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TOM WHEELER:

Welcome to the Econews Report. I'm your host this week, Tom Wheeler, Executive Director of EPIC, and we are taking a trip to the Smith River and joining me is my guest, Greg King, the Executive Director of the Siskiyou Land Conservancy and author of Ghost Forest, that popular book that you've probably seen everywhere these days. Hey, Greg, how are you?

GREG KING:

Hey Tom, I am doing well. Thanks so much for having me on.

WHEELER:

All right, so in particular, we are taking a trip to the estuary, the mouth of the Smith River, where it meets the ocean. And there are some fertile agricultural lands there. And one of the main crops that is being grown are lily bulbs. Can you tell us a little bit about lily bulbs as kind of a product of Del Norte County?

KING:

Yeah, and it's a Smith River estuary, and we've been tracking pesticide use on these lily bulbs for our entire 20-year existence. And it is kind of a mainstay of the Del Norte economy. The lily bulb producers there put out more than 90% of all wholesale Easter lily bulbs in the United States, and they're shipped around and then grown in greenhouses in various markets, because it's very difficult to ship the actual plants much further than, say, the West Coast. So some of them do grow plants as well, and they push them so that they bloom at Easter. And not long ago, I was in Manhattan, and I just happened to be there at Easter. I went into a big, beautiful old church, and there were hundreds of Easter lilies. So it's a real thing. There is a lot of market for this. And so, yeah, we've been working on it for 20 years. Before that, the Smith River Project, which I founded in 1999, we started looking at that in 2001. So personally, I've been dealing with this issue now for 23 years, and it's amazing how little has changed in terms of the amount of pesticides used to grow this crop.

WHEELER:

And you just recently put out a report which tracks a 40 year history of the state government understanding that there is a problem with pesticides coming from label production in, in the Smith river and basically failing to do anything about it to the detriment of salmon and adjacent communities. So let's go back in time to kind of the first warning signs that something was wrong. When was this? And what did, what did we know then?

KING:

Right. In the early 1980s, the state of California, through the North Coast Regional Water Quality Control Board, got notice that there were wells, contaminated wells, in the town of Smith River. And at the time, the entire town, which fluctuates between 1,000 and 2,000 people there in northwestern Del Norte County, was entirely on well water. And people noticed it in their showers and in their drinking water, that there's obviously something wrong with the water. So the water board came in and tested many wells. I think it was 50 wells or so. And most of them were found to be contaminated with a pesticide called 1,2-dichloropropane. And that is a nematicide, mostly. Just like it sounds, it's used to kill nematodes and everything else in the soil, to sterilize the soil prior to planting. And 1,2-d is a pernicious carcinogen. It's an endocrine disruptor. It can cause birth defects and malformations of fetuses. And it was found in Smith River wells in parts per billion amounts that were some of the highest counts in the nation, including wells next to the factories where the 1,2-d was manufactured.

And so it was a real emergency. And the water board stepped in, did this testing, basically told everybody in Smith River, don't touch your water. And we talk about drinking water, but what I learned through this process is that showering with bathing in a tub with this water can be even more harmful because one of the most effective ways of poisoning a human body with a chemical is through steam. And so that was also a highly pernicious thing. And then there's also the drift in the community of Smith River, which we can get to later. So the water board issued some water filters and some literature and basically went away. Later, the county established the Smith River Community Services District, tapped Rowdy Creek above Lily Growing, and now services the town of Smith River and local environments with that water. But still many people are on wells.

And just to jump forward for a second, in 2002, the Smith River project tested about a dozen wells again in Smith River and found many of them still contaminated with 1,2-d. And what was really pernicious about this was that some of them were more than 100 feet deep. So that is how these groundwater-contaminating chemicals can seep through the soils and get into a water table that's already very shallow. And we can talk about that later too.

WHEELER:

So you fast forwarded to 2002. I believe you said that the Smith River project began working on this issue again. And I think you said in 1999, what was it that got you interested in pesticide pollution in the Smith River?

KING:

The project, Smith River Project, did found in 1999, mostly to examine small private inholdings that were biologically important that needed protecting. There was already the Smith River Alliance, which was doing this on a much broader scale with very large acreages, 9,000 acres, 5,000 acres, that the Alliance actually ended up getting put into the Smith River National Recreation Area. So they did some brilliant work there. We were looking more at small parcels that were kind of overlooked but were critically important. So for instance, we currently own 80 acres on Stoney Creek on the North Fork Smith River, which is one of the more fascinating and outstanding examples of rare plants in the world, endemic plants. And it was pristine, and it was privately held, and we raised $100,000 and we bought it.

So that was one of our first projects with Smith River Project and then moving into Siskiyou Land Conservancy, took that over in 2004. In 2001, well, prior to 2001, as I'm doing this work in Smith River, we stopped a logging project on the South Fork of the Smith in old growth spotted owl habitat, things like that. People there were telling me, hey, you've got to look at the Easter lily growing. There's a lot of chemicals used there. People are getting sick. There's a lot of cancer. Would you please examine that? And it was not something that I really wanted to do or planned to do with this new project that we founded. But I did take a trip there in 2001, in March of 01, and drove around the town of Smith River, saw the lily fields, which the lilies were just starting to come up in the fields at that time, and drove on one of the lanes in Smith River. And I could see the lily field, and I could see across the lily field, Smith River Elementary School. And at my back was about a 30-mile-an-hour wind clocked that day. And then in front of me was a spray rig spraying chlorothalonil, I later learned was the chemical, another carcinogen, highly toxic. And it was blowing directly into Smith River Elementary School. And of course, I was appalled. It's for the children, right? I mean, my God.

And so that is really what catalyzed my own interest. And then I brought the organization into it, of course, to begin examining what's going on here with these chemicals in Smith River. And since then, just in terms of the human population, we continue to get reports of sicknesses that are often associated with pesticides, including widespread cancer, stuff like that. Moving forward just to 2016, Siskiyou Land Conservancy conducted and put out a report on a community health assessment that demonstrated highly elevated illnesses in the town of Smith River from before and after the time people moved there, including cancer, eye problems, respiratory problems, skin problems, all of them associated with pesticides.

WHEELER:

And in your report, which you can find on the Lost Coast Outpost, we'll have a link to that report. There are some of the responses, a sample of the responses to your health survey. And I want to read some of these because I think that they're very powerful.

"There are five homes that I'm personally aware of that one or more of the residents were diagnosed and treated for cancer. This is all on the same street. I have had cancer twice. The person who bought the home from had cancer. One of our neighbors also had cancer twice and one of the other neighbors died due to cancer. So that was one response. Another neighbor got cancer and died. My mom got cancer and died. I got cancer again, still here in remission. In 22 years living here, four dogs, two cats all died of cancer. And here is a third. My dog died of pancreatic cancer, came on very quickly and severe, felt very sick and lost a lot of weight over 65 pounds in a very short amount of time. Nausea, stomach pain, vomiting. My dog also suffered dizziness, confusion, falling over, stress, anxiety, not eating, stomach and bowel problems, as well as being diagnosed with terminal cancer. Myself, severe headaches, stomach pains, depression, anxiety, worse arthritis, feelings in all joints and nose and throat and eye problems, severe weight loss, et cetera."

And you have, I could keep on reading probably for the entirety of this show. There are just so many responses. It's concerning this pesticide application. As you said, when you first went to visit and you saw the spray rig, they're spraying 30 mile an hour winds. I don't take that, that that is, that that was legal, right? That that was against pesticide application regulations.

KING:

Yes, at the time there was a seven mile an hour limit to applying pesticides and clearly the wind was much higher. Again, it was clocked that day at gusts of 30 miles an hour. I could feel it. It was consistently blowing. It's right on the ocean. If you go to the ocean here at Trinidad or somewhere, it's basically like that. Big winds a lot of the time. There's really no containing these chemicals there. And it's rather horrific that this town is absolutely surrounded by some of the highest per acre use of some of the most pernicious carcinogenic pesticides allowed in California. And when we got to, we took our report to the county health department and they almost ran us out on a rail. Myself and Ken Miller, a director of Siskiyou Land Conservancy, and we presented it. He's a physician and he's dealt with pesticide poisoning issues down in the Bay Area when he was a physician down there and really knows what he's talking about.

And they just didn't want to hear it. They weren't going to do anything about it because if you have a viable industry in Del Norte County, A, that's rare because the economy up there is really sapped. So I get that part of it. But B, people do not like speaking out against the lily growers. We've had a lot of anonymous comments about how intimidated they feel. So for that survey that we did, they could be anonymous. Most of them were anonymous. Some were not. We got a return from about 14% of households, which is fairly robust and almost surprising because people do not like to speak out. We were working with several families in 2002. We did a lot of free water testing and we had people speaking out publicly who lived in Smith River and they all went away to a person after a couple of years would not deal with us anymore.

And it wasn't because of us. Our work was very strong. We hired Analytical Sciences Incorporated out of Sonoma County to come up and do the water testing. Mark Valentini, a PhD scientist, ran that organization and was very good. And our work we did was with Amenable. And the people told us, some of them, well, we just can't do this anymore. No reason given. But they just felt contained. And a lot of them live in these homes that they purchased from out of the area, thinking what a beautiful place to go and retire or raise our kids. And then they get there and the home values they find were so strong because the value that they got as buyers because of the pesticides. And so the home values don't go up that much. They would be saddled with their debt on the houses and couldn't really leave. So they were really in a bind. And just if you can't leave, you don't want to speak out too much. Absolutely.

WHEELER:

So we do have some public data about the pesticides that are being applied and the amounts that have been applied in Del Norte County. The data is slightly old. I think 2021 is your most recent year that we have data available for. Can you tell us about the kinds of pesticides that are being applied and the amounts that there are applied?

KING:

Yes. The two pesticides used in the greatest amounts are methamsodium, which are generally about 100,000 pounds a year on 300 to 400 acres of rotated lily fields, and 1,3-dichloropropene, which replaced 1,2-dichloropropane because of the pernicious groundwater contaminating qualities of the latter. Now, 1,3-D, as it's called in the shorthand, also is a groundwater contaminant, and it's also a carcinogen. And it is a big problem throughout California. You get down into the big ag counties, and there's a lot of fighting over this chemical that's used in millions and millions of pounds throughout the state.

And then methamsodium, same thing, carcinogen, endocrine disruptor, very dangerous chemical for humans and for aquatic life, both for aquatic life, methamsodium in particular. Methamsodium is the chemical that spilled into the Sacramento River, I want to say 1991, and killed everything for about 50 miles, everything in the river for about 50 miles until it diluted in Lake Shasta. So, highly pernicious, dangerous chemical used in great quantities. We did an assessment with CITOS, the Center for Ethics and Toxics, in 2002. That was Mark Lappe's outfit, the famous chemist and an analyst, and found that methamsodium and 1,3-D were used in pounds per acre amounts that were higher than anywhere else in California. So, that's a huge amount of saturation. And then there's a host of other pesticides, and they're all in the report there, and also their effects on human and aquatic life.

WHEELER:

You are listening to the Econews Report. We're talking about the Smith river and joining me is my guest, Greg King, the executive director of the Siskiyou Land Conservancy and author of Ghost Forest.

KING:

And that's another thing, of course, that we're focused on. In fact, the main thing, because ironically, aquatic life has greater protections than human life from pesticides and not great protections. But we're working on that. But many of these pesticides will kill fish outright or and frogs and other aquatic species. But what they really attack is the food chain. Well, first, they'll attack an anadromous fish's ability to smell through a lot of the copper contamination, which is pretty massive there. Copper hydroxide, one of the more pernicious of the copper products, is used in great quantities there at Smith River. So the copper is is deadly to fish and can ruin an anadromous fish's ability to return to its natal stream, among other impacts. But also what is affected is the food chain. And the food chain consists of zooplankton, tiny micro microscopic organisms that that the young salmonids will feed on to rear. And the contamination, we finally got the water board in 2010 and 2013 and 2016 and 2017, joined by the federal government and state fish and wildlife in the later years to test water quality and surface waters, the small creeks that run through the lily fields and feed the Smith River estuary.

And what turned up was acute and chronic reproductive toxicity in the water where these fish, especially endangered coho salmon, which will rear there for more than a year in the food chain. And so they used a test invertebrate called the water flea, seriodaphnia dubia, and the test is basically if you have chronic reproductive toxicity, water that demonstrates that. That means that if you drop these seriodaphnia dubia into this water, they can't reproduce. If it's acute reproductive toxicity, then you drop them in and they die. And the acute reproductive toxicity was found in lower Rowdy Creek, which among all Smith River tributaries has the second highest intrinsic potential for coho salmon. Classic old coho salmon stream that now has no coho in it, that just there's no spawning. There is an impediment upstream at a fish weir, but in high water years, fish can get up there and they don't.

And so and that is something that is information that I got from U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, which actually issued a what's called a section nine letter in 2018 telling lily growers they were in violation of the Endangered Species Act. So it's a it's a big toxic stew. There's been no help whatsoever from the state government in terms of alleviating, ameliorating this this toxicity. And that's kind of who we're fighting these days is the state.

WHEELER:

Right. So it's a toxic soup. The National Marine Fisheries Service has cited the risks of pesticides for coho salmon and have, as you said, issued a section nine letter warning that the application of pesticides in the way that they are being applied, it could be a violation of the Endangered Species Act. Oh boy. So, so let's take it to the regional water quality control board, because I think that this is an entity or an agency that is currently before us. I understand that you have a petition to the regional water quality control board concerning the Smith River. Can you talk about what's going on at the regional water board and what you're hoping to accomplish?

KING:

Right. The actual petition to the regional water board, we didn't file that. That's a petition that was filed by a couple of other conservation groups, fisheries groups, that wanted the water board to get back to creating what's called a waste discharge permit for lily growers. And that process was started in 2011 by the water board. At the time we were involved, you guys, EPIC preceding you, I believe, was one of the NGOs and Caltrouth. So we were all going to these meetings starting in 2011 with the lily growers and the water board and other agencies, and it was very productive. After a while, the state water quality control board separated everybody. They had pullout meetings with the lily growers and then pullout meetings with the NGOs, and we didn't meet together anymore. In 2018, the water board dropped that process altogether and created what I am referring to as an illusory plan. It's called a water management plan for lily growers to create buffer strips, filter strips, they're called, to keep water from running off the fields into streams that feed these creeks and the estuary.

And they allowed the lily growers to self-monitor and self-report. Well, that didn't go so well because the first report, when it was due after a year, it was not forthcoming. I contacted the water board, it took about a month, and they finally said, okay, well, this was six months after it was due. We're going to get you that. And finally, we got this report, which was just the lily growers going out and saying, oh, yeah, everything's working fine. So this is how the state of California has been developing a process and a program for protecting the Smith River estuary, which is not at all. And we've seen this with the North Coast Regional Board throughout the district. In particular, I think one of the more infamous examples is on the Elk River, which 30 years ago was registered as an impaired watershed with all the fixes that are supposed to go with that. And the water board for 30 years has done nothing demonstrable to alleviate the severe flooding and mass wasting of the Elk River. We're seeing that at Smith River.

Again, since 2002, well, since the early 80s, the water board really hasn't done anything about obvious contamination. And that is our biggest gripe, is that they've had all this time to really address this pesticide contamination. It's illegal. We now have this letter from National Marine Fisheries Service that's saying in 2018 that the lily growers are out of compliance with the Endangered Species Act. It's a federal violation. And so we want the water board to develop a far more robust program for diminishing and then eliminating these pesticides. Because as a college professor who has a report coming out in June, he's up at Cal Poly, a chemist, and he's quoted in our report. He told me that it doesn't take much rain for these chemicals to just wash straight off the fields into the streams. And when you're looking at copper, which is an indicator of this, he said it's just, it's accumulating in the soil and that he measured up to 500 parts per billion of copper running off the fields during a fairly light rain because they're wetlands. These are seasonal wetlands. And EPA regulations disallow spraying a lot of these pesticides in open water, yet they are anyway. And they're washing off into this critically important Salmonida stream. And that's what, one more thing I just want to emphasize, is that it's the Smith River, 83% of which is protected in a federal holding. There are Salmonids there that it's considered a Salmonid stronghold. Coho and Chinook Salmon and Steelhead, some of the best Steelhead runs still on the West Coast, but they're all diminishing. And it's considered a seed bank, the Smith is, for endangered species.

And so you look at the Tidewater Gobi, which is listed as endangered, it's the highest level of protection. It's the northernmost population of Tidewater Gobi in California and therefore in the world. And it's considered extremely important for the ongoing survival of the species. But it's only population area that it resides in the Smith River is in a small part of the estuary with all these chemicals flooding it. And the Water Board is doing nothing about this and hasn't done anything for 40 years about this except tread water, if you will, keep NGOs out on a limb and disallow any real reform at the Smith River estuary.

WHEELER:

Uh, one of my main complaints about the regional water board is it always seems afraid of its own power. It has historically been kind of a big disappointment among regulatory agencies for just failing to, to uphold its mission is charge. And it seems like that's happening here again on the Smith river. It's also interesting Del Norte County. They're so proud of the Smith river. It's the crown jewel of the County. Everybody, conservatives, liberals all point to it as kind of the pride of Del Norte County. And yet this is a repeat problem or, or it's a pernicious, persistent problem in Del Norte County impacting its, its crown jewel. So we have, we have to do something about it. Let's let's, let's talk about solutions to this problem. What, what are, what could a future look like for Del Norte County that could make the Smith river safe from this pesticide pollution that can help protect water quality for humans and for wildlife?

KING:

Right, and that's a great question. And we've been looking at that a lot. Obviously, transitioning to organic production would help quite a bit and moving the lily growing out of the wettest areas so that even if it's organically grown, there aren't lilies grown there because really you should not be growing lily bulbs on wetlands that feed the estuary of one of the West Coast's most important rivers.

There is also other agriculture that can occur there. There's quite a large organic dairy operation. The Alexandres run there. It's highly successful. Their products are sold now all over the West in Whole Foods, et cetera. It's not as if there's no problem even with organic dairy. Cattle are very heavy on the land and the waste can impact streams. The Alexandres have done a good job of ameliorating a lot of the problems that have come with their large production. And one of the things they've done is graze on very large landscapes and so that there's not a lot of head and excessive number of head per acre. And again, I don't want to diminish the impact that this can have, but it's far, far better than the lily growing. And I know that the Alexanders right now, they're expanding into what's called Reservation Ranch, which was recently sold by the Westbrook family up there. And so that is another possible solution. I believe the Alexandres would love to expand into some of these lands and create their products.

Really, and so what needs to happen is state and federal governments, rather than spending all this money on preventing any kind of change, need to come in and spend some money on alleviating a financial burden to the lily growers. Ironically, Siskiyou Land Conservancy, we support farmers and protecting farmlands. It's one of our charges. And so protect the lily growers from economic impacts, but allow them to transition out of growing with these pesticides in the Smith River because the aquatic habitat in the lower Smith River is far more important than any human endeavor at that place. And it may sound harsh to people who are economically dependent on that, but Easter lily bulbs are not gonna go extinct if they're not grown there. But the salmon in California could go extinct if they're not allowed to grow in the Smith River estuary.

WHEELER:

It seems like there might be kind of a parallel to Humboldt County and the reckoning that we had, the economic reckoning that we had in the nineties with the timber war, the Redwood wars, Redwood Summer, whatever you want to call it, where we have an economy that is unsustainable, that is causing significant problems for the general public and is in need of some sort of a transition. And sometimes it takes environmental groups to kind of push and prod to force what is ultimately an inevitable transition and to get us to the next form. I sound like a Hegelian here. So, all right, shout out to all my philosophy friends. All right. We have just a little bit of time remaining. Where can folks get more information about these issues and how can they take action?

KING:

Right, thank you for that. On our website, Siskiyouland.org, and Siskiyou is just like the county, S-I-S-K-I-Y-O-U, L-A-N-D dot org, there is a take action button there. And what we're really, we want people to do is, A, contact Jared Huffman, because this really has to be a federal response at this point. I think Mike McGuire, our senator, is a very strong influence on aquatic issues, fisheries issues in particular, in the state, and to contact him as well. But I think, again, a federal response. I think the Justice Department needs to step in and bring legal action to stop the ongoing violation of the Endangered Species Act, and it is ongoing, at the Smith River Estuary. And so, if you go to Siskiyouland.org, there is the report at the top, and then a take action button, which we are adding to. We've just put this all out on the website last week, and so I urge people also to check back, because information is always forthcoming.

And then there are also other Assembly and Senate members for the state of California that have an interest in fisheries, and making sure that they remain strong. And there are a lot of people who care about the residents of Smith River, and we're looking now for support groups from statewide, that work statewide with agricultural communities, that can help out. And so hopefully there will be some of that on there as well.

WHEELER:

All right and you can also find all these links in Lost Coast Outpost. That's where we post the show notes. Greg, thank you so much for joining the Econews Report.

KING:

Tom, thank you so much. I really enjoyed doing it and I appreciate your work.

WHEELER:

All right, 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