Tuesday, September 22, 2020

Vandals target the chairperson of the Arkansas State Plant Board over his opposition to the herbicide called dicamba

NPR:
[The board] has imposed some of the country's tightest restrictions on the use of dicamba, a chemical that's provoked intense conflict - including one murder - in farming communities from Mississippi to Minnesota. Some farmers call it an essential weed-killing tool. Others consider it an intolerable agent of destruction, because it tends to evaporate from fields where it's sprayed and move with the wind, damaging other crops and wild vegetation.

...

Signs, posted along country roads, blame the plant board and him personally for weed-infested fields.

On the night of August 17, unknown vandals located two of Fuller's tractors, parked 12 miles apart, on a levee beside the St. Francis River. According to Fuller, they fed plastic into the hot engines, destroying them. Fuller says it will cost $60,000 to replace the engines, although insurance will cover most of the cost.

A month later, hours after Fuller testified again before the state legislature, someone set fire to more than 300 bales of Fuller's hay, stacked near that same levee, causing $18,000 in damage.
Related, violence and intimidation over the right to fish for lobster in Nova Scotia:
Last Tuesday morning, hundreds of non-Indigenous commercial fishermen set up lobster-trap blockades in Saulnierville to protest what they said were "illegal" fisheries in St. Marys Bay.

Officials with the Sipekne'katik First Nation said their first livelihood traps were cut and when Mi'kmaw fishermen went back out to recover their gear, they were chased by boats wielding flares.

On Friday morning in Saulnierville, a group of boats belonging to non-Indigenous fishers could be seen circling the mouth of the harbour in front of the docked Mi'kmaw vessels. Two people were later arrested and the Assembly of Nova Scotia Mi'kmaw Chiefs declared a state of emergency in response to "violence occurring over Mi'kmaq fisheries across the province."
And another violent conflict in California: