Hawaii and Oregon University Students Share Stories On Pesticide Drift

Last week, GMO Free News live streamed a panel discussion with University of Hawaiʻi at Manoa students of Ho'a O'ahu, a new media organization, that produced the multimedia story, "PESTICIDES on the North Shore" and University of Oregon students that produced the short documentary, "DRIFT: A COMMUNITY SEEKING JUSTICE"

Below are two video clips from the 44+ minute broadcast with transcripts.


Jessica Homrich: Our main target audience for our class when we first came up with this organization was eighteen to thirty year olds on Ho'a O'ahu. But, this story obviously goes above and beyond to nationwide. Though that was kind of one of the things that we wanted to do ideally was to bring the stories locally and then push them out nationally. So I think our investigative team did an exceptional job with doing that.

Rachel Linden, GMO Free News Host: Very professional and very aloha. I like it.

Ana Giliberti-Ippel: You were saying that you were hoping to find a word of an organic farmer in our story and unfortunately there are not that many organic farms here. You know a lot of them didn't want to come forward to talk to us because there's some sort of you know push for diversified agriculture that kind of brings all together and we are not being supported as much and we have found through our story that only one third of agricultural lands are actually being used for agriculture.


So there is a dilemma because there is a lot of development that wants to be taking place here in the North Shore and there's a lot of people supporting agriculture and they want to keep these lands agricultural lands. So its kind of like sure, we'd love to, thing is most of the people in the North Shore would love to have agriculture farm coming in, we have two-thirds of our land available for agriculture. Why isn't organic farming thriving in Hawaii. Its not.

Kathleen Hallal, GMO Free News Host: Young people start paying attention and putting out media like you're doing that other people can see. Maybe you can wake up other people in a very positive way. You know, keep this movement going.

Rachel Linden, GMO Free News: Tell Me what's good about "Drift"?

Hope Tejedas: Well, it's very similar to the story of the folks over in Hawaii. We spent about six months researching it...and advice to you guys....it's never over. You guys will be fighting this battle and it will consume your lives for a long, long time.

It's a rippling affect. You continue to get involved and hear more stories and hear more points-of-view and perspectives and it keeps opening doors to different opportunities and ways to get this information out to diverse communities and diverse people and audiences.

So, here in Oregon our main industry is the timber industry. Which involves clear-cutting our forests and replanting our little Doug firs and then spraying them with pesticides and herbicides for the first five years of growth. These portions of land are close to homes, schools, waterways, fish bearing streams. All the things we don't want herbicide and pesticides to be involved with.

So, we kind of went at it and combating or investigating The Oregon Forest Practice Act and found out that we have very, very weak laws here in Oregon.

It is very unfortunate because being Oregonians we are in love with our environment and in love with the outdoors. That's what we're proud of and as a state and to be young people....you know none of us who produced this film were journalists or in the journalism school.

But, we have different backgrounds in science, biology, environmental studies, humanities and we all came together and really focused on creating ethical media making and storytelling. So we really tried to not be biased. So, we began this project... our leader of the group was the graduate student, so her entire thesis was about this class. "Just Stories"...like justice stories.

It's like trying to combat these environmental justice issues through storytelling and media making.


So our film "Drift" is focused on the community of Gold Beach, Oregon, a coastal town.

After that, we decided to create a website and interviewed multiple women in Oregon who have been involved in this movement for many, many years including Carol Van Strum. So, here's our website.

We had the opportunity to interview all these very powerful women in this movement and we learned so much about how we can get involved and different stories and really learned how powerful stories can be.

Marla Waters: It has a way for us to learn more about what's going on in Oregon. I mean, you live in a place but you think it is this really progressive, really green state and then we come to find out that private timber industry it's still able to spray pesticides. Which is something the government banned in the seventies. But, how is that private timber lands are still able to do this. So, that is really what we are fighting. This really shouldn't be happening any more.

We are at a point, you know, with government that we should be able move pass these issues and that we should be able to protect our land and our community. It has been a crazy experience.

We never thought that "Drift" was going to have this much of an impact. We have been threatened. People have threatened to shut down "Drift" because we've had people come from private foresters saying "we want to shut you down."

So, that's been really crazy and you know that when they're paying attention, you know it's a big deal.

Our movie has been screened a lot of times across Oregon and whats really amazing that people are taking it upon themselves to show this story.

Hope: After we created "Drift" we decided that we wanted to hold public forums and panels. In each community that we went to, we had a panel with scientists, perspectives on the economic side, different nonprofit leaders and different just community leaders throughout Oregon to answer questions. We wanted to create a space to have the conversation about pesticides and herbicides and what is actually going on in our state.

Sometimes we would have a hundred people show up. Sometimes we would have fifty. Sometimes we would have 15 and we went to the rural communities that want this information and are lacking it because these are the timber communities... You know it's a half and half divide of them. Half are timber people and half of them are people who want a healthy community.

Over the summer, I think we had about 10 screenings and altogether probably around twenty and it is still a movement that we are really passionate about. We're presenting at a media conference next month and you know just the ripping effect like we said. We had no idea this was going to become what it has. But it's a really powerful moment that we are really proud and passionate to be involved with.

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NOTE: Joel Edwards, Kennesaw State University, contributed to writing the transcripts.