For decades, some of the dirtiest, darkest secrets of the
chemical industry have been kept in Carol Van Strum’s barn. Creaky,
damp, and prowled by the occasional black bear, the listing, 80-year-old
structure in rural Oregon housed more than 100,000 pages of documents
obtained through legal discovery in lawsuits against Dow, Monsanto, the
Environmental Protection Agency, the U.S. Forest Service, the Air Force,
and pulp and paper companies, among others.
As of today, those documents and others that have been collected by
environmental activists will be publicly available through a project
called the Poison Papers.
Together, the library contains more than 200,000 pages of information
and “lays out a 40-year history of deceit and collusion involving the
chemical industry and the regulatory agencies that were supposed to be
protecting human health and the environment,” said Peter von
Stackelberg, a journalist who along with the Center for Media and Democracy and the Bioscience Resource Project helped put the collection online.
Van Strum didn’t set out to be the repository for the people’s
pushback against the chemical industry. She moved to a house in the
Siuslaw National Forest in 1974 to live a simple life. But soon after
she arrived, she realized the Forest Service was spraying her area with
an herbicide called 2,4,5-T — on one occasion, directly dousing her four
children with it as they fished by the river.
The chemical was one of two active ingredients in Agent Orange, which
the U.S. military had stopped using in Vietnam after public outcry
about the fact that it caused cancer, birth defects, and serious harms
to people, animals, and the environment. But in the U.S., the Forest
Service continued to use both 2,4,5-T and the other herbicide in Agent
Orange, 2,4-D, to kill weeds. (Timber was — and in some places still is — harvested from the national forest and sold.) Between 1972 and 1977, the Forest Service sprayed 20,000 pounds of 2,4,5-T in the 1,600-square-mile area that included Van Strum’s house and the nearby town of Alsea.
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