In May, voters in Lincoln County, Oregon, which stretches along the coast from Lincoln City to Yachats, approved a measure banning the aerial spraying of pesticides and herbicides.
The new ordinance was almost immediately the subject of a lawsuit brought against the county by Rex Capri, a local farmer, and Wakefield Farms. The citizen group that brought the measure, Lincoln County Community Rights, intervened in the case, and has received legal help from the Community Environmental Legal Defense Fund, or CELDF.
Local activist and author of the book “A Bitter Fog,” Carol van Strum, also intervened on behalf of the Siletz River ecosystem, one of very few instances of nature itself being party to a court case in the US (though, as you'll hear, this intervention was not admitted by the judge).
The first hearing in the case was on Monday before Judge Sheryl Bachart.
For more, KBOO reporter Sam Bouman spoke with Rio Davidson, with the group Lincoln County Community Rights.
Other links:
Smart ALEC -- a KBOO project from 2014 looking into the American Legislative Exchange Council's presence in Oregon
Oregon Community Rights Network
Poison Papers -- Gathering the documents obtained by Carol van Strum over several decades via FOIA and other methods, many of them internal chemical company documents detailing how they knew about the dangers inherent in pesticides all along.
- KBOO