Street Roots talks with acclaimed documentary director Alan Adelson about his latest film, ‘The People vs. Agent Orange’
A merican chemical companies made an enduring mark on the human species with the creation of Agent Orange. While no longer in use, the genome-altering impacts of the herbicide are crippling descendants of people exposed to it — generations later.
A documentary film released last year, “The People vs. Agent Orange,” revisits this old problem with a new lens. Through the stories of two elderly women fighting the same battle against chemical manufacturing giants, it shows the ways in which Agent Orange never really went away. Though continents apart, both women were catalyzed by the harm, including death, that befell their children, and they have each spent years seeking justice against chemical manufacturing giants that produce herbicides.
One of the women, Carol Van Strum, lives in Oregon’s Siuslaw National Forest, and a significant portion of the film is dedicated to revealing how herbicides, including a main ingredient of Agent Orange, are sprayed over industrial forests and watersheds that supply drinking water to some areas of the state today.
“The film has a real connection with Oregon,” Alan Adelson told Street Roots. The Oscar- and Emmy-winning filmmaker wrote, produced and directed the film with Kate Taverna and Véronique Bernard.
At City Lights Cinema in Florence, one of two Oregon theaters offering tickets for virtual viewing of the documentary, the owner is donating the box office profits to community rights organizations fighting toxic herbicide spraying. The Clinton Street Theater in Portland is also offering streaming tickets, and the movie will air on PBS’s Independent Lens starting June 28. It will also be available to stream on the PBS Video App.
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Van Strum’s activism began in the 1970s. Shortly after moving to Five Rivers, near Oregon’s central coast, her farm was sprayed from overhead with herbicides used in forest management. Her family got sick, and animals in the area were dying. Along with other residents in the area, she sued the U.S. Forest Service. Community groups in the area continue that battle today against private timber companies. After Lincoln County residents voted to ban aerial spraying, a judge ruled their ban invalid. As recently as June 1, the Oregon Court of Appeals heard oral arguments against the ruling.
Q&A: Environmentalist Carol Van Strum: Do not believe anything they tell you
On the other side of the world, Tran To Nga, who is French-Vietnamese, was an activist working to liberate the southern half of Vietnam during the Vietnam War. In crossing through the jungle, she was exposed to high levels of Agent Orange sprayed from U.S. Army helicopters. She subsequently gave birth to children with genetic defects; her first died at age 3 months.
Now 79, her case against 14 chemical manufacturers including Bayer-Monsanto and Dow Chemical, was recently dismissed in a French courtroom.
Adelson recently spoke with Street Roots about the film over Zoom from a farmhouse in central New York, where he’s been waiting out the pandemic.
Emily Green: We’ve long known about the atrocities of Agent Orange stemming from the United States use of the chemical during the Vietnam War — why make a film about it now?
Alan Adelson: You’d be amazed at how little of the country is aware of the problems that you (Oregonians) are having with the aerial spraying of toxic herbicides there now. It’s kind of an old chestnut in The Oregonian, but Americans in general don’t know about it at all, and are reacting when they see it on these virtual cinema platforms. Elsewhere in the country, they’re amazed that it’s going on. But also, it’s just plain taken this long for us to make and get the film out. I’ve been working on it for 10 years, and it was already a 40-year-old story. But the truth hasn’t come out about how much avarice and heedless treatment of human health, and as one of the people in the film refers to it: The human genome have all been under attack by these toxic herbicides.
It’s a complicated film, we wanted to address the numerous important issues: the abandonment of the veterans and their children who’ve been sickened by the herbicides, both in Vietnam and Oregon. There’s new research that has come out from a biologist at a university in Washington state, which has documented that several generations — after a generation is exposed to toxins — that an increased susceptibility to disease results. That’s kind of elaborate language, but if you are exposed to dioxin from, let’s say a paper purification plant, or a household chemical, or perhaps an herbicide like Roundup, which is very controversial as to its toxicity, and there are huge numbers of lawsuits against Monsanto-Bayer because of allegations of its toxicity. If you’re exposed to toxins now, the great grandchildren that can descend from you will have an increased likelihood of serious illnesses, cancers and the like. And of deformities, because of that exposure three generations earlier. It’s really scary.
Green: This David and Goliath fight, with so many Davids, has occupied the majority of some victims’ lifetimes, and as illustrated in your film, it seems the injustice might outlive all of us. When you finish this film, were you feeling optimistic that at some point justice will finally be served? Or did you come away more disillusioned with the power of these chemical manufacturing giants?
Adelson: Madame Tran lost her case two weeks ago, and much of the film had anticipated the ruling that the French court would give. The fact that after seven years of administrative, procedural and evidentiary hearings, that the court would find itself incompetent to rule on the case and dismiss it! Seven years of effort by the lawyers, enormous, passionate, energetic efforts by Madame Tran and her ever-building support movement, and then the court dismisses the case saying they can’t judge such cases, ignoring all of the issues related to corporate malfeasance that Madame Tran’s lawyers had presented — and are not adequately addressed, if at all — in that ruling. I haven’t had the privilege of reading the entire ruling in translation yet, which I need to.
But she succeeded, and that has bolstered our hopes and ambitions and our outlook. When the final pleadings in her case occurred on Jan. 10, to our shock, the global press turned out. It was a media carnival. And we had thought that nobody knew about Madame Tran and that we were the only ones on the story, and then, oh my God, there’s a hundred different newspapers and television from all over the world. And they want to know whether this little old lady is going to score against Monsanto, Dow and the other chemical giants, and in all probability, they’re all rooting for Madame Tran. But the case is dismissed, leaving a newly awakened world, which is all the more skeptical about how the powers that be will treat efforts to protect them. Leaving Madame Tran as an activist, as a celebrity — she always insisted she didn’t want to be a celebrity — but it has to be really satisfying to her to have the media so attentive to what she wants done, and to what she has to say. And she says all the right things. She’s working toward the criminalization of ecocide — ecocide being a massive attack against the environment and its inhabitants. Ecocide is not a crime now, and the International Criminal Court is being asked to codify it as a crime. It’s going on in the burning of the Brazilian rainforest, in various ways related to the oil and gas industry. Certainly, people are considering climate change to be ecocide related as well. So it’s a way that the Rights of Nature can be enforced through the definition of new crimes that have not been acknowledged before. And, that’s really cool. There’s a lot of new stuff that’s happening. I don’t know if it’ll happen in my lifetime. I surely hope so. But then I’m an older guy. I’m confident it will happen in your in your lifetime.
Green: This film features two older women, Madame Tran and Carol Van Strum, who have been fighting this fight for a long time. They’re both mothers. And even though they’re continents apart, I saw so many similarities in what had catalyzed them and the way they were fighting. Was there anything that struck you, in particular, about the parallels of their story lines?
Adelson: There are certain traits that we’ve seen turning up in the primary people who are finding places in our films. The degree of entitlement to be heard, and to give warnings that warrant attention and to hold individuals and countries and corporations accountable. The belief that they can do that is absolutely common for Madame Tran and for Carol Van Strum, and they really admire one another because of that. They consider themselves documentary film sisters; they’ve never met one another. They talk about wanting to meet; they send greetings to one another through us. It would be wonderful if they did meet. They both really like to garden.
An interesting parallel with Dr. James Clary, the Air Force scientist whistleblower, is that both he and Carol Van Strum rescue animals that nobody else wants: donkeys and horses and dogs and chickens and birds and just about everything. And I’ve never seen either of them apart from some animal or another, ever. I think it’s the same humane trait as makes them more want to warn the world about herbicides.
Green: In Vietnam, children today are living with these debilitating birth defects from their families’ Agent Orange exposure. There’s one part of the film that was really hard to watch. When you visit the children’s home housing a lot of these young people. Can you tell me a little bit about the experience of going there, and the ways in which it impacted the direction of this film?
Adelson: It’s a very telling question. Because it beckons some definition of the goals of the film. It was no surprise that we filmed in that very upsetting care center. In fact, 10 years before that, I had been induced to make the film by a young woman who had just returned from an orphanage that had a very similar care center for Agent Orange-affected children. She put her cell phone in front of me and said, these are the saddest human creatures I’ve ever seen in my life, and you have to make a documentary about them. And 10 years later, I’m finishing a documentary about them and filming them and hearing them wail and seeing them writhe and squirm, seeing them respond with delight when Tran tickles one of their bellies and seeing a young child who would soon die who had water on her brain because of Agent Orange, it’s one of the many syndromes it causes. Seeing the isolation of that human being who could do nothing but stare and yet it is such a haunting reminder of the horror that was created with Agent Orange. We weren’t sure how much of that material to put into the film or where to position it. Lots of people told us if we put it in, it would scare people off and it would hurt the film’s chances of being seen. But that didn’t feel fair, even to those victims. If there is any justification for their existence, perhaps it is as bearing witness helplessly as they are to what was done to the human genome.
STREET ROOTS NEWS: Ghosts of Agent Orange: The notorious defoliant continues to ravage generations of Vietnamese (from 2014)
Green: In the beginning of the film, Carol Van Strum implies that Agent Orange is still being sprayed in Oregon and in fact, it’s true that half of the chemical soup that is Agent Orange is still being applied. What would you say to chemical manufacturers who say, “This part of Agent Orange, known as 2,4-D, is safe. ”
Adelson: EPA records themselves — although you have to go pretty deep — indicate there are several forms of dioxin in 2,4-D. But a proper study of the herbicide has never been conducted, although it is very widely used. And I would only say that it and all broadly disseminated chemicals need to be given proper testing, and they have not been. The EPA has been through several periods when its independence has been very legitimately questioned. Corporate ties have been way too strong. Procedures have been disturbingly dependent on submissions from the chemical companies themselves, as opposed to independent research in the public’s best interest.
But I do want to point out that Carol is not quite saying in the beginning of the film that Agent Orange is still being used. To some extent that conclusion is a very understandable one because she is describing when she and her kids and their dog were sprayed with what the road crew identified as 2,4-D and 2,4,5-T, which she knows as Agent Orange. And when she says “it’s still going on,” she’s referring to the use of toxic herbicides in general. Not to Agent Orange and to be precise, Agent Orange is not being used, to the best of my knowledge, anywhere anymore. And you’re right that half of it, 2,4-D, is in wide usage.
Green: This is the fourth film that you and Kate Taverna have directed together. Do you have any other collaborations in the works that moviegoers can look forward to?
Adelson: Our previous film, which is wonderfully enjoyable, has not been broadcast because the Agent Orange film came up and we left it somewhat unexploited, which I would really love to get out. It’s called “In Bed with Ulysses,” and it’s about James Joyce’s novel and the crazy Joyce family. The wonderful thing about it is that it’s almost like James Joyce family sitcom: You’re at home with the Joyces, and they are something to behold.
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