The contents in this series describe the successful campaign by the Silicon Valley Toxic Coalition (SVTC) and other local organizers to end the burning of waste rocket fuel in the Coyote Foothills southeast of San José. The company incinerating the fuel, United Technologies Corporation (UTC), manufactured rockets for commercial and military applications, with one of its largest contracts in the mid-1980s coming from the United States Air Force for production of the Minuteman missile. UTC first established a research & development division in the Coyote region in the late 1950s, and it began using open pits to burn excess rocket fuel in the late 1970s. Alongside SVTC, those local groups active in protesting UTC's open-bit burning in the late 1980s included the Coyote Creek Neighborhood Association, the South Bay Greens, the San José State University Environmental Resource Center, and The UTC Conversion Project, which was housed in the San José Peace Center. The UTC Conversion Project, an umbrella group of sorts, was focused not only on eliminating the open-pit burning, but on the larger objective of pressuring the UTC Coyote facility to transition to "non-military, non-toxic" products. In 1989, the Conversion Project authored and circulated a petition to the U.S. E.P.A, requested the pit areas be declared a Superfund federal cleanup site.

The specific role that SVTC played in the UTC Conversion Project includes a long script of arguments presented by Ted Smith to the Bay Area Air Quality Management District (BAAQMD) on October 11, 1990. Researchers will also find letters from residents of the Coyote Creek Neighborhood to BAAQMD Chairperson Paul Cooper after the UTC pits were closed in 1992, and a more detailed account of the UTC case, including notes from what appear to be UTC Conversion Project meetings as well as a full transcript of an October, 1990, BAAQMD hearing at which Ted Smith served as a witness for the public.