DDT Wars: Rescuing Our National Bird, Preventing Cancer, and Creating the Environmental Defense Fund

by Charles F. Wurster

Carol, in a lawsuit pending against the Mosquito Commission for causing a fish kill on Yaphank Lake,

“Sue the bastards” was his battle cry. “If you scientists know what you are talking about, a lawsuit ought to get some action,” said Vic.

Judge D. Ormonde Ritchie, requesting an injunction against the continued use of DDT by the Commission.

This lawyer with his typewriter (nobody had computers then) seemed to have some strong medicine, and we needed it. This was very exciting.

Vic charged off to Riverhead, filing a motion claiming contempt of court.

The case seeking a permanent injunction was appealed all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court, which refused to hear it. Justice William O. Douglas wrote a vigorous dissent, but widespread use of DDT continued.

Environmental conservation always seemed to be politically impotent, and we all were amply frustrated at being ignored. We were tired of losing. Conservationists spent much time complaining to each other, but not influencing political decision makers. Letters to politicians received form letters in reply. Not much happened following letters to editors. A lawsuit seemed to get the attention of our tormentors; maybe it was like a police whistle in traffic.

It made them read our documents. A competent and correct scientific position, along with legal pleadings, clearly had some clout.

Those were the days when judges had never heard of the word “ecology.” The judge had to look it up in the dictionary before coming into the courtroom.

He said that DDT was a persistent poison that damaged wildlife, including Ospreys and Bald Eagles, and that other materials could be used to control mosquitoes.

I also submitted a “Technical Appendix” containing more than 100 reprints of papers documenting wildlife damage from DDT, which included reference to a book by Robert L. Rudd (1964) that documented more than 300 scientific papers detailing wildlife damage from DDT as early as 1947 in Princeton, New Jersey.

Dennis Puleston had studied Ospreys on Gardiners Island, an essentially uninhabited island between the two forks of extreme eastern Long Island, since 1954. The island is an ideal nesting habitat for Ospreys, where they have always been fully protected and the habitat has remained unchanged.

Studies within the next few years would greatly clarify this effect and would show that effects on reproduction were having a devastating effect on their populations.

Dennis Puleston in Yannacone vs. Mosquito Commission, November 1966.

George Woodwell explained how DDT travels with circulation patterns of air and water and gets around the world, contaminating most of the world’s organisms and reaching higher levels in carnivores at the ends of food chains.

We were well prepared for this trial, which was a bit like teaching a college course, and the judge was attentive and fair.

The judge must have been impressed with the validity of our case because he kept the temporary injunction in place through the winter and into 1967.

We didn’t know it then, but DDT was never to be used again on Long Island.

In 1967 it was prohibited by the Suffolk County Board of Supervisors and by the Town of Huntington, and by 1971 D...

Our remedy, to secure a ban on DDT, lay with the legislature, not with the court.

But the good news, for us at least, was that the court case generated publicity and alerted the public and the legislature to the DDT problem, and Suffolk County would use DDT no more.

We had won while losing.

had educated the public through the newspapers, exposed the DDT issue, put an almost immediate halt to the use of DDT by the Commission, and then lost the court case.

You could win by winning, or you might get much of what you were after while losing.

Environmental quality, he argued, is protected by the Ninth Amendment, which says, “The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others [such as the right to an uncontaminated environment] retained by the people.”

the Constitution guarantees that all citizens shall enjoy equal protection of the laws and, in the Fifth Amendment, that “nor shall any person … be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law.”

Jurisdiction was one of them,

Our strategy was to keep knocking on that locked courthouse door.

Sooner or later, we figured, somebody will forget to lock the door, and one way or another, we would get our foot in the door.

During much of 1967 we were casting about for a way to go forward with the DDT issue, but we had no organization, no money, and no forum or mechanism for initiating further actions.

National Audubon Society

He wanted to “take over” the convention and to steer Audubon’s membership into establishing an “environmental defense fund” to fight Audubon’s environmental battles in court.

Vic and Carol Yannacone; Robert Burnap,

establish an environmental defense fund with money from Audubon’s Rachel Carson Memorial Fund,

that this environmental defense fund would fight environmental battles in court,

and that the first case would be to seek a national ban ...

be referred to Donald C. Hays,

and we were not going to have an environmental defense fund within National Audubon that would take environmental issues to court.

we would have to do it ourselves

Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful committed citizens can change the world. Indeed, it is the only thing that has. Margaret Mead.

The 10 signers of the certificate were the ringleaders of the Long Island DDT suit, as well as the “troublemakers” from the Audubon convention.

Lew Batts, who hated to fly, had not yet taken his train back to Michigan and was still in town.

Friday, October 6, 1967, nine men and a woman gathered in that conference room at Brookhaven National Laboratory on eastern Long Island to sign the certificate of incorporation of the Environmental Defense Fund (EDF).

Vic Yannacone and his wife, Carol;

Lew Batts; Bob Burnap; a...

BTNRC troublemakers Dennis Puleston, George Woodwell, Bob Smolker, Art Co...

EDF was born from the frustration of a group of environmentalists unable to move the system, to make it respond, to force environmental protection; the frustration of losing environmental battles, often irreversibly; the deep conviction that we had an idea that was going to work because we had seen it work; and the final frustration that even our friends, the National Audubon Society, were not going to buy the idea. EDF would have to go it alone.

Vic, the only lawyer in the group, was a master at generating confusion among his opponents, and he sometimes kept the edge on this

talent by practicing it on his friends as well.

$37 to register the organization in Albany as a not-for-profit corporation in the State of New York.