I suppose a psychoanalyst would say that my concern for the environment is rooted in the

fact that I was raised in a paper mill community. I was raised in Camus, C-A-M-A-S, Washington,

which is about 12 miles away from Portland, Oregon, but on the other side of the Columbia

River. It's a small town, it was then under 5,000 people and essentially everyone in

the town was either employed by the paper mill or they were selling groceries or being

doctors or lawyers or pharmacists to people who worked in the paper mill. So it was in

a very real sense a mill town. The only image that anybody had of Camus was the place where

the stink comes from. But that was viewed by all of the families that I knew as the

smell of prosperity. That's the smell of progress. The smokestacks set out unfiltered sulfur dioxide

and hydrogen sulfide. The hydrogen sulfide smelled like rotten eggs. The sulfur dioxide

added accurate, very, very sharply, both of which, if they're mixed with rain, turn into

acids. And since this was in Southwest Washington, it picks with rain virtually every day. A hazy

mist that is sort of constantly there and would accumulate on surfaces and corroded them.

It pitted the roofs of cars, destroyed the roofs of houses and gave everybody sore

throats. People were buying cars and within six months a year the finishes on the cars

were destroyed and they were starting to model and rust. And the mill, rather than cleaning

up the air, it installed a car wash at the exit of the parking lots. So whenever you left

the mill your car would go through this spray that would spray off the accumulated sulfur

dioxide and hydrogen sulfide. And it was a small slew near the mill and every now and

then you could outpass the Columbia slew and there'd be a few under dead fish just floating

in the water. If you haven't experienced anything else, what you're experiencing is simply

normalcy. I'm Dennis Hayes. I'm president of the Bullet Foundation and Environmental Philanthropy

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