Campaign for Family Farms and the Environment

Family Farmers mourn a fallen ally
Senator Paul Wellstone killed in Minnesota plane crash

Contact:Paul Sobocinski, Minnesota farmer, 507-342-2323
Roger Allison, Missouri farmer, 660-273-2386
Land Stewardship Project (Minnesota), 612-722-6377
Iowa Citizens for Community Improvement, 515-282-0484
Illinois Stewardship Alliance, 217-498-9707
Missouri Rural Crisis Center, 573-449-1336

10/25/02
Family farmers in Minnesota and throughout the nation today lost a champion of economic justice in rural America when Senator Paul Wellstone was killed in a tragic airplane crash. Paul's wife Sheila, his daughter Marcia, and five others died with him in the crash.

Paul Wellstone gladly waded into the fight for justice because he knew it was right. Unlike nearly any other member of Congress, Wellstone understood and lent support to grassroots organizing, the only way that ordinary Americans have to impact the major decisions that affect their lives. Paul found the issues he championed the old-fashioned way-democratically. He listened to the people.

Wellstone's leadership was of both the heart and the mind, and no voice was more effective, more genuine, and more enduring. Paul Wellstone stood with us on courthouse steps and Capitol steps in the 1980s, fighting against the foreclosures of family farms by the Farm Credit System, major insurance companies, and the banks-and fighting for fair prices and fair treatment for family farms. He stood with us in the past year, introducing the ban on corporate meatpacker ownership of livestock in the U.S. Senate Agriculture Committee, and fighting hard and winning its passage on the Senate floor over the intense lobbying of corporate agribusiness and proponents of factory farms. He stood firm for the environment as well, becoming a champion of the Conservation Security Program in the 2002 Farm Bill and working to stop huge subsidies for factory farms.

Paul Wellstone was never afraid to speak truth to power. Most importantly, he was never afraid to help ordinary people build real political and economic power against the entrenched monied power of corporate America. Wellstone even shared this with family farmers and working people: he did his work despite constant physical pain and long, long hours.

Paul Wellstone is gone, tragically and too soon. What remains is the commitment to the cause: economic justice, environmental stewardship, long-term social change for the good of our communities and our nation. We will continue the good work in the spirit of Paul Wellstone. From the bottom of our hearts we thank him and thank Sheila Wellstone for their years of leadership and service.

The Campaign for Family Farms and the Environment, of which the Land Stewardship Project is a founding member, calls on the citizens and public officials in Minnesota to respond to this tragedy by ensuring that Paul Wellstone's work is carried forward by whomever replaces him on the ballot or by appointment.

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