway.

There is (or was) a stream here, the buffer requirement was not enforced. The leave tree requirement of two trees per acre was ignored, without consequence. Two trees left per acre is woefully too low for any meaningful ecological value, but the clearcutters could not even bother to meet that low legal standard.

Note that this violation was not miles down a logging road, past a locked gate. This view is directly from a major state highway connecting the Willamette Valley with the Oregon Coast. The idea that the 2020 deal between big timber and big green will result in meaningful enforcement of anything is dangerously naive at best, and duplicitous at worst. Plus, any seasoned advocate who has sought to have regulatory requirements enforced on violators understands that even well intentioned government regulators often have to choose between doing their job and keeping their job. Even good requirements to restrain pollution and habitat destruction are irrelevant if there is little enforcement.

Clearcutting forests increases desertification, we have known this since the days of ancient Greece. It's happening in Oregon but the decline in water supply takes longer than the political system can respond to it.

 

December 19, 2017 public comment to Lane County commissioners

In 1963, Martin luther King wrote in Letter from the Birmingham Jail:

We should never forget that everything Adolf Hitler did in Germany was "legal" and everything the Hungarian freedom fighters did in Hungary was "illegal." It was "illegal" to aid and comfort a Jew in Hitler's Germany. Even so, I am sure that, had I lived in Germany at the time, I would have aided and comforted my Jewish brothers.

Yesterday there was a tragic derailment of the Amtrak Cascades train, in Washington, on its very first revenue trip on the new route, killing and wounding passengers. This morning, I read in The London Guardian that the train was apparently speeding, 80 mph in a 30 mph zone.

Why mention this?

There are many examples of assuming that technologies are infallible, that dangerous consequences can be mitigated despite obvious hazards.

The combination of deforestation and defoliants is well understood to damage public health.

Aerial spraying of defoliants, perfected in vietnam, has now impacted every corner of our county, with toxic impacts.

The federal forests stopped this practice three decades ago. the Siuslaw National Forest, in particular, has been able to function without dumping 2,4-dichlorophenoxyacetic acid.

it is astonishing that it is still legal to dump tons of poisons over our heads. Instead of micromanaging measures to outlaw this abuse, the county should be taking all possible steps to make this assault a felony

Our 18th century legal system does not recognize delayed casualty.

if the helicopters were firing bullets, the violence would be recognized for what it is

but if the copter is assaulting people with weapons that take years to kill, the legal system pretends that this is not what it is

If North Korea was flying helicopters over Oregon, spraying carcinogens, we might consider this an act of war.

Dante "The hottest place in Hell is reserved for those who in time of crisis remain neutral"

Forestry can be done without using chemicals that cause cancer, birth defects and other damage. But this also requires shifting from clearcut obliteration to selective forestry that maintains the canopy. there are a few examples of this in our county but they are done by individuals, families and non profit organizations. More jobs are created when there are value added products. According to the Atlas of Oregon, the value of the furniture industry in our state is less than the cost of the most recent ramp addition to the Beltline I-5 interchange. Converting forests to tree farms has reduced the long term potention of wood products, just as happened in the Appalachians a century ago and in the Middle East two thousand years ago. That deforestation exacerbated desertification, a root of the conflicts there today.

Lane County contains forests that have some of the highest density of biomass per hectare on the planet. These primeval forests grew to their densities without needing chlorinated herbicides or synthetic fertilizers. An amendment to the Lane County code, from 1980 if I recall correctly, noted that old forests are the least flammable land use, more resilient than young forests or shrubs. But the most important reason to protect forest integrity was articulated by science writer Isaac Asimov:

ASIMOV: Because without the rain forests, we're going to have deserts. The food supply will dwindle. As a matter of fact, there's even the possibility that we're going to lose all kinds of valuable substances we know nothing about. Those rain forests have an incredible number of species of plants and animals that we know very little about. Some of them may produce chemicals of great pharmacological and medical importance. If properly cultivated, some of the plants might be new food sources. In addition to that, nothing produces the oxygen of the atmosphere with the same intensity that a forest does. Anything that substitutes for it will be producing less oxygen. We're going to be destroying our atmosphere, too.

In conclusion, some people don't know that air grows on trees. Forests are the lungs of the Earth. Carcinogens don't care about political philosophies. Nature bats last.

 

From: Mark Robinowitz
Date: December 18, 2017 9:28 PM : Dec 18
To: Pat Farr, Gary Williams, Sid Leiken, Jay Bozievich, SORENSON Pete

Subject: Lane County Commissioners: support public health of citizens, not cancer causing chemicals

Dear Commissioners:

55 years after the publication of Silent Spring, it is astonishing that it is still "legal" to spray tons of poison from helicopters over Oregon forests. Dumping biocides such as 2,4-D into our air and water is random assault that leads to sickness and premature death, but our 18th century legal system doesn't recognize delayed casualty, which allows the crime to continue into the 21st century.

The Nuremberg Code on human experimentation, enacted by the US government after the Holocaust, prohibits forcing people to participate in involuntary experiments. People have the right not to be sprayed by timber barons, even if the kings of these corporations have unquestioned political power and a lot of money in their banks. Causing death by chemical induced cancer is a crime like bullets or any other form of murder. I have already had a minor form of cancer (basal cell) and do not consent to being forced to breathe timber company carcinogens sprayed upwind.

Agent Orange is a 50-50 mix of 2,4-dichlorophenoxyacetic acid and 2,4,5-trichlorophenoxyacetic acid. During the Carter administration, 2,4,5-T was banned, but its close cousin 2,4-D remained legal for further dispersal. These two compounds only differ by one extra chlorine atom on the benzene rings that are the basic building block of this compound and both have essentially the same toxic impact on mammals.

During the Bush the First administration, Gordon Durnil, the former chair of the Indiana Republican Party (ie. a friend of Dan Quayle), was appointed to the US - Canada International Joint Commission on the Great Lakes. Durnil looked at the evidence about toxic chemicals in that bioregion, where a quarter of the US chemical industry is concentrated. Women who eat fish from the Great Lakes (the single largest source of fresh water on Earth) have children with more developmental disabilities than women who do not eat them. Durnil concluded the environmental regulatory system had failed and the precautionary principle (not "regulating the impact") should be used. Since there is no way to test for the synergistic impact of all of the synthetic poisons in commerce, treating chemicals as classes of compounds instead of individual chemicals would be more useful. Rather than spend centuries to study each chemical one by one, classes of toxic chemicals should be banned before further harm is done, starting with industrial use of chlorine. Durnil was an honest conservative, which is a highly endangered species in American political habitats.

The chlorine-carbon bond is not naturally found in mammals and is the root of much of what we call toxic waste. A third of industrial chlorine is used for PVC plastic, made by boiling oil byproducts with chlorine gas. About a sixth is used to bleach paper even though annual plants can be used instead of trees to prevent pollution. Chlorinated solvents and biocides each use under a tenth of chlorine. Only about one percent of chlorine is used to treat drinking water -- four times more is used to chlorinate our excrement before it is dumped into rivers. All of these uses have safer alternatives, but switching would be an admission a mistake was made.

If there was rationality in the design and enforcement of the Oregon Forest Practices Act, it would be illegal to clearcut on corporate timberlands and it would be a felony to use a helicopter to spray chlorinated herbicides over communities. Selective forestry makes more board feet in the long run and does not convert forests into tree farms that get overrun with blackberries and Scotch broom. Short term cut and run deforestation is at the root of the decline of Oregon's timber industry and has ruined many other parts of the world, most notably the Mediterranean societies still coping with the consequences of deforestation two millennia ago. The fact that the Oregon Department of so-called Forestry allows clearcutters to violate requirements for stream buffers and leave trees -- even when the clearcut is next to a major highway -- suggests the promise of regulation of toxic sprays is a cruel farce.

Allowing helicopters to spray chlorinated hydrocarbons over Oregon is a crime of random assault, a violation of basic human rights. The fact that both political parties promote this abuse is a reason I am neither a Republicrat nor a Demican and I look forward to continued decline of public support for both flavors of corporate controlled politics.

Mark Robinowitz

www.forestclimate.org: Clearcutting the Climate - Forest Biofuels - Restoration

www.sustaineugene.org: Green Eugene or Greenwash? Big Steps to Sincere Sustainability

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from 2015:

Helicopter Herbicide Spray: to ban or not to ban?

Downwinders need helicopter herbicides stopped
Precautionary Principle — not the illusion of regulation
BAN helicopter herbicides: drift blows downwind for miles
Four decades of spraying: it's past time to stop the abuse

For four decades, downwinder communities have tried to stop helicopter spraying of herbicides over corporate clearcuts. (National Forest & BLM spraying was stopped in 1989.) Two bills in the 2015 Oregon legislature mention this.

A bill promoted by Beyond Toxics would allow the spraying to continue, although with modest buffers for these sprays. Helicopter rotors can blow the poison for miles and the State Dept. of Forestry rarely enforces existing regulations about “leave trees” in clearcuts. It also would require record keeping of the spraying.

After some downwinders complained that this bill would not prevent poisoning, a second bill was introduced that would ban aerial spraying — House Bill 3123. Unfortunately, the environmental groups promoting the "better buffers" bill are not supporting the bill to ban the spraying.

Banning toxic abuses has been more successful for protecting public health than regulations. Air pollution from lead was reduced by banning it as a gasoline additive, not by permits to permit pollution.

— Mark Robinowitz

 

From: Mark Robinowitz
Date: February 26, 2015
To: Paul Holvey, sen.chrisedwards@state.or.us, Sen Prozanski, "Rep. Phil Barnhart"
Cc: Lisa Arkin <larkin@beyondtoxics.org>, christy@olcv.org
Subject: 'cide committee composition consideration

Dear Representatives:

A ban on the abuse of helicopter herbicides is orders of magnitude preferable to having another committee to study something that does not need further studies.

However, if you fail to ban the sprays this session and create a panel to study the obvious, I recommend at a minimum:

-- ensuring that rural citizens who are downwinders are well represented on the panel. Blachley, Triangle Lake and other sprayees should have their concerns front and center in any discussion. Those who were proved to have timber company poisons in their urine should be given special priority for participation. If all views are to be heard, then those who have been on the front line of the abuse deserve to participate, preferably with a stipend to cover their transportation costs from their locations to Salem (or wherever the meetings will be). Environmental justice principles mean that those who are enduring the worst impact need to be heard -- and protected from further abuse. Dumping poison into rural areas is just as wrong as targeting any other group. Perhaps the committee meetings could be in impacted communities, preferably directly along the property lines of clearcuts being sprayed. Suitable sites should not be hard to find.

-- medical experts need to be heard. Having cancer doctors and other health experts could lend an important perspective, since these are not mere academic concerns - people have been poisoned for decades. Perhaps a Vietnam veterans group familiar with the consequences of Agent Orange (2,4-D / 2,4,5,-T mix) could participate, too.

-- it's worth revisiting the history of what has worked, and what has not, regarding environmental protection over the past half century. One of my favorite examples is lead in the air, which was drastically reduced by making it illegal to add it to gasoline. It didn't have trading credits, regulatory restrictions, the rights to pollute -- a Federal law was enacted that banned the practice.

-- selective forestry that maintains the canopy does not convert forests into blackberry fields. Clearcutting is at the root of the helicopter herbicide problem. I don't expect the State of Oregon to ban corporate clearcuts, but if you want the nice rhetoric about climate change to be worth more than partisan votes, letting the tree farms grow back to forests would be a prerequisite. Deforestation disrupts the hydrologic cycle, something already happening on the West Coast. (Perhaps we could call it the "Brown Coast" if Washington State gets a Governor also named Brown.) This could include making the State Forests into State Parks, not pretending that we only need to protect a few "special places" while logging all of the rest. A quarter century ago, numerous advocates for the Amazon rainforest warned that the clearcutting could cause desertification, which has now happened. Sao Paolo, the largest city in Brazil, has FIVE PERCENT of its main drinking water reservoir filled right now and is likely to have severe water rationing in the near future. Our rainfall patterns are also being disrupted. Value added products that turn raw logs into useful things (furniture?) create more jobs per tree than exporting raw logs. Kitzhaber gave "carte blanche" to the timber barons to strip the forests, export raw logs, spray whatever they wanted, not pay stump taxes, use rivers as their sewers and have their heavy trucks stress our bridges.

-- it would be useful to know exactly how enforcement, and how many violations, have been found for corporate clearcutting and spraying. If one doesn't look, then no violations are going to be found.

-- A good compromise would be to halt the helicopter herbicides while the committee deliberates.

Organochlorine herbicide / biocide can bioaccumulate up the food chain. When absorbed into mammals it can stay in the body for years. Cancers are part of the consequence but there are many non-cancer effects to be concerned about, especially birth defects.

The Nuremberg Code on Human Experimentation prohibits forcing people to participate in involuntary human experimentation. This does not merely apply to the Nazis, it applies to everyone, including those who spray poison over people's homes. It does not say that it's fine for people to be notified they're going to be experimented on against their consent.

It's anyone's guess when oil rationing will finally arrive, a development that will probably make it difficult if not impossible to fuel these helicopters, but the Alaska Pipeline continues to drop toward "low flow" shutdown (when not enough oil will flow through the pipeline to keep the contents from freezing). Fracking in North Dakota is much less than the Alaska Pipeline was at its peak in 1988, and fracking is a short term bubble that is close to its peak now. We should be working on studies of how we are going to cope with the logistics of ensuring food in the grocery stores when oil rationing finally arrives instead of if or when to finally protect the public from aerial poisoning.

Respectfully,

Mark Robinowitz

downwinder in Lane County

 

From: Mark Robinowitz
Date: February 18, 2015
To: Sen Prozanski, Paul Holvey, Rep Barnhart
Cc: Lisa Arkin
Subject: I do not support SB 613 - the illusion of regulation - it should be illegal to spray poison from helicopters

Dear politicians:

I do not support SB 613, which would require slightly better notifications for people being poisoned by the timber barons.

Instead, I support the "precautionary principle" and prevention of harm - not better disclosure of this abuse.

I do not trust ODF to draft meaningful regulations given that they do not enforce existing regulations.

I have lost count of the number of corporate clearcuts I have seen without any "leave" trees. I don't support clearcutting (selective forestry is far better) but the ODF's failure to enforce leave tree requirements, even for clearcuts next to major state highways, suggests that the illusion of regulation means more promises of regulation are a bad joke.

Selective forestry does not convert forests into stumpfields that get swallowed up by blackberries and Scotch broom. I recommend taking the time to visit a forest near Lorane, on the Siuslaw River, that was managed by Curt Mitchell for about a quarter century. McKenzie River Trust has the conservation easement for this property, you could ask them for a tour. Mr. Mitchell cut the forest seven times over a quarter century, but did so very selectively. It had about 350 thousand board feet in 1976 and about 1,400 thousand board feet in 2001. You can barely tell it was ever cut if you visit it today. If he had ever clearcut it the forest would be just another monoculture tree farm. The adjacent BLM remnant old growth looks very similar to this managed forest (although it has larger diameter trees). If Weyerhauser, et al were required to respect their forests this way there would not be any alleged "need" to spray poison, especially from helicopters.

Helicopter sprays of herbicides can have drift for miles since the rotors ensure that precise deposition of the poison is impossible. Slightly better buffer requirements are a palliative, a public relations effort, not a serious effort to protect public health.

It should be a felony to spray 2,4-D and other carcinogens from helicopters.

The Nuremberg Code on Human Experimentation, which is federal law, states that people have a right not to be experimented on. I do not consent to breathing in sprays from Weyerhauser, Giustina, et al., and hope that this toothless bill is not enacted by the legislature. Instead, the legislature should prohibit these limited liability corporations from dumping poisons from the sky. Are there any politicians in Oregon who have the courage to say "NO" to the timber barons?

In 1992, NASA conducted a study comparing Oregon and the Amazonian state of Rondonia regarding deforestation. Oregon was found to be more deforested. That's not a contest we should be proud of winning.

I have already had a minor cancer and do not consent to having carcinogens sprayed upwind of my house.

Mark Robinowitz

downwinder in Lane County

www.freshplaza.com/article/121830/France-bans-aerial-spraying-of-pesticides

France bans aerial spraying of pesticides

 

www.reuters.com/article/2009/01/13/us-eu-pesticides-idUSTRE50C5GH20090113

EU assembly votes to ban toxic pesticides
by Jeremy Smith
January 13, 2009

 

www.europarl.europa.eu/sides/getDoc.do?language=EN&type=IM-PRESS&reference=20071019IPR11929

European Parliament votes at first reading on pesticides package
Environment - 25-10-2007 - 09:04
New EU legislation on pesticides was approved with amendments by the European Parliament at first reading on Tuesday 23 October. MEPs voted to ban aerial spraying with pesticides and to prohibit the use of pesticides in buffer zones round water courses. They also approved plans to ban or at least restrict pesticides in parks and sports grounds. However, they threw out proposals to divide the EU into three zones for the purposes of approving new pesticide products.

2020 lack of vision: "Private Forest Accord"

Memo of Understanding between environmental elite and big timber

On February 10, 2020, Oregon's environmental establishment announced a truce with timber companies, accepting continued clearcuts and aerial spraying of poison in exchange for vague promises about better regulation.

This will avoid dueling ballot measures this fall about logging and aerial spraying of herbicides.

Unfortunately, the agreement's details show it is not cooperation and dialogue, but rather capitulation by the environmentalists.

Some Oregon timber companies have sprayed poison from helicopters for a half century, sickening people and contaminating wildlife.  In the 1980s, public pressure forced federal forests to stop this abuse but it continues on corporate forests.  

The agreement withdraws proposed environmental ballot measures for a 500 foot buffer around schools and homes, a meek and unenforceable approach considering copter rotors can blow sprays for miles.  It also promises that downwinders will be notified they are going to be poisoned, a parody of democratic participation.

A simpler, effective approach would ban aerial spray.  In the 1970s, lead in the air was reduced by banning it from gasoline, not creating complicated categories of when it can be used. Prevention is the only solution to pollution.

If a foreign country sprayed these poisons over Oregon we would consider it an attack.

Mark Robinowitz

 

"I think one of the most important lessons that came out of our efforts is that there is no compromise unless there are equal advantages on both sides. Otherwise it's not compromise. What are activist giving up when they compromise? Nothing. What are the highway people getting? Everything they wanted. It's really important to understand this because people are always being asked to be reasonable. There is no such thing as being reasonable when somebody is putting your head on a chopping block. People are deceived all the time: "Let's get a few of you together and talk it over, we're all reasonable people." You are dead in the water if you buy that. Never go in small groups. Take everybody. Let everybody hear what the highway proponents are up to."
-- Angela Rooney, successful freeway fighter who stopped I-95 in Washington, D.C.

 

original posted at

www.beyondtoxics.org/wp-content/uploads/OregonStrategyMOU_Final_Executed_2-10-2020.pdf

oregonwild.org/sites/default/files/1-Uploads/Documents/MOU.pdf

(some of the numeric formatting didn't transfer, but the text is reproduced here)

 

---

Oregon timber companies, environmentalists
sign 'historic' pact

Please contact environmental participants in this deal to request they withdraw support for their agreement with Governor Brown and the timber industry, open dialogue with downwinders and others they excluded from this deal:

• support a ban on aerial spraying of poison instead of unenforceable buffers
• rescind their support for increased penalties for downwinders "intentionally interfering" with spraying
• oppose continued corporate clearcutting now that climate change is accelerating, including desertification and Douglas Fir dieoff in the Willamette Valley
• support selective forestry instead of cut and run deforestation

  www.youtube.com/watch?v=BXCUBVS4kfQ Bambi Meets Godzilla (a metaphor for unrepresentative groups negotiating with big polluters)

• support value added products and an end to raw log exports
• explain why they negotiated in secret with some of the region's biggest polluters, a process that resulted in a disastrous agreement from the perspectives of public health, pollution prevention, wildlife protection, democratic accountability.
• explain if they would accept their family being given three months notice that their home or their children's school was going to get sprayed with cancer causing poisons, and if not, why they agreed to requiring other people to experience the stress of becoming downwinders
• perhaps most important, these groups would benefit from asking their alleged members whether they prefer the promise of better regulation or an enforceable ban of aerial spraying.
  A dirty secret of most environmental groups is the lack of input from "members" who donate but are not invited to have input into organizational priorities.
• In over two decades of being concerned about aerial spray impacts to humans and other species, the only advocates for "buffers" I have met were working for foundation funded groups allied with the Democratic Party. In that time, the Democrats have controlled the Governorship in Oregon and most of the time controlled the State Senate and State House. Perhaps if Oregon was run by Republicans these "environmental" groups would support an end to the spraying instead of negotiating how much exposure to cancer causing poison is acceptable.
• Downwinders forced to breathe and drink residues spray operations want the abuse stopped. Period.

If you donate to these groups and support an end to aerial spraying of poison, please consider redirectiing your contributions. A few worthy alternatives would be increasing your family's home garden, supporting local farms through purchase of their produce, keeping the funds as a reserve for unexpected health care costs (something to consider in the era of corona virus and other public health crises), taking a permaculture training course or other practical efforts for community resilience.

Oregon Wild's Forest and Watershed Campaign Organizer Jason Gonzales quit immediately after this deal was made public (see "OR Wild staffer quit" tab above).

Roy Keene led old growth hikes at the Public Interest Environmental Law Conference for many years. He had a unique perspective on deforestation, a veteran of the timber industry forced out for opposing clearcutting. This was his last editorial before his death in 2021.

January 2, 2021 — Register Guard
Don't support token logging reforms
Roy Keene

Living in the heaviest logged county in Oregon, we rightfully debate logging, especially practices that impact publicly owned water and wildlife. Although assured by industry that large-scale logging is good for forests, many of us have seen enough of these practices to know better.

It's visually obvious that we're losing water quality and wildlife habitat to massive clear-cutting, erosion and insidious forest poisoning.

Senate Bill 1602 exonerates further industrial forest exploitation by legislating a few token logging reforms. Calling this act "a landmark bill," a timber industry lobbyist claimed in a Register-Guard opinion that "Oregon has been on the forefront of progressive forest management."

The truth is that Oregon's logging practices are woefully less progressive than its neighbors. As a widely traveled forest consultant, I've witnessed adjacent states doing far better to protect the public's entwined forest resources from degrading private forest practices.

In California, private logging operations are carefully planned by a registered forester and open for public commentary. These timber harvest plans generously protect all streams and springs from logging. In Oregon, only fish-bearing streams and domestic water sources are even minimally protected. In California, clear-cuts are restricted to 40 acres or less, a fraction of the huge 240 acre clear-cuts allowed in Oregon. In California, trees must be 50 years old before clear-cut with ample leave trees retained. In Oregon, trees of any age may be completely clear-cut, allowing entire watersheds to be stripped.

After 50 years of sustainable forest practices, California's private forest timber volume has increased 60% percent while Oregon has lost 40% of its timber volume through overharvesting. Large forest owners in California like Sierra Pacific profitably manage their lands while complying with distinctly more progressive forest practice rules. These rules conserve water, forest carbon and critical habitat while greatly reducing the supposed need for aerial spraying.

In seeking private forest reform, one would think Oregon's environmental groups would be enlightened by California's workable and more sustainable logging practices. Instead, 13 of these groups, with little real-world forestry experience, attempted to reinvent logging reforms with a complicated and costly initiative. The timber industry, alarmed by Lincoln County's conservative voters passing an initiative banning aerial spray, convinced environmentalists to waive further initiative attempts and seek a logging reform compromise with 12 logging-savvy industry groups. Their agreement resulted in a few minor reforms being quickly and nearly unanimously legislated as Senate Bill 1602.

This reform compromise allows landscape-scale clear-cuts and aerial pesticide spraying to continue with little change in Lane County's corporate forests, much of it up the already heavily logged McKenzie River. Though 15,000 Lane County voters signed an aerial spray ban initiative, none of us was consulted or considered by the 13 environmental groups before they agreed to timber industry's clever compromise. While the Portland compromisers drink safely from their protected Bull Run watershed, Eugene's citizens drink from an increasingly vulnerable McKenzie watershed.

Some of Lane County's largest and most visible environmental groups dismissed our watershed's health and Lane's voters, choosing instead to join and even promote this industry-extolled logging compromise. They don't deserve support any more than SB 1602's token reforms.

from Carol Van Strum: long time activist against aerial spraying

Op-ed piece for Oregonian: re: https://www.oregonlive.com/environment/2020/02/oregon-environmental-groups-timber-companies-strike-landmark-compromise-signaling-end-to-november-ballot-fight.html

Governor Brown touted the recent Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) between timber corporations and environmental groups as "historic" and "extraordinary." It is neither. The MOU simply dresses up the status quo in new clothes, offered as a giant pacifier to a public tired of lies and industry-generated controversy about poisons.

The MOU is in fact an empty and misleading promise that allows business as usual for years to come -- vast clearcutting, aerial poison spraying, road-making, and pollution of entire watersheds -- while opposing signatories "negotiate" unenforceable buffer zones and inadequate protections for endangered species. In return for agreeing to such hollow negotiations all signatories agree to withdraw and refrain from legislative petitions to protect their opposing interests.

Significantly, NONE of the signatories to this MOU represent those of us on the ground who are and have been directly affected by timber industry practices. The so-called environmental group signatories have in fact agreed to deny us -- Oregon communities and citizens directly affected by clear cuts and poison spraying -- ANY right to say no to being poisoned, to having our livelihoods threatened, our properties destroyed by clearcut-caused landslides, our ecosystems ravaged, etc. The timber industry, with state sanctioned approval, has denied us that right for many decades, but for allegedly environmental groups to sign our rights away without our consent is an unconscionable betrayal.

In the 1970s, my neighbors and I won what was truly an "historic" court victory against the U.S. Forest Service aerial spraying of Agent Orange poisons on our watersheds and homes, leading in further lawsuits to a halt of aerial poison spraying on all national forests and a total ban of two forest-use poisons. Despite our pleas, not a single so-called environmental group supported or approved our efforts back then -- we were on our own, as were others in the Northwest who eventually banded together as the Northwest Coalition for Alternatives to Pesticides [NCAP].

Since those historic events some 50 years ago, I have researched, written about, and litigated pesticide and timber issues nationwide, compiled in the huge Poison Papers and Columbia University Toxic Docs data bases (see e.g., https://theintercept.com/2017/07/26/chemical-industry-herbicide-poison-papers/). Much of that research has detailed the fraud and lies underlying all EPA approvals of the poisons used in forestry, which prompted the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals to rule that the U.S. Forest Service could not rely on EPA approval of such pesticides because no valid studies on their safety existed (to say nothing of the untested synergistic effects of poison mixtures commonly used in forestry).

There is therefore absolutely no excuse for state and timber industry use of such poisons, or for environmental groups to agree to continued exposure of us, our children, our land, our livestock, our wildlife, our water and ecosystems to what are legally defined as "economic poisons." Such commercialization of forests, watersheds, life and nature itself is responsible for the global catastrophe of climate change that the MOU signatories perpetuate with smoke-and-mirrors illusions of reform.

One illusion is the MOU's unenforceable buffer zones around schools and homes. These are a toxic joke, as aerially applied poisons drift, blow, and drain for miles. Were the MOU signatories truly interested in preventing further harmful exposures, they would have followed the U.S. Forest Service's example and stopped the vast strip-mined clearcuts that require aerial poison spraying to establish unhealthy commercial monocultures.

Contrary to the timber industry's dire predictions back in the '70s, the forests did not die, nor were 22,000 jobs lost without using Agent Orange on the national forest. The national forests today are thriving with healthy diversity. The only valid compromise between timber and "environmental" parties would be an immediate, unequivocal, environmentally and economically sound agreement to halt clearcutting and its requisite poison applications. For any alleged environmental group to agree to less is a profound betrayal of public and environmental health as well as basic human and natural rights.

Carol Van Strum
Tidewater, Oregon
Author of A Bitter Fog: Herbicides and Human Rights; No Margin of Safety; The Oreo File; and other works.

John Sundquist, organic farmer and long time activist against roadside poison spraying by Lane County

John Sundquist wrote:

Thanks for your letters shining light through the smoke
Yeah, what theater—almost everybody benefits—

--the Repubs are shocked  Big Timber is going to lock in guaranteed rights to deforest:

-- Gov Brown consolidates powers to rule by fiat and secret meetings

-- no more advance legislative agendas needed or whistleblowers and conflicts of interest ombudsmen, lost in committee;

—outmaneuvered Chosen Enviros get their names in the news

—Everybody gets to ignore deforestation, the greatest cause of climate, environmental and human health collapse in Oregon and the world.

—Oregon's biggest law firms get employment writing laws and rules and arguments for government on the one hand and gets paid suing the government based on the laws they wrote.

—everybody's waiting for the Feds to call to liquidate

—chemical deforestation keeps rolling unchecke

—poisoned citizens and whole communities backing minimal forestry poison reform get a free education in being sold out

 

 

Center for a Sustainable Economy, kept out of deal, points out problems:

https://sustainable-economy.org/protection-vs-process-cses-take-on-governor-browns-logging-deal/

PROTECTION VS. PROCESS:
CSE'S TAKE ON GOVERNOR KATE BROWN'S OREGON LOGGING DEAL

Regulate or End Human Rights Abuse?

Downwinders do not consent to being sprayed.

Allowing the state to designate supposedly acceptable buffers continues the abuse.

Drift from aerial spray invalidates claims it can be done safely.

---

www.eugeneweekly.com/20150219/news-briefs/bill-seeks-tighten-laws-chemical-sprays
comment from “spiralmom”

“People have the right to safety and health on their own property,” Arkin says. “The bill respects that.”

I'm sorry, this is a joke! They will still be spraying and buffer zones are a waste of all our time. We should stop asking for what we think we can get, which is what this bill is, and we need to start asking for what we WANT!! We want to END aerial spraying for good.

This bill is a compromise that citizens around Oregon are NOT willing to make, only the conventional environmental organizations are willing to make that compromise because it's not personal to them. Their children are not being affected by aerial spray 2-4 miles away!! The Board of Forestry TOOK AWAY THE BUFFERS back in the 90's and we're expecting them to reinstate "reasonable" buffers?? What a joke. And it's a shame that these environmental groups will dupe citizens into believing this legislation is a move in the right direction. In the long run, this will hurt the citizens of Oregon more than it will help.

BAN AERIAL SPRAYING of PESTICIDES!!! Our children deserve better!!

---

If there is no struggle, there is no progress. Those who profess to favor freedom, and yet deprecate agitation, are men who want crops without plowing up the ground, they want rain without thunder and lightning. They want the ocean without the awful roar of its many waters. This struggle may be a moral one; or it may be a physical one; or it may be both moral and physical, but it must be a struggle. Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did, and it never will. Find out just what people will submit to, and you have found out the exact amount of injustice and wrong which will be imposed upon them; and these will continue until they are resisted with either words or blows, or both. The limits of tyrants are proscribed by the endurance of those whom they oppress ... People might not get all that they work for in this world, but they must certainly work for all they get.
-- Frederick Douglass, freed slave and abolitionist, speech at Canandaigua, NY, August 4, 1857, partially reprinted in "Thoughts for All Times," Washington, DC: Frederick Douglass National Historical Site, 1990, p. 6

We are constantly being told about "a permissible amount of radiation." Who permitted it? Who has any right to permit it?
­ -- Dr. Albert Schweitzer

Thus, confronted by powerful corporate opposition, the environmental movement has split in two. The older national environmental organizations, in their Washington offices, have taken the soft path of negotiation, compromising with the corporations about how much pollution is acceptable ... The people living in the polluted communities have taken the hard path of confrontation ... The national organizations deal with the environmental disease by negotiating about the kind of "Band-Aid" to apply to it; the community groups deal with the disease by trying to prevent it.
­ -- Barry Commoner, "Making Peace With the Planet"

Compromise is often necessary, but it ought not to originate with environmental leaders. Our role is to hold fast to what we believe is right, to fight for it, to find allies, and to adduce all possible arguments for our cause. If we cannot find enough vigor in us or our friends to win, then let someone else propose the compromise, which we must then work hard to coax our way. We thus become a nucleus around which activists can build and function.
— David Brower, Earth Island Institute, Friends of the Earth, Sierra Club

At some point we must draw a line across the ground of our home and our being, drive a spear into the land, and say to the bulldozers, earthmovers, government and corporations, "thus far and no farther." If we do not, we shall later feel, instead of pride, the regret of Thoreau, that good but overly bookish man, who wrote, near the end of his life, "If I repent of anything it is likely to be my good behavior."
— Edward Abbey

These sprays, dusts, and aerosols are now applied almost universally to farms, gardens, forests, and homes -— nonselective chemicals that have the power to kill every insect, the "good" and the “bad,” to still the song of birds and the leaping of fish in the streams, to coat the leaves with a deadly film, and to linger on in soil -- all this though the intended target may be only a few weeds or insects.  Can anyone believe it is possible to lay down such a barrage of poisons on the surface of the earth without making it unfit for all life?  They should not be called "insecticides," but "biocides."
Along with the possibility of the extinction of mankind by nuclear war, the central problem of our age has therefore become the contamination of man's total environment with such substances of incredible potential for harm — substances that accumulate in the tissues of plants and animals and even penetrate the germ cells to shatter or alter the very material of heredity upon with the shape of the future depends.
— Rachel Carson, "Silent Spring"

"The whole fabric of society will go to wrack if we really lay hands of reform on our rotten institutions. From top to bottom the whole system is a fraud, all of us know it, laborers and capitalists alike, and all of us are consenting parties to it."
-- Henry Adams, American historian, 1838-1918

Cautious, careful people, always casting about to preserve their reputation and social standing, never can bring about reform. Those who are really in earnest must be willing to be anything or nothing in the world's estimation, and publicly and privately, in season and out, avow their sympathy with despised and persecuted ideas and their advocates, and bear the consequences.
-- Susan B. Anthony

My hardest fight as a performer has been with myself, to be as clear a conduit as possible for what needs to be said. That's the ongoing struggle. Get my ego and my brain out of the way and let this stuff happen.
— from "mouth that roared: Bruce Cockburn says he's not an activist but a concerned voice", Edmonton Sun, 27 March 2002, by Fish Griwkowsky.

Before he left California to take over the Wilderness Society, photographer and lifelong environmental activist Ansel Adams, who knew most of the players well, had warned him: 'You're about to go work with the biggest egos on the planet. They don't get paid much so the drive is ego, and the righteousness is self-righteousness,' Adams added, 'the worst kind.' Turnage says Adams foreboding proved accurate. 'I've never seen so much territoriality and rivalry. Some rivalry is healthy, but this was counterproductive." There were, however, some good meetings, 'although the organizations' staffs disliked each other so immensely it was hard to get them to collaborate on anything we decided to do together.'
— Mark Dowie, Losing Ground: American Environmentalism at the Close of the Twentieth Century, p. 69-70

I must confess that over the last few years I have been gravely disappointed with the white moderate. I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the Negro's great stumbling block in the stride toward freedom is not the White Citizen's Counciler or the Ku Klux Klanner, but the white moderate who is more devoted to "order" than to justice; who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice; who constantly says "I agree with you in the goal you seek, but I can't agree with your methods of direct action;" who paternalistically feels he can set the timetable for another man's freedom; who lives by the myth of time and who constantly advises the Negro to wait until a "more convenient season." Shallow understanding from people of goodwill is more frustrating than absolute misunderstanding from people of ill will. Lukewarm acceptance is much more bewildering than outright rejection.
— Martin Luther King, Jr., "Letter from the Birmingham Jail", April 16, 1963

 

Nuremberg Code on Human Experimentation

www.ushmm.org/research/doctors/Nuremberg_Code.htm

From Trials of War Criminals before the Nuremberg Military Tribunals under Control Council Law No. 10. Nuremberg, October 1946–April 1949. Washington, D.C.: U.S. G.P.O, 1949–1953.

The great weight of the evidence before us is to the effect that certain types of medical experiments on human beings, when kept within reasonably well-defined bounds, conform to the ethics of the medical profession generally. The protagonists of the practice of human experimentation justify their views on the basis that such experiments yield results for the good of society that are unprocurable by other methods or means of study. All agree, however, that certain basic principles must be observed in order to satisfy moral, ethical and legal concepts:

1. The voluntary consent of the human subject is absolutely essential. This means that the person involved should have legal capacity to give consent; should be so situated as to be able to exercise free power of choice, without the intervention of any element of force, fraud, deceit, duress, over-reaching, or other ulterior form of constraint or coercion; and should have sufficient knowledge and comprehension of the elements of the subject matter involved as to enable him to make an understanding and enlightened decision. This latter element requires that before the acceptance of an affirmative decision by the experimental subject there should be made known to him the nature, duration, and purpose of the experiment; the method and means by which it is to be conducted; all inconveniences and hazards reasonably to be expected; and the effects upon his health or person which may possibly come from his participation in the experiment. The duty and responsibility for ascertaining the quality of the consent rests upon each individual who initiates, directs or engages in the experiment. It is a personal duty and responsibility which may not be delegated to another with impunity.
2. The experiment should be such as to yield fruitful results for the good of society, unprocurable by other methods or means of study, and not random and unnecessary in nature.
3. The experiment should be so designed and based on the results of animal experimentation and a knowledge of the natural history of the disease or other problem under study that the anticipated results will justify the performance of the experiment.
4. The experiment should be so conducted as to avoid all unnecessary physical and mental suffering and injury.
5. No experiment should be conducted where there is an a priori reason to believe that death or disabling injury will occur; except, perhaps, in those experiments where the experimental physicians also serve as subjects.
6. The degree of risk to be taken should never exceed that determined by the humanitarian importance of the problem to be solved by the experiment.
7. Proper preparations should be made and adequate facilities provided to protect the experimental subject against even remote possibilities of injury, disability, or death.
8. The experiment should be conducted only by scientifically qualified persons. The highest degree of skill and care should be required through all stages of the experiment of those who conduct or engage in the experiment.
9. During the course of the experiment the human subject should be at liberty to bring the experiment to an end if he has reached the physical or mental state where continuation of the experiment seems to him to be impossible.
10. During the course of the experiment the scientist in charge must be prepared to terminate the experiment at any stage, if he has probably cause to believe, in the exercise of the good faith, superior skill and careful judgment required of him that a continuation of the experiment is likely to result in injury, disability, or death to the experimental subject.