Activism at its Finest
By Geov Parrish
Patty Martin is middle-aged, a self-described Republican, socially conservative and a mother of four who lives in the Central Washington farming community of Quincy (pop.: 5000). She acknowledges that she sounds like a radical, but she insists that she isn't. Martin's attendance at some council meetings would change the course of her life.
I know what she means.
My introduction to politics came over 20 years ago, when I was
working as a morning DJ, Program Director, and jack of however
many other trades were necessary at the only radio station in
Tillamook, Oregon (pop.: 3,920). I played country music, of course,
except for the four Swiss yodeling songs between 6 and 7 AM for
the Swiss dairy farmers and one particularly enthusiastic local
advertiser. In those days, small town radio stations weren't programmed
by satellite from some big city and actually had local staffs.
KTIL even had a newsperson-rare today. And one fall day, he threw
out his back painting his house. Consequently, for a couple of
months, after signing the station on at 4:30 in the morning and
working all day, I had to go cover the city council meetings.
And I was hooked.
I became interested. Then I became an activist. Then I became
a full-time activist. Two decades and a long, twisting road later,
I make my living writing about and agitating for public policies
all over the country, and millions of people seem to care what
I think about a lot of different issues.
In the decade since Patty Martin discovered her town's city council
meetings, her life has taken a somewhat different, and far more
remarkable, path.
Martin first landed in council chambers when she had begun supplementing
her homemaking with volunteer work around town. One thing led
to another-a new recycling program, tutoring and recruiting other
tutors-and so, when one of the projects led to her brush with
civic politics and she decided to start watchdogging her elected
officials, she was already well-known around town.
Within a few months, at the insistence of a friend, she decided
to apply herself by running for mayor. And she won. She beat Quincy's
incumbent mayor in a 66% landslide-which is to say, Patty got
649 votes.
Her newfound civic activism wasn't all that was on her mind, though.
In one of those city council meetings she'd attended months previously,
she'd heard about a peculiar land deal the city was proposing:
paying top dollar for mediocre farm land, well outside town, to
use for the disposal of wastewater from the town's expanding industrial
wastewater treatment plant. Quincy is home to two major plants
that produce frozen foods and several that market agricultural
fertilizers.
Martin wondered about the cost of the deal; but she'd suspected
something was more seriously wrong. Martin had been encouraged
to contact Dennis DeYoung, a farmer who had accused a local fertilizer
manufacturer, Cenex/Land O'Lakes, of poisoning his land by effectively
paying a tenant to apply some of its industrial waste as "fertilizer."
What she found in talking with him was enough to make her believe
that the land the city intended to buy had also been contaminated
by bad "fertilizer," and enough to make her start digging
around.
Four years later, in 1997, she, too, lost in her re-election bid-not
to another energetic political newcomer, but to a vigorous campaign
waged by Quincy's biggest employers and businesses. Martin had
become a pariah to much of her own community, which is a big deal
in a small town. But then, not every small town mayor stumbles
upon a practice that conceivably threatens the entire country's
food supply, inspires a Pulitzer-finalist investigative series
by a big city newspaper, spreads to national network TV, and jump-starts
an entire national movement to clean up a very dirty industry.
None of it was intentional, Martin says today: "I had a choice
between running for office and trying to make a difference, or
sitting back and [being] totally frustrated for four years, not
being able to fix what I didn't like. I believe people become
cynical. That's not my style." So, reluctantly, Martin ran
for office. And won. And her life changed forever.
What Martin had stumbled upon-and then relentlessly pursued with
a combination of stubbornness and a mother's urgency-was a regulatory
loophole that allows corporations across the country to dispose
of their industrial facilities' toxic waste by simply calling
it a "product." As a "product," these hazardous
wastes suddenly no longer need to be stored, expensively, in specially
designed industrial waste landfills. They can be sold. To us.
And it turned out that one of the best ways to "use"
many types of toxic waste-legally-is to claim to "recycle"
them-as is-for their nutrient or micronutrient content, however
minimal, and to call the result fertilizer. And then, rather than
using specially designed landfills, the waste can be spread on
the land that grows food for livestock, and food for humans.
Fertilizer, Martin discovered, is tested for levels of the active
ingredients listed on its label. But there is no regulatory oversight
that controls the unlisted ingredients-in agribusiness as well
as in home gardening products-of poisonous heavy metals like arsenic,
cadmium, lead, and dioxin. Those metals may or may not harm various
plants, but untreated they invariably stay in the soil, accumulate
in the food chain, and can be lethal to humans.
The particularly clumsy disposal of waste by Cenex killed or stunted
much of the plant life in that original farmland outside Quincy;
as Martin notes, "A person could potentially dispose of waste
on a person's land, pay for the crop damage and it would still
be cheaper than putting it in an industrial landfill" (Quincy's
city council backed away from the deal to buy that land, once
Martin started asking questions). But there is absolutely nothing
in most places to legally prevent companies from selling their
toxic waste to other companies who then put it into products used
to (supposedly) help grow our food. Proper waste disposal costs
a lot of money, and providing it to, say, a fertilizer maker does
not. Industries across America now call the process "industrial
recycling," and insist that no harm has been proven-most
likely because no studies have been done at all to establish the
actual degree of health or safety risk involved. Most of those
companies then object strenuously when people like Martin point
to anecdotal evidence of harm, cite increasing childhood health
problems like asthma, autism, and cancer then demand to know what's
being put on and in our food.
Five years ago, Martin's outspokenness got her unelected as a
small-town mayor. Since then, she's continued to work tirelessly
on this issue.
She's started a national
advocacy group, Safe Food and Fertilizer (http://www.safefoodand
fertilizer.com). Last year, HarperCollins published a book
on her story ("A
Fateful Harvest" by Duff Wilson, the original Seattle
Times investigative reporter who wrote about her). She travels
the country, speaking and lobbying and organizing on the issue.
Her civic curiosity has blossomed into an improbable crusade that
has helped and inspired millions to better understand what's in
our food, and that may some day lead to safer food and stricter
controls on industrial waste disposal.
Martin certainly isn't the only person in the country who has
sounded the alarm on this particular issue-though as a former
elected official of a small farming town, her word carries special
authority. But her experience does show what many of us doubt
in an era when corporate and money-making interests control many
of our public decisions, from small town Farm Bureau politics
to Lincoln Bedroom auctioneering. Individuals not only can make
a difference in such a climate; very often, we're the only thing
that can. If we don't, nobody else will.
Martin has met with astonishing success, but there are also plenty
of other less spectacular stories all around us. A couple of years
ago, the acreage from which much of Seattle's drinking water is
drawn-the Cedar River Watershed-was under consideration for clear-cutting
as politicians decided how best to manage the land for the next
50 years. The various options laid out ranged from only clearcutting
some of the land's timber, to raise the money to manage the watershed,
to clearcutting a lot more of it, so as to make more money for
the city.
The mainstream environmental groups that were paying attention
had already signed off on the "lesser" option-only clearcutting
about a third of the watershed. It was literally two people-Jasmine
Minbashian, who worked with the Pacific Crest Biodiversity Project,
and Erica Kay, an activist with Seattle Earth First!-Who decided
to start organizing to demand that the city consider the possibility
of not clearcutting any of the land at all. They took their case
to elected officials and to the public, showed that the extra
cost to water users would be minimal and the benefits to salmon
habitat and water quality enormous, and it became an issue. And
two years later, they won. The City of Seattle now officially
plans to not clearcut that watershed until at least the year 2049.
Ask Erica or Jasmine if they made a difference. Or ask Brita Butler-Wall.
She's the former PTSA mom who, five years ago, started a group
to challenge the Seattle School District's disturbing enthusiasm
for corporate advertising in its schools. A few months ago, in
a near-complete reversal from those days, Seattle's school board,
for the first time ever, adopted a policy explicitly aimed at
minimizing salesmanship in our public schools-a position Brita
and like-minded parents and community activists dragged them to
kicking and screaming.
Or ask residents in Beacon Hill or Bitter Lake. They breathe easier
than they did a couple of years ago thanks to neighborhood activists-particularly
Rick Barrett in Bitter Lake and the Community Coalition for Environmental
Justice, a local group that focuses on environmental concerns
in poor, urban, nonwhite areas, on Beacon Hill. Those activists
got Northwest Hospital and the VA Hospital to stop disposing of
their medical waste through the last two remaining smokestack
incinerators in Seattle.
Activism doesn't necessarily require organized activity, and it
can be as simple as the decisions we make every single day through
our choices as consumers. Think of it as a daily election. We
have the power to let businesses know what we will and will not
accept through the ways in which we choose to spend our money.
Businesses spend BILLIONS to find out what our desires are so
that they can be sure to fill that need effectively. Many times,
they just create that demand themselves with savy marketing campaigns
which promise our eternal happiness (at least until the next ad)
just for buying a box of "whatever."
When we make choices with our money based on our beliefs-and especially
when we let them know what we're choosing and why-companies take
heed. We can define our own happiness, rather than letting marketers
do it for us, by buying from those companies that are already
adhering to the values we support. Whether it's seeking out shoes
or clothing from companies that don't use child labor and sweatshops,
or fairly traded shade-grown coffee, or organic food from growers
who would never put toxic sludge in your dinner, something as
simple as deciding what we buy-based on our values-is a very important
form of activism.
In Patty Martin's case, it has already helped-several fertilizer
companies now make a point of telling their customers that they
don't use industrial waste in their products. Martin has certainly
become a believer-not just on the issue of industrial waste disposal,
but on the larger issue of the ability, in our cynical times,
of ordinary people to make a difference in the world around us.
"In my community, I was the voice for people who'd never
had a voice before," she says now. (Along with other divisions,
two-thirds of Quincy is now Hispanic, but the white minority still
controls most of the town's politics.) "And on this issue,
I helped to disclose information about a practice that the public
would otherwise have been denied, and farmers would only have
discovered after losing crops or livelihoods."
Martin undoubtedly could have lived without the local hostility
and the loss of her mayor's office-initially a six-by-ten foot
room with a window to the hallway, for a job paying $500 a month-but
she sure doesn't sound like she regrets having gotten involved.
"You don't ever have to run for political office," she
suggests-though she thinks that's a fine idea, too-"But you
do have to look over the shoulders of your elected officials.
People have to be engaged in the political process. This is a
democracy, and a democracy is a participatory form of government.
We're encouraging people to contact their elected officials, introduce
themselves, and tell them they're going to be watching what they
do."
Spoken like a true radical.
Information on use of industrial wastes in fertilizers and
Martin's group can be found at http://www.safefoodandfertilizer.com.
For information on a wide variety of environmental and social
justice events and groups in the Seattle area, check Jean Buskin's
Peace Calendar at http://www.scn.org/activism/calendar.