PAN Magazine Fall 2010 by Pesticide Action Network

PAN North America

Pesticide Action Network North America â&#x20AC;˘ advancing alternatives to pesticides worldwide

Get Together

Fall 2010

&Get to Work

Contents Features 4 Get Together & Get to Work 7 Caught in the Crossfire: Hormones,

Honeybees & Lisa Jackson

11 Freedom to Farm without GMOs:

On the Road with Farmers from Brazil to Mississippi Marcia Ishii-Eiteman

11 Departments First Word

Campaign Reports

The Network in Action

1 Making Movement Heather Pilatic

9 Unstoppable, Unpredictable Change: Methyl Iodide Blocked Three Years So Far Kathryn Gilje 10 Dateline Geneva: Endosulfan Moves Toward Global Ban!

20 Breast Cancer Action: Buckets for the Cure?

Last Word 21 On Not Trying to Turn Back the Clock Russ Lester

New Website & Blog Conversation, truth-telling, ease of use

Denial as a Political Strategy

Partner Profile

from Merchants of Doubt

Smock Paper: Preserving More Than a Tradition

on the cover PAN calls on our members and allies to reclaim our democratic roots and gather our friends to build power for change from the ground up. Story on p. 4.

PAN North America

First Word

Volume V, Number 3

Making Movement

Fall 2010

Pesticide Action Network North America combines science and community-led campaigns to force global phaseouts of highly hazardous pesticides. We promote solutions that protect the health of communities and the environment. PAN North America is one of five independent regional centers of PAN International, a worldwide network of more than 600 organizations in 90 countries. Our work advances environmental justice, sustainable agriculture and food sovereignty. Executive Director: Kathryn Gilje Communications Director: Heather Pilatic Managing Director: Steve Scholl-Buckwald Design: Brenda J. Willoughby Other Contributors: Beverly Becker, Clint Boerner, Jan Buckwald, Medha Chandra, Gunther Korshak, Marcia Ishii-Eiteman, Kristin Schafer, Gar Smith, Karl Tupper

Board of Directors Amy Shannon President

Illinois, Charles Stewart Mott Foundation

Judy Hatcher Vice President

Virginia, Environmental Support Center

Polly Hoppin Secretary

Massachusetts, Lowell Center

Shawna Larson Treasurer

Alaska, Pacific Environment

Martha Guzman

California Rural Legal Assistance Foundation

Ellen Kennedy

Maryland, Calvert Group

Nikiko Masumoto

California, Masumoto Family Farm

Ana Duncan Pardo

Toxic Free North Carolina

Michael Picker

California, Lincoln Crow Strategic Communications

Ted Schettler

Michigan, Science and Environmental Health Network

Lucia Sayre

San Francisco Bay Area Physicians for Social Responsibility

Jennifer Sokolove California, Compton Foundation

A member publication of Pesticide Action Network North America. Views expressed herein are the authors’ and do not necessarily represent those of PAN International or PAN North America. Permission granted to reproduce portions of this publication, provided the source (Pesticide Action Network North America) is acknowledged.

our CFC number is 11437

49 Powell Street, #500 San Francisco, CA 94102 415-981-1771 panna@panna.org www.panna.org Printing by Autumn Press with soy-based ink on New Leaf Sakura: 100% De-inked Recycled, 50% Post-Consumer Waste, Processed Chlorine Free.

Whatever the outcome of the mid-term elections, we will be living and struggling in the wake of Citizens United, just as we have endured the long fetch of waves of deregulation—for many years and in ways both surprising and predictable. But so much rides on how we engage the struggle. At PAN we are redoubling efforts to build power, momentum and connection among people and communities. We cannot beat corporations at their own game —we can’t buy elections, fund fake movements, or deploy an army of lobbyists. But we can build real movements with deep roots, and we can all get into the habit of making ourselves heard by decision makers. The word “movement” can be intimidating. It conjures images of marches, street theater and endless evenings of consensus-based decision-making. But there are so many ways to engage and struggle for what is right and fair, each bringing its own intelligence. Water cooler conversations, dinner parties, farmers markets and church are all spaces of democracy and movement-building waiting to happen. Newspapers are not dead: people and policymakers still read them (especially the letters section!). And whether or not “social media” proves democratic is really up to us. So PAN is re-tooling to help you engage in making democracy work wherever you are. We have a suite of new online tools designed with one thing in mind: engagement. Our new website is built to enable action and connection. We have an interactive blog featuring an array of voices. In the coming months we’ll get going on Facebook, YouTube and (lord help me) Twitter. In every instance we will need and solicit your help and insight in order to build power, connection, momentum—in a word, movement. Don’t worry. We are still on the ground with partners in Brazil, still in Geneva doing what we can to influence treaty negotiations, still in the Midwest listening to farmers, and still holding the line on methyl iodide in California. We still do Drift Catching and geek out on soil science. We still monitor the EPA’s daily register as if things were developing there at breakneck speed (one can hope, and push). In this issue we call for reclaiming our democratic roots and gathering our friends to build power for change from the ground up. We unmask mythmakers and report on progress toward breaking the bonds of a corporate-controlled food system. And we encourage you to keep up and honor however it is that you make movement happen.

—Heather Pilatic, Co-director & Communication Director

Pesticide Action Network International PAN has autonomous regional facilitating centers in Africa, Asia and the Pacific, Europe, Latin America and North America. A primary strength of PAN is the collaboration among the regional centers with more than 600 NGOs in 90 countries.

africa

PAN Africa Dakar, Senegal pan-afrique.org asia/pacific

PAN Asia & the Paciﬁc Penang, Malaysia panap.net

europe

PAN Europe pan-europe.info PAN Germany Hamburg, Germany pan-germany.org PAN UK London, UK pan-uk.org

latin america

RAP-AL Buenos Aires, Argentina rap-al.org north america

PAN North America San Francisco, USA panna.org

Welcome to Our New Website

This fall we launched a new organizational website and blog. If you haven’t yet, please visit us at www.panna.org and www.panna.org/blog. In designing both the site and the blog, three themes have served as our touchstones: conversation, truth-telling and ease of use. You’ll find navigation is more intuitive and design much cleaner, with white space setting off a richer array of images. We hope our online presence will now be an invitation for people who may not yet know the issues, but are hungry for independent science, a global perspective and opportunities for meaningful action. Some highlights:

GroundTruth: PAN’s blog on pesticides

The details:

Different than a daily digest or our past news service (PANUPS), our blog offers perspectives from the global PAN community in an interactive format that will showcase a variety of voices. Bloggers will report on the latest science, offer readers timely analysis, and share news and opportunities for action that can change our world. GroundTruth will continue PAN’s strong tradition of decoding pesticide science and speaking truth to power, from the ground up.

• We’ll post blogs as news and analysis happens. We’ll link to robust resources and opportunities to go deeper. • GroundTruth can be delivered via RSS as it happens, or in a weekly digest format. • If you find you have a favorite blogger at PAN, you can sign up to receive just their posts. • Blogs and PANUPS both are archived at www.panna.org. • Comments: Log in to join the conversation!

PAN North America Magazine Fall 2010

Website Re-organization Here you’ll find the most profound change: we’ve completely re-organized how we present ourselves to the world in a more audience-friendly way. With sections on “Your Health,” “Grassroots Science” and “Our Community” as well as the more standard presentation of “Issues” or areas of work — the logic of the site is built around you, our supporters. Get Involved 

This is where you come as you are and find the tools that you need. From links and toolkits for writing letters to the editor and OpEds, to “Advocacy 101” to help you hold leaders accountable — this is where to get started. You’ll find tips on hosting dinner parties and friendraisers as well as online banners and social media tools to spread the word. As we say on the site, “Do one thing. Nobody can do everything, but everybody can choose one thing and do it. Whether it’s writing a letter or check, making a phone call, or being a conscientious consumer— we each have real power. That power builds when we act together, and it starts when one person does one thing.”

What is GroundTruth? Noun. What actually happens on the ground or in the field. Verb. Using information collected on the ground to verify or correct presumed, modeled or computed expectations of reality. Blog. The fertile soil in which democratic, science-based solutions thrive by telling the truth about pesticides.

Your Health 

Here we pull out the pieces of what we do that most directly impact people’s lives. Cancer. Reproductive health. How pesticides affect children. And what you need to know about pesticides in your food and in your home — and what you can do to protect your family. Coming soon: a “hot topics” roundup of the latest science and news on pesticides and health. The Science 

PAN specializes in Grassroots Science that makes a difference. Here we explain exactly what we mean by this and how it works. You’ll also find s pecifics on the science of pesticide drift, biomonitoring and agroecology. Plenty of substance here for those who want to dive deep into the issues we all care so much about.

PAN’s Victory Timeline

This thing is snazzy. Nearly 30 years of work presented in an interactive timeline with a flipbook of images and a scannable timeline. It’s been a long time coming, and remains a work in progress, but having our history pegged down in anything less than a 1,000-word essay is no small feat. Now we need a tight “elevator pitch.” That’s next.

Let us know what you think Seriously. Email Andrew Olsen, Online Coordinator at andrew@panna.org or Heather Pilatic, Co-director/Communications Director at heather@ panna.org. We look forward to hearing from you.

PAN North America Magazine Fall 2010

Get Together

The policy battles and candidate debates of the 2010 election season were nothing if not a disheartening illustration of corporate capture:

• Federal climate policy died in the Senate, even after giving away the store in industry concessions; • Citizens United undid decades of legal precedent to allow the unlimited funneling of secret corporate cash into elections; • The Koch brothers are apparently funding what may be the most politically toxic operation yet with the Tea Party; • BP’s oil spill is remarkable not only for the devastation it wrought in the gulf, but also for what it reveals about how firmly the federal Minerals Management Service sat in the pocket of industry, and as the Union of Concerned Scientists shows, many other regulatory agencies are also under serious pressure to accommodate industry; • And, despite serious progress, reform of our national chemicals policy has stalled, running up against chemical industry opposition. “Corporate capture” is a term that names the control exerted over government policy and agencies by corporations, either through direct influence as in lobbying, placing “revolving door” candidates in key positions, or through indirect structural means like intellectual property here’s always a space rights, trade policy, tax in which you can make law or corporate personhood entitlements. democracy flourish and it

begins with you.”

As we go to print, the November 2010 midterm elections are still a week away, but they don’t look promising for progressive candidates. Whatever the outcome, we already know one thing — that corporate control over government and economy will remain firmly in place, and that this corporate capture undermines a free and fair society. Raj Patel

What is to be done? In the face of such powerful corporate interests that thwart deep policy and regulatory change, we

Get to Work must re-gather ourselves and engage in robust local action. We can and should do what neighbors do when times are good or bad: come together, innovate, create local solutions that allow markets to serve people, restore our environment and nourish health, with some measure of justice. Rely on the wisdom of farmers, the ingenuity of farmworkers, the skill of thrifty and magical cooks. Refuse to cede the science and art of agriculture to the laboratories of Monsanto and Kraft. And along the way, we will build the engaged community and citizenry that one day will steer our nation and globe toward policies that protect our interests, rather than those of an elite few. By PAN’s analysis, the key strategic task of this moment is to gather strength and momentum— build power — to engage in the public struggle for America’s values with truth and compelling stories and redouble our efforts where megacorporations have the least influence: local organizing and movement building. By movement, we mean the stuff that happens around the table, at church and in the marketplace — wherever you find yourself with other people willing to work together and have a conversation. By movement building we also mean re-gathering the reins of control over the economy: putting markets to work for people and making markets that put people and the land back to work. Thousands of work parties gathered on 10/10/10 to lay down roots and local infrastructure for a climate movement from below — many of them focused on rebuilding local control over food and farming. An international peasants’ movement 150 million strong in Via Campesina will convene upon the Cancun climate meeting in December not to ask officials for better policy, but to draw attention to the solution to climate change that is already viable: smallholder, agroecological farming.

Facing a legacy of inequity The deck is stacked — we must acknowledge and be undaunted by this reality. We live with markets that “externalize” scorched lands and used-up or displaced people. We are stymied by a corporate hold that sets a glacial pace for policy action in the face of new scientific understanding and a rapidly crumbling planet. And the deep divisions and

PAN North America Magazine Fall 2010

inequalities embedded in the fabric of our nation often undermine our ability to build a robust and inclusive democracy. But it is only by working together that we can assert democratic control over markets, policy and the future of our communities. Whatever the corporate and industrial interests may say, U.S. food is not cheap, nor is industrial food benefitting our health and pocketbooks across the board. Our food is terribly expensive, once we take into account the externalization of social and environmental costs. And this is not just a theoretical argument—we pay the costs out of our own pocket—at the doctor’s office, to clean up pollution, to keep our children safe from toxic exposure. Nowhere in food and agriculture is this more evident than in the lives of immigrant workers in the food chain—from farmworkers in the fields, to food service providers in restaurants, to innovative small food producers and vendors. The industrial food chain relies upon and reinforces a division of labor largely determined by race and class. Food chain workers are some of the most politically vulnerable people in our society, and they pay for the costs of industrial food at the doctor’s office, with ADD, diabetes, asthma and cancers — all linked by science to toxic exposures. The good food system takes into account all costs and pays them when the bill comes due. The industrial system, however, foists these costs onto taxpayers and the most marginalized, asking society to foot the bill for damage done as part of the daily routine.

Immigrant scapegoating: 2010 In the run-up to this election cycle, the targeting of Latino and Latina immigrants (millions of whom are farmworkers), in particular, grew fierce. We know how scapegoating works: People and communities are targeted and blamed, while the actors and systems that brew inequity go unchecked and unexamined. This inequity, and the racial misunderstanding, fear and hatred that it feeds on and breeds, fuels division and results in a broad swath of America scapegoating immigrants, rather than rallying for change. A government that denies workers across the food chain access to basic civil and human rights is a good part of the reason that local, green and fair food just can’t compete with industrial, corporate agriculture. This fact and these are worth repeating: • Farmworkers are exempt from protection under national labor and occupational safety laws — and they perform one of the three most dangerous occupations in the U.S. and experience the highest rates of chemical-related occupational illness. • The average farmworker makes $10,000 per year. • In Florida, multiple modern day slavery cases have been brought to court in the last few years.

Correcting Misconceptions about Immigration Immigrants and farmworkers aren’t to blame for a crumbling economy and joblessness. Corporate capture is —capture of our market structures, our trade relations, our tax code and domestic policies. Farmworkers are: 1) largely refugees of NAFTA policies which have driven farmers from their land in home countries, or 2) continued travelers on the path opened and paved by the U.S. government during the World War II Bracero Program that institutionalized the import and deportation of Mexican workers for agricultural labor for more than 22 years. Without change, 11 million undocumented people live in the balance of an American dream sharply divided by race and class. We allow a society built on second-class status for the people caring for one of our most vital systems: food. We live alongside each other while some can vote, others can’t. Some can drive legally, while others would be arrested and deported. And where people across the spectrum are increasingly criminalized for dissent against such inequity. Two efforts to address immigrant scapegoating and hatred head on in the media were launched in 2010. Take our jobs

In September, United Farmworkers and Steven Colbert together in a Congressional hearing to promote the masterful Take Our Jobs campaign to expose just how untrue are the myths that undocumented immigrants are taking jobs that other folks will do. Drop the I-Word

Calling out the normalization of immigrants as second-class citizens, the Applied Research Center has launched a campaign to drop the word “illegal” when referring to people. The I-Word creates an environment of hate by exploiting racial fear and economic anxiety, creating an easy scapegoat for complex issues, and condoning violence against those labeled with the word.

Full cost accounting When it comes to the true costs of pesticides, in particular, farmworkers, farm families and rural peoples pay. Our society and health care systems don’t bear the full cost of frontline illness and disease related to chemical exposure. The categorical exclusion of immigrant farmworkers, in particular, means that the real costs of pesticides are barely

PAN North America Magazine Fall 2010

known, let alone internalized in our understandings of the full costs of industrial agriculture. Policies (and their enforcement) that would keep the makers of pesticides — like Monsanto, Syngenta and Bayer — accountable for the costs to society, go undeveloped and unpassed. A case in point: the current proposal to use methyl iodide in California agriculture, primarily in strawberries. This pesticide, proposed by Arysta LifeScience, the largest private pesticide corporation in the world, is already in use in Florida and a few other states. New York and Washington opted against this chemical experiment, but California, the largest market for this controversial pesticide, has not made its final decision. But in the most recent round from the state Department of Pesticide Regulation, word was that they planned to give the new pesticide a green light. A blatant example of how the decreased political and economic power of farmworkers results in hazardous outcomes for us all, the push for methyl iodide is possible only because Arysta is banking on the fact that those on the front lines, who face cancer and miscarriages won’t have the muster to counter the chemical company push. And they are counting on “eater complicity,” since while a fumigant like methyl iodide sterilizes the soil, contaminates groundwater and poisons neighbors as it drifts off fields — it doesn’t arrive on the fruit in the store.

Arysta’s strawberry surprise What Arysta didn’t count on was the increasingly aligned political mobilization between farmworkers, farmers and eaters—and the shared insistence that our strawberry future be safe, healthy and fair, not rife with one of the most “toxic chemicals on earth.” And they didn’t count on local people who have already moved forward implementing alternatives. In fact, strawberry farmers across the state launched organic strawberry growing long ago. One farm in particular, Swanton Berry, grows organic strawberries without use of hazardous pesticides and with a United Farmworkers contract to boot. Safe, fair and green. It’s already on the ground. The Arysta push is increasingly exposed as a chemical company sham.

Provide for a safe and sustainable future Join the PAN Sustainers Circle with a monthly or quarterly pledge, or create a legacy gift for you and your family by including Pesticide Action Network in your will or trust.

How to rebalance? Policy change is needed, certainly. Comprehensive immigration reform and changes to labor laws that categorically exclude farmworkers are critical. Investments in organic agriculture and healthy food access programs are a must. Yet recent efforts have failed or made minimal progress on all these fronts, leaving the options directly in our hands. Inaction fuels corporate control rather than community resilience. It’s just not an option. In the face of a stymied Congress, local solutions exist. They need our support and are the pathway toward rebalancing corporate power with human ingenuity, community and democracy.

The Reporter Fond du Lac, Wisconsin

LETTER: Science backs push against atrazine Environmental Protection Agency scientists recently met in Washington, D.C., to review the latest studies linking the herbicide atrazine to human health harms. They won’t meet again until early next year and, in the meanwhile, we will all be subject to a rather predictable PR push from the makers and defenders of atrazine. In particular, we will be asked to believe that this review of atrazine is “unusual” and “unnecessary.” When something is detected in 94% of drinking water tested by the USDA, and is linked to everything from birth defects to cancer in a body of science that delivers more conclusive evidence every day, I would say that we need to take a hard look at the facts. When the EU and Switzerland (where atrazine’s maker, Syngenta, is based) ban atrazine because they do not want their water contaminated, I would say we need to take a hard look at the facts. New science linking low-level exposure to endocrine-disrupting chemicals like atrazine emerges all the time. But already we know more than enough to realize that the EPA would be remiss in its duties if it were not undertaking this review. I am glad EPA is following the science and hope they will be neither intimidated nor distracted by Syngenta’s disingenuous efforts to keep its product on the market.

Learn more at www.panna.org/support or call 415-981-1771 ext 309.

Vicki Baum Burnett Letter to the editor by PAN supporter on Oct. 12, 2010

PAN North America Magazine Fall 2010

Things We All Can Do to Push for a Better Future

1. Take markets into our own hands Markets make wonderful servants and terrible masters. There is no need to choose between environmental health and the economy — in fact, a healthy environment is a pillar of shared prosperity. • Stand in solidarity. Support the Coalition of Immokalee Worker’s Campaign for Fair Food against supermarkets that refuse to pay higher wages to farm workers. (www.ciw-online.org/tools) • Speak out! Tell the Justice Department what you think about corporate control of your food. Join thousands who have sent letters in response to the public hearings on monopoly control in the food and agriculture sector. (www.usfoodcrisisgroup.org/node/7)

2. Shift the terms of debate • Address immigrant scapegoating directly. • Share your local fair, green and safe innovations far and wide. • Write to your local paper. More people, especially politicians, read the opinion and letters section than any other non-front page section.

3. Organize to change local policies We’ve got the upper hand when we get local. It takes an extraordinary amount of money for corporate interests to decentralize and get active in local school boards, counties and cities across the country. • Join or start a food policy council. Hundreds are springing up around the country — visit our food democracy page to learn more. (www.panna.org/issues/ food-agriculture/food-democracy) • Make yours a sanctuary city: More than 30 cities and towns are creating sanctuary ordinances, officially refusing to enforce national laws they consider too against-theprogress-of-humanity to implement. From New York City to Los Angeles; Miami to Minneapolis, these ordinances ban city employees and police officers from asking people about their immigration status. • Institutional sourcing practices have big effects. Convince schools and hospitals in your community to do the right thing.

4. Build community with food Help build a healthy and fair food web where you live. Every dollar spent supporting local farmers and food businesses creates employment, self-reliance and prosperity for your community. • Support local farmers markets, Community Supported Agriculture (CSAs) and farmer and food justice organizations. • Grow a garden yourself or join with others to start a community garden. • Set the table. Celebrate and organize community meals with neighbors, local chefs, gardeners, farmers and others to build community and talk about making “Good Food”— food that is healthy, green, fair and affordable — accessible for all. Grub It Up parties are a great way to go.

Caught in the Crossfire Hormones, Honeybees & Lisa Jackson In food and agriculture, a handful of corporate players control the scene — Monsanto, Syngenta Bayer, Dow and Arysta as key agrichemical actors; Cargill, ADM, Kraft, Tyson, et al., on the sell side. Brokering themselves as the salvation of the American farmer and offering “technological innovation for sustainability,” their true interests remain obscured in the public eye. They’ve firmly captured our government for their ends: selling a coffer of toxic pesticides, controlling food markets from seed to plate, and ensuring that corporate-reliant food systems are displacing community food, especially in Africa and Latin America, as they search for moral cover and new markets for chemicals and control. A key strategy of the PR toolbox employed by these players, it turns out, is to manufacture scientific uncertainty and doubt — just enough to confuse the issue and delay policy change for generations. Dubbed “The Tobacco Strategy,” and detailed by Oreskes and Conway in Merchants of Doubt (see excerpt on page 14), “This was the tobacco industry’s key insight: that you could use normal scientific uncertainty to undermine the status of actual scientific knowledge. As in jujitsu, you could use science against itself. ‘Doubt is our product,’ ran the infamous memo written by one tobacco industry executive in 1969, ‘since it is the best means of competing with the “body of fact” that exists in the minds of the general public.’” Over the past three months, the tales of hormones, honeybees and Lisa Jackson reveal just who is caught in the crossfire of such agrichemical company misinformation and mobilization.

Hormones One of the most controversial impacts of pesticides is the way that extremely low doses of pesticides have powerful and irreversible impacts on the delicate hormone system. The results? Feminization of male frogs when exposed to atrazine at very low levels. Changes that result in breast cancer or prostate cancer later in life. General havoc with immune and endocrine development. The scientific evidence has been built by a cadre of rigorous experts, including Drs. Theo Colburn and Tyrone Hayes. And yet a mendacious propaganda campaign to manufacture controversy, obscure and deny the science and intimidate any scientist or policymaker willing to speak publicly is being escalated by Syngenta, as the U.S. EPA reviews the safety of its product. The result: No U.S. government agency takes

PAN North America Magazine Fall 2010

endocrine disruption into account when making chemicals or pesticides policy. There are no rules to protect the endocrine system, and policymakers barely know the science. A massive score for the merchants of doubt.

Honeybees

oneybees are susceptible to multiple factors that weaken their health. However, it appears that the neonicitinoid pesticides, in particular, play a significant role in the recent years of bee deaths. As Tom Theobald, professional beekeeper, commented, “Pesticides are the portion of this problem that can be most immediately addressed without any new money, any new people, any new laws…. If we don’t solve this pesticide problem, these other things aren’t going to matter. We’re going to have some of the best-looking cadavers that we’ve had in years.” Current regulatory review of just one of the family of pesticides has been reopened, with a tentative timeline pegged to 2016 for initial decisions. Beekeepers are desperate for experiments and answers beginning now, and fear that if they face a spring 2011 like the past three, the majority will be completely out of business. Perhaps even more important to pesticide corporations in the honeybee debate is the profound ways that bees connect with people, and represent the strength of a resilient and hopeful agriculture. If pesticides are publicly associated with their downfall, they move down the continuum from “crop protection products,” the language used for toxic chemicals by their manufacturers, to poison that is too difficult to control for us to risk it. • Honeybees pollinate plants responsible for one of every three bites of food. • French and German farmers have convinced their governments to stop use of key neonicitinoid pesticides, preferring precautionary action that benefits farmers, beekeepers and food systems, rather than profits for Bayer.

The myth-making by agrichemical corporate interests around the true causes of Colony Collapse Disorder most recently appeared in the October 9, 2010, New York Times. Research was reported as scientific evidence pointing to a virus and fungus as the cause for massive bee deaths that have left commercial beekeepers with 30–40% of their colonies dead for a third year in a row, with no mention that pesticides are a critical factor in the crisis. An exposé days later revealed that the Times had failed to mention that Bayer, manufacturer of pesticides implicated in bee deaths, had funded the researcher. Which brings us to EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson.

Lisa Jackson Manufacturing scientific uncertainty is one tool; discrediting those who seek to rebalance the playing field is another. Perhaps no one person has received the public flogging by corporate interests during the 2010 election season so much as Lisa Jackson. An administrative appointee rather than a political candidate running for office, Jackson took the brunt of heat from Republicans and Democrats alike, all bent on finding people to blame for our economic mess, without taking on big business and corporate polluters who are the true culprits who set the terms for this mess. Characterizing her decisions as emotional and her will as unbridled, threatening her with the whipping post and other assorted sexist and racist metaphors, industry’s servants took aim at a public figure who seeks to act in the face of artificial doubt and disingenuous criticism, in the hope that the health of rural communities, farm families and urban residents not continue to be sacrificed for corporate profit.

• Appointed to oversee the U.S. EPA, 2009. First African American to lead the Agency. • Agency priorities, 2009– 2011: climate change, environmental justice, children’s health.

EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson. Photo: Becky W. Evans/ThreeBeats Media

• Proposed regulating climate change gasses in face of Congressional inaction and entrenchment.

• Initiated review of herbicide atrazine due to children’s and human health concerns, despite concerted backlash from Syngenta Corporation, atrazine’s Swiss-based primary manufacturer. • “When I go around the country, people want clean air. They are as passionate about clean air and clean water as [about] any of a number of issues; they want protection for their families and their children.”

PAN North America Magazine Fall 2010

Campaign Updates

Unstoppable, Unpredictable Change Methyl Iodide Blocked Three Years So Far by Kathryn Gilje, PAN North America Executive Director

I’m an organizer by training and by passion, so days like an early October community meeting in Pajaro, California, are what I live for. A teacher and high school students walked up to me and said, “We want to be PAN’s first high school chapter.” We don’t have a chapters program but I said, “Absolutely. Let’s figure out how,” because this is how we’ll keep making unstoppable change.

system are outspending us, but we’re outflanking them, and now they’re on the defensive. In organizing, this is what change looks like:

Pajaro, a community on California’s central coast, will be on the front lines if the state approves the carcinogenic new pesticide methyl iodide. When Arysta brought methyl iodide to the U.S. market, they didn’t bet on high school students starting chapters, on scientists voicing outrage, and they definitely didn’t bet on thousands of ordinary people flatly refusing to allow “one of the most toxic chemicals on earth” into our communities.

• Monsanto on guard and under scrutiny, with its stock price down and Forbes recanting on an earlier proclamation that Monsanto was the “Company of the Year;” and

Arysta now has a very expensive PR and lobbying problem on their hands: they’ll have to outspend us one thousand to one to have a chance of getting methyl iodide to market this year—more than PAN’s annual budget.

• High school students starting a PAN chapter of their own gumption; • People landing letters to the editor in their local papers;

• Farmers and gardeners leading the way to growing good, fair food that puts people and the land back to work. It looks like California’s Department of Pesticide Regulation (DPR) will punt the decision whether to register methyl iodide to the new administration — meaning we’ve held off this new fumigant for more than three years. With scientists, farmworkers, rural communities and, now, high school students on the front lines, this could be the first time DPR has rejected a pesticide.

Over the course of the past year, we’ve seen one industrial food and chemical interest after another — from Monsanto to Syngenta to Arysta — forced to defend their product, image or market share with very expensive PR and lobbying campaigns. Here too, I love my job because we’re winning! The handful of corporations who control most of the world’s food

trawberries garnered special attention this year as global pesticide corporation Arysta aggressively promoted methyl iodide for use in California’s strawberry industry. Public opinion aligns firmly against use of the chemical because of its extreme health risks, but there’s another reason to oppose fumigation: new science on the superiority of strawberries grown organically. Researchers at Washington State University compared organic and industrial berries over five years, and published their results in September in the journal PLoS ONE, in an article titled, “Fruit and Soil Quality of Organic and Conventional Strawberry Agroecosystems.”

The scientists found that compared to industrial berries, organic strawberries have: • More antioxidants and vitamin C; • A longer shelf life; and • Better taste and sweetness. And one thing organic strawberries don’t have: pesticide residues. The secret is in the soil, scientists found. Organically farmed soils pack a nutritious punch, with higher levels of carbon, nitrogen and important micronutrients. Organic farming enhances food quality by building soil quality — a key point highlighted in the

PAN North America Magazine Fall 2010

September 3 National Public Radio show Science Friday which discussed the research. Organically farmed soils also support thriving microbial communities — the living part of the soil — that are larger, more diverse, and more active. The really sweet part of the story: farmers in California and around the country are already growing organic berries. Martinez Farms (founded by a former farmworker family) and giant Driscoll’s are just two examples of businesses small and large thriving in this growing sector.

Dateline Geneva Endosulfan Moves Toward Global Ban! PAN scientist Karl Tupper blogged from the October 2010 meetings of the Stockholm Convention on Persistent Organic Pollutants “POPs” Review Committee in Geneva. October 12: It’s Tuesday morning in Geneva and there’s lots of good news from the first full day of negotiations of the expert committee of the Stockholm Convention. For the next four days, scientific experts, government delegates, representatives from industry and NGOs like PAN will be discussing some of the most dangerous chemicals in the world: those which are not only highly toxic but also extremely persistent. Long after they fulfill their intended purposes, these “chemical zombies” continue to wander the Earth inflicting indiscriminate damage, refusing to die.

As the parties convened to consider whether to recommend a worldwide ban on the insecticide endosulfan, Japan and South Korea announced domestic bans. October 13: This morning we awoke to the unexpected news that Australia has decided on an endosulfan ban. With the U.S., Canada, and Brazil phasing it out, Australia was the only large developed country standing by this dangerous POP. Its defenders can no longer argue that it must be safe since “Western countries” are still using it. October 16: It’s been a real nail-biter, but at about 5pm, the POPs Review Committee decided to recommend a global ban on endosulfan. As predicted, India would not agree, so the committee was forced to a vote: 24 for a ban, none against (China and four others abstained).

Otters Back from the Brink Organochlorine pesticides like endosulfan and DDT have a history of laying waste to wildlife populations. This chemical class persists in the environment for decades, bioaccumulating in animals in increasingly higher concentrations as they move up the food chain. It is heartening, then, that otter populations in the UK, until recently threatened with extinction, have made a comeback, largely due to less polluted rivers resulting from UK bans on organochlorine pesticides in the 1970s. Not only is the water safer for the otters, who are high up in the aquatic food chain, but also for their prey: fish populations have likewise recovered.

There’s also the little detail of exemptions, as is always the case with these environmental treaties. In the end, it was agreed to recommend “specific exemptions” for only five years. Which uses will get exemptions is something the Convention will have to wrestle with in April. PAN maintains that all uses of endosulfan can be replaced with lower-risk pesticides and — even better — non-chemical alternatives such as agroecological methods including organic farming. Now it’s up to the 172 countries that have ratified the Convention to turn this recommendation into a reality when they meet in April. India, along with China and others who are producing and/or using this antiquated pesticide, may continue to oppose a ban, so it’s important for civil society and like-minded governments to keep up the pressure.

There are many ways to support a pesticide-free world

DDT was famously responsible for the collapse of raptor populations in the U.S., particularly bald eagles who are high on the terrestrial food chain. Since the U.S. EPA banned DDT in 1972, eagles, peregrine falcons and hawks have recovered and their populations are once again stable in the wild.

Matching Gifts double your impact! Ask your

While many organochlorine pesticides remain in use around the world, progress such as the U.S. decision in June to phase out endosulfan and the POPs action in Geneva in October suggest that birds, otters and the rest of us might just have a shot at survival.

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PAN North America Magazine Fall 2010

Freedom to Farm without GMOs On the Road with Farmers from Brazil to Mississippi by Marcia Ishii-Eiteman

I spent a week in New Orleans in October, the highlight of which was a visit to a farmers’ cooperative in nearby Indian Springs, Mississippi. Farmers there provide fresh produce to neighboring schools, grocery stores and other institutions, contributing to healthy communities and reinvigorating their rural economy. Back in New Orleans, I joined other participants attending the Community Food Security Coalition’s 14th annual conference. Our conversations returned again and again to the pervasive and corrupting influence of megacorporations on our food system, in this country and around the world. One afternoon, at a workshop on building power to resist the U.S. and corporate push of GMOs (genetically modified organisms) into Africa — co-facilitated by PAN and partners from the Community Alliance for Global Justice, WHY Hunger, Agricultural Missions and the Presbyterian Hunger Program — I shared stories from my trip to Rio de Janeiro this past summer. There I had the good fortune to spend a week discussing the future of food with an amazing group of activists from Brazil, Germany, India, South Africa and the Philippines. The event was organized by PAN partner AS-PTA (Assessoria e Serviços a Projetos em Agricultura Alternativa),

Ben Burkett, Mississippi farmer, founder of the Indian Springs Farmers Association and president of the National Family Farm Coalition, leads food justice activists on a tour of his family farm in October during the Community Food Security Coalition meetings in New Orleans. Burkett and a handful of other African American farmers established their co-op over 30 years ago when they discovered they were receiving far lower prices than white farmers. They started trucking their watermelons all the way to Chicago to get a fair price. Now 42 farmer members strong, they distribute their fruits and vegetables to local markets, schools and businesses, as well as to places as far away as Boston and Toronto. Marcia Ishii-Eiteman

one of the lead NGOs campaigning in Brazil against agricultural GMOs and promoting agroecology as the better way forward. While in Rio, I was inspired by stories of courage, persistence and deep commitment. I talked with mothers and fathers, farmers, ecologists, agronomists, community organizers, health experts and human rights lawyers. Like many of us in the U.S., they are seeking to build healthy, safe, fair and sustainable food systems at home and want more than anything to leave a healthy legacy for their children and for future generations. So what is stopping the flowering of sustainable food systems in many of these countries?

PAN North America senior scientist Marcia Ishii-Eiteman in Rio with Ricado Jacobs of the Surplus People’s Project in Capetown, South Africa, and Devinder Sharma, award-winning journalist and food and trade policy analyst who chairs the independent collective, Forum for Biotechnology and Food Security in New Delhi. Vanessa Black

One major hindrance is Monsanto and the U.S. government, joined at the hip it seems by a shared agenda of expanding global markets for agricultural biotechnology. Many are familiar with the Obama administration’s disappointing series of “revolving door” appointments of people from the ag biotech sector (Islam Siddiqui, Roger Beachy, Michael Taylor, et al.), but I’ve seen less coverage of the fact that glo-

PAN North America Magazine Fall 2010

Corporate Capture by Contamination Monsanto’s strategy to expand its control of Brazilian farmers has been very successful — and the results an outrage. When GM Roundup Ready soy was legalized in 2003, Monsanto made agreements with every trader in southern Brazil that when they purchase soy from farmers, they would also analyze it to determine if it contained any Roundup Ready soy genes. In this way, Monsanto secured their cooperation as de facto inspectors for the transnational giant. But it gets worse — in ways that family farmers from the U.S. will surely recognize. In Brazil, farmers that purchase GMOs legally will already have

the same harvesting equipment is used for both GM and non-GM crops. Farmers rent harvesters and have no way to ensure they receive “GM-clean” equipment. Thus many farmers now simply declare they have used GMOs “illegally” even if they have not, to avoid the higher penalty. Eventually, farmers in the southern state of Rio Grande do Sul — even those who had no desire to plant GM soy — began to adopt the seeds simply to avoid the penalties. And so the practice spread. Over 30 varieties of GM crops are now planted in Brazil, with no functional restrictions in place to prevent further contamination.

Seu Francisco, Paraná, Brazil: Food activists meet with farmers to assess the results of ecological maize production using traditional seeds. AS-PTA

paid various fees and royalties to Monsanto. If farmers plant GMOs illegally, but admit this to their local trader at point of sale, they are charged a penalty fee of 2.3% of their crop’s value. If, however, they deny using Monsanto’s seeds, but on-site testing reveals genetic contamination of as little as 1% of their crop, they are then required to pay a higher penalty fee of 3% of their entire crop’s value. Contamination at the 1% level is virtually inevitable, particularly as

Feeding the future without learning from the past Just as in the U.S. Midwest, Brazilian farmers in Rio Grande do Sul can no longer easily find conventional non-GMO seeds. The disappearance of local seed varieties was worsened when the state’s seed companies decided to get rid of their entire conventional seed stock — varieties beautifully adapted to the local agroecosystem — by exporting it to China in 2006 as PAN North America Magazine Fall 2010

grain. Farmers in southern Brazil are now completely dependent on Monsanto (and its network of local traders and inspectors) for their seed supply. A similar scene may be unfolding in Goias state, in Brazil’s Midwest region, where 80% of crops are transgenic. As Gabriel Fernandes of AS-PTA explains, the only way out of the GM trap for these farmers is to abandon soy farming completely. Already, resistance to the GM soy trap is growing across the country, with farmers in Mato Grosso and Paraná abandoning GM soy production and reverting to locally adapted seeds when they can find them. Closer to home, we have our own Trojan horse: the Obama administration’s new $3.5 billion Feed the Future initiative. Filled with reassuring language about U.S. leadership in feeding the world’s poor with sustainable food systems, the initiative contains a mix of wildly conflicting agendas: commendable attention to smallscale farmers, gender equity and land rights sits alongside promotion of agricultural biotechnology, protection of intellectual property rights (whose, I wonder?) and the fast-tracking of trade liberalization. More revealing perhaps are how U.S. officials talk about Feed the Future. Statements by U.S. Secretary of Agriculture, Tom Vilsack and USAID Director Rajiv Shah (formerly of the Gates Foundation) describe ending world hunger by increasing productivity through U.S. “discovery” and “delivery” of “breakthrough technologies” such as biotechnology to poor farmers. No mention of agroecology, no mention of local or Indigenous knowledge, no mention of food democracy. Adapted by Marcia Ishii-Eiteman from AS-PTA’s Brief History of the GM-Free Brazil Campaign. on the web For full report: http://www.aspta.org.br/porum-brasil-livre-de-transgenicos/ updates/backgroundpapers/2010-07-13.3633609214/ download

balizing biotech is an explicit strategic objective of the USDA and a declared intention of the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID). Not coincidentally, USAID is now headed by Rajiv Shah — who hails directly from the pro-GMO Gates Foundation (which recently invested $23 million in Monsanto).

“Biosafety” paves the way The role that our own government plays in paving the way for Monsanto’s global ambitions is astonishing as well as under-reported. USAID has a long history of using taxpayer dollars to promote transgenic crops and technologies around the world. Since the late 1990s, USAID’s Agricultural Biotechnology Support Project has focused on development and commercialization of GM crops, often in partnership with Monsanto. With time, the agency realized that marketing and release of its GM crops in developing countries was hindered not only by the technology’s many failures, but even more by the lack of GMO-supportive “biosafety frameworks”— the rules and regulations governing the introduction and use of transgenic technologies — in target countries. While the name “biosafety” gives the impression of attempting to regulate for public safety, what these frameworks tend to do — at least when designed by the U.S.— is simply speed the introduction of new GMO seeds into farmers’ fields. The absence of biosafety protocols in the 1990s spurred USAID to establish a separate but parallel Programme for Biosafety Systems, to “help” targeted developing countries set up regulatory systems that essentially grease the skids for getting GM crops into foreign markets. USAID did exactly this in Kenya with its failed GM sweet potato project. The program — conducted in partnership with Monsanto— laid the groundwork for Kenya’s first regulatory framework for biotech field trials that ultimately evolved into the country’s famously GMO-favorable biosafety rules. Similarly, USAID’s policy work in Egypt and Uganda led to strongly pro-GMO biosafety frameworks there. To lubricate Brazil, the U.S. Embassy brought parliamentarians to Monsanto’s headquarters in St. Louis and then on to a winefueled safari in South Africa, achieving the same outcome: opening Brazil’s rich agricultural lands and markets to Monsanto’s wares. But stunning new developments in the international negotiation of a binding biosafety protocol emerged this October in Nagoya, Japan, dealing a severe blow to companies like Monsanto and Syngenta. For the

Indian tribal farmers of Orissa Nari Samaj, protesting against the introduction of genetically engineered Bt brinjal (eggplant) with a symbolic “cremation near Jhabua, Madhya Pradesh. Kheti Virasat Mission

first time ever, the Cartagena Protocol on Biosafety now includes globally agreed rules to hold corporations liable for damage to ecosystems or human health caused by the movement of genetically modified organisms. Countries will be able to ratify the new protocol beginning next March; once 40 countries have ratified it, the accord goes into effect. There are 160 signatories to the Cartagena Protocol, although not the United States.

Globalizing GMOs My colleagues in Rio de Janeiro who came from Brazil, India and South Africa were horrified—and then outraged—to see that their three countries (along with Nigeria) have been designated by the U.S. as “potential strategic partners” to bring another 20 “focus countries” along in what is essentially the United States’ and Monsanto’s shared agenda of globalizing transgenic crops. So, as it turns out, standing up for food democracy means not only buying local and organic whenever we can. It also means paying attention to where our taxpayer dollars are going, and to what use they are being put by U.S. agencies—especially in light of new global agreements to hold corporations accountable for harm. That is the least we can do for the millions of farmers around the world who are next in line to receive our “aid.” Breaking up the U.S.–Monsanto–Gates Foundation biotech cartel here at home might just be the best thing we can do to help build sustainable food systems around the world. on the web

PAN North America Magazine Fall 2010

www.panna.org/blogs/marcia-ishii-eiteman

Denial as a Political Strategy Excerpted from Merchants of Doubt: How a Handful of Scientists Obscured the Truth on Issues from Tobacco Smoke to Global Warming, by Naomi Oreskes and Erik M. Conway

Silent Spring and the banning of DDT Rachel Carson is an American hero — the courageous woman who in the early 1960s called our attention to the harms of indiscriminate pesticide use. In Silent Spring, a beautiful book about a dreadful topic, Carson explained how pesticides were accumulating in the food chain, damaging the natural environment, and threatening even the symbol of American freedom: the bald eagle. Although the pesticide n the demonizing of industry tried to paint her as Rachel Carson, free a hysterical female, her work marketeers realized was affirmed by the President’s Science Advisory Committhat if you could tee, and in 1972, the EPA convince people that an concluded that the scientific example of successful evidence was sufficient to warrant the banning of the government regulation pesticide DDT in America. wasn’t, in fact,

successful — that it was actually a mistake — you could strengthen the argument against regulation in general.

Most historians, we included, consider this a success story. A serious problem was brought to public attention by an articulate spokesperson, and, acting on the advice of acknowledged experts, our government took appropriate action. Moreover, the banning of DDT, which took place under a Republican administration, had widespread public and bipartisan political support. The policy allowed for exceptions, including the sale of DDT to the World Health Organization for use in countries with endemic malaria, and for public health emergencies here at home. It was sensible policy, based on solid science.

Fast-forward to 2007 The Internet is flooded with the assertion that Carson was a mass murderer, worse than Hitler. Carson killed more people than the Nazis. She had blood on her hands, posthumously. Why? Because Silent Spring led to the banning of DDT, without which millions of Africans died of malaria. The Competitive Enterprise Institute [who had defended tobacco against evidence it was linked to cancer, and spread doubt about the reality of global warming] now tells us that “Rachel was wrong.” “Millions of

Merchants of Doubt is available as a thank you gift for donations of $125 or more. See back cover for details.

people around the world suffer the painful and often deadly effects of malaria because one person sounded a false alarm,” their site asserts. “That person is Rachel Carson.” Other conservative and Libertarian think tanks sound a similar cry. The American Enterprise Institute argues that DDT was “probably the single most valuable chemical ever synthesized to prevent disease,” but was unnecessarily banned because of hysteria generated by Carson’s influence. The Cato Institute tells us that DDT is making a comeback. And the Heartland Institute posts an article defending DDT by Bonner Cohen, the man who created EPA Watch for Philip Morris back in the mid1990s. (Heartland also has extensive, continuing programs to challenge climate science.) The stories we’ve told in Merchants of Doubt involve the creation of doubt and the spread of disinformation by individuals and groups attempting to prevent regulation of tobacco, CFCs, pollution from coal-fired power plants, and greenhouse gases. They involve fighting facts that demonstrate the harms that these products and pollutants induce in order to stave off regulation. At first, the Carson case seems slightly different from these earlier ones, because by 2007 DDT had been banned in the United States for more than thirty years. This horse was long out of the barn, so why try to reopen a thirty-year-old debate?

PAN North America Magazine Fall 2010

Sometimes reopening an old debate can serve present purposes. In the 1950s, the tobacco industry realized that they could protect their product by casting doubt on the science and insisting the dangers of smoking were unproven. In the 1990s, they realized that if you could convince people that science in general was unreliable, then you didn’t have to argue the merits of any particular case, particularly one — like the defense of secondhand smoke—that had no scientific merit. In the demonizing of Rachel Carson, free marketeers realized that if you could convince people that an example of successful government regulation wasn’t, in fact, successful—that it was actually a mistake — you could strengthen the argument against regulation in general.

••

Denial rides again …The twenty-first-century attack on Rachel Carson had nothing to do with preventing regulation; the regulation was long established. Nor was it an effort to overturn that regulation. It was well understood in American science, government, and agriculture that DDT was no longer effective in the United States [because insects had become resistant]. So why does DDT matter? Why attack a woman who has been dead for nearly half a century? As the acid rain story was emerging in the 1960s, the American environmental movement was changing its orientation away from an aesthetic environmentalism toward legal regulation. Carson’s voice was fundamental to that reorientation. After all, what was the value of a national park if no birds sang in it? If Carson was wrong, then the shift in orientation might have been wrong, too. The contemporary environmental movement could be shown to have been based on a fallacy, and the need for government intervention in the marketplace would be refuted.

••

The Orwellian problem The network of right-wing foundations, the corporations that fund them, and the journalists who echo their claims have created a tremendous problem for American science. A recent academic study found that of the fifty-six “environmentally skeptical” books published in the 1990s, 92 percent were linked to these right-wing foundations (only thirteen were published in the 1980s, and 100 percent were linked to the foundations). Scientists have faced an ongoing misrepresentation of scientific evidence and historical facts that brands them as public enemies—even mass murderers — on the basis of phony facts.

REVIEW & OUTLOOK APRIL 24, 2010

DDT and Population Control

nvironmental activists this quent generations.” For these activists, week marked the 40th annimalaria was nature’s way of controlling versary of Earth Day, which population growth, and DDT got in the happened to fall way. three days before Today, malaria World Malaria still claims about Malaria still kills one Day. Insofar as one million lives Earth Day politics every year—mostly million every year. have contributed women and chilto today’s malaria dren in sub-Sahaepidemic, the two ran Africa. There’s events are related. no evidence that Earth Day founder Gaylord Nelson, spraying the chemical inside homes a U.S. Senator from Wisconsin, was in the amounts needed to combat the a leading opponent of the insecticide disease harms humans, animals or DDT, which remains the cheapest and the environment. Yet DDT remains most effective way to combat malarial severely underutilized in the fight mosquitoes. Rachel Carson’s 1962 book, against malaria because the intel“Silent Spring,” misleadingly linked lectual descendants of Senator Nelson pesticides to cancer and is generally continue to hold sway at the World credited with popularizing environmenHealth Organization and other United tal awareness. But other leading greens Nations agencies. of the period, including Nelson, bioloThe good news is that the Obama gist Paul Ehrlich and ecologist Garrett Administration has continued the Hardin, were also animated by a belief Bush policy of supporting DDT spraythat growth in human populations was ing in Zambia, Mozambique and other harming the environment. countries where the locals want it “The same powerful forces which creused. “Groups like the Pesticide Action ate the crisis of air pollution also are Network have lobbied the U.S. Agency threatening our freshwater resources, for International Development to stop our woods, our wildlife,” said Nelson. spraying DDT, and Obama is ignoring “These forces are the rapid increase in them so far,” says Richard Tren of population, industrialization, urbanAfrica Fighting Malaria, an advocacy ization and scientific technology.” In group. “They’re prioritizing what his book “The Population Bomb,” Mr. makes sense from a science and public Ehrlich criticized DDT for being too health point of view.” effective in reducing death rates and DDT helped to eradicate malaria in thus contributing to “overpopulation.” the U.S. and Europe after World War Hardin opposed spraying pesticides II, and the U.S. is right to take the lead in the Third World because “every in reforming public health insecticide life saved this year in a poor country policy and putting the lives of the diminishes the quality of life for subseworld’s poor above green ideology.

Free marketeers regularly use the editorial pages of the Wall Street Journal to quote environmental advocates out of context, twist statements from UNEP and WHO, and caricature Pesticide Action Network, Greenpeace and Environmental Defense Fund as callous to suffering in Africa, caring more about birds and trees than people.

There is a deep irony here. One of the great heroes of the anti-Communist political right wing — indeed one of the clearest, most reasoned voices against the risks of oppressive government, in general — was George Orwell, whose famous 1984 portrayed a government that manufactured fake histories to support its political program. Orwell coined the term “memory hole” to denote a system that destroyed inconvenient facts, and “Newspeak” for a language designed to constrain thought within politically acceptable bounds. All of us who were children in the Cold War learned in school how the Soviet Union routinely engaged in historical cleansing, erasing real events and real

PAN North America Magazine Fall 2010

people from their official histories and even official photographs. The right-wing defenders of American liberty have now done the same. The painstaking work of scientists, the reasoned deliberations of the President’s Science Advisory Committee, and the bipartisan American agreement to ban DDT have been flushed down the memory hole, along with the well-documented and easily found (but extremely inconvenient) fact that the most important reason that DDT failed to eliminate malaria was because insects evolved. That is the truth — a truth that those with blind faith in free markets and blind trust in technology simply refuse to see. The rhetoric of “sound science” is similarly Orwellian. Real science — done by scienaintaining our tists and published in scienstandard of living tific journals — is dismissed will require finding as “junk,” while misrepresentations and inventions are new ways to produce offered in its place. Orwell’s our energy and less Newspeak contained no sciecologically damaging ence at all, as the very concept of science had been erased ways to produce our from his dystopia. And not food. Science has surprisingly, for if science is shown us that Rachel about studying the world as it Carson was not wrong. actually is — rather than as we wish it to be — then science will always have the potential to unsettle the status quo. As an independent source of authority and knowledge, science has always had the capacity to challenge ruling powers’ ability to control people by controlling their beliefs. Indeed, it has the power to challenge anyone who wishes to preserve, protect, or defend the status quo.

Lately science has shown us that contemporary industrial civilization is not sustainable. Maintaining our standard of living will require finding new ways to produce our energy and less ecologically damaging ways to produce our food. Science has shown us that Rachel Carson was not wrong. This is the crux of the issue, the crux of our story. For the shift in the American environmental movement from aesthetic environmentalism to regulatory environmentalism wasn’t just a change in political strategy. It was the manifestation of a crucial realization: that unrestricted commercial activity was doing damage — real, lasting, pervasive damage. It was the realization that pollution was global, not just local, and the solution to pollution was not dilution. This shift began with the understanding that DDT remained in the environment long after its purpose was served. And it grew as acid rain and the ozone hole demonstrated that pollution traveled

hundreds or even thousands of kilometers from its source, doing damage to people who did not benefit from the economic activity that produced it. It reached a crescendo when global warming showed that even the most seemingly innocuous by-product of industrial civilization — CO2, the stuff on which plants depend — could produce a very different planet. To acknowledge this was to acknowledge the soft underbelly of free market capitalism: that free enterprise can bring real costs — profound costs—that the free market does not reflect. Economists have a term for these costs…. “negative externalities”: negative because they aren’t beneficial and external because they fall outside the market system. Those who find this hard to accept attack the messenger, which is science. We all expect to pay for the things we buy—to pay a fair cost for goods and services from which we expect to reap benefits — but external costs are unhinged from benefits, often imposed on people who did not choose the good or service, and did not benefit from their use. They are imposed on people who did not benefit from the economic activity that produced them. DDT imposed enormous external costs through the destruction of ecosystems; acid rain, secondhand smoke, the ozone hole, and global warming did the same. This is the common thread that ties these diverse issues together: they were all market failures. They are instances where serious damage was done and the free market seemed unable to account for it, much less prevent it. Government intervention was required. This is why free market ideologues and old Cold Warriors joined together to fight them. Accepting that by-products of industrial civilization were irreparably damaging the global environment was to accept the reality of market failure. It was to acknowledge the limits of free market capitalism. Copyright ©2010 by Naomi Oreskes and Erik M. Conway. From: Merchants of Doubt: How a Handful of Scientists Obscured the Truth on Issues from Tobacco Smoke to Global Warming by Naomi Oreskes and Erik M. Conway. Reprinted by permission of Bloomsbury USA. Naomi Oreskes is one of the world’s leading historians of science. Professor of History and Science Studies at the University of California, San Diego, and Adjunct Professor of Geosciences at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography, her research focuses on consensus and dissent in science. Erik Conway is a historian of science and technology, currently at the California Institute of Technology. He studies the history of space exploration and examines the intersections of space science, Earth science, and technological change.

PAN North America Magazine Fall 2010

DDT for Bedbugs? With the media reporting a nationwide outbreak of bedbugs, it was only a matter of time before the merchants of doubt began blaming the current resurgence of bugs on the EPA’s ban on DDT. Until recently, this false claim had been confined to anti-environmental regulation hype from the fringes of the right-wing — those same folks who spread doubt about global warming, the dangers of toxic chemicals and the health effects of smoking. In a New York Post column, contrarian and professional climate change denier Paul Driessen argued that, thanks to the return of bedbugs, “decades of chemophobic indoctrination and… [e]co-myths are being replaced with more informed discussions about the alleged effects of DDT and other pesticides.” While Driessen stopped short of explicitly blaming the DDT ban for the resurgence of bedbugs, others jumped at the opportunity. On July 29, Dr. Gilbert Ross, the Executive Director of the American Council on Science and Health (ACSH — an industry front group), wrote: “The resurgence of bedbugs...can be at least partially attributed to the prohibition of DDT and other highly effective pesticides.” There are three problems with this narrative, however. One is that the U.S. banned DDT in 1972, but it’s only now that bedbugs have reemerged. Another is that bedbugs still plague countries where homes are sprayed with DDT for malaria control. But the biggest problem is the fact that bedbugs are resistant to DDT. As early as 1948, DDT-resistant bedbugs were found in Hawaii. By 1982, the World Health Organization reported that DDT-resistant bedbugs were “almost everywhere.” A joint statement from the EPA and the Centers for Disease Control notes that bedbugs were “widely resistant” by the mid-1950s — 15 to 20 years before the DDT ban. And, according to recent studies from the Journal of Agricultural and Urban Entomology and Pest Control Technology, bedbugs haven’t lost their resistance since we stopped using DDT.

Bedbugs are no fun, but they’re also not disease carriers. Their recent resurgence in hotels and homes may be abetted by increased travel, and prevention is the best line of defense. Solving infections doesn’t require hazardous pesticides. PAN partner Beyond Pesticides has a helpful factsheet: “Got Bedbugs? Don’t Panic.” www.beyondpesticides.org

Driessen and ACSH have a long history of distorting the facts on DDT. Their consistent goal is to raise doubt about environmental science. Unfortunately, myths are easier to start than they are to correct—even when the facts are readily available. Just last month, the New York Times repeated the myth (“Bedbugs, once nearly eradicated, have spread across New York City, in part because of the decline in the use of DDT”) and the Washington Post recently made the same mistake. Now calls for bringing back DDT are erupting in the blogosphere. Let’s hope these misinformed appeals fizzle. Fortunately, when it comes to bedbugs, effective, non-toxic solutions are available. Adapted from PAN scientist Karl Tupper’s blog

PAN North America Magazine Fall 2010

Partner Profile

Preserving More Than a Tradition When we asked PAN supporters Harold Kyle and Debbie Urbanski, owners of the artisan letterpress company Smock, to donate their beautiful products for a Pesticide Action Network donor premium, our conversations became an inspiration to all of us at PAN. We thought our members might share the inspiration of these “accidental business owners,” dedicated to seeing what good their company can do as they preserve a 600-year-old craft. Here is an excerpt from a conversation between Debbie Urbanski and Beverly Becker, PAN’s director of individual giving. Beverly: Smock is distinguished by its artisanquality letterpress work, but can you explain “letterpress”? Debbie: Letterpress means we use cool old cast

iron presses to print beautiful things. It’s the only printing method where the type, or printing plate, pushes into the paper, turning text and illustration into a beautiful textural experience. Invented in the mid-1400s by Johannes Gutenberg, letterpress is the oldest printing process on the planet. It began as printing for the masses; it was how people printed their books, broadsides, manuals, pamphlets, and their newspapers. Letterpress became commercially extinct in the 1950s, but it recently has enjoyed a resurgence with finely crafted printing.

How did you get started? Is there really a market for this work in a world of text messages and Twitter?

Stella Urbansky hitches a ride with her mom, Debbie, trekking in Yoho National Park in Alberta.

Harold Kyle, my now business partner and husband, started our parent company, Boxcar Press, 11 years ago in Minneapolis, and I joined the business a few years later as the second employee when I was in graduate school and trying to get out of teaching introduction to composition. Harold got into printing because he loves heavy old machines, and he loved what these particular old machines could

do: print really, really beautifully. Our first printing jobs were a lot of poetry, impractical but beautiful CD packaging for local rock bands, posters for film festivals, and the occasional wedding invitation. Back in the late 1990s, there was far less letterpress, and it wasn’t a given that this craft way of printing would continue to exist. We were trying to preserve an art form.

Harold Kyle

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Eventually we settled in the rolling hills of central New York and our business, along with letterpress in general, has grown. We work now in a sprawling warehouse with 20 antique presses and 58 employees in a building that used to be a factory for John Deere, and before that for the Syracuse Chilled Plow Company. We feel lucky to be living and working in a renaissance of craft — people have started to care very deeply about where things come from. They want something handmade, which has been shaped by human hands and that hasn’t harmed the planet in the making. You see it in food (knowing the farm and the farmer who grows your food) and in the popularity of Etsy.com (crafters making beautiful and often useful things). Not much has changed in the letterpress process since Gutenberg printed on his wooden press hundreds of years ago, and I think customers respond to that sense of history and authenticity. Twitter and texting are perfect for certain occasions, but I don’t think it will ever feel right to tweet one’s wedding invitation.

Community Supported Agriculture memberships with a local organic farm, because we believe our food shouldn’t have to travel 1,500 miles to reach us. And we donate 1% of sales to causes like Pesticide Action Network through 1% for the Planet. That’s a deep commitment. How does your support for PAN figure in there?

The thread goes back to bamboo. Bamboo interested us because it can be cultivated without pesticides. Cotton, the standard for fine letterpress paper, generally uses an enormous amount of pesticides and though we tried very hard to figure out how to make paper out of organic cotton, we weren’t able to convince any paper mills to give it a try.

Besides putting such beautiful products in your customers’ hands, how else are you expressing your commitment to a better world?

We print sustainably, doing things all responsible printers should do. We use only vegetable oil based inks that are low in volatile organic compounds (VOCs). We use low-VOC and citrus-based solvents. We recycle our photo chemicals, film, paper offcuts, and photopolymer printing plates. Empty ink cans and old rags are kept out of landfills. We use recycled packaging materials and reuse packing materials our vendors send us. We donate surplus paper and envelopes to our local public schools. Our retail packaging is biodegradable, tree-free and petroleum-free. We package our custom work in keepsake boxes made here in Syracuse from 100% post-consumer recycled materials. Working with an historic European paper mill, we developed a bamboo paper because we wanted a truly sustainable paper that was gorgeous. Bamboo is the fastest growing plant on this planet, our bamboo is not genetically modified, and it is grown without pesticides or synthetic fertilizers. Our bamboo is supplied by local farmers from Thailand and is not harvested from areas where traditional or civil rights are violated, nor does it come from natural forests that have been converted to plantations. We are entirely wind-powered and we have “zeroed out” our business’s carbon footprint by planting trees. We offer bus passes to employees to encourage public transportation usage. Also for our employees, we subsidize 20-week

Working Smock’s antique letterpresses in the historic factory that once housed Syracuse Chilled Plow Company in central New York.

When Smock started, we wanted to find a few organizations to support. We connected to the work that PAN was doing to eliminate endosulfan, used heavily on cotton as well as food crops — we’re strong supporters of organic farming. Harold and I are somewhat accidental business owners— we never imagined our business would grow larger than the two of us. What really interests me about owning a company is seeing what good our business can do in the world, and how we can encourage our customers to do good as well. When we get to make donations to causes we believe in, it honestly thrills us. It’s one of the reasons we’re in business. Smock is offering PAN supporters an incentive to donate this season with a handsome set of letterpress cards they produced and donated to PAN. See details on back cover.

PAN North America Magazine Fall 2010

the network in action

Buckets for the Cure? Frustrated by both the rise of breast cancer rates in women and the lack of public knowledge about the disease, a San Francisco Bay Area support group founded Breast Cancer Action in 1990. Their goal was to help transform breast cancer from a private medical crisis to one recognized as a public health emergency. In the two decades since, their circle has expanded to thousands of people organizing to also “do something besides worry.” Breast Cancer Action (BCA) advocates for policy changes in three essential areas: • Putting Patients First: advocating for more effective, less toxic treatments, shifting the balance of power at the Food and Drug Administration away from the pharmaceutical industry and towards the public interest. • Creating Healthy Environments: decreasing involuntary environmental exposures that put people at risk for breast cancer. • Eliminating Social Inequities: raising awareness that it is also social injustices — not just genes — that lead to disparities in breast cancer incidence and outcomes.

Think Before You Pink® BCA became the first and remains the only national breast cancer organization to refuse funding from companies that profit from or contribute to cancer. Their award winning Think Before You Pink® campaign targets “pinkwashers,” a term BCA coined in 2003 for companies that purport to care about breast cancer but manufacture products linked to the disease. BCA aims to transform how the public and the media think about marketing for breast cancer. BCA also challenges the ways other breast cancer organizations engage in this marketing. In early 2010 they launched “What the Cluck?”— an e-letter campaign that calls for an end to “Buckets for the Cure,” the pinkwashing campaign by Kentucky Fried Chicken and Susan G. Komen for the Cure. The campaign is gaining momentum. In 2009, BCA activists persuaded General Mills to stop using dairy products that came from cows whose growth was stimulated by rBGH in the company’s pink ribbonlabeled Yoplait yogurt. Dannon promised to do the same by 2010. Together, General Mills and Dannon account for two-thirds of the American dairy market for rBGH. But BCA isn’t stopping: they’re going after the sole manufacturer of rBGH, Eli Lilly, the pharmaceutical giant who also makes breast cancer

Barbara A. Brenner, J.D., came to BCA as a member of the board of directors, and for the last 15 years has served as executive director. At the end of 2010 she is retiring from paid work with the organization she has helped lead to amazing success.

“prevention” and treatment drugs, as well as pesticides linked to cancer. Through their current “Milking Cancer” campaign, BCA is demanding that Eli Lilly break their shameful cancer profit circle and stop manufacturing rBGH all together, thus eradicating it from the world market. In 2007, BCA was the only national breast cancer organization to actively oppose the use of Avastin for metastatic breast cancer because of its failure to improve overall survival or quality of life, its side effects, and its high price tag. In 2010 they succeeded in getting the FDA to stop use of Avastin for metastatic breast cancer and now other breast cancer organizations are following BCA’s leadership. On October 7 in San Francisco, BCA celebrated 20 years as a national activist and education organization with a party for 300 members and allies. They shared the occasion by recognizing three groups who exemplify BCA’s priorities: Our Bodies Ourselves (patients first), Pesticide Action Network (healthy environments), and California Latinas for Reproductive Justice (social inequities). PAN North America is proud to count Breast Cancer Action as part of our network. Over the last decade we’ve collaborated to win environmental protections that address the causes, rather than the symptoms, of this epidemic disease. We are honored to be challenging public assumptions about cancer alongside Breast Cancer Action, demanding healthprotective, precautionary environmental policies. For more information about Think Before You Pink and BCA’s work, please visit www.bcaction.org or www.thinkbeforeyoupink.org.

PAN North America Magazine Fall 2010

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MAGFALL11

Last Word

On Not Trying to Turn Back the Clock by Russ Lester

adoption, and financial incentives and investments. This is the kind of innovation that California agriculture has always excelled at.

California is poised to be a global leader in clean energy technology, and the agriculture industry is in a good position to benefit from this leadership. Our state’s clean energy and clean air policies have driven investments in renewable energy technology into the state at a dramatic rate — $10 billion in just the last four years.

California farmers and ranchers have survived the many challenges they face by innovating, adapting, and keeping lots of options on the table. Organic walnut grower Russ Lester, California Climate Action Network and PAN joined the campaign against Prop. 23 — an For our industry, it’s more initiative to gut the state’s greenhouse gas emissions law. important than ever to keep moving forward On our organic walnut The emissions are low and the byand not stay stuck in the past. We farm and processing facility, we have product of this machine, bio-char, is must focus our resources on moving installed a biogas generator that an excellent soil amendment. This into the clean, green economy of the gasifies walnut shells to produce technology is transferable to other future and constructively addressing combustible gas, electricity and heat. biomass fuels and is available now. the barriers to doing so —not on This system produces over $70,000 The California Biomass Collaborative trying to turn back the clock. worth of energy every year. We has estimated that these fuels can produce even more on-peak electricity provide about 20% of California’s with solar panels. We currently use Russ Lester is the owner of Dixon energy needs. only one-third of our available shells. Ridge Farms, grower of organic walnuts and the largest processor of organic These walnut shells are a by-product There are technological, regulatory walnuts in the U.S. This piece was of our processing. All the energy and financial barriers to the adapted from a letter he wrote to the is used here and the shells are not widespread generation of on-farm ag trade paper, Capital Press, opposing shipped anywhere, reducing traffic, renewable energy. Producers need Prop. 23, the Texas-oil-funded initiative road and transmission line impacts. to kill California’s climate act. technical expertise to accelerate

PAN North America Magazine Fall 2010

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Get Together & Get to Work Your actions and support help PAN eliminate the most hazardous pesticides and promote a democratic, safe and clean food system. Donate $125 or more and receive as our thank you: Merchants of Doubt:

How a Handful of Scientists Obscured the Truth on Issues from Tobacco Smoke to Global Warming. Authors Naomi Oreskes and Eric M. Conway tell the compelling story of how corporations deny scientific evidence to protect their products and limit regulation.

Offer extended: Donate $75 or more and receive as our thank you: A set of six elegant cards with patterned envelopes

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ready for your message, 3.3x5.4 inches.

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