ON A DECEMBER DAY IN 1968, DDT WENT ON TRIAL IN MADison, Wisconsin.
US senator Gaylord Nelson, who had emerged as an environmental leader in Congress, was the first witness at an administrative hearing brought by a group of citizens who challenged the use of what had once been considered a miracle chemical. The initial phases of the hearing were held in the ornate Assembly Chamber of the Wisconsin State Capitol building. Later, as legislators reclaimed their chambers for work in a new session, the hearing moved to the Hill Farms State Office Building. The citizens used a provision in Wisconsin’s administrative rules that allowed them to challenge the use of DDT on the grounds that it was a water pollutant.
DDT was a persistent organochlorine chemical known to scientists as dichlorodiphenyltrichloroethane. Almost everyone else just used the handy abbreviation DDT, which, as it turned out, fit well in headlines—and of those there were plenty during the height of controversy over the chemical. One writer speculated that other than “S-E-X” few letters of the alphabet were drawing as much attention as DDT.
The Madison hearing served as a beginning and an end. Environmental historians frequently cite it as the first big skirmish of the modern environmental era. Closer to home, the hearing was the culmination of years of agitating by a small but determined group of citizens called the Citizens Natural Resources Association of Wisconsin. The CNRA had been focused on drawing attention to the increasing use of chemicals to deal with everything from roadside weeds to the insect pests that were ravaging city elm populations across the state.
The hearing would drag on into 1969. On May 21, 1970, Hearing Examiner Maurice Van Susteren—who possessed a strong legal mind and a penchant for challenging convention—ruled that DDT was, indeed, polluting state waters. By then, Michigan had become the first state to ban DDT, and Wisconsin’s legislature already had followed suit.
The Wisconsin DDT hearing may have seemed tame compared to other conflicts raging across the country in the 1960s. There had been no massive demonstrations calling for an end to the use of DDT. While the CNRA was formed with the intent of being a “militant” defender of the environment, there was no violence. The hearing produced more than its share of dry, highly technical testimony.
But this Wisconsin administrative hearing had been pivotal. It gave the citizen activists a national stage. Media coverage was heavy, thanks in no small part to the fact that an editor at the Capital Times in Madison—convinced that the hearing was of immense importance—put aggressive young reporter Whitney Gould on the story from start to finish.
America bristled with citizen activism and cultural conflict in the 1960s: Students and others took to the streets to protest an unpopular war in Vietnam; blacks demanded civil rights in the face of fierce opposition and at risk of life; the women’s liberation movement demanded that society practice equality on collective and individual levels. The environmental movement was gaining its legs, thanks to voices like those of Gaylord Nelson, who was elected to the US Senate in 1962. Nelson had established a strong conservation record while serving as governor of Wisconsin. He continued to agitate on behalf of the environment upon arriving in Washington. By 1965, he was proposing a federal ban on DDT. But despite the growing stack of research indicting DDT for its impact on ecosystems, a federal ban was still years away.
In a tumultuous decade, 1968 was as white-hot as any year. For Wisconsin residents, it started out happily enough. The Green Bay Packers won their second Super Bowl in January, dispatching the Oakland Raiders in what would be Vince Lombardi’s last game as coach of the Packers.
That same month, the war in Vietnam was raging. The bloody battle of Khe Sanh and North Vietnam’s Tet Offensive served to galvanize an already burgeoning antiwar movement, and the University of Wisconsin in Madison was a hotbed of antiwar activity. Vietnam had become the first TV war, with nightly news reports served up along with dinner for people across the country.
On June 6, Americans awakened to news that Senator Robert F. Kennedy had been fatally wounded by assassin Sirhan Sirhan in Los Angeles, during a celebration marking his victories in Democratic primaries in California and South Dakota. As the Democratic Party convened in Chicago that summer, the nation would watch live as antiwar protesters were battered by Chicago police outside the convention. Vietnam would lead to the demise of Lyndon Johnson’s presidency and the birth of Richard Nixon’s in 1968.
Meanwhile, the civil rights movement that had begun earlier in the decade continued to be propelled by demonstrations and strikes across the country, and frequent violence associated with this citizen uprising was also a staple on the nightly news. Three college students died in February when highway patrolmen were called in to quell a demonstration in Orangeburg, South Carolina. In that same month, black sanitation workers in Memphis, Tennessee, went on strike, bringing Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. to the city several times. On April 4, King was assassinated as he stood on the balcony outside his room at the Lorraine Motel in Memphis, Tennessee. Across the country, blacks took to the streets to protest in a massive wave of riots.
In Milwaukee, Father James Groppi was calling attention to housing segregation and other inequalities. He led marches and other activities to draw attention to the cause.
President Johnson would sign the Civil Rights Act in 1968.
Women’s rights had emerged as another social uprising, and when the Miss America Pageant got underway that September in Atlantic City, New Jersey, hundreds of women were on hand to protest what they saw as the pageant’s exploitation of women. Later that year, Yale University announced it would admit women students.
It was clear in the early 1960s that something was afoot in America. While Earth Day was still a decade off, everyday citizens were awakening to a new understanding about human impacts on the environment. Prior to Rachel Carson’s world-changing Silent Spring, published in 1962, the impact of pesticides on the environment was being documented by some scientists, but the information was scattered and not well understood by the general public. Silent Spring shook a nation from its unflagging reliance on the perceived magic of pesticides by drawing attention to the dangers of their indiscriminate use. Renowned Harvard biologist Edward O. Wilson would later describe the book’s impact this way: “Silent Spring delivered a galvanic jolt to public consciousness and, as a result, infused the environmental movement with new substance and meaning.”1 Others were less impressed. Carson was excoriated in many quarters, especially the agricultural sector, for her book. It remains a target of criticism to this day, with some charging that her science was flawed.
In Wisconsin, the CNRA and other groups had been pointing out the danger of pesticides for several years prior to Carson’s book. Some of the earliest to raise concerns were both the least and most likely. They were garden club enthusiasts from upscale suburbs and well-kept cities—most of whom were housewives unaccustomed to “stepping out” into the public fray—who began to notice that DDT spraying to control Dutch elm disease was decimating songbird populations. The Wisconsin activists weren’t the first to draw attention to the impacts of DDT on a variety of species. Bird-watchers had issued warnings as early as 1945, when Richard Pough, then with the National Audubon Society, related his concerns to the New Yorker.
Acute toxicity caused by DDT and leading to songbird deaths was a concern, but so was the loss of beloved elm trees that lined the streets of cities across the eastern United States. At first, concerns about DDT use in Wisconsin were directed at the local governments that authorized spraying. Those local elected officials found themselves in a quandary: many citizens demanded action to save their elm trees, but when DDT was employed, there was a strong backlash.
Eventually, these citizen activists realized that the matter went beyond confrontations with city, village, and town boards. University agriculture departments, state agricultural agencies, the US Department of Agriculture, and multinational corporations that made millions from pesticide sales were all in agreement: pesticide regulation was sufficient, economic entomologists were the experts, and the control of disease and elimination of agricultural and forest pests depended on chemicals like DDT.
Meanwhile, the little cadre of Wisconsin activists forged ahead, seeking a ban on DDT use. In 1968, after a series of setbacks, the door opened.
Research by ecological scientists slowly uncovered an even more dramatic discovery: DDT concentrations built up as they moved up the food chain, and they were decimating populations of raptors and other species by disrupting their reproductive cycles. By the time of the Wisconsin hearing, it had also become clear that DDT was accumulating in lakes and rivers and threatening the state’s billion-dollar sportfishing industry.
In Wisconsin, the CNRA had found a cause worth fighting for, and at the same time, a group of eastern environmental activists was fishing around for a DDT test case. The upstart Environmental Defense Fund, incorporated in New York State in 1967, had a simple motto in those days: “Sue the bastards.” True to its word, the EDF sought to advance its arguments in courts of law and hearing rooms.
The two groups found one another in 1968. In August of that year, Lorrie Otto, a suburban Milwaukee housewife later derisively referred to by one local politician as “the little lady in tennis shoes,”2 spied a notice in a local paper: the Wisconsin Department of Agriculture had again recommended DDT for Dutch elm disease control in Milwaukee and some of its suburbs. Otto called Joseph Hickey, a professor in the Department of Wildlife Management in the College of Agriculture at the University of Wisconsin in Madison, who was coming around to the belief that it was time for scientists to act. Otto and Hickey were by then members of the CNRA, and Hickey agreed that a suit was the group’s only recourse.3
Soon the CNRA was raising money to bring the EDF to Wisconsin. The CNRA filed a complaint with the Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources over the city of Milwaukee’s plan to spray DDT for Dutch elm disease control. The two groups planned to sue the city and Buckley Tree Service of Waukesha. Maurice Van Susteren, chief hearing examiner for the DNR, presided. The hearing in Milwaukee quickly fizzled: the city and the tree service agreed not to use DDT, and thus argued that no contract for spraying existed between them. Van Susteren told the litigants the case was moot: without a contract for spraying there was no basis for a suit.
In effect, the citizen activists had won. The city would not spray DDT. But the citizens were not pleased. Picking up on this, Van Susteren asked the “winners” why they were disheartened. EDF attorney Victor Yannacone explained that his organization wanted a forum to present scientific evidence against DDT and to get a judgment on its use.
Van Susteren told the citizens’ group that if they really wanted to press forward with their concerns about DDT spraying, Wisconsin law provided for a declaratory hearing procedure in which Wisconsin citizens could ask a government department for a ruling on the applicability of a particular set of facts on any rule enforced by that agency.4 Essentially, CNRA members could simply ask the DNR if DDT was a water pollutant under the state’s water-quality standards and thereby set in motion a hearing, complete with testimony, which would ultimately result in a ruling by that department’s hearing examiner.
On October 28, 1968, Frederick L. Ott, a Milwaukee businessman and an early member of the CNRA who also would serve as its chief fund-raiser for the DDT hearing, asked the DNR for a ruling on whether DDT was a water pollutant. Van Susteren assigned himself to the action and set a hearing for December.
Van Susteren’s own interest in the topic and for the environmentalists’ cause was but one example of Wisconsin DNR employees advocating on behalf of the citizen activists and for the environment. It also underscored a split between state agencies. The Department of Agriculture continued to promote the use of DDT even as the DNR had suspended its use on state lands and recommended against its use in other settings.
The hearing also highlighted differences within the scientific community, with most of the University of Wisconsin College of Agriculture faculty proclaiming the need for DDT even as other colleagues, such as Hickey, saw the pesticide as a major threat to the environment.
The CNRA engaged the EDF and Yannacone, a brilliant and flamboyant Long Islander, for the hearing. He and his wife, Carol, had already undertaken localized legal actions in their own state to halt the use of DDT. CNRA members dug into their own pockets and pried funds from friends and neighbors to cover air travel and other expenses. Group members also hosted EDF staff in their homes during the hearings.
The chemical industry and its supporters initially underestimated the potential impact of the hearing. But the EDF had crafted a careful strategy supported by testimony from experts around the country and beyond. By the time the industry realized the score, the game was over. The hearing would last for six months and produce 4,499 pages of testimony weighing forty pounds.
The Capital Times’s Gould was far from the only reporter on hand. The New York Times and other major newspapers, news services, and other media outlets covered the hearing. The coverage focused national and international attention on DDT and the unfolding story of its impact on a variety of species. The hearing and resulting ruling were considered a major victory for modern-day environmentalists. And the environment was emerging as a beat worthy of attention, be it from the local newspaper or the most powerful media outlets on Earth.
The actions of the activists whose deeds fill the following pages were—and continue to be—questioned by many. Today, foes of the DDT bans claim that uninformed people guided by pseudoscience removed one of the world’s most important pesticides from the public health and agriculture and forestry toolboxes. They say millions died from malaria in developing countries once DDT use was scaled back. They decried the marriage of science and citizen activism, often characterizing the activists as food faddists (a then popular term for organic food advocates opposed to pesticide use), nature lovers, and Marxists.
Many of those who sought to ban DDT maintain that they recognized the need for the compound in certain situations, especially where human health was at stake. Most of those who supported a DDT ban also said that other chemicals and pest management strategies were as effective or more so in addition to being safer. They pointed out that numerous insect species had developed resistance to the chemical. And they maintained that DDT’s persistence and impact on whole ecosystems made its use too dangerous. Supporters of the ban also said that lessons learned from the DDT battle underscore the importance of interdisciplinary scientific review of pesticides. More important, they said citizens deserve a voice on the health of the land and water that sustain us. They were adhering to a simple idea that, in a democracy, citizens have not only the right but the responsibility to be informed and involved.
What is clear about Wisconsin’s DDT battles is that a handful of citizens did make a difference. That is a lesson worth revisiting.