No Spray Zone Presentation at Washington Toxic Coalition's May 22nd, 2000 Forum

We have a poor record of stewardship of our biosphere. In a world where capitalism and Mammon reign, the welfare of drug, chemical, and other manufacturers must be weighed against the safety of the public. Our government officials have too often decided in favor of private profits and against the well being of the citizens they are supposed to protect.

We need go no further than our own state to see this phenomenon all around us. Washington, whose persona is salmon and Sound, rainforests, jet planes, and computers, is also the state of exploding pipelines - the state that allows pulp mills and incinerators to pour dioxins and other PBT's unchecked into our water and air - the state that turns a blind eye to smelters and cement kilns dumping their toxic waste onto our farms, despoiling our wonderful produce with invisible poisons - and a state that would spray, willy-nilly, bacteria and chemicals of unknown long-term consequences on its citizens from the air, for no discernable reason at all other than a fearful panicked governor and a plodding, intransigent, unresponsive bureaucracy.

A few days ago, I heard a sound bite on NPR in which a chemical industry representative, when asked about the possibility of more stringent rules for the release of dioxins, said "We're not contesting that these substances are hazardous. All that were asking is that the results of human tests, not animal tests, be used when setting standards." This is the same industry that insists that safety tests can be done on mice to approve a chemical for release into the environment.

You should know that recent research indicates that laboratory mice that are used for these chemical sensitivity tests have been shown to be bred for insensitivity to endocrine disrupters, and when wild mice stocks are used in these tests, suddenly all our so-called safety standards are several orders of magnitude too weak. And that industry rep was talking about dioxins - substances for which no safe threshhold level has ever been found.

Who can protect us and the earth from this chemical and biological onslaught? Will the Federal government protect us? No. They operate under the same tired rules of tradeoffs - if you can't produce studies showing a substance is absolutely unsafe, it must be safe. No matter that there hasn't been time or money to do these studies, or that the only studies available were done by industry. They have forgotten the Precautionary Principle - that when health and the environment are concerned, it is only ethical to err on the side of caution. No, the federal government is not helping very much. Can we look to our own state government, then?

Not to the Department of Health, which declares BTk safe to expose tens of thousands to because they wouldn't properly consider medical studies showing BTk could be unsafe. No caution there.

Not to the Agriculture Department, which is complicit in the use of pesticides without due regard to public safety and sound scientific and environmental practice.

The Department of Ecology is the people's only shield against corporate pressure and out-of-control state bureaucracies. The mandate of Ecology is to protect citizens and the environment, and this is what we, the people, are demanding. With strong leadership at the top, it is possible for Ecology to use its rulemaking authority and enforce existing laws. Ecology must be an advocate for those who have little voice in state government - the plants, the animals, the water, the air, and the people who have no lobbyists in back rooms. This would go a long way toward a new vision of Washington as a forward-looking state - a state that guards the health of its citizens and preserves the environment for future generations.