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- All these people here to enjoy the
outdoors and boy, they have no idea what just drove by.
And we'll go right up the top of the mountain and...
spray 'em all.
Douglas County Parks picnic area here.
Swift Water Park.
So we'll go up top and toxify things.
- These helicopters flying over the ridge
spraying something and they didn't even see the kids.
The kids were all fishing or just playing by the river.
And the kids were all choking and gasping.
That night they were all really sick.
They had diarrhea, they were having trouble breathing.
We went down to the river that next day
and that's when we found dead ducklings
and dead crayfish, dead trout.
We called the Forest Service
and they said, "Oh no, it's perfectly safe."
It was a mixture 2,4-D and 2,4,5-T, Agent Orange,
that was banned in Vietnam and nobody realized
that the same chemicals were being used here.
And it's still going on.
- Agent Orange was a tremendously
destructive component of a tremendously destructive war.
In its own unique way, Agent Orange was
the most destructive instance
of chemical warfare in modern history.
- You're such a good puppy, uh-huh.
You're gonna be a big help?
This is our newt pond.
If the sun comes out, the newts will come out
but they're all in hiding, and in the spring
which probably in another month, they have orgies.
Really, I have X-rated pictures of my newts.
[chickens clucking]
When I was still five years old or something,
I read everything, cereal boxes, the New York Times.
I mean it just didn't matter
and it was still during the war
and I read something about all the birds
being killed by oil spills from ships being blown up
and that's what I worried about
during the War was all those birds.
You coming, Mike? You gonna help me?
And I started writing letters.
I'm not sure who I sent them to or [chuckles],
wanting someone to take care of those birds, please!
Maybe that was the beginning of my activism, I have no idea.
We moved here in '74.
The kids were just part of this landscape.
They were down along the river.
They knew everything that lived down there,
the dippers and they're called dippers
because they'll sit on a rock and bow to you.
My kids loved it, I mean they were part of it.
There were beavers and otters in the river then too
and of course all the fish and the herons and ospreys.
So they just were part of that, they loved it.
There was nothing to worry about.
[saw buzzing]
[vehicles rumbling]
[truck beeping]
[Carol] Clear-cutting is one of the most
insane things you could ever do.
It's like strip mining a living organism, which a forest is.
They weren't required to replant and most
of those clear-cuts developed into huge brush fields.
Anything that would save the soil was better than nothing.
Then all of a sudden they were faced
with this law that says you can't clear-cut
unless you replant within three years.
So then they had to clear all the brush
on these old clear-cuts so they could replant them.
It just all coincided
with the end of the use of Agent Orange in Vietnam.
Michael Newton from Oregon State University
was getting surplus barrels of Agent Orange
that the Air Force couldn't use anymore in Vietnam
and was praising the use of these things
and how they were going to transform forestry forever.
And they started to just blanket these
huge clear-cuts with a lot of Agent Orange.
It drifts, and we could smell it and within a few days,
our garden was dead, the kids were all sick again
and the dog got so sick he died.
[ominous tones]
One woman had had 14 miscarriages
and hunters were finding deformed deer,
baby fawns with no eyes.
Geese were hatching with horrendous deformities.
They had their feet on backwards, they had crossed beaks.
Some of them had only one wing
or a little crippled up, you know what I mean?
We just didn't know until we were hearing
the same thing from other people and that
it didn't happen until the spraying happened.
That first meeting we had out here,
no one knew what they were spraying or what it was for.
A lot of people just assumed, well,
it's the government doing it, it must be okay.
We invited the Forest Service
and we were basically saying
"This is what's happening to us and maybe you
don't know about it but now you do and you need to stop."
And of course they didn't take us seriously at all.
We call ourselves the document junkies, you know?
Yeah, "no trace Of contamination found."
That's the lies they got published.
- Carol has been just a tireless champion
for uncovering true, factual, scientifically-based
information and trying to get that before decision makers.
[protesters chanting]
These people were just literally at their wit's end
and I remember sitting there thinking Bruce,
there's some way you've gotta help these people.
They are literally -- nobody's willing to help 'em.
And I said, you've gotta produce the experts
and if you can produce the experts, I'll take
your case on and we'll go to battle over it.
[camera snaps]
- It was raining a minute ago and the sun just came out.
So I just wanted to document this.
I think this is why you're not
supposed to spray at certain temperatures
and obviously you're not supposed to spray
during the rain because it goes right down
into the creek and over there and over there.
Anyways, everything's going into the creek around here.
These vapors, I'm breathing 'em right now.
I'm in a gas chamber right now.
These chemicals volatize.
[helicopter whirring]
You gotta be f'ing kidding me.
I just got sprayed again.
[horns honking]
- [Reporter] At the White House,
the stage of history is set for first meeting between
President Eisenhower and Senator Kennedy since the election.
- When Eisenhower passed over
the national security apparatus to John Kennedy,
how scared we had to be that Communism
was on the march and we had to stop it wherever it was.
Kennedy loved the idea that American ingenuity,
not just big, scary bombs but
different, more surgical kinds of technologies could be used
to defeat these insurgencies. And Agent Orange,
herbicides in general, was part of that strategic view.
[dramatic trumpet music]
- [Spokesman] Here at the Dow Chemical Company in Midland,
Michigan, revolutionary chemical killers are being
produced to help rid us of these costly pests.
One of the newest and most versatile weapons in Dow's
arsenal of chemical warfare is 2,4-Dow weed killer.
Proved in action against hundreds
of weeds and a wide variety of crops.
2,4-D is a growth regulator type of weed killer.
The action is physiological, appearing to upset the plant's
growth processes and causing gradual but certain death.
- The Saigon government in 1961
was a vociferous proponent
of the use of herbicides in Vietnam.
The Diem government was fighting a Communist insurgency
in the South that was supplied by the North.
[gunfire clacking]
They felt that the insurgency
was a major threat to their existence.
- Okay.
This is in October, 1961.
Things haven't really gotten started yet.
These are Telexes: it's a message from Ambassador Nolting
but basically saying President Diem is begging people
to spray crops and there's so much doubt and confusion
in Washington about whether to do this or not.
- And as long as they controlled the defoliation program
in a very professional way, then there wasn't any concern
that the prohibitions of the Geneva Protocol applied.
"The President has approved the recommendation
of the Secretary of State and the Deputy Secretary
of Defense to participate in a selective
and carefully controlled joint program
of defoliant operations in Vietnam,
starting with the clearance of key routes
and proceeding thereafter to food denial."
- [Zierler] - Take away the forest cover,
take away the insurgents' capability
to hide and conduct guerrilla ambush operations.
But once the overall war escalated, the defoliation program
just sort of followed rather mindlessly right behind it.
Spraying millions of gallons of highly concentrated
herbicides indiscriminately over vast areas of forest
many times over is chemical warfare.
It was highly destructive and it was massive.
It was a weapon of mass destruction.
- Ranch Hand was the name for the
herbicide defoliation program run by the Air Force.
I was sent over to Vietnam in May of 1971
to do the final historical write-up
of the Ranch Hand program.
I had made friends with a young Army lieutenant over there
and he came to me one afternoon and said,
"We have received orders from headquarters."
This was 1971.
"We are to dump the computer and erase it."
Not download it and ship to Washington.
"Dumped," he said.
He said, "If you want any of that information
for your report, you're gonna have to come
with me tonight and we'll go over to MACV Headquarters
and I'll get you into my office and we'll print 'em out."
And he turned on the machine
and we printed out a stack like that,
that had missions,
sorties, how many aircraft in every mission,
coordinates, how many gallons dropped, the dates,
everything for all of Southeast Asia including Laos.
My report indicated that
there were some real problems
developing from people exposed to Agent Orange.
I finished my report and it was immediately
classified SECRET and the government kept it locked up
for over 35 years and denied that it even existed.
- It was tantamount to a cover up regardless.
There was information that was withheld, distortions
that were commonplace,
that did a real disservice
to the veterans and to our rule of law.
All of that occurred with far greater regularity
and at far higher levels than I would like to acknowledge.
- [Clary] The powers that be went to great lengths
to play down--
to deny--any effect of the TCDD, dioxin,
in the herbicide.
- When we started the litigation,
this became a real David and Goliath act
because we had the whole U.S.Attorney's office representing
the Federal government and the largest law firm
in the state of Oregon representing I.F.A.,
which is a front group for the chemical
manufacturers and for timber sprayers.
The Forest Service had been unwilling to do any kind
of community health survey after the spraying
to see if anybody was in fact being harmed.
It was simply saying,"Our chemicals aren't harming anybody."
But it wasn't looking to see if they were harmed.
- My cousin, she said she had a miscarriage
and a friend of mine, she did have a miscarriage.
- [Reporter] And this was all
in this area where they're spraying?
- Yeah.
- The women have lived in areas
that have been sprayed very close to their homes.
Many of us have gravity-feed water systems.
And the dates that they were sprayed
are really amazing because all of the areas
were sprayed within a month before the miscarriage.
- And it was very stunning
that they would spray an area and within a month
the miscarriage rate--what they called
the spontaneous abortion rate--would skyrocket,
according to the hospital data.
- Between my husband and I and our nurse practitioner,
we delivered between 100 and 150 children a year...
seeing a larger number of birth defects
than we would've expected.
We saw a number of congenital hearts.
And I think it was 1978, I delivered an anencephalic child.
That's a child that doesn't have basically the normal brain.
In my lifetime of delivering babies,
I would not expect ever to see one.
And about a year later,
we delivered a second anencephalic child.
Those odds were just astronomical
that a small practice like ours
would have two anencephalic children.
All of these chemicals are suspect.
We know in animals that they cause birth defects.
Why are we using them in humans?
It made me realize that there was something going on
and the something that I was aware of
was broadcast spraying of herbicides.
At that point, it was mainly 2,4-D over our water supplies
because we drink surface water at the coast.
[ominous tones ]
[camera snaps]
- Down below me is a dam and a water supply.
If this camera shows it, there's the helicopter
on the ridge right there by the trees.
So we're gonna be spraying right below it.
Crazy!
That whole unit over there is dead, dead, dead, dead
and they're spraying more chemicals on it
right now as we speak.
I gotta hold this low because
right over there is the honcho of the forest.
So basically we dropped 1160 gallons
into this right here
and it is, I'm gonna show you real quick,
it's gonna go basically right down into that watershed
and the unit's already de-weeded anyways.
I don't know why they did that.
And here's the reservoir,
I'm down here at the reservoir.
And we're gonna go spray
on the other side of the reservoir now.
Both sides of the watershed.
[Darryl coughs]
My throat is burning.
- The kids were involved in the whole herbicide battle.
They were helping write the newsletters
and draw the pictures and help with signs.
There's the poster that Daphne made.
She did that when she was about 11.
They were right in the thick of it.
We had like five minutes to come up with a name
for this group: Citizens Against Toxic Sprays, CATS.
It wasn't the most imaginative name but it worked, I guess.
Hi. - Hi, Carol.
- And it wasn't until basically CATS was formed
and started questioning it with filing a court action
and then it suddenly got some attention and
there was a lot of pushback
from the chemical companies and the timber companies.
- Chemicals are being used as a means
of achieving environmental goals, really.
The attack is not scientific, it's purely emotional.
The public does not understand and we unfortunately
haven't successfully communicated to the public as yet.
Take 2,4,5-T for example.
2,4,5-T is about as toxic as aspirin.
The safety factor in the use of 2,4,5-T
is far greater than the safety factors in use of aspirin.
Now does the public understand that?
- [Carol] Documents disappearing
is a common thing I think in this whole story.
Susan Swift's health study
that she was doing of everybody in this valley...
she had done door-to-door survey
of peoples' health and the children's health and animals,
anything that people could report about
and her house getting broken into and this health study,
all the data she had collected, it was gone.
- I was just taking information
and gathered the data together
and I created a questionnaire to go
and I interviewed every home up and down Five Rivers Road.
There was an enormous amount
of small tumors and miscarriages.
Right after that, my box of
documented forms disappeared out of my house.
The board members of Citizens Against Toxic Sprays
were going to Eugene over the mountain
taking these Forest Service roads,
just going straight up and over the mountain,
all gravel little logging roads,
and we were being followed by a shiny sedan
with guys in suits.
And that was pretty bizarre.
[low, ominous tones]
- One Saturday morning when my husband
was making rounds at the hospital,
two fellows in suits showed up at my front door
and said they wanted to talk about the herbicides.
And I said that was fine.
My two children were running around
very happily playing.
They didn't really say where they were from.
I said, "Come on in, have a cup of coffee."
Because I had had a number of reporters
and other people show up. And then when they said,
"Do you know at all times where your children are?"
I realized that I didn't.
And I said it was time to end the interview
because it was clearly a threat against me and my children.
And it worked, I'm done.
- [Bruce] A van that had dark tinted windows on both sides
suddenly showed up outside of Carol and Steve's house,
who were the leaders of
the Citizens Against Toxic Spray movement.
- This is for Sadie.
The car was parked here but they were walking up here
with all their gear, obviously thinking I wasn't home.
He didn't really explain why they were here.
It was when I realized the other guy
was sneaking up there and talking to the kids,
then I got kind of angry.
He was asking them all about what kinds
of deformed critters we had in the freezer--because we did!
We saved a bunch of them hoping to get 'em
analyzed to see what was in 'em.
- But the rear door flew open as it drove away and they
could see that there were large video cameras in there.
- [Carol] The phone company itself, their employees
told us that our phones were being tapped.
Steve would get in the car
and he would usually drive over the back roads.
Nobody drives over there, nobody did then.
Suddenly, there'd be a car behind him
and it would stick to him all the way
every time they went to the valley to do anything.
Who is it? We don't know.
Is it government people? Is it industry people?
There was no way to really know.
- [Bruce] It was an obvious attempt to try to intimidate
the folks who were bringing this litigation
to try to reduce herbicide aerial spraying.
- Well, we won a temporary injunction.
What the Judge in the CATS case,
thanks to all those scientists and studies
that we were able to compile, ruled was that hey,
you've got to include in your environmental impact
statement the effects of these chemicals in Vietnam.
And that was a blow to the Forest Service because by then,
there were some really documented impacts in Vietnam.
We felt vindicated in a lot of ways
but his injunction only applied to 2,4,5-T,
which was half of Agent Orange.
The CATS case generated quite a bit of publicity
just because it was so amazing that these people living
out in the woods could sue the Federal government and win.
It was kind of unheard of at that point,
especially on an environmental issue.
So other people were contacting us.
They were all experiencing the same thing.
This was people in other places in Oregon, in
the state of Washington, in Idaho, in Northern California.
There were even requests from places back east.
- [Susan] One thing I'll never forget is that just
gathering scientific data from Oregon State University,
what we were able to find from their own library,
studies in Idaho of roadside spray workers
that showed deformed sperm after the spray season.
- So we put together an information packet
and then they could use that information to take
their own actions and file their own cases, whatever.
[ominous music]
There were negative feelings toward what we were doing.
The propaganda put out by
the chemical companies and the timber companies
that number one, there's nothing wrong with the sprays
and number two, these people are just the lunatic fringe.
They convinced the loggers or some
of them anyway that they were gonna all
be out of work if they couldn't use the herbicides.
- The house was on fire when Carol came up the driveway.
The house was totally in flames.
Patrick said he stopped her,
that she grabbed a knife off his belt and started
running up the hill and he just grabbed her and held her.
And he felt sure that Carol was gonna
try to take her own life that night.
The Van Strum children were gone...
And we all crumbled, we all just couldn't believe it.
- The firefighters said it was arson.
It's hard to talk about it, I just can't really.
They had done the absolute worst thing anybody
could do to me and they couldn't do anymore.
Okay everybody, who's hungry?
Yes, you want some brekker.
The animals were still here.
I think that's what kept me going, you know?
It was what was left of my kids
was what they loved, you know?
Oh boy, here you go.
Oakey's the big one, 30 years old.
He's very intuitive.
Like if you're really upset about something, he will come
and just like lean against you and be comforting.
Hey, Rudy-tooty.
He wants to help you feel better, I don't know.
I rely on him.
[Carol laughs]
This was the garage, there was no floor here.
And so we put a floor in and I just was living
in this room and I still am.
In a way, it was in honor of my kids I had to keep going.
They fought this fight too, it wasn't just me.
And the only thing was to keep going for their sake.
- The Federal government basically federalized
all the chemical companies to do nothing but produce
Agent Orange and other chemicals for the war in Vietnam.
And they knew that the more they produced,
the more money they would make.
So they, in order to
deliver as much as they could as quickly as they could,
they violated then existing industry standards
for the production of herbicides
by using a process that was much shorter,
at higher temperatures,
that was responsible for the presence of the dioxin
in the ultimate chemical substances that were created.
And they knew that it posed a risk to individuals.
They knew that it posed a risk to the land.
They knew that it contained a poison
and they knew that the effects could be devastating.
- While I was preparing my report,
I came across a letter that I got out of headquarters
that was from Dow to the government and back and said,
"We cannot produce the quantities
of Agent Orange you want and maintain the low level,
insignificant level, of TCDD, dioxin."
And they went back and said,
"Don't worry about it, we need the quantities.
Besides, it's gonna be sprayed on the jungle over there.
There aren't gonna be any people there.
And if they happen to get into it, so what?
We're at war."
- In a letter from Dr. James Clary,
an Air Force scientist, saying that he and others involved
in Ranch Hand knew that Agent Orange was harmful.
- We knew dioxin
is an extremely potent carcinogenic,
mutagenic, meaning it causes chromosomes to mutate,
teratogenic, affecting the fetus of a woman.
Very potent compound.
- National Bureau of Standards
estimate on the half-life for a dioxin molecule:
two billion years.
That's why EPA regards it as equivalent to plutonium,
both in its toxicity and in its longevity,
how long it can persist.
So it doesn't go away, it goes away politically.
- This is the first time that the scientists have
ever created a molecule this toxic and that they
know that even just one to two parts per trillion
can cause birth defects, mutations, cancer.
- We sprayed 20 million gallons of that stuff over there.
Their watersheds are contaminated.
Their rice fields are contaminated.
Their wells are contaminated.
Depending on who you want to believe,
there's four or 500,000 adults
contaminated with it and half a million children.
[somber tone]
[helicopters whirring]
- The Forest Service never did spray 2,4,5-T again.
They substituted 2,4-D on the assumption
that it had no dioxin in it
and that it was safe
and Melyse's water supply got sprayed.
- [Reporter] Melyse Connelly was one of the Five Rivers
women who pleaded with the government
to come and test their environment.
She remembers that the EPA
sent two scientists from Colorado.
They took some samples and left,
promising to return in 90 days.
In the meantime, they wanted
Melyse to come up with more material.
That included a backyard chicken
which she still has in her freezer and a number
of water samples taken with special EPA filters.
- We called him, we wrote him.
We wondered where he was.
90 days is what he gave us,
that he would be back in touch with us.
That was in '79.
'83, here we are.
- Are you angry? - I'm very angry.
I'm very upset.
- There were samples taken of people in the area,
of tissue and blood and I believe
urine as well and submitted for testing.
Somehow, they disappeared.
How can you have something like that disappear?
- Well it's both a bureaucratic bollix and suppression.
- [reporter] Paul Merrell and Carol Van Strum
have been battling with the EPA for years.
They're also responsible for uncovering many
of the EPA documents that have now come to light.
- The EPA planned ahead of time with the Forest Service
to come in after they sprayed and collect the body count.
- [reporter] You're saying the people
out there were used as guinea pigs?
- That's right. - How do you know that?
- From their own documents.
- I'm not sure what's gonna happen now but
somebody's gonna pay.
- [reporter] Dr. Mike Newton of Oregon State
says that a recent study of herbicide
applicators showed no signs of health hazards.
- They've got to start listening
to some of the residents and our rights.
I mean I have to move because my daughter became very ill
just a year ago with a blood disease
that has been associated with herbicides.
I feel like I'm just
up against the wall, you know?
And that I've done all that I can do peaceably.
- This is sort of a cause of life and death in a way.
- Working within the system has been done.
The appeals have been done, lawsuits have been done.
Public hearings, conferences with officials
have been done and still the spraying goes on.
- This person has been contaminated. They spray people!
- [Carol] There've been incidents
in other parts of the country where
people have actually shot at the spray helicopter.
- [Masked Woman] A helicopter was burned as a message
to the companies who profit from spraying poisons.
We sabotage poison-spreading machines
as an act of self-defense.
- [Carol] No one was hurt.
It was the frustration, even with the CATS case,
that they could still go ahead and spray 2,4-D
and at that point they were adding, since they
couldn't use 2,4,5-T, they added glyphosate
and atrazine and- - Tordon.
- All these chemical
cocktails that no one has ever put together
and tested on any living creature.
- And so they could continue spraying is the point.
- [Masked Woman] Our present health
and genetic future are at stake. We will strike again.
- Newly released court documents indicate
that the companies which manufactured Agent Orange
knew as far back as the 1960s that one of its ingredients
known as 2,4,5-T contained the toxic contaminant dioxin.
- It just blew my mind to see documents,
internal memos from chemical companies, that would say
"We know this is toxic, we're gonna sell it anyway."
- Dow realized that they needed to settle
the Agent Orange case to keep all that information buried.
In the fall of 1983,
Dow as the leader of all the 2,4,5-T
manufacturers withdrew all registrations for 2,4,5-T.
And what that did was bury everything:
all that evidence of dioxin
in the environment, in human tissues,
in the Vietnam veterans.
Very, very damaging information on
the health effects of 2,4,5-T and dioxin
just was swept under the rug, went into EPA archives
and it's now gone forever except what I managed to save.
So that record would have been dynamite
for the veterans if that case had continued,
but it didn't.
- The case was not settled on any scientific basis.
It was settled on a political basis.
The defendants wished
to avoid further litigation.
The moment it was settled, their stock went up.
So they made a wise decision.
- I think this is good for the veterans.
I think it's good for the defendants.
I think it's good for the country
because I think it allows us all now to put this issue
behind us and get on with the business we have to do.
- My mother had two miscarriages when my father
came back from Vietnam and then I was born in '72.
I only weighed three pounds and four ounces.
My father said he could hold me
in his hand like this, I was so small.
I'm missing my right leg below the knee,
my fingers and I'm missing my big toe
and my other toes are webbed but, yeah.
My story is not very much unlike many, many children
in Vietnam and other American children as well.
So we share the same type of birth defects.
- No, I don't get any benefits from the government.
They deny that the children
of male Vietnam veterans
are affected.
My father's own illness, he died of.
So I'm hoping with your lawsuit, that things will change.
That it'll stick this time
and many people will understand how
the chemical companies have destroyed many people.
- I was getting so angry
that my own government
didn't want to provide help to veterans who were suffering.
- We had a sense of moral outrage about what happened
and the fact that we felt as lawyers, we had
the opportunity and the obligation to raise these issues.
[gavel bangs]
And the case died.
It's frustrating.
- Was any assurance given when you arrived at
the settlement with the chemical companies and the veterans
that there would not be
any more litigation?
Would such an assurance have
affected your role
when the Vietnamese people's case came to you?
- I'm not prepared to discuss the Vietnamese issue.
It was a separate case,
decided long after the major settlement was
decided upon, accepted and fully executed.
- [Alan] So then no such assurance was given
to the chemical companies in the original case?
- The original case gave
the producers what they settled for.
- [Alan] And was there finality,
an assurance of finality to that?
- I thought there was.
- These companies have been able
to avoid accountability for what they've done.
I think your case is incredibly important as sort of
the last opportunity that we may have to hold these
companies accountable for the wrongdoing that they knew
they were engaged in when they made this poisonous product.
- The National Forest here is no longer sprayed
and the reason is a series of lawsuits
that began with the CATS lawsuit.
But how about all those other people?
How about people right down the road that have
private timberland around them that's getting sprayed?
- Here he comes, I gotta reload him.
All these chemicals are going in there.
All this goes into that truck.
This stuff is nasty stuff.
It's a nasty combo and it kills everything.
It kills everything including
my ability to breathe correctly.
[camera snaps]
Hold on, it says on the label:
"hazardous to humans and domestic animals."
And it leaks out onto everywhere.
There's just so many things not right about this.
- [Carol] They're gonna keep these chemicals
on the market no matter what.
The only hope is for the community rights
movement to keep insisting that we have the right
to protect all of our communities from being poisoned.
And maybe it's a pipe dream but if these corporations
have human rights according to the Supreme Court,
well damn it, they should be subject
to capital punishment just like an individual would be.
[people applauding]
- It's been hard work coming for us but-
- A lot of hard work but I want
to emphasize how important the work is.
Even though you feel sometimes you're working in isolation,
there's a lot of people watching this.
- [Amelie] She was diagnosed with cancer this week.
[thunder booming]
- [Carol] Documents accumulated over 40 years
of Freedom of Information Actions that I did,
including several lawsuits
to try to get documents out of EPA,
PCB lawsuits, the Agent Orange lawsuits
trying to stop the government spraying out here.
Then I had a bunch of stuff
from Dow Chemical that they hoped I'd never get.
I couldn't afford to store them anywhere
and that's when Peter von Stackelberg,
the Canadian journalist, drummed up some funding to get them
all scanned and that was how the Poison Papers happened.
We must have scanned close to 200,000 pages.
He could upload them as they were scanned.
10 hours a day, non-stop.
A lot of the documents involved
the fraudulent testing of chemical products.
So lawyers now in bringing these lawsuits
are being able to find that information and use it.
I hope they'll make trouble.
I mean, that's the whole goal
is to make them available to anybody that needs them.
[camera snapping]
- Will you film my tongue please?
Can you see that?
I am at the hospital
and I'm getting ready to go into
the decontamination shower.
I showed them some of the pamphlets
of
what I got sprayed with and this one right here,
they seemed to be very concerned about.
They have told me to come out here
and stand here because they don't want me in the hospital
and so I'm being treated like a biological hazard here.
I just got up.
This is what...
[Darryl coughs]
The only way I can sleep at night...
is eating lots of those
'cause I can't breathe right due to these chemicals.
This is my old rag I have at night
by the bed and obviously,
you can see I'm using it for, really nasty,
I know this is a nasty video but
this is the crap that's coming out of me.
[coughs]
- [Susan] There's a wonderful saying that
if you think you're too little to make a difference,
then you have never been in bed with a mosquito.
- It is with great pleasure that the conference co-directors
of the 36th annual Public Interest Environmental Law
Conference select Carol Van Strum as a recipient
of this year's David Brower Lifetime Achievement Award
in recognition of her outstanding environmental
social justice work in Lincoln County, Oregon.
[people applauding]
- I just want to thank everybody for making this happen.
It's amazing and the other thing
I want to say is that it was never about me.
It's always
been a lot of other people,
some of them not alive with us today. [sniffs]
And that's what's gonna make the changes that are needed.
I think you've got several generations
coming up of troublemakers that'll do
a whole lot more than any of us did, I hope.
[people cheering]
[Music crescendoes]