Not in My Back Yard! : Neophyte Activists Rally Around Their First Cause: Malathion Spraying

The signs were handmade but the messages were legible and curt.

“Stop malathion spraying.”

“It’s your air! No spraying.”

“Honk your support.”

The scrawled slogans reflected the frustrations and resolve of 100 demonstrators gathered last week at the intersection of Brea Boulevard and Imperial Highway in Orange County. For two hours, they persisted, waving the signs at rush-hour motorists and evoking nearly constant feedback of horns and shouts.

Resistance seems destined to mushroom despite warnings from agricultural experts who say that aerial spraying is the only remedy that can prevent an agricultural disaster, and that there is no association between the dilute malathion falling out of the sky and birth defects, neurological damage, chronic headaches and other ailments being blamed on the spraying.

Nevertheless, several Southern California cities and the Los Angeles Board of Education have called for a halt to the spraying. State Sen. Art Torres (D-Los Angeles) has introduced two anti-malathion bills, and the cast of television’s “Cheers” marched in another recent rally. Environmental groups are actively protesting as well. The Los Angeles City Council’s Arts, Health and Humanities Committee has scheduled a public hearing this morning on possible health risks of aerial spraying.

But politicians, celebrities and hard-core environmentalists aren’t the only ones complaining. Notable in the stop-spraying movement are a substantial number of first-time activists--Southern Californians whose political involvement, until now, has consisted of little more than voting.

These neophyte activists are devoting most of their leisure hours to “the cause.” They attend committee meetings, talk to legislators, phone the state Department of Food and Agriculture, scour medical libraries for scientific studies and persuade friends and neighbors to jump on the bandwagon.

Renee Dufresne, a 30-year-old La Habra Heights resident, brought her 10-month-old daughter Genevieve Baccaro to last week’s Brea rally.

“I wrote some letters once about food irradiation,” she said, summing up her previous political involvement. She began protesting malathion spraying after her town got a dose. “Until the helicopters came over our house,” she said, “malathion was someone else’s problem.”

“Not in my back yard” has become the rallying cry of many of Dufresne’s neighbors as well. Here, the stories of four other activist newcomers: What pushed them from easy chairs to activism? What have they learned along the way? And will their toe-in-the-water effort prove a springboard to a lifetime of activism?

Robert Conner used to think of himself as a quiet hippie. Bearded and red-haired, the 39-year-old graphic artist is fond of turquoise jewelry, comfortable shoes and a low-key life style. He was the type, he laughed recently, to dodge petitions at the supermarket. Before the Medfly invasion, he spent weekends puttering in the organic garden surrounding the tiny Mt. Washington studio-style home he shares with his wife, 37-year-old Pamela Mower-Conner, who is also a graphic artist.

Then the flyer announcing malathion spraying arrived at the Conners’ doorstep. As soon as she read the flyer, Pamela, home sick from work, telephoned Robert. Her first concern was the garden. Since they settled there five years ago, the Conners have planted hundreds of medicinal herbs and native California plants.

“We use herbs like sage and rosemary,” she said. “We boil eucalyptus leaves and inhale the steam to clear our sinuses.” The Conners also worried about their three Xoloitzcuintli (Mexican hairless dogs), who usually romp in a fenced area overlooking the kitchen window.

“At first we considered gigantic tarps,” said Mower-Conner. Becoming malathion refugees--a solution for many in the spray areas--was out of the question, the Conners decided. “We feel protective of our land,” she said, “and wanted to stay.” Instead, they decided to hose off the property after each spraying.

Once they settled on a coping plan, the Conners felt better. But not for long. Dealing with the sound of the helicopters was traumatic. “I felt helpless,” Mower-Conner remembers. “Like we were in Vietnam.” The odor was unpleasant, too. “It was like raw gas out of an oven burner,” Conner said. For four days after the spraying, she suffered headaches. “And I never get headaches.”

“I’ve thrown up during the spraying,” her husband added. “It could be psychosomatic, but it’s still invasive to me.”

Then there is the impact on the water bill, which has tripled. “Our average daily use was 777 gallons last month,” Conner said.

Concerned and angry, the Conners sprang into action. They read about the efforts of a neighbor, Virginia Johannessen , who had begun to protest the aerial sprayings through the Mt. Washington Assn. They stopped by her house the next day. “I read her information and saw how dangerous it really is,” Mower-Conner said. “We made 500 copies of each information sheet and started handing them out.”

“We got petitions to halt the spraying,” Conner added. “We started seeking signatures.” It proved to be their first lesson in activism. One neighbor protested the spraying as vehemently as the Conners, but threw up her hands. “What can we do about it?” she asked. “The other 90% of signers would sign and complain,” Conner said. Friends toted around petitions, but “none got as zealous as we did,” Mower-Conner added.

The malathion protest has spawned a new awareness about other causes. While the Conners were in the throes of signature gathering, a newsletter arrived from the California League of Conservation Voters, asking for support for the Environmental Protection Intitative of 1990.

“The request fell on fertile ears,” said Mower-Conner. She has since devoted 40 hours or more to sketching and completing a promotional poster for the initiative. “Shocking, isn’t it?” she asked, displaying the poster. A man stands, head bowed, surrounded by burned trees and skeletons. The copy asks: “Is this the kind of planet you want to live on?”

At this point, victory over the malathion proponents would be bittersweet, the Conners say. Even if spraying stops tomorrow, they pointed out, eating the currants and their other garden crops is out of the question. “The malathion goes into the soil,” Robert said.

But even if the spraying continues, the Conners cite fringe benefits to their new-found activism. “I have an expanded sense of community,” Robert said.

Trips to the market, the couple concur, will never be the same. “No more petition-dodging,” Robert said with a laugh. “I now pay close attention to every cause.”

Minutes after Susie Seals of Brea said goodby to the last of six children she baby-sits in her home day-care center, she pulled on her long black wool coat and rushed to last week’s Brea rally. The scheduled start was 5:30 p.m., but at 5 people were already helping themselves to marking pens and poster boards. By 6, about 100 protesters waved and shouted from all four corners of the intersection.

Seals--who joined the Orange County Coalition Against Urban Spraying (CAUS), an umbrella group of 10 organizations--looked like a veteran protester as she walked through the crowd, checking supplies, introducing herself and waving hello to other CAUS members. But it was only the second rally she’s organized--or ever participated in. The first, three weeks before, had drawn about 30 people. “I’m pleased, really pleased with the turnout,” said Seals, 35. “More and more people are becoming aware.”

Seals, a self-described shrinking violet, said the anti-malathion movement has brought her out of her shell. “It’s amazing what crowds and people patting you on the back all the time will do,” Seals noted. “It gives you courage to continue. Normally I don’t even speak to strangers well on the telephone. And since this has come about, the calls have been nonstop. Talking to strangers has become easier all of a sudden.”

Cooperation has helped, Seals said. “Everybody involved is concerned, and that make it more comfortable to deal with.”

When Seals first heard about the scheduled spraying of Brea, she wasn’t particularly panicked or moved to protest. “I thought, well, one time and the malathion is really diluted. I’ll hose everything down. We’ll be OK. Then I found out it was going to continue and then to increase. I heard it would be every three weeks and then once a week. I felt scared. I said to myself, ‘They’re doing this without even asking us. They are taking away our rights.’ ”

Seals was concerned not just for her own two children, 9-year-old Nathan and 14-year-old April, and her husband Greg. “I was concerned about my day-care children and about all the other kids out there.” She found the name of a local contact for the newly formed Orange County CAUS. Since then, she’s worked every day, interspersing telephone calls and strategy meetings with her day-care responsibilities. And feeling as though the fires of protest are burning brightly.

“Look at the small number of people we had at the first rally,” she said. “Back then, a lot of people were saying, ‘Oh, it’s all right.’ Now all of a sudden you see all these people saying, ‘It’s not all right.’ And you see the movement growing.”

Seals doesn’t plan to move on to other causes, but her involvement protesting malathion has left her with two valuable lessons. “The good part? It really restores your faith in people to see them so concerned. But the cynical part is seeing how helpless we really are to stop the spraying.”

When Virginia Johannessen quit her job as a real estate investment manager four months ago, she had carefully mapped out her professional future. She wanted to start her own business, along with taking care of the four tenants who rent part of her spacious, prairie-style Mt. Washington house.

Then the helicopters came. After the first application of malathion in Mt. Washington, she felt ill but didn’t give it much thought. “Four days later, I realized I had not been feeling well since the spraying,” she said recently. “I had nosebleeds and insomnia, among other problems.”

She decided to put her own business plans on hold. Working through the Mt. Washington Assn., she’s been putting in 60-plus hour weeks for the last two months to halt malathion sprayings. Much of her time is spent on the telephone and in committee meetings. So far, she has spent about $600 out of pocket to cover copying costs and telephone bills.

She describes the effort as the first significant political action of her life. “I grew up in the ‘60s in Berkeley,” she said, “and there were plenty of people politically inclined. It was an oversubscribed field.”

During long days spent in committee meetings, on the telephone and canvassing for support, Johannessen, 34, has discovered what she describes as the miracle of volunteer work: “No one agrees on anything.” But there’s been no door-slamming or phone hang-ups that she knows about, and she admires the patience that hard-core activists have shown towards her and other newcomers. “It’s difficult for people who know what they’re doing to watch people like me make mistakes,” she acknowledged. “Veteran environmentalists know the ins and outs of raising money, for instance. They have connections. They know who to call in someone’s office.”

Slowly, they’re teaching Johannessen the subtleties of the game. “Some of the more sophisticated activists warned me, for instance, that the minute a politician wants to slow down an issue, he’ll call for a study.”

On her own, Johannessen has learned to temper outrage with realism. “I don’t think we can stop the spraying,” she said last week. “Not this time anyway. We’ve had really fine lawyers look at this question. We don’t see a way to stop it legally. The goal at this point is to stop future spraying.”

But her involvement has also spawned an unexpected pleasure. “I’m pleased with the people I’ve met. Not just in the immediate neighborhood but in El Sereno and Lincoln Heights. I’m optimistic about the future of East Los Angeles. And I certainly wasn’t before.”