AUDIO:

The following is a rough machine transcript. Click the words to skip to that point in the audio.

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 joining me is my friend and colleague, Greg King, executive director of the Siskiyou Land Conservancy. Hey, Greg. Welcome.

GREG KING:

Tom, thank you, great to be here.

WHEELER:

All right, so we are going to be talking about lily bulb pesticide pollution in the Smith River estuary, which is something that you have been tracking for a good long time. And it seems that now there is promise that the state is going to do something. So we're going to talk about the history of this issue, and then where we're at now and the call to action that's going out to the community to to show up and support a good effective regulatory program. So let's get all the way back to the basics. Tell me about the Smith River. And why is it the crown jewel of the North Coast River system?

KING:

Yeah, well, I think a lot of people, especially who listen to this show, are familiar, at least in passing, with the Smith River, if not intimately, because it's a favorite, really, nationwide. It's got more miles of wild and scenic river status than any other river in the country, which is really astounding. Almost the entire river is protected in wild and scenic status. 83% of the watershed is in federal hands, mostly in the, or state, like State Park Jedediah-Smith. The Smith River National Recreation Area, which protects significantly, along with the wild and scenic river status, most of the Smith River watershed, which is pretty amazing, probably the most protected and, at the same time, relatively intact watershed on the West Coast of the United States. And yet, at the estuary, we're looking at some of the highest concentrations of some of the worst pesticides allowed by law on wetlands surrounding the estuary of what is one of the most important salmonid streams left on the West Coast of the United States.

WHEELER:

And Siskiyou Land Conservancy, your organization, is a land trust in part, you are much more than just a land trust though, but you have property in the Smith River. Can you talk about the decision to invest in why the Smith River has been an area that your organization has focused on?

KING:

That's a good question, it's really personal, like a lot of these things, right? So I've known the Smith River my entire life. I went there with my parents, we camped in Jedediah Smith Redwoods, swam in the river growing up and stuff like that. And then my wife, Joanne Rand, lived there on the way in the upper South Fork in the 1980s. So when we got together in the 90s, she no longer lived there, but she really introduced me to the South Fork and the upper regions, which are very wild and stunningly beautiful. And the water is pristine. And so through the 90s, I got to know this river really well.

And then in 1999, understanding that there were these private lands inside the National Recreation Area that had no real environmental protection, I started an organization called the Smith River Project. And that was to identify high value private lands for protection. And we identified several of those, one of which was on the North Fork of the Smith River, which was an 80 acre parcel and contained some of the highest concentrations of rare plants in the country. And so we actually raised $100,000 to purchase this property and protect it permanently. And it's right at the gateway to a huge wild land, about a million acres. It goes up into Southwest Oregon and then in the Camiopsis Wilderness. So we understood the importance of this and we actually got it.

Now, what we didn't have was an entity to put it in. A land trust, a North Coast Regional Land Trust was really too small for them and it was kind of distant from where their focus is. And there wasn't another land trust that served the area. So I understood there was a need. So in 04, we founded Siskiyou Land Conservancy as its own 501c3 nonprofit land trust. And then we transferred title of that property over to SLC. At the same time, another property we identified was on the South Fork of the Smith River, 148 acres, half of it flat, the easternmost redwoods on the Smith River, some gorgeous meadows, old growth, white oak habitat, and pretty much right on the river. So that property, we didn't have any money for. I bugged the timber company for two years to sell it. And finally, the lands and minerals officer said, oh yeah, well, we are gonna sell that land.

And oh my God. So Joanna and I, we owned a house in Sonoma County and we sold it to buy that property. Put a conservation easement on it, found a conservation buyer and three years later sold it and really had no profit, but we protected it. And that was the point of that. So those are the two properties that we protect either through fee title ownership or the conservation easement. In 2001, while all this was going on before an establishment of Siskiyou Land Conservancy, people started contacting me to ask if, because there was this new Smith River group, if we would look at pesticide use on the Smith River estuary or land surrounding it. And I hadn't heard about it. I didn't know anything about it. And I wasn't gonna take it up. I was not interested in dealing with farming. And then one day I just took a side trip up there and drove my truck around and just happened to come upon a spray rig, applying what turned out to be chlorothalonil, a highly carcinogenic, it fights mold on plants. And it was spraying it into the teeth of a 30 mile an hour wind that was blowing directly into Smith River Elementary School. And I understood that there was a real serious problem just from that. It was not legal to spray over seven miles an hour wind and it was going in there. So it's a fungicide.

So at that point, I started looking at the pesticides. And in 02, we tested wells in Smith River that had also been tested in the early 1980s by the State Water Board for, and they discovered at that time, high concentrations of 1,2-dichloropropane, a very toxic, again, carcinogenic pesticide in wells, some of the highest levels recorded in the country. We found some of those wells still contaminated 20 years later. So we alerted the Water Board, State Regional Water Quality Control Board, and they confirmed our findings. And then from that point on, we were applying pressure on the state to do surface water testing in the Smith River estuary.

And just as background, the reason, one of the many reasons the Smith River is so important, not only is because it's this major undammed coastal river and most of it is protected, but for that reason, it still is the home to some of the best, most protected runs of salmonids on the West Coast of the United States. The Institute for Fisheries Resources at Cal Poly Humboldt considers it a seed bank for recolonizing aquatic species, not just salmon, but lots of species, up and down the California-Oregon coast when those watersheds start to recover. And so we understood there's a problem. So we wanted the Water Board to test these surface waters that feed the estuary, around which are surrounded by the lily growing. And these are salmonid streams, especially coho streams, very important habitat. And it took us eight years.

And finally, in 2010, the Water Board did test surface waters and found chronic and acute reproductive toxicity in the salmonid food chain, in the water column, and very high levels of copper, which is lethal to aquatic species. And then we could go through the 2010s, but we can move along. But that was the beginning of really finally getting the Water Board to at least do some testing. And since then, there's been a real legacy of starting up projects by the state and then going away and leaving it, and really leaving the estuary to suffer under this incredible pesticide inundation.

WHEELER:

So, so we have multiple different issues here, right? We have impacts to human health from, from spray drift. As you said, that spray application has been violating the, the, the label instructions and is going on to adjacent properties. So there's a potential issue there. We also have impacts to human health from wells and contamination of groundwater. So a lot of folks in this area aren't part of a municipal water system. They pull their own groundwater for drinking, for showering, for their personal uses. So there's a, a nexus to human health there. And then we have an environmental issue. The Smith River being this wonderful, pristine river for most of its stretch, except for the estuary where there are significant amounts of pesticides being applied by lily bulb growers.

So, so we have three kind of independent issues, three reasons why the state should be involved. Let's talk a little bit about the industry here. So it's, it's a lily bulb production, which is, which is kind of a unique and niche industry. Do you want to talk at all about why pesticides and why lily bulbs? What, what, why are they such a, why are lily bulb production, why is it such a problem and why does it need such large amounts of pesticides? Right.

KING:

The Easter lily has usually one sale season around Easter, and limited small buying, relatively small buying population. But 90 plus percent of the entire wholesale crop of Easter lily bulbs, which are sent to commercial growers and they'll make, grow the lilies all around the country, are grown in Smith River. And they're grown on a thousand acres of bottomlands, essentially wetlands, that surround the estuary. In one of the rainiest places in California. And they are, like you say, a niche market. There's not really much else going on for lily season except for at Easter, for Easter lilies. And yet, to grow them there, to fight the molds, to fight the nematodes, almost 300,000 pounds of highly toxic pesticides are used every year on what are really wetlands. Dan Free, the National Marines Fisheries Service biologist, has been complaining to the state. He says, literally, do your job, stop the pesticide contamination of the estuary. The state has not done that. He said, these are wetlands. It is inappropriate to grow these Easter lily bulbs on these lands.

And so, whereas our organization has significant issues with pesticide use at all, in terms of the industrial applications that we see throughout California, we would not be even talking about this if the lily production was not occurring on a major stream in the state. It doesn't need to be there. Lilies used to be grown up and down the California-Oregon coast, Easter lilies, bulbs. Especially after World War II, when a lot of the bulbs used to be produced by Japan and that got cut off during the war. So it concentrated, started to, on the West Coast here, and then further consolidated around the Smith River estuary, where virtually all of it occurs now.

WHEELER:

So we went through some of the history, and now we're at this moment where the state seems like they are interested in doing something. How did we arrive at the state actually being interested in doing something? And what is that thing that the state is considering here?

KING:

Right. Well, the first question first, we contend that the state wouldn't be doing anything if we hadn't been pressuring them for years. We got a front page story on a Sunday, San Francisco Chronicle years ago. We've hounded people in Sacramento. This is the Smith River, my goodness, one of the crown jewels of all river ecosystems on the West Coast, in the entire country outside of Alaska. It's one of the cleanest, wildest rivers in that sphere. And so, in 2010, Waterboard did some testing after many years of pressure from us, found acute and chronic reproductive toxicity. Same thing in 2013. And just to back up a bit, chronic toxicity means that the invertebrates that feed the young fish, Cereodaphnia dubia is the test species they use, they can't reproduce in that water. So that was widespread.

And then acute reproductive toxicity means that the invertebrates that feed the salmon can't survive in the water, they die. So you drop them in the water and they die. And that was an incredible find, really shocking for the Smith River, right? And yet, really nothing happened in 2010, except finally in 2011, the state was ordered by the State Resources Control Board to provide a permit. And it gets a little complex, so I won't go into too much of it. It's Clean Water Act. If you're going to pollute a stream, you have to get a permit and it's regulated. And if it looks like it's going to be damaging, then the state can step in and say, okay, we need water buffers. We need different best management practices. Add some oil to the droplets to make it so they don't fly so far. I mean, this is real. And so we were involved in that process as was Epic and Caltrout. We were the three NGOs in that process until 2018 and the Water Board abandoned it and created a stewardship team that did not involve us at all to create best management practices. And that was going nowhere. It remains to go nowhere. And finally last year, the State Water Board said, okay, you got to get back on this permit thing. They got petitioned to do that. And so now, this is a long story short for sure, because it's been years of this. If people want to see the history of this, we have a 40-year history on our website, syskeland.org.

Now the state has resurrected the irrigated lands discharge permit process. And there are several stakeholders, including Epic, which is great, and us, Friends of Del Norte, and many others, True North, the organizing group up there. And of course, state and federal officials and scientists and others are on this process to create this permit to pollute, basically is what it is. And so the state is designing what they call thresholds, above which there will be new actions taken against lily growers. And that would be thresholds of allowable pesticide contamination.

WHEELER:

You are listening to the Econews Report.

KING:

And so what we've discovered through our attorneys is that we cannot, the state cannot necessarily, perhaps in some cases, but not necessarily disallow use of individual pesticides. They can disallow any discharges into state waters and we feel should. None of these contaminants should be getting into the water of any stream, much less the Smith River and much less the estuary, the most important reach of a river for salmonids. And so we are calling in this newly revised process for zero discharge. And there is an opportunity October 8th to Wednesday at 6 p.m. for people if they want to attend this meeting in person or on Zoom, and I'll get to that. But the state, the full North Coast Water Board is coming to Del Norte County to hear testimony from scientists, residents, concerned individuals. And the Smith River is everyone's river. It's again, the crown jewel of the wild and scenic river system. It is beloved throughout the country, has had special protections. There were three dam proposals in the 60s and those all got shut down even then because the Smith was so precious. So everyone should be concerned about this and can comment on October 8th. And you can go to our website, syskeyland.org to see how to do that. And we can get into more of that if you want.

WHEELER:

Yeah. So I think that you're previewing that you might be disappointed by what the state ultimately comes up with, that that this regulatory process might yield more best management practices. What what are what are outside of just wholly prohibiting pesticide application? What what can be done in the Smith River by lily bulb growers? Can can these two things coexist? Can lily bulb production continue to go on in the Smith River? And can we have a pesticide free Smith River?

KING:

Right, lily bulb production could go on, but we can't have a pesticide-free Smith River unless really the pesticides go away. And so when we're asking for zero discharge, proof of zero discharge, we want also within that capacity, within that finding, there to be a clause that will require lily growing to be discontinued in that watershed. There's five main watersheds, small all-coho streams, and tidewater goby, which is another imperiled species, that there should be no pesticide use until something can be done about what is clearly contamination. It needs to be made illegal to contaminate the estuary, and we believe it is. Clean Water Act, Endangered Species Act, probably if there is enough legal muscle, could be enforced here.

Maybe not at the federal level anymore, I'm not sure about that. But what we've seen with these efforts, if you will, by the Water Board to create these, to create a permit, to actually try and remedy the situation, is really so much window dressing. Maybe that's not what's happening here, but it kind of looks like it. So what we're seeing in the draft order is going to be thresholds that indeed allow for certain amounts of the pesticide pollution to enter into the Smith River estuary, even copper, which is deadly to fish. There have been amounts of copper found in a salmonid stream that feeds the estuary at 28 times higher than state law allows. And that was 15 years ago. And still nothing, nothing has been done, no enforcement to address that whatsoever. The lily growers apply almost 40,000 pounds of class one, that is most toxic copper, pesticides to lily crops, and the copper washes off. It's been proven.

There's a professor at Cal Poly Humboldt who just did a study last year, and that's on our website as well, of copper inundation. And he devised these buffer strips, these filter strips that are allegedly going to stop the copper from running off the fields into these streams. And he planted the filter strip and went through a winter, and the water just becomes a seasonal wetland, and it flows right through the filter strip. And his conclusion, a leading expert in the chemistry of pesticides, he said, you can't stop these things with the filter strips. And that's what we're looking at, filter strips, adaptive management, best management practices, which could take this process. And this is the danger, which we've seen with the waterboard. 23 years ago, we found the wells are still contaminated. It's been going on since then, and there has been no action to remedy the situation. So the danger is that we get into these adaptive management scenarios and, oh, well, you're still polluting above the thresholds. So now we're going to make it so in the next three years, you have to do this kind of buffer strip, or you have to maybe move over there. And it's just untenable. It's not going to work.

And we don't have that much time anymore. Not in the Smith, not on the West Coast of the United States. With Salmonids, particularly not in California.

WHEELER:

As you said, the coho salmon of this area are listed under the Endangered Species Act. There are other fish, Tidewater Goby, Ulyssian as well in the Smith River Estuary, which are also listed under the Federal Endangered Species Act. So this meeting coming up on October 8th, it is going to be in person in Del Norte County, but there's going to be a Zoom option available. I imagine that most of our listening audience is outside of Del Norte County and a drive to Crescent City is probably not in the cards for October 8th, but it sounds as if there is an option for public participation by Zoom. Can you talk about how folks can engage and what are the sort of messages that would be most effective for the North Coast Regional Water Quality Control Board to hear on lily bulb pollution?

KING:

Yeah, well, the way to engage, you can go to the meeting in person. It's at 6 p.m. at the Board of Supervisors Chambers in Crescent City on October 8th, Wednesday. And like you said, probably most people, vast majority can't do that, but it is going to be online. And so on our website should be up by tonight. We're working on that to get the link to the state water board where we'll have the link to the ability to be online and participate and watch the meeting and comment. We're encouraging people now more than ever to do that. We need a lot of voices. We need voices throughout the state. Contact your friends throughout the state. Or it doesn't have to be even in California. Again, this is a nationally important issue. Contact people, you know, who love rivers, who might even know the Smith and ask them to chime in. You know, I live in the Bay Area. I come to the Smith all the time. I fish there, blah, blah, blah. Whatever, you know, whatever your love is for the Smith River or for rivers in general, bring that. So, yeah, so that's the online potential.

And then it really it's the it's the water board. It's we've been dealing with staffers, but it's the board itself that is coming. Pretty unusual to have a special meeting like this. So we appreciate that the water board is engaged and wants to hear from people. And it could be a really great thing. There's some good folks on the water board. And I think I think that they're a little bit hemmed in by state policies that don't want to crack down on agriculture. So in any case, that the fact that they're going to be there listening is really important. And I think it's a great opportunity for people who love rivers, who love salmon, who love Smith and the people who live there, you know, who are being demonstrably poisoned. That's that's all documented. It's really important that we protect people from these pesticides, which even if you had zero discharge in the waters, you aren't necessarily going to protect the local residents.

Two thousand people at least live surrounded by these fields. And and they are impacted severely by the pesticides. We have a health assessment on our website that we did in 2016. And you can read the number and severity of the health problems that are occurring in the town of Smith River from the pesticides.

WHEELER:

And the town of Smith River is also home to a lot of Indigenous folks. This is where the Tolowa Dee-ni' Nation is headquartered. There are a lot of low-income folks in this community too, folks who don't have an ability to escape, to filter their water, to do other things, to reduce their risk of exposure. So it's an environmental justice issue as well. And yeah, so October 8th, check it out. Greg, repeat your website again. www.globalonenessproject.org

KING:

Siskiyou land, Siskiyou, just like the county, S-I-S-K-I-Y-O-U-L-A-N-D dot org, and that the full information about this meeting should be up by tonight, I'm hoping. And there's a lot more information about this current process. We have our comments on the findings section of the draft order, which I think are quite illuminative of the issue because even now there is so much left out of the findings. But the importance is even the 2018 federal COHO recovery plan information that said pesticides are a huge threat is not in the findings, that kind of thing. So they can read that, they can read our 40-year report, and then there's a lot of older material that gives a really, I think, solid background on what we're looking at here.

WHEELER:

So something that I think is important to highlight here is somewhat the difficulty of the regional board to respond to this problem. Politically, because agriculture is an important part of the economy of Del Norte County, and some of the families here who are involved are important families in Del Norte County. The water board has themselves a somewhat constrained ability to regulate pesticides, because as you say, California as an agricultural state has really hemmed in the ability by regulators besides the Department of Agriculture to regulate pesticide application, which is not to say though that the regional board is powerless.

And why I bring all of this up is just to reinforce the importance of having a significant public turnout. If we are going to ask the regional board to do a difficult thing, which this is a difficult thing, if we're going to ask them to use the extent of their powers available to them, which they're going to be hesitant to do, we need to have significant public turnout. And this is folks who live in the community who say, I am one of those folks who draw water from a well. I am a parent of a student who is at this elementary school that has been shown to have overspray drift onto the school. It's gonna require those folks. It's also gonna require folks who just really love the Smith River, as Greg said earlier, to come out and to talk about how much this matters, how much the Smith River matters. Having a drinkable, swimmable river matters to us, to the public. That's what's going to, I think, expand the capacity of the North Coast Regional Water Quality Control Board to really do the thing that they need to do here. Greg, any closing thoughts before we end the show?

KING:

Yeah, I just will hit on something you just briefly brought up, and that is what are the impediments to the Water Board actually doing something that what are the politics? And in 2018, right after the National Marine Fisheries Service issued a Section 9 letter saying, you know, under the Endangered Species Act that the pesticides are threatening extinction of coho salmon, the State Farm Bureau representative came to the Water Board, and we know this from somebody, a federal agency, and came to the end, the person who was then running the State Water Board, the staffer process for the first Lilly order permit process, he decided unilaterally, basically, to drop that whole process due to pressure from the State Farm Bureau, and then he resigned. And so that is what we're talking, they don't want to regulate pesticides on the Smith River if it might seem applicable to the multi-billion dollar industry in California. So that's an issue.

The other thing is, just our voices really do matter, especially now, and especially perhaps at the state level. California has an opportunity and has the talk, we want to see the walk the talk, to really put a hand up against the federal attacks right now on the environment, on people, and so we want the state to step up in this way as well. Gavin Newsom's been doing some interesting work in that regard, and Gavin Newsom, the governor's office is key here. They appoint the Water Board members, and we would like to see the governor himself step up for the Smith River.

WHEELER:

Okay, so October 8th, check out Siskiyou Land Conservancy online, read all the history, and I hope to see you there online or in person to make comments in support of the Smith River. Greg King, Siskiyou Land Conservancy, thank you so much for joining the Econews.

KING:

Thank you, Tom, what a great pleasure.

WHEELER:

All right, join us again next week on this time and channel for more environmental news from the North Coast of California.