Re: Need Advice Please

Dear Ev,

Finally Faith gave you some good advice. You
need to find out when they'll be spraying in
your neighborhood.

If the officials in charge of the spraying
aren't willing to tell you, go to the City
Attorney. Tell him that you're extremely
upset by this poisonous spraying, and that
his colleagues have refused to tell you when
the spraying will take place in your neighborhood. Suggest to him that if the
city won't honor your simple request, that
you will do your best to organize opposition
to the entire pesticide spraying program.
Tell him that you hope it won't come to that -- or to litigation down the road, if you or
your children become very sick because of
inhaling pesticides. The attorney will growl,
but he'll probably decide that the best
solution is to give you the information you
desire.

Are there any active environmental groups
in your area, Ev? If you're not sure, check
with the editor at your local paper who
handles environmental stories. See if you
can hook up with some other people who also
oppose the spraying of pesticides.

The ONLY thing that politicians care about --
aside from being re-elected -- is the NUMBER
of people who are against one of their policies. The only time politicians EVER
become frightened, is when they think that
so many people oppose this policy that, they,
the politicians, may be voted out of office.
At that point, they will do the "right" thing;
not because it's right, but because it's
expedient.

Case in point: From 1986 to 1990, I was a
very successful environmental activist in
Cape May County, New Jersy. CMC sits right
at the bottom of NJ. It's surrounded on 3
sides by water. The entire economy of the
county depends on tourism during the summer
months.

The local politicans wanted to build an
enormous incinerator to burn CMC's garbage,
at a cost of $250 million. A few of us
thought that was a terrible idea. I created
and funded an environmental group to fight
the incinerator project. We quickly found out
that virtually NO ONE else cared if the
incinerator was built or not. Total apathy.

And then that Spring, dolphins began to wash
up dead on our ocean beaches; not only dolphins, but lots of other fish. The water
off-shore looked green and filthy and smelled
awful.

The dolphin die-off made news all over the
country --but especially in the Philadelphia
area, where most of our tourists came from.
TV covered the story extensively, and so did
the daily papers. All you heard about that
Spring and Summer was that something in
CMC's ocean was causing all these beautiful
dolphins to die. Everyone was concerned that
the terrible publicity would have a catastrophic effect on the tourist business.
Predictably, that summer was the slowest in
anyone's memory. Most of the tourists stayed
home.

It struck me that instead of going after the
garbage incinerator -- which no one cared about -- our group, the Environmental Response
Network (ERN), should target the states of New Jersey and New York, both of which dumped enormous amounts of sewage sludge in our coastal waters. Our secondary targets were two gigantic
corporations, Dupont and Allied Signal, who
routinely dumped toxic waste within 10 miles
of the beach. Allied-Signal had been doing it
since 1924.

So I created a petition with the title,
STOP ALL OCEAN DUMPING NOW!! It was addressed to New Jersey's Governor, Thomas Kean. Beneath the
title, were 3 short paragraphs about why
ocean dumping was insane, and lines for
20 people to sign their names and addresses.

Instantly, the local and regional newspapers,
picked up on this story. The ERN bcame
legitimate seemingly overnight. Our little
group of 5 people grew, within 6 months, to
500 dedicated activists, who met monthly,
and kept in communication (this was before
computers) with regular newsletters and an
answering service I created, People could call
the ERN's number 24-hours a day, and hear
a 3-minute recorded message (me) which I
changed almost every day.

Within a year, our petition had 150,000
signatures on it. Greenpeace liked it so
much, that they took it door to door in
New York and Connecticut. Every day, my
mailbox was filled with packets that
contained signed petitions. Within 3
years, we had 750,000 signatures on the
petition.

Once the ocean campaign took off, we
also went back to fighting the incinerator.
THIS time, people listened! We were the
heroes who were fighting to save the tourist
economy, so maybe we were right about the
dangers of the incinerator, too.

In 1989, the local politicians decided to
have a non-binding referendum on the incinerator project. To their utter dismay,
74 percent of the voters said NO INCINERATOR.
Politicians can count, so that was the end
of the garbage incinerator. Spin-offs of
the ERN also stopped six other incinerators
in other parts of NJ and Connecticut.

Governors can also count. In 1990, the ERN presented the massed petitions to Governor Kean. Within a month, he and the Governor of New York announced that there would be no more sludge dumping in our ocean. Dupont and Allied-Signal could also read the handwriting
on the wall. In August of that same year, both of the giant
corporations announced that they would no
longer use our ocean as a dumping ground
for their toxic waste products.

So it is possible to win significant environmental victories, but ONLY when
large numbers of people care about the outcome. If the dolphin die-off hadn't
occurred in 1987, there would be a garbage
incinerator in Cape May County today.

It's not going to be easy to arouse opposition
to the spraying of pesticides. None of my
neighbors here in South Florida care a whit
about pesticides. The grounds of our 15-unit condo community are sprayed routinely every
two weeks. The other 14 owners permit a man
to spray pesticides INSIDE their condos,
every month. To them, it's just bug-spray.
And it's that ignorant attitude that you'll
be facing, Ev if you try
to arouse opposition to the spraying in your
community.

As FF suggested, find out when the spraying
will take place, and then close your windows
and stay inside. That's what I do, and it
seems to work for me.

Let us know how it plays out.

Blessings,

Owen

http://owen.curezone.com/






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