Three years ago, my family moved to the country and became organic farmers. My wife, Neila, and I had long desired to live in the forest, thinking it a healthy place to raise our children. And it is healthy, except for one thing: the aerial spraying of herbicide on the clear-cuts that surround our land.

Soon after moving to this gorgeous 35 acres in the Coast Range near Triangle Lake, our neighbors began telling us horror stories about herbicide exposure. Shocked by what we were hearing, we began holding community meetings. Dozens of local folks gave heart-rending testimonies of horrible health consequences – including cancers, nervous disorders and still-births – that they attributed to long-term exposure to herbicides applied by the timber industry.

For a year we gathered testimony and invited experts to our monthly meetings. Then we began contacting various government agencies with a plea for help. We started with the Oregon Department of Forestry, and since then we have contacted every agency that has anything to do with the environment or public health.

Right off the bat, we noticed something fishy: These state and federal agencies seemed to be spokespersons for big timber and big pesticide companies. Their words seemed to come directly from industry handbooks. Not one agency was interested in interviewing the people who claim to have been harmed by the aerial spraying of herbicides; in fact, each agency took an adversarial stance toward us.

To call attention to our frustration with these agencies, we held the largest demonstration in the history of the small town of Greenleaf. To illustrate the fact that we are not your usual demonstrators but angry country folk, we called the demonstration The Pitchfork Rebellion. Many of the 70 or so who attended brought farm animals, including sheep, goats and chickens. The Pitchfork Rebellion became the name of our ongoing movement to protect the health of forest dwellers, human and nonhuman, and the health of the forests that are our home.

Because we thought it bizarre that state and federal agencies were not interested in our plight and that their language parroted Big Timber and Big Chemical literature, we launched an investigation. The results of the first year of what will be a three-year investigation – “The Pitchfork Inquiry Into the Influence of Big Business on State and Federal Agencies” – are now in. Already we have accumulated very revealing data…

Full Story: http://www.registerguard.com/csp/cms/sites/dt.cms.support.
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