Americans trigger off ‘Spray Wars’

Press, 11 October 1979, Page 21

Americans trigger off ‘Spray Wars’

By

WILLIAM SCOBIE,

••Observer.” London

The tranquil, deeplywooded hills of southern Oregon became a miniature battle zone for a week in September. Home-made barrage balloons — gimrt plastic bags filled with helium and anchored to me earth by fishing lines — swung in blue skies. Bands of vigilantes gathered on remote hilltops, some reportedly armed with rifles, on the watch for invading helicopters.

Access roads were blocked by chopped-down trees. United States Forest Service bureaucrats found their car tyres slashed or deflated, as demonstrators paraded outside Govern-

ment offices in small towns.

And about 200 Oregon homesteaders fled the hills to stay with friends or families. or camp in tents until the threat had passed. It was the latest chapter in the "Spray Wars” saga — a growing American rebellion against aerial dousing of crops and forests with tons of pesticides which, environmentalists claim, cause cancer, miscarriages, birth defects, and ailments ranging from “intestinal flu” to vaginal bleeding.

The chemical cloud is casting a long shadow in the Far West. State legi-

slatures from Arizona, on the border with Mexico, to Washington, in the Pacific North-West, are exercised over an issue that Tom Hayden, activist friend of California’s Governor Jerry Brown, predicts will be

“one of the hottest of the 1980 s”. Aerial spraying went ahead in Oregon despite bitter protest from grassroots groups, which included several pregnant women who threatened to chain themselves to trees

in the helicopters’ path. The Forest Service, the Bureau of Land Management, and the chemical companies insist that the case against such defoliants as 2.4-D is “not proven”. But bulletins from

the Spray Wars front suggets that Tom Hayden may, for once, have popular feeling behind him: • Public protests halted a huge spraying project in California’s Six Rivers national forest. • Voters in one Cali-

fomia county approved, by an overwhelming majority, a total ban on aerial spraying. • California’s Governor Brown appointed a leading environmental scientist as head of a state “early warning system” to detect and study potentially dangerous agribusiness chemicals. • Two multi-million dollar lawsuits were filed by Californian women who allege they suffered cancer and miscarriages as a result of exposure to spraying. The suits, against the United States Government and Dow Chemical Company, are

the first of their kind in America. There are signs that the revolt is spreading within the Forest Service itself. Three Californian foresters recently refused to join in a helicopter-spraying operation. They were fired. Earlier this year, the Environmental Protection Agency banned sales of 2,4,5-T, after it was linked to miscarriages among Oregon women. But 2,4-D, the most widely used phenoxy herbicide ' in the world, is still freely available. Together, the two chemicals make up “agent orange, ’’ the defoliant used in massive quantities on

Vietnam by the United States military. The chemical companies cite studies showing little or no damage to animals from 2,4-D. Their opponents wave a report by the Health. Education, and Welfare Department, involving tests on 79,000 animals, which concluded that 2,4-D, produced as many birth deformities as 2.4.5.-T. "Whoever is right, people are alarmed.” a California county supervisor says. "The rate of abnormal pregnancies in spray areas justifies that alarm." Recorded birth defects < range from cleft palates to

a high incidence of a medically rare phenomenon known as a mole pregnancy—a miscarriage in which the foetus is expelled, although contained with the placenta, as an unrecognisable mass of blood and tissue. "It’s a new Vietnam, pitting Government against the little people,” says the Oregon activist, Ivan Rossall. "The courts don’t worry, the bureaucracy laughs at us. And so a new alliance is forming, of small farmers, fishermen, Indians, homesteaders, even the sisters at a local nunnery.” —O.F.N.S. copyright.