Our farm is situated at the foot of the Coast Range, in a beautiful little valley at the western edge of the Tualatin Basin. The rain that falls on our little piece of paradise drops from air masses that travel thousands of miles across the open Pacific and is therefore about as pristine as rain can be anywhere on our increasingly trashy, polluted planet. There are no factories or cities upstream of us, just farms, a few homesteads, tens of thousands of acres of sterilized Douglas-fir plantations and scattered swatches of natural coastal forest that have yet to be cleared and sprayed by our Oregon Department of Forestry. Just give them a couple of decades, though, and they will make short work of that.
Anywho…
So one would expect that the water in our well would be free of most everything except the herbicides and pesticides that farmers, ODF and corporations regularly spray with booms and helicopters onto fields and forests. I would not expect to find other industrial or household chemicals, though. But here they are, deep in the ground under our farm, in the water that my little grandchildren drink, poisoning them a little bit every single day. I just found this out last week as lab results came back showing just shy of 0.5 ng/l of perfluorooctanesulfonamide, a PFAS chemical, the active ingredient in ScotchGuard and used in a multitude of industrial and consumer products.
PFAS is a class of chemicals containing a dizzying array of entirely man-made compounds. Our very own EPA, the regulator of pollution in our fair land, has managed to count 14,735 of them (the chemists have actually concocted over 7 million PFAS by some counts), of which EPA now requires reporting of 206 and actually regulates just 2. The EPA’s lame response to PFAS didn’t even get out of the gate until 2006, with a halfhearted “let’s ask our friends at DuPont and 3M what to think about this PFAS thing,” just the kind of fervent action we would expect from EPA on behalf of the public interest. A day late and a dollar short. And absolutely idiotic.
The true story of these chemicals should be enough to turn everyone’s stomach. It’s a tale as old as human technology. Curious and ingenius humans fiddle around with fire and stone and find some great process or product that can be used for an immediate benefit. Money and power ensue. Then people start getting sick and dropping dead. Aww..that’s too bad! But the money..
Corporate interests long ago figured out that science matters. On the technology side, science is the wellspring of new and better ways to make money. But then there’s this pesky problem with rivers catching on fire, birds falling from the sky and babies being born with facial defects and lifelong reproductive harm. Or not being born at all. Just think of all the little prospective consumers that aren’t there because mom or dad worked at a 3M plant in the 80’s.
So the corporations have a conundrum. Their products and technological advancements have definitively curtailed the human population via large-scale drops in human fertility. But that problem, the reduction in future customers, is way too far down the road to matter. What matters to the corporate strategists is making money in the next two quarters. And bad press and litigation actually matter to this year’s bottom line. Corporations hate bad press and they will do anything and everything to avoid it, or at least put it off for the next round of corporate officers to deal with. In the case of 3M and DuPont, this strategy was fantastically effective, buying them over a half century of uninhibited PFAS money-making, from the first indications of the toxicity of this stuff in the 1950’s, to 2006 when EPA first broke out of their perpetual slumber and said “what…huh? What the hell..who woke us up?”
From the stock chart above, we can infer that up until about the mid 2000’s, the money was just rolling in. The industry scientists and bumbling bureaucrats, with their obfuscation, selective research, outright lies and omissions, managed to keep the PFAS pot from boiling over for a very, very long time ( https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/37273487/ ). Finally, along about 2005, there were a few hiccups asociated with bad press as the public started hearing whispers about PFAS, and then there was the 2008 meltdown. But by and large, the machine kept chugging along despite what should have been a full-stop kind of national wake-up. DuPont and 3M went on making PFAS, cranking out money for the Epstein Class, until 2018 when the whole thing started to fall apart and the massive legacy of contamination and human suffering could no longer be fully denied. Not that they haven’t given it their all. If there’s a nickel to be made at the cost of everyone else’s dime, by golly, they will take that deal in a flash. Even if it’s shorting their own stock. That 3M exists outside of a receivership is a testament to the power of corporations, and the government agencies that enable them, despite in this case a legacy of environmental disasters so enormous that the entire economy of the United States can’t begin to repair them. This stuff is in the groundwater now across the entire country, and many aquifers are so polluted that they are essentially undrinkable for the rest of time. How do you fix that? You can’t, not with all the money in the world.
So, there you go. A classic American tale. Ride that old mare ‘til she drops. But behind this swashbuckling scene of American derring-do, there are labs and offices full of scientists and bureaucrats, publishing thousands of studies and policy statements, purportedly to ensure due process and public safety. But this scurrying about, shuffling of papers and injecting lab rats with PFAS, doesn’t in any way protect due process or safety, it just muddies the water. Which brings me back to my little valley, the formerly forested hills around it and the scurrilous bastards that own them.
Stimson Lumber, Weyerhaeuser and the rest own most of the forest in northwest Oregon. They have cut and sprayed essentially every acre of their forest in the past 4 decades, plus whatever small private ownerships they could get their hands on, totalling something close to 6 million acres of logging and spraying across western Oregon. The effect on ecosystems of the north Coast Range has been, in a word, apolcalyptic. Native plants have been annihilated by the billions – trillium, violet, elderberry, maple, cascara, black-caps and hundreds of other species – with chemical “cocktails” as they are known in the industry, applied from helicopters to millions of acres of former forest, converting them into biologically strangled plantations of Douglas-fir super trees. Glyphosate, hexazinone, imazapyr, metsulfuron, sulfometuron, clopyralid, 2,4-d, atrazine and several other high-powered herbicides are applied to over 100,000 acres of Oregon forests every year, a fact that is well-known to state officials, but rarely discussed in the open as these folks prefer to be seen as environmentally sensitive hipsters. Or at least to stay out of sight of this particularly shameful spotlight.
This is the point in the story where I have to insist that I am not some tree-hugging fool trying to stop the chainsaws. I am a huge fan of real wood – the kind of wood that Oregon is blessed to be able to produce better than anyplace else in the world, but that hasn’t been produced here since corporate power killed the federal timber supply and cornered the log market. I actually want more trees cut in this state, not less. I want more quality wood produced, not less. I want more good jobs and healthy small towns, not fewer. All of this is possible, and none of it requires spraying chemicals on forests. At all.
How is this possible, you ask? Isn’t industry maximizing the economic productivity of their forests? No, they are not. They are maximizing corporate profits and shielding themselves from taxes and other liabilities. Your job, if you are one of the few people still working in wood products in this state, is a corporate liability. That is the one and only reason that there are so few of you left, and if you don’t wake up, there will be none of you left. The corporate strategists do not want you, and they don’t care if you, your family and your home town go up in flames. Just look at Idanha and Mill City for proof positive that this is so. The economic conflagration and collapse of timber towns across this state was entirely engineered by corporate strategists, and blessed and enabled by our own government. I have an admission of this on the record, from Weyerhaeuser VP Dan Newton himself, if you want to hear the story sometime. Just give me a call.
Like the PFAS circus, we have our own scientists, bureaucrats and spin-doctors working hard to protect the money-making machine that is Oregon corporate forestry. This machine has its own nightmarish legacy of small-town economic despair and environmental destruction. The story is the same, only the names and places have changed. Right now, I am engaged in a debate with researchers at our very own Oregon State University and its partners at industry think tanks (e.g. NCASI) and propaganda generating organizations (OFRI). Corporate operatives are so deeply enmeshed at Oregon State University’s Peavy Hall that they come and go seamlessly, silently prodding the ivory tower to do its bidding. It’s a formidable force, this fabulously well-funded partnership between moneyed interests and academics, and the selective research it produces is oil for the corporate machine and a slippery, squishy defense against anyone that bothers to question it. And I’m bothering.
To the scientists and other employees working for Peavy Hall, Weyerhaeuser et al, the industry think tank NCASI and for their publicly funded propaganda machine, the Oregon Forest Resources Institute, I have this to say. You are working for the exact same machine that has poisoned my grandchildren. If you were not aware of this, I have to hope it was just an oversight. But it’s true.
Real science – the kind that is curious, open and focused on truth – is a beautiful thing. It can open windows and doors for us to a truly better world. Science really matters. Truth really matters. But it has to be the whole truth, unadulterated with money-making bias. Science without truth is not science. It is fuel for the propaganda machine, and unless we all wise up, at some point that machine will finally get what it wants – the worlds’ biggest stack of greenbacks that will ever exist.
And that will be that.
‘Til next time,
-George