by Lisa Arkin

Lane County is lush with fir and pine forests. From the top of the Cascade Range all the way to the shores of the Pacific Ocean, private timber companies log their own extensive acreage and seek out business arrangements that give them logging rights to more acreage on both public and private lands. These companies–Weyerhaeuser, Rosboro, Seneca Jones, Frontier Resources LLC, Guistina, Georgia–Pacific, and others–are the Who's Who of Oregon timber industry. They are involved in the wood products industry from start to finish, from the clear cut of trees to the production of paper, plywood and particle board at their mills.

In response to logging practices, area environmental activists and local residents have mounted visible campaigns to keep roadless areas pristine, protect the spotted owl and the salmon, save old growth forests and expose the risk of mudslides from denuded hillsides. Now we can add to that list work to disclose and prevent toxic chemical sprays from contaminating the water and poisoning residents.

While advocacy topics like clearcutting and protecting endangered species are familiar to Oregonians, one aspect of logging lingers in the background because it is harder to see and document it. Lane County is drowning in massive amounts of herbicide spray that are applied on millions of acres of clear cut land.

Some rural homeowners, used to enjoying the solitude of the country, may find that their country havens look more like a war zone once the land has been logged and sprayed. Additionally, Lane County's reputation as a place to grow wine grapes is also expanding. Some clear cuts that are not sprayed for reforestation may be converted to vineyards, resulting in the intensive use of herbicides and pesticides.
Oregon Toxics Alliance (OTA) challenges the root causes of toxic pollution by empowering Lane County residents to actively protect themselves and their communities from the impact of pesticide sprays. The sheer size of Lane County–roughly equal to the state of Connecticut–and its maze of mountains and valleys leave rural dwellers feeling geographically isolated and abandoned by mainstream environmental campaigns. Oregon Toxics Alliance staff has engaged in conversations and meetings with people who feel their suffering from pesticide contact will remain with them, and their families, the rest of their lives.

Dina (names have been changed to respect people's privacy) was repeatedly exposed to herbicides when she lived with her husband and son near the small town of Crow, in western Lane County. She described her experience with tears in her eyes. “A person doesn't know how horrible it is… The spray totally burned me–I was on fire, my head, my legs, my arms. There were eruptions all over my body. I tied a hankie over my face and tried to find my animals and get fresh air. I hit a wall of chemical-it was like pudding. The spray was so thick you could cut it with a knife.”

Dina's symptoms are typical of the health effects from pesticide exposure that are reported by the Oregon Department of Health. Although Dina doesn't know exactly what was being sprayed, her symptoms are consistent with exposure to organophosphates and carbamates, two common classes of pesticide used in Oregon. These chemicals can cause intense dermatological reactions and irritation of the respiratory system and eyes, as well as chronic diseases such as cancer, immunological impairment, and asthma.
OTA receives three or four phone calls a month from people suffering from chemical exposure. Most of the time, people are poisoned in their own homes by drift from aerial pesticides spray. Because it is their own home, people have nowhere else to go. Often they are unaware that their home won't protect them from the serious impacts of repeated exposures to herbicides. After all, these are chemicals designed to destroy living organisms. But a strong culture of property rights and privacy values in Oregon lull rural folks into keeping their worries to themselves.

Oregon's economy is based on extensive forestry and agricultural operations that rely heavily on the use of pesticides. Oregon Toxics Alliance has seen that behind every industrial farm or forestry operation stands a cadre of lobbyists representing fertilizer, pesticides or industrial chemical interests. Few legislators have stepped up to confront those state agencies whose responsibility it is to protect the public's health but instead are beholden to the special interest industries that profit from avoiding oversight.

The laws in Oregon protect farmers from public inquiries into their chemical practices rather than protect residents (or streams or threatened species for that matter) from chemical exposures. The Department of Forestry will provide some spray information, if you know what tax lots to ask for and are willing to pay a fee of $5 per square mile for the information.

It suits the agricultural and forestry industry to keep things under wraps because it allows them to quietly run tests on new formulations of pesticides, use conventional chemical solutions rather than sustainable solutions to weed problems, and keep their labor costs down.
Furthermore, industry has successfully discouraged government studies into the health effects of pesticide exposure for the people of rural Oregon. Although OTA has received numerous anecdotal reports of increased incidences of breast cancer, miscarriage, and birth deformities from our rural contacts, the Oregon Department of Health claims that it is impossible to make valid statistical associations between long term chemical exposure and health problems.

Wanting to support gutsy acts of resistance and do all that we can to challenge toxic pollution in this state, OTA is partnering with rural forestland dwellers. The stories of impacted residents help to shine a light on terribly harmful uses of pesticides and address archaic chemical policies. OTA staunchly believes that we can reform laws by assisting local communities to use their personal experiences to confront local environmental and public health threats.

Despite the rampant suffering, citizen activism is difficult to cultivate in rural Lane County. Herbicide issues are tied to economic factors-people are beholden to timber or agriculture for their jobs. Also, when a timber company is your neighbor and they own lots of chemicals and equipment, folks tell us that they feel reluctant to get involved.

One rural organizer, Linda, who has been documenting forestry sprays in western Lane County for over five years, told us, “The people I know are afraid to talk. They're afraid they won't be believed. Or worse yet, they've witnessed strange events like fires that demolished a family's home or chemical contamination of a person's well water after people have spoken up. And if someone ever needs to sell their property to get out, they would have to disclose knowledge about chemical contamination. That would essentially decimate the local property values and make the rest of neighbors hopping mad.”
Fear, intimidation and the lack of scientific corroboration aren't the only hurdles to overcome when building a grassroots resistance movement amongst communities facing toxic threats. A more debilitating obstacle is helping those people who, because of chronic illness and a weakened immune system, have lost the stamina to be reliable activist partners.

Common symptoms of pesticides poisoning include utter fatigue, chronic flu-like illness, hair loss, depression, and a keen and unrelenting chemical sensitivity. Annie, a resident of Deadwood, a town with a population of less than 500, had this insight: “People are embarrassed about medical difficulties. They feel like they are to blame because the American Cancer Society tells them it is a lifestyle issue — ‘you eat too much butter, you don't exercise enough, you have to get more mammograms.’ People don't like to chat about genital deformities or their child's learning disability.” Because of this, forestland dwellers often refer to themselves as the canaries in the coalmine.

A woman who received a direct hit of pesticides by a boom sprayer being used on the nearby vineyard reported, “They sprayed every three weeks, and I didn't realize that by hanging our clothes out on the line, or opening up our windows or eating from our ‘organic’ garden, we were being exposed over and over again.”

Three years ago, a group of residents in Western Lane County finally said they were literally sick, and very tired of the extent of herbicide use in neighboring areas. They formed Forestland Dwellers and began to make hand-colored maps of forestry sprays for some sections of rural Lane County. The mapping helped illustrate the vast extent of chemicals being dumped onto land shared by timber companies and families alike.

In addition to mapping, some residents also began to document first-hand accounts of illness. Yet they have had little luck getting a response from elected officials.
About two years ago, someone from Forestland Dwellers invited Oregon Toxics Alliance to join them in a self-proclaimed press conference on a Wednesday afternoon in the Lane County Administrative Building's free speech plaza. We talked to the six folks on the sidewalk about the problem of herbicide spray drifting onto the private property of rural homeowners. Their map work was so impressive and the story these forestland dwellers had to tell so gut-wrenching that it was inevitable that OTA agreed to work with them.

From that first auspicious press conference, the two groups have quickly moved forward to bring the citizens' resistance to chemical domination in our forestlands and farmlands to the forefront of the political discussion in Oregon. We are documenting threats to rural residents, threats to water rights, and the need for buffers zones to protect school children from herbicide drift off forestry lands. The potential for exposure to pesticide drift is undeniable.

For example, we have documented that during the last months of 2006, sprays of poisonous pesticides will occur less than one mile from six rural Lane County schools. We are engaging rural land owners in toxics right-to-know strategies and are forming spray notification networks. We are holding meetings with elected officials at the city, county and state levels. We are looking at the relationship of grass field and slash burning to levels of pesticides that are subsequently distributed into the airshed from such massive burns.

Equally important, we are tackling the isolation felt by rural dwellers who are faced with activities (over which they have no control) that threatened their health, their property and their livelihood. The folks in Deadwood summed it best:
Our land-grant universities, the Oregon Department of Forestry, Board of Forestry, and the lobby groups of the timber interests are complicit in creating herbicide policies that have been used for the last 30 years that harm the land and the people. These are the institutions that are responsible for the pesticide practices that we have had to endure.

Activism in the face of toxic contamination is a tough calling. The people of rural Lane County are accepting the challenge and seeking alliances that can bring them out of the isolation of geographic separation and the loneliness of pervasive and chronic illness. As Annie, the woman from Deadwood said, “The thousands of Lane County people who have been impacted and now have health issue are unwilling victims in this. We will stand up and express our anger and pain about this.”

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Lisa Arkin is the Executive Director of Oregon Toxics Alliance, which received a grant from Resist this year. For more information, contact OTA, PO Box 1106, Eugene OR 97440; www.oregontoxics.org.