Her advice for young activists is to remain skeptical and to relish the small victories
Carol Van Strum, 78, still lives in the forest she fought to protect.
She moved with her family to Five Rivers in Oregon’s Siuslaw National Forest in the 1970s, and soon after, her farm was sprayed from overhead with a compound found in Agent Orange. Her family got sick, and animals in the area were dying.
Along with other residents in Lincoln County, she sued the U.S. Forest Service, winning an injunction to stop the aerial spraying of federal forests with toxic herbicides.
Thus began her lifetime of environmental activism that continues today with the effort to ban aerial spraying on private timberlands in Lincoln County.
During the course of several lawsuits against federal agencies and chemical companies such as Dow and Monsanto, Van Strum obtained an arsenal of documentation – nearly three tons of paper – revealing massive, coordinated cover-ups and fraud among government regulators and the companies they were responsible for watchdogging.
The Bioscience Resource Project and the Center for Media and Democracy have digitized her collection and have made it available online to the public. The Poison Papers Project, as it’s called, has served as a resource for attorneys suing Monsanto. It contains documents spanning back to the 1920s and, as a whole, demonstrates how both the chemical industry and its regulators understood and worked to conceal the dangerous toxicity of many products that were approved for use – and in some cases still widely used today.
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Van Strum chronicled the efforts of herself and her fellow activists in the award-winning book “A Bitter Fog.” Ultimately, her research and activism contributed to the adoption of more sustainable national forest policies still used today.
She has also written several other books, and her articles have appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post and USA Today.
In 2018, Van Strum was awarded the prestigious international David Brower Lifetime Achievement Award for outstanding environmental and social justice work.
What’s the most difficult lesson you learned in your activism?
Carol Van Strum: I think the most difficult lesson was finding out that our entire system of government, of protecting the environment or human health, is a fraud and that you can’t believe anything that they say.
And, it really is a massive fraud. The Environmental Protection Agency’s very name is a lie. And, you know, President Nixon knew that when he established it. He created it to be a buffer between the chemical industry and the people who were getting affected by the chemicals and starting to find out about it, thanks to Rachel Carson (author of “Silent Spring”).
I guess we were naive. This was 40 years ago, and the Forest Service was spraying us with Agent Orange. We were getting sick, and we were finding dead animals and deformed animals, and we thought if we just told them about it, they’d stop. (She laughs.) And we found out otherwise, so that was a real hard lesson at that time.
In a way, that kind of set the whole systemized, institutionalized lying that now the government, at the very top, indulges in. It’s become so commonplace people don’t even get upset. Well, I got upset. I don’t like being lied to.
What kept you going at times when winning seemed impossible?
Van Strum: Well, I guess the opposite of that is, what’s the alternative? Do you do nothing while the things you love are dying? You can’t. Or at least I can’t. So the alternative was always worse than the battle.
I have to say, you can’t look at the big picture all the time. You have to take what I call “a wicked glee” in causing some bureaucrat to crap his pants.
You have to look for those moments and celebrate them and laugh. That’s so important, I can’t emphasize that enough.
What do you think young environmental activists today are doing right?
Van Strum: Oh, God, I love them! They’re doing wonderful things that I see. They’re finding their strength in numbers, which is so important. No one person can do this alone. I still feel kind of weird for being singled out as this so-called activist when I was only part of something that was a large group of people. I wrote about it, so I kind of became the point person, but the activism – if you want to call it that – it was a group of people, of really unrelated people. There were loggers, there were tree planters, there were doctors, there were nurses and there were housewives that came together for a common cause.
That’s so important, and I see the young people doing that, and I love it! The way they are banding together behind Greta Thunberg, joining class-action lawsuits to force their elders to accept that they’re changing the climate. They’re not accepting the word or the authority of elders bent on destroying the world that they will inherit. I just applaud them. I can’t say that enough. I love them. I’m really proud of them all being able to call bullshit on all of the lies.
What are they doing wrong?
Van Strum: I can’t really think of anything they’re doing wrong. I think they’re using what they have – that we didn’t have – things like the internet and social media. They’re connecting with more and more people. I think they’re already achieving far beyond what we did, and that’s wonderful.
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What advice would you offer young activists today?
Van Strum: Some of it is what they’re already doing; they’re not being afraid to care. That sounds kind of hokey, doesn’t it? But you have to care. You have to care about something. It doesn’t matter what it is. Once you start caring, then you want to protect, then you become the cornered badger; you’re going to fight, and you’re going to join with others. And that’s what they’re doing.
My advice would be: Don’t ever, ever accept the platitudes, the euphemisms, the lies of their elders and those who say it can’t be done or say, “You don’t understand; you’re too young to know.” That’s baloney, and they should never, ever listen to it.
The other thing is: Demand proof of every statement coming out of government or industry, or whatever they’re fighting.
Whether they’re tracking or spraying or nuclear waste, it doesn’t matter. Demand their data. Don’t take their word for anything.
And above all, have fun. Humor is the strongest weapon we have, and you burn out without it. Believe me, I’ve seen too many people fall by the wayside; they just can’t handle it anymore. But if you can keep laughing at the absurdity and insanity of what you’re fighting, it really makes all the difference in the world.
Look at Randy Rainbow or the Trump Blimp. Any way you can to point out the nonsense that you’re fighting is so much more effective than any other weapon that you have. So I would say, keep laughing. When you can make people laugh, then you’ve really reached them; they understand.
When you look back over your years of activism, can you describe a moment that you feel defined your legacy?
Van Strum: For me, after 40 years of feeling, at times, like a voice in the wilderness, proving information to people all over the globe, really, but not seeing much progress. But then this little group comes together in my own county (Lincoln County Community Rights) to stop the aerial spraying of poisons by timber companies.
It was so beautiful and so simple, and they won it; the voters voted it through. Then, of course, industry challenged it in court, and I think the most touching moment for me was when Lincoln County Community Rights asked me to be the voice of the ecosystem, the trees, the river, in court. It was such a beautiful thing. I felt like I was standing there with the Lorax or Justice William O. Douglas – he actually was a voice in the Supreme Court for giving nature rights to exist – and to me, that was my proudest moment, being asked to do that.
It’s giving a voice to the voiceless. That’s what it’s all about. And I feel very proud that they asked me to do that. I still kind of tear up thinking about it.
(Since our interview with Van Strum, a Lincoln County judge overturned the voter-approved ban on aerial spraying within the county, ruling that the state law trumped the local law. Lincoln County Community Rights said it is preparing an appeal. The deadline to appeal is Dec. 19.)
Advice For Young Activists is a periodic series where accomplished Oregon activists offer lessons learned to young people fighting for social and environmental justice today.
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