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TOM WHEELER:

Welcome to the Econews Report. I'm your host this week -- Tom Wheeler, executive director of EPIC, the Environmental Protection Information Center, and I'm joined by my co-executive director at the North Coast Environmental Center, Caroline Griffith. Hey Caroline.

CAROLINE GRIFFITH:

Hi, Tom.

WHEELER:

And we are joined by also a host of the show, but this time a guest of the show, the president of the North Coast Environmental Center and the executive director of SAFE, Safe Alternatives for our Forest Environments, a nonprofit environmental advocacy group based at Trinity County. It's Larry Glass. Hey, Larry.

And we are also joined by Patty Clary, the executive director of Californians for Alternatives to Toxics, which has my favorite acronym of all time. The only acronym that could be better than EPIC -- CATS. Cats are, if people know me, my absolute favorite animal. So Patty, great job on the acronym. Hey, and there's Larry's cat. All right.

So we are talking about pesticides, today and the reason why we're talking about pesticides is that Pacific Gas and Electric -- PG&E -- has come back into Humboldt County with a plan to spray around power poles that they maintain in the county. And this was a really big deal in my community. EPIC has its roots in the anti-herbicide movement in the late 1970s. And so a lot of EPIC old timers, a lot of a lot of current EPIC members, reached out to me and said: Holy smokes, this is awful. What are the environmental group's gonna do about this. And it's important to remember our past and all the work that has led up to this moment and all the collective knowledge that we have on how to deal with threats like this, because Humboldt County is one of the prime breeding grounds for effective advocacy around pesticides. Um, so I have two great friends here -- Patty Clary and Larry Glass, who are gonna help tell the story of the herbicide wars. Of the pesticide wars that existed from the 1970s to the present. So, welcome to you both. Um, if you want just a quick opportunity to kind of outline why or how you got into this particular area of environmental advocacy, uh, Patty, I'll start with you. What's your story? How did you arrive in this world?

PATTY CLARY:

Well, I had a different trajectory. I thought I was interested in getting a PhD in anthropology, social anthropology, community work. And instead, uh, I got sprayed with Agent Orange. I had two young children. We got sprayed three different times, which surprises people because people don't realize that that combination and pesticide was used in the United States on forests. This is the Bureau of Land Management. I was living in southern Oregon at the time. So I thought, well, I'll work on this for a while. I didn't mean to have it take over my entire life and become my career, etcetera. But it did just one thing led to another. You know, I moved back down here to California because to get away from that stuff and it was here too. So there was no running away. So I had to work. So here I am and many years later

WHEELER:

And approximately what year, if you can remember where you were, were you sprayed in southern Oregon?

CLARY:

1976 is the beginning, way back in the dark ages.

WHEELER:

And the only

CLARY:

way that we, the only way that I had connected it to spraying was because Mother Earth News magazine was a pretty big deal at the time and they had a really good expose in a letter. And so reading that is like bingo and there we go.

WHEELER:

And you know, this comes on the heels of Silent Spring. This comes on the heels of so many veterans coming back from Vietnam having experienced Agent Orange and starting to starting to develop symptoms from their exposure still, uh, many years later. So, uh, it was a fertile time to, to get involved. Larry, how did you come about pesticide advocacy?

LARRY GLASS:

Well, um, I had recently escaped from southern California and moved to northern calif. Yeah. And was living on the coast and I used to love to go over to Trinity County and my favorite spot over there in those days was a place called Denny, California. And um, there was a lot of back-to-the-landers and Vietnam vets living in the hills, back there on mining claims. I, I loved going back there when I wasn't working and hanging out back there. And one weekend I showed up out there and everybody was sick and you know, and telling me horror stories of how these army helicopters had flown over the area and sprayed everything. And everybody with chemicals and, and they weren't sure at that time what chemical it was we later found out is what Patty described. It was basically overstock from Vietnam that they brought back with him to the US and they started using it in the National Forest. And so a bunch of my friends that I had made back there got sick uh, and subsequent visits, I saw dead fish. I saw dead deer. Um, and the main uh, exposure route for people was in back. There wasn't necessarily getting the drift right on them, but they didn't realize it, but they were eating blackberries and whatnot that grew along the trails and they were getting ingesting it that way as well. So some people got the drift. Some people actually consumed plants and animals that had been sprayed. And so a lot of people got sick. That fired me up. I went to the North Coast Environmental Center and and where I had been in engaging with other issues with them about and then brought this to their attention attention and tried to get people fired up about it. And some people didn't quite get it because if you didn't live out in the woods, you didn't realize that there was helicopters flying overhead dumping these dangerous chemicals on everybody. And it was getting in the water that was getting into everybody. You know, even people who lived on the coast that didn't know about the spring, it was getting in the water

WHEELER:

and patty. Um I know that this isn't really your story to tell necessarily, but we have a shared friend who is no longer with us in genie McCovey. and I think a really interesting part of the larger narrative, the story here about pesticide advocacy is the tribal connection. You live out in hoopla. And I understand that there was a lot of tribal organizing work around uh around pesticides. Can you speak briefly about that kind of connection and what that brought to this community.

CLARY:

Right. Well, the interesting thing is when I actually got back to humboldt County, a ton of work had already been done by people by like Larry Glass and others on the forest spring. And so that and there was already a huge network of people working together from 28 northern California counties and they beat it down because that's how many counties aerial spraying was going on. And when I really got involved with cats, the last of the aerial spraying was going on on and around the Euro Reservation so briefly, who had already taken care of it years ago when they were under B. I. A they had already stopped the herbicide spraying. What brought to their attention besides their own health and their fear of the toxic chemicals and their sophistication was that they go out and do deer for a home, you know, subsistence living. The deer was full of tumors and other nasty things. So that brought it to that really brought it home here in who pa further upriver in Oakland. the crew had a home health care nurse, Mavis Mako be who figured out all the people who were having miscarriages and birth defects. and just in the karoo tribe, which is very small tribe and put it together and send it to the state of California. And the whole law was written about that. the birth defects prevention Act, I don't know how effective it's been. So it's done some work. But you know, these things kind of tend to unless somebody is hanging over and they kind of don't work that great. Uh So then the Yurok tribe was not formed yet. So it was then they wanted to form a certain type of government that was different from what the United States expected. But the United States via dug bosco crammed down their throats having to do in the regular council style. They had a public law before, which is going to be. Each village would have representation on a equal scale. So they got pulled, they got So when I got first got involved with them, they were an interim council and they were being hammered by herbicides on and all around the reservation, Just thousands and thousands of acres aerially. So we thought that that was one of Castro's main projects for about six years. Finally it came to an end and then we had uh uh so that's it. That was the end of aerial spraying in California. Indian tribes.

GLASS:

I wanna give a shout out to Dr. Ricklefs, who was a doctor in the Orleans/Hoopa area that treated many indigenous people, was married to indigenous woman, and he was one of the first MDs to come out and blame herbicides for all the the miscarriages, mole pregnancies and and bad things that were going on, health effects that people were experiencing.

GRIFFTH:

This is something that a lot of old space and old echo news is is devoted to. And I know when I first started picking those up a few years ago, it really struck me just the idea that there would be that that these entities would aerially spray herbicides. And I think that that is something that a lot of people don't really understand. Why can either of you talk about the what it was they were trying to accomplish by doing this because I know that there were some innovative solutions that that people came up with in order to get around the need for herbicides.

GLASS:

Well they claim the forestry use, they claimed that the grass and troubles were competing with their crop trees that they would plant after they clear cut. And so they wanted to kill all the vegetation around these little trees. So the group you're talking about goats formed to uh to do what was called manual release. In other words, they used hose and grubbing tools to clear circles around these newly planted trees. And it sort of became a little cottage industry for people that were looking for summertime work. A lot of students did it and so they would do this grubbing around there. But the the aerial spraying was just a quick and dirty, cheap way to to get it done. They just fill up the tanks on the helicopter and go over with these big spray booms and just hit the whole the whole area of course killed pretty much everything.

CLARY:

And on a broader scale, we learned that the federal government in particular, but also the state government would allow more cutting if they thought there was gonna be more growing. So the herbicides was sort of like, oh yeah, we're just gonna spray the heck out of everything and then that will make our trees go faster so we can cut down more trees. And I mean, we went in with that excuse, we went into a period of intense deforestation in the pacific Northwest. So herbicides have a really deep connection to vast environmental destruction we've never recovered from,

GLASS:

they would plant thousands of trees and thousands of trees per acre and then spray the out of them and then that would allow them to harvest more trees. Sorry about

WHEELER:

that. And and on private lands, this was also happening and this is as I understand that the formation of epic we had a bunch of back to the Landers in southern humboldt County who would buy kind of worthless cut over industrial former industrial Timberlands. Um And they moved out to the hills to set up their homesteads and their bucolic rural life. and they soon found that their neighbors who were still industrial timber companies were spraying and that spray would drift onto their land onto their crops, into their water. And so epic organized to address this and this was in 1977 and we've kept that party going now for 45 years. Um So you know in this moment we're thinking about how we can Oh and speaking of which here's Richard Jinger, but see if if Richard comes in well until he does There is hopefully, hey Richard Richard you there. Alright, I imagine I will hear from Richard soon until we do, let's just keep keep rolling. Um So

GLASS:

I want to talk about the how the reaction then, because that's where I can talk about.

WHEELER:

Yeah,

GLASS:

yeah, so the so the reaction to this was from the public was outraged. And so eventually counties that had a lot of timber action going on and then started trying to regulate the use of these pesticides and it was a reel. Uh Each county had had its sort of own approach. Mendocino County outlawed aerial spraying of pesticides. santa Cruz County had this notification regime that they came up with, that was pretty elaborate, trendy county came up with the process of getting a local permit from the county health director and they made it pretty difficult. So it wound up being sort of a de facto ban in Trinity County because they made it so difficult for these companies and the forest Service to to get a permit. It wasn't impossible, but they made it extremely difficult and this really riot the herbicide manufacturers and Big Ag Big Ag was just freaking out over the idea that counties were starting to try and regulate pesticides. So um but Pretty County went forward with it. The um Big Ag sued said trendy county and Mendocino County in Santa Cruz County couldn't do that. It drug through the court systems. We eventually won in court. The state appealed, It went to the state appeals court, we won in the appeals court. This, this was going on for number of years that this went on eventually wound up in state Supreme Court and by that point, Mendocino and santa Cruz had dropped out. But all of the counties that were interested were secretly sort of financing this under the table with Trinity County letting Trinity County be at the forefront of the, of the fight anyways, we won in front of the California Supreme Court and very shortly after that, big ag who really controlled the state of California still may do, I'm not sure. But in those days they really controlled it. They went to their person in sacramento, the head of the Democratic Assembly, Willie Brown and they said, this has to stop, You can't let individual counties be doing this. So as Patty reminded me, he called a special session of the legislature after everybody had gone home for vacation. Everybody had come back to sacramento and the special session happened and they passed this preemption state preemption of what they called economic poisons. That's what it actually says in the law that was passed, calls an economic poison and it prevented the counties in other municipalities, cities and other jurisdictions from having any say at all. And and it went down to as much as they couldn't even require signs posted or anything like that. Just completely preempted the field.

WHEELER:

And so then I imagine that we had to start getting creative from the advocacy side. And maybe this is where the next kind of chapter of the story goes. Right. So patty after state preemption, How did you begin to address pesticides Brain if we can't regulate this locally. How how do we go after? How did you go after spraying by groups like Caltrans?

CLARY:

Right. Well cast wasn't involved too much when I was there with, well like in Mendocino, it was it was an initiative on the ballot that outlawed herbicide spraying on force there. Um And Humboldt County tried to pass 12. We had initiative and it came pretty amazingly close to success. I mean it was unbalanced, but we were surprised at how many people in the community supported this. But of course Willie Brown and company shot us down. So

GLASS:

they claimed it was going to shut down the timber industry. That was the fear tactic they used will never be able to harvest another tree if if this passes.

CLARY:

So, and that wasn't the first time we've heard that in this battle, I'll tell you there are other battles in like involving 245 T. And getting that band. So so yeah, so basically what we had to do was become and and this has been one of the cornerstones of our organization is to inform the public to take complicated uh scientific economic etcetera information and make it available to the interest of public because not everybody has the time to learn what they need. You know, and we've relied a lot on experts. We we aren't experts. We rely cats is really dedicated to science and what scientifically can be verified into facts and those ring true, they ring true because we've been able to inform a lot of people and to then achieve the political goals that we have uh, which I think are unachievable without the kind of support that is necessary. And plus you want to be able to talk to anybody. I mean I'm gonna stay right here. I was on the United Nations committee for 4.5 years, all over the world working on the only pay pesticide that's ever been internationally banned, that's methyl bromide. It's an ozone depleting chemical. And we were we were reporting to the committee. Ozan was reporting to the International Treaty Organization, the Montreal Protocol for substances that deplete the ozone layer. And that was just, you know, I had to be on that committee with world class experts. We were people all over the world and I had to be able to hold my own. So by relying on science, it doesn't have to be the science that you're doing. Um, tom's relied, you've done a great job relying on science like in the Richardson growth case right now, which seems to have come to a little bit of a halt possibly because you found and exposed the science that is very harmful to the idea of trading out Richardson growth. So being able to have that and to keep your focus highly on getting the most valid and validated information that you can get. Uh, it brings true and people then of all stripes will listen to you and I think that's really important. So we try to get the information out so that just regular, interested people in the public can talk like that too or they can whip it out of their pocket and say here it is. Uh, so it's really what we're aiming for is for politics, you know, politics, what our politics, politics or people wanting enough people wanting something so that we can elect and make even the people who are elected that don't want to do what we want to do it. So that's by informing the public, so that's the way we've done

GLASS:

so over in Trinity County. What we did was Trinity County being a stubborn stubborn state county. That it is basically after the court. big ag went to court and said, uh, we've preempted this. We need Trinity County to uh strike their ordinances in Trinity refused. And so we got drug through the court system that way until the courts made us take the ordinance down. Then we passed resolutions, which we determined that they couldn't force make us strike down and we declared herbicide use in Trinity County to be a public nuisance.

CLARY:

And

GLASS:

Um, it's been on the books now since 1992, I believe, um, it's been on the books as a public nuisance. And these various resolutions that have been, I think the last one was renewed again in 2004, um, that basically say that, you know, they're not acceptable. Forestry use of these chemicals is not acceptable in Trinity County. And because of that stature or that stance that the county has taken, all of the agencies Caltrans, the Forest service, C D F A B L M. All of them have not sprayed in Trinity County, uh, because of that strong stance and like patty said, it's, this is one of those issues that cuts across all the political spectrum. We had people on the far right, we had people on the far left and we had main street, we were built all back us on this stand in opposed to two chemicals. And every once in a while, you know, they named the new head of particular agency and they think, hey, I got a great idea, list sprayer besides, and then then we'll have another big uproar again and they remember what a big deal it is in Trinity County.

CLARY:

So let's bring that back around to the PG&E spring here that now that we're getting down, which is that a lot of people are saying, let's pass a bill in the, or resolution, whatever uh, in the, uh, for the county, let's pass something by initiative or the board of supervisors to stop people from being able to come into the county and put pesticides in here. And this is our answer. You know, basically we can't, we can't do that, we can do it. The county can do it for. And the cities and the cities most of the cities have done this in Humboldt County already. We can say you can't use pesticides on our property but we can't say that you can't use pesticides all over the county. It's not doable because we've been preempted and uh

GLASS:

shut down

CLARY:

in one way or another. That's the lesson that we have to learn from this is we have to take a different tack if we're going to change things and get something done in humboldt County.

GLASS:

Yeah so that the declaration of it being a public nuisance, the way that's worked in Trinity is that's a civil thing. So

CLARY:

the

GLASS:

reason that it intimidated a bunch of the agencies was they realized it left them open to litigation on a civil level. And there's been and people did take S. P. I. And another of the other timber companies to court after their water was contaminated. Unfortunately uh it had a very limited impact. And S. P. I. Was able to buy a lot more lawyers than we could. So unfortunately they're the one outlier in Trinity County, they keep spraying and have continued to spray, they don't care

CLARY:

that's S. P. I. For you

spk_3

well and I know that you know patty you and cats have had some success recently with some lawsuits against certain companies that are spraying. But I'm curious what the currently what the big issues are like who who primarily is using these herbicides and what are the big herbicides that you are seeing and fighting against? Like you said metal methyl bromide was one of the big ones that has been banned. But what's next up on the docket?

CLARY:

Right, well, right now we've done, we've done a lot of litigation and one of the things we're looking at right now is the results of part of our I think had a big influence on some of that. Uh some litigation that we did has had a big influence on state policy, which is, we sued the North Coast Railroad Authority and that ancient railroad that they were trying to patch back together with grants from here, there and everywhere. And we sued them because they released environmental Impact report for the Russian River section that completely ignored toxic chemicals. And in the railroad right away and believe me railroad right aways nationwide are brownfields, they're just a linear brownfield with some parts that are way worse than other parts, but all the parts are bad. So we won't go into those details. But I can tell you we had a lot of evidence. We went to court, we lost in the trial court that we lost in the court of appeal and then the state Supreme Court picked up. And by that point, I had gone from being an argument about what was in the er to being E. I. R. The environmental impact report to being an argument about whether we had the right to be in court because the north the railroad folks were saying no you don't belong here. This is a federal issue. You are preempted by federal law. So it became a total battle all the way through the Supreme Court, the Court of appeal in the Supreme Court where we won resoundingly and then they tried to drag us into the U. S. Supreme Court but they wouldn't take the case. So um We want, but what do we win? Well we won the right to go in the door of the courthouse. That is what we want. eight years of battle were pretty fatigued at the end of it. I can tell you so we did go back to court but by that time the whole thing was moot because N. C. R. A. Was dying and the state legislature was ready to push it over the cliff. In fact I've been told from a Senate committee meeting on the N. C. R. A. When they were getting ready to push it over the cliff. But one of the most far right republican state senators from somewhere down south east California said well I hate trails because they were talking about converting Great River trail. I hate trails but I hate the N. C. R. A. Even more so

WHEELER:

that got us

CLARY:

you know we had a settlement. The case is over. We never even got to talk about except in our initial filing the toxic contamination of the rail line. So things can get a little diverted sometimes when we're working on things especially when you're working on pesticides.

WHEELER:

So maybe we can wrap this up by by kind of applying the lessons learned from our history from your work patty in in pushing Humboldt County and Arcadia and other jurisdictions to adopt policies regarding pesticide use and leveraging those policies to discourage state agencies from spring. Um Let's think about this PG any threat. What what are are remaining tools? How can we employ them? Give us a roadmap for what should we do?

CLARY:

Well in my opinion what we need to do is everybody in the county needs to flam on PG&E. You can live in a place like I do where they're not gonna be spraying any polls or most of the county actually. But we all need to come together as one county. We can't just leave this in the hands of the people in southern Humboldt. We need to all be calling and emailing PG any and and our board of supervisors because they are the decision making body for the county and they do need to start thinking about what they can do. I hope they think very carefully about it because we'd like them to be successful. and whatever they do do. But those those are things I think we need right now is a lot of public pressure on the PG me because I think they'll buckle, They buckled 24 years ago, they haven't sprayed for at least 20 years and now they're trying to do it again. I think they're nervous as heck. So we should just hammer them and just swish them out of the county and then proceed to set things up here in the county to prevent this kind of thing from getting a foothold again and we can do stuff and and

WHEELER:

and and so far advocacy by you and by others in the community has already resulted in progress so on friday. the news was that PG&E was gonna come in, they were going to spray you needed to opt out of their sprain and they were going to start spraying on monday Just three days later over the weekend, people got activated. They met and organized and started to write to PG&E started to write to their supervisors and demand action and lo and behold monday midday we hear from PG&E. That they are going to have a pause on spraying that they weren't going to spray this week. And that moving forward instead of having to opt out from spraying, you're gonna have to opt in to be sprayed. So already we've seen kind of the nervousness of PG&E I think that that government agencies that large corporations like PG&E. Forget that this is a really big deal here in humboldt County. And you know, every couple of years a new boss gets in charge who doesn't have this history and they need to be reminded of the fact that this county operates differently than elsewhere in California.

CLARY:

That's right my second half.

WHEELER:

Well very cool. It was a fun history lesson today and one that was certainly very relevant to things in the news. So thank you, Paty Clary, executive director for Californians for Alternatives to Toxics ,and Larry Glass, board president of the NEC and executive director of SAFE, Safe Alternatives for Forest Environments, based out of Trinity County. Thank you to you both.

GLASS:

All right.

CLARY:

Thank you.

WHEELER:

This has been another episode of the Econews Report. Join us again on this time and channel next week for more environmental news from the north coast of California.