Agent Orange use in Canada, 1950s-1980s

I recently wrote a post on doxin pollution in the Willamette River watershed linked to herbicide spraying in the Douglas-fir forests of Western Oregon, and to chlorinated effluents from pulp and paper mills. One of the unconscionable and shocking things I learned in this research was that the U.S. Army had stopped using Agent Orange in Vietnam in 1970 because it contained 2,4,5-T (which, in turned, contained the highly toxic dioxin 2,3,7,8-TCDD). However, the U.S. Forest Service continued to use 2,4,5-T in the Douglas-fir country of Oregon until the mid-1980s.

Oregon and Vietnam certainly weren't the only places where Agent Orange (a mixture of 2,4-D and 2,4,5-T) was used, as the brief video below outlines:




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Reader Poll: Is Coal the Answer?

There's a movement afoot among some residents, civic leaders, and businesspeople in Whatcom County, Washington, to mine coal in the county and ship it to China. (For an overview of this proposal and links to other information, see Preston Schiller, "How to Stop Worrying and Love Coal Trains," Whatcom Watch Online, April 2011.)

This proposal would involve the burning of fossil fuels to extract fossil fuel from the ground; burning fossil fuel to transport the fossil fuel to the shipping terminal and load the fossil fuel onto freighters; burning fossil fuel to ship the fossil fuel across the Pacific Ocean to China; transporting the fossil fuel -- using fossil-fuel-burning trains and trucks -- to power generation plants, where the fossil fuel will be burned to produce electricity. The extraction will leave polluted land and air in Whatcom County; clog the regional rail system; and, when the coal is burned in China, produce emissions containing the greenhouse gases carbon dioxide and methane, as well as sulfur dioxide, aluminium, arsenic, chromium, cobalt, copper, iron, mercury, selenium, and uranium (See here and here, among others).

So, readers, is the above proposal:

A) Crazy

B) Ridiculous

C) Farcical

D) Nonsensical

E) Ill-informed

F) Desperate

G) Inconsiderate

H) Asinine

I) Silly

K) All of the Above

Answer below the fold . . .

Reading the lines between the lines

I started to reply to Anonymous' comment to my post "The white men fired back. That is the story," and then realized that I was in the process of writing another post on the topic of a recurrent theme in this blog, "what use is history?"

Anonymous' shouted comment was: "MURDER IS MURDER IS IT NOT? IF IT WAS YOUR FAMILY HISTORY WHAT WOULD YOU SAY THEN?"

My reply below . . .

Dioxin and Willamette River Pollution: A First Step Into the Toxic Waters

This post provides some preliminary research and analysis on dioxin pollution in the Willamette Watershed connected to pulp and paper mill effluents.

I was recently at an environmental history conference and found myself in a discussion with someone doing research on dioxin pollution from pulp and paper mill effluents. As we were sharing stories, I realized that I had not seen a single reference to the word "dioxin" in any of the government reports, newspaper articles, professional journals, letters, or other primary sources from the 1900s into the 1960s that I have consulted thus far. Over the past few weeks, I've searched various primary and secondary sources, with the goal of determining just when dioxins became a known toxin, and when they were linked empirically with pulp and paper mill effluents, to determine if I had inadvertently missed something very important (and would have to re-write my thesis), or if this type of pollution hadn't been discovered until after the 1960s (and I was OK).

Here is what I have found thus far . . .

Another May 18th

One of my favorite DJs, John Richards, on my favorite radio station, KEXP, dedicated his show this morning to the memory of Ian Curtis, the lead singer of one of my favorite bands of all time, Joy Division. Ian took his own life on this day in 1980, at age 23.

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"The white men fired back. That is the story."

I was doing some research in the Oregonian the other day and came across a 1931 interpretation of Euro-American settlement of Oregon that will likely strike some modern readers as quite dated:

"But They Fought Back," Morning Oregonian, June 20, 1931, p6.

In case you're not able to read the text, the pertinent and eyebrow-raising sections are as follows:

Global mega corporations = fascism?

In a recent opinion piece on Aljazeera online, William I. Robinson (Prof. of Sociology, U.C. Santa Barbara) claims that "The global economic crisis and the attack on immigrant rights are bound together" in a potentially catastrophic dynamic.

Robert Reich had a thought-provoking take on something similar the other day. Reich observed on American Public Media's "Marketplace" program that "Corporate profits don't translate." He asked, "How can big American corporations be doing so well and the economy so badly?" His conclusion was, "Because their sales are booming -- abroad. And they're adding new jobs where their sales are."

My interpretation of Reich's point was that the current growth of corporate profits in spite of little to no job creation here in the U.S. shows how detached so-called American corporations are becoming from democratic oversight and input. In fact, this shows how detached they're becoming from any real interest in the well-being of their host countries. If it is true that General Motors President Erwin Wilson stated in 1953 that "what was good for the country was good for General Motors and vice versa," the dynamic that Reich discusses seems to represent a different era. Erwin was equating corporate and national interests, a claim that many of us can argue with. However, Reich is describing an era in which the big global corporations don't even pretend to care whether or not corporate practices are "good" for the U.S., and vice-versa.[1]

Robinson incorporates Reich's observation as a central strand in a "web of 21st century fascism."

I'm struck by Robinson's use of the word "fascism."

It Seems So Long Ago . . .

. . . because it was!

Cave bear skull placed atop stone in Chauvet cave, ca. 25,000 years ago.

 

Some time about 20,000-40,000 years ago, people created the amazing art inside the cave at Chauvet Pont d'Arc. About 20,000 years ago, the entrance to the cave was sealed, and it was not discovered until 1994.

The people who created the cave art were part of what we now refer to as the Aurignacian culture, a

toolmaking industry and artistic tradition of Upper Paleolithic Europe . . . marked by a great diversification and specialization of tools . . . The art of the Aurignacian culture represents the first complete tradition in the history of art, moving from awkward attempts to a well-developed, mature style."

Werner Herzog has made a 3-D film of the inside of this cave, "Cave of Forgotten Dreams." Read a review from Slate.com here, and listen to Terry Gross' interview of Herzog here. See images at the official Chauvet Cave website here.

Watch the trailer below . . .

Another of capitalism's many benefits

My sister sent me a hard-copy version of Ed Dante's article about ghost writing for college and university students, "The Shadow Scholar" (Chronicle of Higher Education, Nov. 12, 2010).

This article points to yet another of capitalism's many benefits: enabling humans to gain financially from cheating while concurrently convincing themselves that they are not complicit in undermining social structures more important than capitalism.