TAKING ON BIG CHEMICAL COMPANIES
Former Leader-Post reporter still making headlines with publishing of The Poison Papers
As he sat in an Oregon office, scanning thousands of pages of documents about the chemical industry, Peter von Stackelberg must have thought back to his days in Saskatchewan.
In early 1980, von Stackelberg, a native of Peace River, Alta., was working as a reporter at the Regina Leader-Post and caught a rumour the provincial government was about to cut off access to 100 different chemicals — largely agricultural.
While the rumour wasn’t entirely true, he did find a source who opened up to him about problems the province was having with information about the safety of certain chemicals due to the testing done at Industrial Biotest Laboratories, a lab later confirmed to have been providing fraudulent test results.
Nearly 40 years later, that work led this spring to von Stackelberg helping orchestrate an incredible dump of information on the dubious practices of the chemical industry in North America — The Poison Papers.
Through his reporting on the IBT scandal and pesticides, von Stackelberg would make the acquaintance of Carol Van Strum, an Oregon woman who was gaining fame among environmental activists after challenging the U.S. Forest Service over its use of herbicides near her home.
The two kept in touch over the years as von Stackelberg’s work took him to Edmonton, then Houston (where he jumped into the world of web development) and western New York, where he now teaches at Keuka College while still writing and working as a futurist, looking into the impact of technological change politically, socially and economically.
Von Stackelberg knew Van Strum had a wealth of documents about chemical companies and their relationships with U.S. government agencies, including the EPA. The information — internal documents obtained through Freedom of Information requests, lawsuits and more — showed the alleged collusion between government agencies and corporations in covering up potentially dangerous pesticides, herbicides and dioxins (a group of potentially dangerous chemicals most often produced as the byproduct of industrial practices).
The volume of paper documents — some 200,000 — was an obvious deterrent. So, too, was the scanning technology over the years. But von Stackelberg always kept his eye on that changing technology and eventually they decided the time was right. Partnering with the Center for Media and Democracy and the Bioscience Resource Project, von Stackelberg and Van Strum digitized the thousands of pages of documents and put them online as The Poison Papers.
The continued attack on science and the administration in the U.S. were certainly drivers in getting the information out there now, but for von Stackelberg, its importance is simple.
“We need to know what’s going on,” he says. “We’ve been sold a bill of goods that the government tested all of this and everything is supposed to be safe. Time and time again, it turns out not to be safe.”
And when he looks at the chemical industry today, he says it is “not one bit different” from when he started reporting on the issue in 1980.
“Without honesty in regulating industry, who know what we’ll unleash?” he says.
The hope among those who published The Poison Papers is the documents will be mined by environmental groups, journalists and lawyers for weeks, months and years to come and last beyond “the next news cycle.”
It is already starting to work. An August headline in The Guardian newspaper read: “Monsanto sold banned chemicals for years despite known health risks, archives reveal.”
More like that could follow. Von Stackelberg has a line on another 90,000 pages of documents that could join The Poison Papers.
It’s work he didn’t exactly expect to end up doing, but it’s not a far leap from his time reporting, web developing or teaching.
“The common thread through a zigzagging career is the communication of information,” he says.