Wikipedia talk:Wiki Ed/University of California, Berkeley/Environmental Justice Section 103 (Spring 2017)

Disc 103 Lead section draft - Intro to Pesticide drift

         The ongoing nature of pesticide drift despite efforts by the agricultural industry, environmental regulatory agencies, and alternative agrifood

movement to make agriculture more environmentally sustainable—as well as the conflicting stories told about the problem—raise fundamental questions that must be examined to understand this environmental problem and it's solutions. Why do pesticide drift incidents occur in a context of progressive environmental change? How do we explain the coexistence of two completely different interpretations of the problem itself? Which of these has guided the regulatory response to pesticide drift, and with what consequences? Like other scholars of EJ, I argue that understanding these contradictions requires that we recognize pesticide drift as not only a technical problem but also a social one, rooted in systems of inequality and oppression. In some ways, pesticide drift is a complex, technical problem best understood by medical and environmental scientists. First, the study of pesticide drift includes analyzing the countless ways in which pesticides move through, change in, and interact with the environment. The nine hundred- plus pesticide active ingredients registered for use in California are manufactured into over thirteen thousand different formulations, in which various amounts of different pesticides are mixed together and applied with innumerable “inert” ingredients that help the pesticide reach and/or adhere to its target.

          All of these various formulations interact with each other and the ever- changing environments into which they are

applied in countless ways, most of which are poorly understood. Also, pesticide drift analysis includes studying pesticide exposure, such as the various pesticides’ different routes of exposure (dermal, dietary, or inhalation) and the extent to which some human populations (especially children and farmworkers) are subject to higher rates of exposure. Finally, analysts must take into account the actual health effects of exposure to the various pesticides, where every pesticide interacts with the human body in its own way, produces or contributes to its own collection of health problems, interacts in unknown synergistic or cumulative ways with other environmental toxins, and affects certain sensitive populations (children, fetuses, the elderly, the ill, and the chemically sensitive) more than the “average” body.

          That said, pesticide drift must be understood as a social problem as much as a technical one, and the intersections between these social and

technical dimensions explain the continuation and invisibility of pesticide drift. As I will illustrate throughout the book, experts’ abilities to understand and control pesticide drift are challenged not simply by the technical complexity of agricultural pesticides but also from the highly unequal and oppressive social relations in which they are used. Although pesticide drift affects all people living in and near agricultural fields, farmworkers and their families are exposed most frequently.

            The legal status issues, language barriers, political disenfranchisement, and other forms of social marginalization widespread in farmworking communities tend to obscure pesticide exposures and other problems. I will show as well how other pesticide drift victims and activists, although more

empowered than immigrant farmworkers, are nonetheless marginalized within the environmental regulatory arena and by mainstream pesticide activism. At the same time, various industry groups exert extraordinary influence within environmental regulatory and policy institutions. Industry groups’ financial power, strong coherence, scientific resources, and social networks enable them to shape the terms of regulatory debate in ways that residents of agricultural communities are simply unable to do. Environmental regulation consequently has been bounded by a narrow interpretation of pesticide drift as a series of isolated, unfortunate events requiring minimal regulatory change.