The Next Eco-Warriors (19 page)

I had seen this good cop, bad cop act before and I wasn't going to have any of it. As he was midway through his pitch on why we should be lobbying our municipal councilors instead of sitting in front of the pesticide trucks, I just cut him off. Lobbying could come later, but today one thing was for sure: there would be no spraying, period.

We walked back out to the blockade and into the melee. The press had shown up and there were TV cameras and photographers galore. The bright lights were on us as we took up our positions on the blockade once more. But just as we were settling in for the long haul, the tie-wearing city worker marched out of his office and announced to the cameras that all spraying was suspended till further notice.

Victory! We stood up and gave each other high-fives. We hugged each other and then turned to the media to explain why this was an important victory for public health. “Winnipegers, young and old, would be better off without clouds of chemicals floating across their lawns and their gardens, into their houses and their lungs,” I said to the cameras.

I was jubilant. I thought that we had shown that the voices of citizens can be heard, that popular sentiment can overcome business interests and, in short, that the system works. But three days later, our victory would fall short. I would get a call saying that the trucks were getting ready to head out of the yard again, and I knew that it wasn't going to be as easy as I'd thought.

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IN AN EFFORT TO KILL MOSQUITOES, THE City of Winnipeg employs the pesticide Malathion, sprayed in a fine mist in the middle of the night. Their hope is that the droplets of poison will kill a significant number of mosquitoes that hit the city, and thereby reduce the nuisance of getting bitten, as well as reduce the exaggerated risk of West Nile disease that had everyone in crisis mode in the early 2000's.

Besides the fact that the risk mosquitoes pose is negligible, this 1950s-style solution doesn't work, and the authorities know it. Fogging with Malathion does nothing to kill mosquitoes, but it does poison everything in the local environment that has a brain, human and animal alike.

In fact, to say that Malathion harms human health is an understatement. There is no debate as to the toxicity of Malathion. There are numerous studies showing the health effects of Malathion and it would take this whole chapter just to cite them. Malathion has shown to cause intestinal disorders in children, leukemia, birth defects, brain damage, chromosome defects, gene loss, lung damage, weakening of the immune system and many other deleterious effects on wildlife. It's also been shown to do damage at very low doses.

Yet the majority of our citizens are convinced that fogging is a good idea. As soon as the mosquitoes start biting, it is as if everyone is trained to start looking around for the fogging trucks to come to the rescue. Only slowly are residents becoming concerned about the health effects of pesticides, but the loud voices of support for the fogging program always seem to be winning.

Yet there was a small hardcore group of local activists who decided to take action despite the popularity of the fogging. Back in 2002, several groups of activists on bikes blocked the fogging trucks. I wasn't active on the issue at
this point, but I remember the bikers wearing bandanas for some protection from the poison fog. It made them look like villains from the old west.

I decided to explore and took my camera with me. I don't really know when I crossed the line from observer to participant, but I soon found myself acting as a self-appointed media liaison. There were journalists and photographers milling around, but they weren't seeing the bigger picture. I knew that this was an important issue and I could tell that these activists felt strongly that the fogging should be stopped. We never heard their side of the story and I just thought that their protest should be covered so that as many people as possible could see it. I started directing journalists towards the blockades and offering up my photos for their articles.

There was one wild-west biker in particular who caught my eye. She was sitting in the middle of the street, right in front of one of those massive trucks, and the cops were trying to convince her to move. She was adamant and wouldn't budge. Apparently, the truck driver had had enough, so he revved his engine and inched his truck forward. The truck actually bumped the masked woman and then she lost it.

She jumped up screaming and climbed onto the hood of the truck telling the driver just what she thought of his intimidation tactics. It was an image that I'll never forget, this small woman standing up against the big truck and its tattooed driver. Maybe it was then that I decided whose side I was on.

My first act was to help organize the buffer zone requests. We had found a loophole in the municipal bylaws that allowed people to exclude their houses from the fogging. Once a request has been filed with the city, the trucks have to stay 100 meters away from your property. The impact of each exception is pretty minimal, but if you can get three or four people on your block to sign up, the trucks will have to skip your whole street. If you can convince 30 or 40 neighbors, you can get the whole neighborhood exempted.

We went door to door speaking to people, explaining the issue and the science behind Malathion and urged people to sign up for the fogging exclusion. The whole time the newspaper continued to publish unquestioning articles reiterating the politicians' platitudes about how safe the fogging was, and how those against it were just simply “crazy.”

We weren't gaining popular support, but one house at a time we were fighting the spraying. Street by street, block by block, we were reclaiming territory from the pesticides.

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THE SUMMER OF 2004 WAS A PARTICULARLY bad one for mosquitoes. The spring had been really rainy and reports that the West Nile virus was arriving in Manitoba were widely repeated in the media. The city declared a health emergency, which automatically nullified any exclusions. All our work was lost overnight, and the city was now fogging people against their will. In July, the city fogged people without the usual announcements in the local media. People were outraged that they didn't have the chance to at least close their windows to prevent the nerve toxin fog from drifting into their lungs while they slept.

Then we had a win. A big story appeared in the
Winnipeg Free Press
that for the first time didn't blindly accept the city's claims that Malathion was safe. Finally, we had broken through the media blockade. For years we had been telling the media about the toxic effects of pesticides like Malathion, as well as the poor effect it has on the mosquito population. The newspaper went with the story after finally getting the statistics on the fogging program. The official numbers proved our argument. The fogging program had no effect on the mosquito population whatsoever.

This was our chance. Our issue was on the tip of everyone's tongue and we knew now was the time to act big. We headed down to the depot where the fogging trucks parked for the night and sat down, beginning a two day blockade at the municipal yard. We blocked the fogging trucks, even at the odds of their intimidation tactics, with revved engines just inches from our faces. Keeping our ground, we frustrated the city into canceling all spraying until further notice. It was a high point for me personally and collectively for our group.

But we didn't have much time to celebrate. Three days later, the city announced they would be fogging again. So we did what we had to. The lines in the sand had been drawn; we would now have to put our bodies on the frontline for what we believed in.

We knew we were going to be arrested. We prepared by writing lawyers' numbers on our arms and arranging for bail ahead of time. Eight of us went back down to the depot to blockade the trucks. Three of us were promptly arrested in front of the national media. The issue had now grown beyond the bounds of our city and province. Now the whole country was exposed to what was going on in our little toxic city. The debate was in the public spotlight. We hadn't won yet, but we were winning. Or so we thought.

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AS SPRING 2005 ARRIVED, WE GEARED UP for another season of blockades and activism. It was another heavy year for mosquitoes and people had already started to complain to politicians. The fogging trucks were quickly dispatched onto our streets and the clouds of pesticides hung over our city once more. We foolishly thought that using the same tactics as the previous year was a good idea. But blockading the fogging trucks did not have the same effect this time around. The media turned on us and the public was uncomfortable.

After celebrating the media breakthrough of the year before, we were shocked to see journalists act as if they had forgotten everything they had printed. In the year before they were printing stories about the toxicity of pesticides and the fact that fogging wasn't effective at reducing mosquito populations. Yet this year they were asking us what evidence we had for our claims. I was exasperated. I couldn't believe the gall of these journalists. I did the only thing I could think of. I referred them to their own newspapers.

Years earlier, a forest activist colleague of mine had developed cancer. Alice would eventually die of the disease, but she stayed active on forest defense until the end. I had worked with her for years, taking trips into the Boreal Forest investigating clear cuts and logging roads. When she was sick, she offered me some advice.

“This is a terrible disease, Dave. Don't get cancer, just don't,” she told me. I did my best to follow her advice, but just like her I had no choice in the matter. Only a month after our blockades began in 2005, I found out I had testicular cancer.

I can't say with certainty that Malathion caused my cancer. We are exposed to so many different chemicals that it's impossible to know which one got through my defenses. But whether it was due to the fogging or not, the links between indiscriminate use of under-tested and misunderstood chemicals and our increasingly sophisticated illnesses are clear.

At that point, survival was my only focus. I needed to stay alive to finish our battle. So I did the only thing I could: I turned off my emotions and did what I needed to do to live. I walked briskly and purposefully into the surgery that removed the offending organ, which had grown to the size of my fist.

A few days after the surgery, a CT scan showed that the cancer had already spread to the lymph nodes in my abdomen and there were already new tumors. I didn't know whether it was the worst, most aggressive form of cancer, which would mean I had only a short time to live. The doctors performed a biopsy and determined that I had a very aggressive form of cancer—but not the worst. If left untreated, it would spread to my lungs and brain and end my life in a few short months.

So I had to undergo months of chemotherapy. The irony wasn't lost on me. I was an activist that protested against toxins and now I would be knowingly poisoning myself, hoping the cancer inside me would die. I spent three long months hooked up to chemicals that dripped into my blood for hours every day, while the tumors in my abdomen were pressing painfully on my back. This was the worst time for me. It was like my own personal hell. After two weeks, I lost my long hair. Eventually I would lose my facial hair and eyebrows as well. Our bodies have natural defenses against this kind of poison. We get nauseous and throw up the offending substance. But when you submit to voluntary chemical treatment like I did, you need to take more drugs to kill the nausea. I can still taste that chemical tinge on my tongue and I sometimes think I can smell it on my body.

I'm usually a very social person, but the chemotherapy kept me shut indoors. I had to stay away from people for fear of developing a fever from a cold or flu. I was weak and delicate with sickness. Just walking up a flight of stairs would leave me out of breath and my head pounding.

After three months on chemotherapy, I was declared cancer free and began my recovery. I was young, so I recovered fast. I started work again
fixing things in peoples' homes. At first, I would work only half days before becoming too tired to go on. But after a month or so I was able to work full time again. I had come through a deadly illness alive and wanted to get back to the battle.

I hate to say it, but this time it was personal. Not in the action-hero sense you see in the movies, but my battle was no longer abstract for me. I had been sick with a deadly disease, caused by human pollution and I didn't go back to being the same person, doing the same activism.

I could no longer sit in front of fogging trucks and breathe in that poison anymore. I did not want to chat with the poisoners cheerfully and try to engage them in a non-violent and respectful conversation about their jobs. They were giving cancer to people for the illusion of insect control. They think that fooling people into believing they are being taken care of is more important than not poisoning them in the first place.

Instead, I lobbied the city government to enact a pesticide ban, like so many places around Canada were doing. The entire province of Quebec had banned the use of Malathion outright. Ontario was going to enact a pesticide ban. Millions of Canadians were living with much less pesticide exposure. I joined with a couple of cancer survivors to lend more credibility to our cause. Forming this survivor group got us some attention from the mainstream media, but not enough to make the policy change I so desperately wanted.

That was because I was up against something everyone knew all too well: annoying mosquitoes. And my only weapon was something abstract: a cancer that most people can't even imagine getting.

Years later now, the city still hasn't banned pesticides. They now require you to put a sign on your lawn indicating that people should stay off. That's all we got—a sign. It was frustrating to watch places like Quebec, Ontario and the Maritime Provinces enact municipal bans on pesticides and then see Winnipeg just ignore the issue all together.