An Unusual Clause and the Fairy Chasm Keeper
In December of 1968, Wisconsin “became the national battleground . . . of a struggle between conservationists and the pesticide industry when the state’s Department of Natural Resources opened hearing on a petition to limit severely further use of DDT.”
The battle owed its birth to an unusual Wisconsin law. The state’s provision for “declaratory rulings” allowed its citizens to obtain specific clarifications of state rules. A Wisconsin resident could, for example, ask the state’s Department of Natural Resources to decide whether or not a particular substance should be considered a water pollutant. The state would receive the request for the declaratory ruling, hold public hearings with evidence presented as if in a trial, make a determination about the substance, and then issue its decision. In the case of the water pollutant, if the Department of Natural Resources, after hearing all the evidence, ruled that the substance was a pollutant, the substance would then be officially regarded as a pollutant and would be managed as such. Were it not for that unusual clause, and without Lorrie Otto, the woman who requested the declaratory ruling on DDT, Wisconsin probably would not have become the national battleground for DDT.
Lorrie Otto grew up as Mary Lorraine Stoeber on a farm near Madison, Wisconsin. There she savored the experiences of “soil squishing between her toes [and] studying unearthed grubs and earthworms.” She carried her love and knowledge of nature with her as a young bride when she moved to a suburb near Milwaukee’s northern border. The home that she shared with her psychiatrist husband bordered a 20-acre ravine known as Fairy Chasm, a suburban oasis that provided a home to many forms of wildlife and a sense of exhilaration for many of Milwaukee’s suburbanites.
Otto’s response to the chasm’s decline mirrored Rachel Carson’s response to Huckins’ letter and Carol Yannacone’s response to Yaphank Lake. She knew the chasm well and loved it in a way that produced sadness and anger as she observed a growing number of birds suffering from severe tremors and unexplainable deaths. Her feelings intensified as she noticed the disappearance of many species of birds and small mammals. The silence that descended on Fairy Chasm made Lorrie Otto very vocal. She had not yet finished reading Silent Spring but already believed that DDT was poisoning her neighborhood. She knew she had to do something.
Mrs. Otto’s initial protests against DDT failed to produce meaningful results. The meeting in which she brought a dead robin and a dead bat to the government hearings was no different from her other unsuccessful efforts to reduce the use of DDT. The meager results eventually prompted Lorrie Otto to make the move that Carol Yannacone had made in 1966 in her battle against DDT. She enlisted the support of Victor Yannacone.
The Yannacones, Otto, and Hickey
Lorrie Otto’s effort to rescue her ravine brought her into alliance with Joseph Hickey, an ornithologist from the University of Wisconsin – Madison.
Hickey and Otto soon became the de facto leaders of the Wisconsin charge against DDT. A serendipitous sequence of encounters led Lorrie Otto to Victor Yannacone. Lorrie Otto, wearing a bright red cape, greeted the Yannacones when they landed at Milwaukee’s Mitchell Field. The team formed easily and became even stronger when Carol Yannacone became mesmerized with Lorrie Otto’s way of pouring hot water over tea bags – standing on a chair so that the water would hit the tea with greater force, knocking more flavor out of the bag. Lorrie Otto and her colleagues, the Citizens Natural Resources Association of Wisconsin, happily enlisted the articulate, brash, hard-hitting New Yorker and his colleagues, the Environmental Defense Fund, to guide them through the declaratory ruling process.
The group filed its petition for a declaratory ruling on October 28, 1968, hoping that the Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources would classify DDT as a water pollutant and would then control its use or ban it completely. Testimony began on December 2, 1968 with Wisconsin’s U.S. Senator Gaylord Nelson serving as the first witness. The celebrated conservationist, who would soon emerge as the genius behind the first Earth Day, testified that a ban on DDT would “represent the first ray of hope on the horizon for endangered species and perhaps man for many generations to come.”
Other witnesses Yannacone called included Charles Wurster who had played a pivotal role in the Suffolk County Mosquito trial, Richard Welch whose testimony produced the New York Times headline “DDT Termed Peril to the Sex Organs,” and the Swedish toxicologist Dr. Goran Lofroth who informed the audience that “breast-fed infants throughout the world were ingesting approximately twice the amount of DDT compounds recommended as a maximum daily intake by the World Health Organization.” Dr. Wurster said that the hearings provided “the first forum in which the nation’s scientific community has been able to meet the manufacturers in a face to face confrontation that can be carried to a decision . . .”
The agrichemical industry effort was lead by Louis McLean who proved to be no match for Yannacone. His pro-DDT case centered on claims that DDT had enhanced public health and agricultural output, it was cheap, and it did not kill humans when used properly. The trial that was expected to last ten days began in December of 1968 and by the time it ended in May, 1969, court stenographers had complied more than 2,500 pages of transcript. On July 18, 1969, the Wisconsin State Assembly voted unanimously to ban DDT.
On January 8, 1970, the state’s Senate agreed to the ban. Five weeks later Governor Warren Knowles signed the bill into law. In very important ways, the story in Madison, Wisconsin resembled the story in Yaphank, New York. A concerned “housewife” who shared Rachel Carson’s way of knowing, loving, and caring for her environment, honored her misgivings and shared her concerns with the right people.
Excerpt from Chapter 9 of a yet unpublished book by Francis J. “Hank” Hilton, SJ, PhD, August 24, 2004