Thank You, Fritzi Cohen!

At the end of last year, we shared the sad news that one of our favorite allies and supporters, Fritzi Cohen, had passed away and reprinted journalist Sam Husseini’s heartfelt tribute, “Fritzi Cohen, Fighter Against the Pentagon, RIP.”

This week, we learned that Fritzi remembered the Organic Consumers Association in her will with a very generous donation that will support our continued work on the causes she cared so much about.

Fritzi loved Ronnie Cummins and the OCA team, especially our Planting Peace and Stop Weaponizing Pathogens campaigns, saying “they’re not afraid to say what they believe and they blend the serious environmental concerns and peace.” One of the causes Fritzi was most passionate about at the end of her life was Pentagon pollution.

Fritzi was enemy number one of Monsanto (now Bayer)’s “invasive species” scam that has required pesticides like the glyphosate-based herbicide Roundup to be sprayed in waterways, forests, along roadways, as well as in wildlife and recreational areas.

She waged a decade-long legal battle to try to keep pesticides out of the Willapa Bay, home to her Moby Dick hotel and oyster farm, after the Moby Dick’s oyster farmer Keith Stavrum was diagnosed with non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma, likely due to Pacific County Department of Vegetation Management’s spraying of Roundup on the property.

The Washington State Department of Agriculture claimed that pesticides were necessary to control spartina, which it describes as an aggressive noxious weed that displaces native species. 

But it is oyster farm profits, more than wildlife habitat, that has driven the pesticides policy, ironically for the benefit of industrial-scale “farming” of non-native shellfish species.

According to a review of Toxic Pearl, a 2019 book that documents the environmental crimes of a shellfish industry more concerned with profit than the environment:

For decades, this industry sprayed the pesticide Carbaryl, a powerful neurotoxin (also known as Sevin) around Willapa Bay and other local shore areas to kill a Washington State native animal, the burrowing shrimp. Burrowing shrimp are an important food source for many native species including fish, birds, and crabs. Why does the shellfish industry want to kill the native shrimp? Because they aerate and mix the mudflats, making it more difficult for the shellfish industry to cheaply plant their non-native shellfish seed (clams and oysters) into the mud.

Some members of the shellfish industry are also spraying herbicides such as imazamox over the coastal zone to kill eel grasse to make it easier for the industrial clam and oyster operations. Such grasses are an important source of food for wildlife and provide habitat for a wide variety of species.  More recently, some in the shellfish industry have pushed to spray ANOTHER neurotoxin (Imidacloprid) over our coastal waters. And, chasing the high-value Chinese market for geoducks, the industry is putting in miles of cut-off plastic tubes with plastic netting over mudflats around the region, resulting in the dispersal of plastic pollution throughout our coastal environment.

Fritzi lost her lawsuit, but she was proven right by ecologists who scientifically validated her assertions. When an endangered bird lives in an “invasive” grass like spartina, wiping it out with herbicides does more harm than good. A regenerative approach that focuses on restoration rather than eradication is the best way to support the recovery of native plants and the species that depend on them.

Read Fritzi Cohen’s obituary to learn more about this amazing woman.

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