Praised for its ability to kill insects effectively and cheaply and reviled as an ecological hazard, DDT continues to engender passion across the political spectrum as one of the world's most controversial chemical pesticides. In DDT and the American Century, David Kinkela chronicles the use of DDT around the world from 1941 to the present with a particular focus on the United States, which has played a critical role in encouraging the global use of the pesticide. Kinkela's study offers a unique approach to understanding both this contentious chemical and modern environmentalism in an international context.
The Global Politics of Pesticides explores the varied, and often conflicting, interests involved in the formulation of international policies on chemical pesticide manufacture and use in each of the main areas of environmental pollution, trade, development, public health, food security, biotechnology and industrial safety and explains why some aspects of pesticide use are subject to strict international guidelines whilst others are not. The book breaks new ground in objectively examining the competing viewpoints of food producers and other pesticide users, the chemical industry, health officials, traders, environmental/consumer pressure groups and the public. It also considers how international regulation can occur in spite of the fundamental differences of opinion and seemingly opposing interests held by the key actors.
“We are being poisoned, and this book is sounding a well-informed alarm. Read it. Get educated and then join the thousands rising up against those who care more for profit than the health of our bodies and our earth.”–Eve Ensler, New York Times bestselling author Chemical poisons have infiltrated all facets of our lives – housing, agriculture, work places, sidewalks, subways, schools, parks, even the air we breathe. More than half a century since Rachel Carson issued Silent Spring – her call-to-arms against the poisoning of our drinking water, food, animals, air, and the natural environment – The Fight Against Monsanto's Roundup takes a fresh look at the politics underlying the mass use of pesticides and the challenges people around the world are making against the purveyors of poison and the governments that enable them. The scientists and activists contributing to The Fight Against Monsanto's Roundup, edited by long-time Green activist Mitchel Cohen, explore not only the dangers of glyphosate – better known as “Roundup” – but the campaign resulting in glyphosate being declared as a probable cancer-causing agent. In an age where banned pesticides are simply replaced with newer and more deadly ones, and where corporations such as Monsanto, Bayer, Dow and DuPont scuttle attempts to regulate the products they manufacture, what is the effective, practical, and philosophical framework for banning glyphosate and other pesticides? The Fight Against Monsanto's Roundup: The Politics of Pesticides takes lessons from activists who have come before and offers a radical approach that is essential for defending life on this planet and creating for our kids, and for ourselves, a future worth living in.
Food Systems in an Unequal World examines regulatory risk and how it translates to and impacts farmers in Costa Rica. Ryan E. Galt shows how the food produced for domestic markets lacks regulation similar to that of export markets, creating a dangerous double standard of pesticide use.
This book is a sound science report about the consequences of pesticides to nature, health and environment. The book shares essential insights into the use of pesticides in agriculture, discusses the politics, rhetoric and profits involved, addresses the potential health and ecological risks of pesticides in our daily lives, and debates possible solutions. Does sustainable agriculture exist, and is agriculture without pesticides possible at all? Moreover, the author gives insight into his scientific work, the set-up of the experiments, and also writes about his very own experiences with the media and press after publication of his studies. For many years, Johann G. Zaller, an ecologist at the University of Natural Resources and Life Sciences in Vienna, and his team, have been researching applied chemicals and their effects on the environment. Their findings, together with relevant literature and media reports, are presented in this book, which offers a unique resource for anyone who wants to know the nature and background of pesticides and how we come into contact with them in our daily lives. Ever ate an apple? Read this book!
An examination of political conflicts over pesticide drift and the differing conceptions of justice held by industry, regulators, and activists. The widespread but virtually invisible problem of pesticide drift—the airborne movement of agricultural pesticides into residential areas—has fueled grassroots activism from Maine to Hawaii. Pesticide drift accidents have terrified and sickened many living in the country's most marginalized and vulnerable communities. In this book, Jill Lindsey Harrison considers political conflicts over pesticide drift in California, using them to illuminate the broader problem and its potential solutions. The fact that pesticide pollution and illnesses associated with it disproportionately affect the poor and the powerless raises questions of environmental justice (and political injustice). Despite California's impressive record of environmental protection, massive pesticide regulatory apparatus, and booming organic farming industry, pesticide-related accidents and illnesses continue unabated. To unpack this conundrum, Harrison examines the conceptions of justice that increasingly shape environmental politics and finds that California's agricultural industry, regulators, and pesticide drift activists hold different, and conflicting, notions of what justice looks like. Drawing on her own extensive ethnographic research as well as in-depth interviews with regulators, activists, scientists, and public health practitioners, Harrison examines the ways industry, regulatory agencies, and different kinds of activists address pesticide drift, connecting their efforts to communitarian and libertarian conceptions of justice. The approach taken by pesticide drift activists, she finds, not only critiques theories of justice undergirding mainstream sustainable-agriculture activism, but also offers an entirely new notion of what justice means. To solve seemingly intractable environmental problems such as pesticide drift, Harrison argues, we need a different kind of environmental justice. She proposes the precautionary principle as a framework for effectively and justly addressing environmental inequities in the everyday work of environmental regulatory institutions.
Combining history and an analysis of policy today, this book exposes the contradictions in America's disability policy and suggests means of remedying them. Based on careful archival research and interviews with policymakers, the book illustrates the dilemmas that public policies pose for the handicapped: the present system forces too many people with physical impairments into retirement, despite the availability of constructive alternatives.
Introduction : why agroecology? -- The scientific principles of agroecology -- The scientific evidence for agroecology : can it feed the world? -- Scaling up agroecology : social process and organization -- The politics of agroecology -- Conclusions : conform or transform?
The Politics of Precaution examines the politics of consumer and environmental risk regulation in the United States and Europe over the last five decades, explaining why America and Europe have often regulated a wide range of similar risks differently. It finds that between 1960 and 1990, American health, safety, and environmental regulations were more stringent, risk averse, comprehensive, and innovative than those adopted in Europe. But since around 1990, the book shows, global regulatory leadership has shifted to Europe. What explains this striking reversal? David Vogel takes an in-depth, comparative look at European and American policies toward a range of consumer and environmental risks, including vehicle air pollution, ozone depletion, climate change, beef and milk hormones, genetically modified agriculture, antibiotics in animal feed, pesticides, cosmetic safety, and hazardous substances in electronic products. He traces how concerns over such risks--and pressure on political leaders to do something about them--have risen among the European public but declined among Americans. Vogel explores how policymakers in Europe have grown supportive of more stringent regulations while those in the United States have become sharply polarized along partisan lines. And as European policymakers have grown more willing to regulate risks on precautionary grounds, increasingly skeptical American policymakers have called for higher levels of scientific certainty before imposing additional regulatory controls on business.
Winner of the 1988 Policy Studies Organization Book Award Among the more dramatic changes brought by World War II was the widespread introduction of new synthetic chemical pesticides - products welcomed as technological answers to a whole host of agricultural problems. The dangers posed by these products were often ignored in the rush to get them onto the market. Federal policy primarily reflected the interests of those promoting the new technologies. The risks associated with pesticides, as yet ill-understood, continued to be played down during the 1950s, despite their sudden emergence as a public problem as a result of health scares and fish and wildlife deaths following massive pest eradication campaigns. These events, together with the publication of Rachel Carson's Silent Spring, spawned the environmental movement of the 1960s.Dramatic changes came in the early 1970s as environmental values permeated the institutions and dynamics of American politics. Such changes produced new priorities, and - in part - a redirection in federal policy on chemical pesticides. The National Environmental Policy Act, the creation of the Environmental Protection Agency, congressional reforms, and broad popular support opened opportunities for those seeking to alter pesticides policy. But by the mid-1980s, after more than a decade of conflict, that policy is in limbo, caught between powerful environmental, economic, and political forces.How did this happen?Pesticides and Politics traces the long battle over control of pesticides through an analytical framework that is at the same time historical, comparative, and theoretical. Christopher J. Bosso's account analyzes the responses to this complex problem by commercial interests, government, the media, and the public, and shows how the issue evolved over forty years of technological and political change.Bosso's research leads to a number of insights about the U.S. structure of governance. It shows how the system itself determines who gains access to decision making and who is excluded, and how conflicts are redefined as the range of interests attached to them grows. Bosso concludes that for fundamental institutional reasons, as well as political ones, federal pesticides policy lies stalled and impotent in the mid-1980s.Relying heavily on government documents, the sizable literature on environmental politics, and interviews with relevant policy actors, Pesticides and Politics will enlighten students of the public policy process, and also be useful in courses in policy making and policy analysis.
