Activist saw J.H. Baxter site as a crime scene long before the regulators did

The worst of the pollution happened when most people were sleeping.

On an October 2019 night, chemical fumes drifted under streetlights throughout west Eugene neighborhoods, lofting from J.H. Baxter & Co., a facility that treated timber with decay-resistant mixes for products like telephone poles.

One resident watched her husband try to leave for his work shift around 4 a.m. After the short walk from the front door to his car, he would come back inside retching, recalled Lisa Arkin — then executive director of the environmental justice group Beyond Toxics.

The resident was one of many in west Eugene calling Arkin, who believed they were being sickened by a facility that used cancer-causing chemicals as part of its business. While environmental agencies went through the motions of enforcing laws, residents didn’t feel their health concerns were taken seriously beyond the required paperwork.

Arkin listened and verified their experiences, then made recommendations to regulators, such as monitoring the facility after dark.

“We kept saying something’s happening at night,” Arkin said. “We need someone to be out there at night.” 

That happened when 62 people, some living nearly 3 miles away from the facility, filed formal complaints with Lane Regional Air Pollution Agency about smelling something like kerosene in the early hours of Oct. 6, 2019.

Agency investigators went the next day and found several hundred gallons of spilled tar-like creosote. It came from a clogged retort, a high-pressure cylinder used to apply a solution with creosote to large logs. Meanwhile, another retort was boiling off wastewater from the process, releasing toxic vapors into the air — like larger-than-life crockpots both leaking and left uncovered. 

The violation was only one chapter in the unfolding story of J.H. Baxter’s environmental crimes.

That day, Oct. 6, would later become known as one of 136 days that year when the company evaporated at least 1.7 million gallons of contaminated water from the wood-treatment process involving creosote, a chemical linked to tumor development when inhaled.

The Department of Justice went on to convict the company’s president, Georgia Baxter-Krause, of knowingly violating the Clean Air Act. Shortly after the sentencing last year, the Environmental Protection Agency designated the property as a Superfund site, a status given to fewer than 1% of known toxic sites in the United States.

Arkin worked for 25 years in environmental advocacy before the criminal pollution came into the light of day. But her willingness to stand up to institutions and their toxicity — environmentally and culturally — began long before that.

‘With all lights shining’

When she was 22, Arkin interned at Tulane University in Louisiana in the early 1980s — she decapitated large rats in a lab and dissected their brains to study what made them thirsty. As part of the process, she used a chemical compound that helped her trace activity in the animal’s nervous system. The work carried a risk of radiation exposure, which staff monitored with detectors pinned to their white lab coats.

But she never got a detector herself. 

“When I asked for one, they refused. And then I noticed all these guys just like dumping this stuff [radioactive chemicals] down the sink, cleaning up spills with paper towels and throwing it in the trash,” Arkin said. “I [was] the only woman of childbearing age, so I quit.” 

She also left her neurophysiology doctorate program and turned to another passion she was pursuing: dance.

You’ve got to be in community, even if only three people show up to your lecture. lisa arkin

Arkin went on to Stanford University, teaching, choreographing and researching modern dance and classical ballet. She published academic work on how body movement can help women process physical and emotional changes throughout life, from puberty through menopause.

By the mid-1980s, Arkin rose to chair Stanford’s dance department before moving to faculty at the University of Oregon, where she soon faced another institutional fight — this time over gender discrimination.

The university denied her tenure after she took maternity leave for her two sons. She went to court, and the case ended in 2000 with a settlement that, in part, required the university to change how it handled the advancement of women in academic careers.

Arkin was also granted tenure as part of the agreement. She again found herself searching for a new professional path. 

She began attending meetings of Eugene Citizens for Public Accountability, where she met Mary O’Brien, who founded Beyond Toxics. Arkin was one of the first people to staff the organization. And while it brought her back to science, she knew she wasn’t returning to the lab. Instead, she took a different approach — engaging not only with researchers but with everyday people.

“I remember Mary O’Brien saying to me, ‘you’ve got to go into the community. You’ve got to be in community, even if only three people show up to your lecture,'” Arkin said. “‘You’ve got to be there with all lights shining.’ And I really took that to heart.” 

‘A new awareness’  

As Arkin settled into her new role at Beyond Toxics in the early 2000s, writing grant applications asking to support its advocacy work, an environmental problem was turning the sky black. 

“There were days in Eugene where you could barely see your hand in front of your face or massive car accidents on I-5, because smoke would blow in and obliterate everybody’s vision,” she said.

The smoke came from grass seed farmers, who burned thousands of acres as part of their agricultural practices. It drifted across the southern Willamette Valley, where wind patterns and surrounding forests can trap air pollution for days.

Arkin, alongside the first Beyond Toxics executive director, David Monk, was trying to figure out how to take on a multimillion-dollar industry in Oregon that others had tried to challenge for decades. 

“At least for me, in the way I saw the environmental movement, the most important aspect of it was fighting to improve community health. It wasn’t just saving a river or protecting a salmon run, or saving a marble muralette. Although those are wonderful things, not to knock it, but I felt that there was an injustice. I could see it in all the communities I was working with,” Arkin said.

“By bringing the human experience to the Legislature for the fight on field burning, that changed everything,” she said. “When [lawmakers] saw their constituents, and children, being rushed to the hospitals in the middle of the night because they couldn’t breathe, and people getting in accidents, and how it, especially in rural communities, really ruined people’s lives.”

If you can’t breathe, you can’t work. If you can’t breathe, you can’t go to school. lisa arkin

“A new awareness started in Oregon on the need to pay attention to human exposure and resulting illnesses, which then translate into problems with health care, finances, school attendance, job attendance. If you can’t breathe, you can’t work. If you can’t breathe, you can’t go to school.”   

Lawmakers also started listening to concerns about timber companies spraying herbicides and pesticides from helicopters onto forests, often dusting the homes of people who lived nearby and their water supply. Some of the chemical mixtures included 2,4-D — one of the ingredients in the Vietnam War-era defoliant Agent Orange — which has been linked to reproductive health risks.

Over time, the advocacy helped reshape policy. With support from attorneys at the Western Environmental Law Center, field burning in the Willamette Valley was largely phased out. And Oregon adopted new limits on aerial pesticide spraying, including buffer zones around homes and schools with new reporting and notification requirements for nearby residents.

Through all the issues, Arkin looked to a different corner of the country for guidance: environmental advocacy in the Southeast, where pollution often sickened people in low-income communities and communities of color living near industries and landfills.

She turned to the work of Robert D. Bullard, often called the father of environmental justice — a principle that all people and communities deserve protection from environmental hazards. And should they be burdened by those hazards, they have legal recourse to push back. 

And while environmental justice was becoming more widely recognized among environmental advocates around 2010, it was not yet broadly understood among leaders in Eugene.

“The first time I said ‘environmental justice’ regarding J.H. Baxter in front of our City Council, councilors snickered,” she said. “They actually snicked at the thought there could be some kind of justice involved with environmental issues.” 

Taking on Eugene’s most notorious polluter 

It was the railroad that led Arkin to J.H. Baxter. 

“We were first more aware of west Eugene, because of the trains and toxic spills off train cars,” she said. “But then we noticed this pattern that people were complaining about this horrific smell, because it was naphthalene, which is gaggy.” 

Naphthalene, a key chemical component of creosote, became one of the most frequently detected toxins in air samples.

Residents had lived with its stench for more than a decade after a record 762 odor complaints were filed with the Lane Regional Air Protection Agency in 2004. By the late 2010s, both the Lane Regional Air Protection Agency and the Oregon Department of Environmental Quality were testing the air, land and water.

Regulators collected samples not only for creosote and naphthalene but also for chemicals used at the facility — including pentachlorophenol and dioxins, which are linked to increased cancer risks, including lymphoma, a cancer that weakens the body’s ability to fight infections.

Arkin did not think regulators’ pace matched the scale of the pollution’s effects on the community, based on surveys she was conducting by going door to door. And that had to do with the people who answered when she knocked, she said. 

Those residents — including people who were single parents and those on limited incomes — believed exposure was the price of living somewhere they could afford. And Arkin believed it was hurting their children.

She and Beyond Toxics collected asthma data from school districts and found that the rate among students at Willamette High School, about two miles from the J.H. Baxter facility, was 20% — more than double Oregon’s statewide rate of about 9%.

Still, many parents resigned themselves to the conditions in the absence of meaningful government intervention. But not all.

Mothers such as Arjorie Arberry-Baribeault wanted answers when her previously healthy 13-year-old daughter developed a lump. Her daughter, Zion, was diagnosed with Hodgkin’s lymphoma in 2018.

“She [Arkin] believed what I was saying on social media about J.H. Baxter,” Arberry-Baribeault said. “Not only her but the rest of Beyond Toxics believed what I was saying and believed in what I was discovering about what I was seeing in west Eugene.” 

Arkin asked Arberry-Baribeault to join the Beyond Toxics team and campaign for environmental justice. Their work, alongside neighborhood associations like Active Bethel Community, helped bring community members to the table with regulators, armed with their years of community science — research conducted with and by residents. 

The J.H. Baxter core group, convened by DEQ and Oregon Health Authority, became a space for people to share their experiences as a source of information. And Arkin’s expertise helped bring people together, said Lane Regional Air Protection Agency Executive Director Travis Knudsen, who at the time worked in public affairs.

“[She] brought an informed and pointed perspective to the group that I think ultimately helped the core team build trust, and in turn, what started out as information sharing from group to group into more of a collective engagement or shared action,” he said. 

J.H. Baxter stopped operations in 2022. When the Environmental Protection Agency stepped in for a short-term cleanup in 2024, the facility was in disarray. It had been mothballed — abruptly shut down with pipes still full of chemicals, as if operations might resume at any moment.

When crews wearing hazardous materials suits first opened the retorts, they found layers of toxic sludge — liquid, solid, liquid. More than 500,000 gallons of waste were removed and hauled to an EPA-approved disposal facility.

As sparks flew from workers cutting apart the retorts, Arkin was getting ready to retire. 

Reimagining justice 

Eleven people — ranging from geographic information system specialists to environmental justice organizers — now work at Beyond Toxics on a range of environmental challenges across Oregon. That includes Emily Matlock, a communication manager at the organization who helps educate communities throughout the state about environmental justice.

She credits Arkin with laying the foundation for the work she does today and into the future, especially with J.H. Baxter.

“Because of Lisa’s leadership and her ability to research, educate and organize, we were able to shut down J.H. Baxter and end their decades of egregious pollution done to the west Eugene community,” Matlock said. “She’s inspired so many young activists and left a legacy of tenacity, service and dedication to the fight for justice.” 

The younger generation is a reason why Arkin said it was time for her to retire. She wanted to step back so younger activists could step forward. Though, she’s still speaking up through her personal advocacy. 

Arkin is especially focused on the city of Eugene’s Public Health Standards Project. The initiative aims to strengthen oversight of industrial development and how those operations may affect the health of nearby residents.

She believes such a land-use policy could help prevent history from repeating itself — across Bethel and Trainsong and on the very ground where J.H. Baxter once loomed. 

As it stands, there is nothing preventing the property from being sold to another business that could blanket the community with another wave of pollution — a hard hit for a neighborhood still without firm justice, with the company insolvent and court cases dismissed.

Arkin imagines a different future for the site, including possibilities such as a solar farm with public and private ownership that could benefit the surrounding community. 

“We can’t change the past. To me, justice would look like improving the well-being and lives of the people who have been impacted,” she said. “I don’t think the saga of Baxter is over, and I do think that people’s experience in community science can still shape the outcome of the Baxter story.”