Kennedy commissioned an advisory group that wrote a report vindicating her book, which triggered a public hearing where she testified before the Senate. It opened a space in the culture, then all kinds of things happened, including the Clean Air Act, the Clean Water Act, all these monumental pieces of legislation. The least well-known but maybe the most important was NEPA [the National Environmental Policy Act], the federal statute that requires that any time a government proposes to do something with environmental consequences, the public gets to weigh in, stakeholders have to be consulted, and the government has to take into account what they say.
Recently, we’ve seen this amazing thing happen in Washington, D.C., which is a direct legacy of Rachel Carson: There was this attempt to do so-called “permitting reform” and weaken these regulations for being too cumbersome. Led by Senator [Joe] Manchin [D-West Virginia], with his connections to the fossil-fuel industry, the idea was to throw key provisions of NEPA out the window. The consequence almost surely would be more pipelines built faster, environmental justice would go out the window, public health of communities would be impacted, as well as the climate consequences. But there was strong enough outcry, led by communities of color and people on the ground in Appalachia, where the Mountain Valley Pipeline was supposed to run through, that permitting reform got thrown out. This political power, which prevented Chuck Schumer from moving forward with Joe Manchin and throwing out this really important regulatory framework, is a direct result of Silent Spring. I consider it a kind of indirect victory for Rachel Carson.
Ishii: Carson articulated really important concepts in Silent Spring, including the concept of chemical trespass against our bodies, land, water, and air. She articulated this important concept of the public’s right to know, and not only in biological and scientific terms, but also what’s going on politically behind closed doors. Connecting that and looking at past decades of global pesticide activism and advocacy, we do see a tremendous amount of progress since PAN was founded 30 years ago in Malaysia at a gathering of activists looking at health and environmental harms and injustices of the global pesticide trade.
“It has become politically untenable to spray pesticides next to schools and homes in our community, which is a huge shift.”
We’ve fought for and won a 1,000 percent increase in bans of the worst pesticides. But more than just banning individual pesticides, we have been able to push on the public’s right to know not only what toxins we’re being exposed to, but also governments’ right to know about and refuse the importation of pesticides that have been banned or restricted elsewhere. After 20 years of advocacy, we got the Rotterdam Convention on prior informed consent that provides the right of country importing pesticides to know and then decide to refuse the import. That’s a huge success.
We also got the Stockholm Convention on persistent organic pollutants established to phase out chemicals, including a number of pesticides that persist in the environment, that travel far beyond where they’re used, committing chemical trespass along the way. Both of these conventions have been ratified by over 170 countries.
Just this year, after much advocacy by our partner, PAN Germany, the German government publicly committed to prohibit the exporting of pesticides banned at home. This legal action will come into force next year. A lot is happening, and I attribute it to the power of community mobilizing and coalition organizing, challenging corporate lies and false solutions with scientific and empirical evidence, and lifting up the voices of directly affected communities.
Implementation is always an issue. You get these laws, policies, and agreements, and they’re not always implemented on the ground. It’s not only the USDA and EPA that have been captured by corporate influence, but the United Nations, too. The U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) a couple years back announced its intention to formalize a partnership with Crop Life International, the pesticide industry trade group. After mobilizing hundreds of thousands of voices of opposition, the FAO said they are not moving forward with the partnership, but they’re also not really canceling it; it’s just sort of sitting there behind a curtain.
I also have to say despite all this amazing work, pesticide use, profits, and poisonings are all increasing. This is a huge problem. PAN recently investigated pesticide poisonings globally and found that over 385 million people are poisoned from acute unintentional poisonings every year. That’s 44 percent of the 850 million people involved in agriculture. This is a big jump from the often-cited 1990 figure of 25 million.
The problem hasn’t gone away. We can’t just ban, restrict, and phase out. We must do that, especially highly hazard pesticides, but we need to build solutions on the ground. That’s where I’m so excited by local agroecology movements, the work of farmers like Mas who are creating viable, resilient systems on the ground, who are building bridges between rural and urban communities.
Anne, can you speak to how much you’ve been able to accomplish in Hawaii and how much are you’re still up against?
Frederick: I think about my friend who lived 100 feet from test fields—her, her daughters, and community are safer these days. It has become politically untenable to spray pesticides next to schools and homes in our community, which is a huge shift. I see tangible improvements to people’s lives. The banning of chlorpyrifos is another [win], especially because it was so heavily used, particularly on the west side of our island.
“Reframing—that’s what good stories do. Stories reframe things, rewrite things, and allow people to reflect. Suddenly the foods that they eat, it’s like, ‘What are we consuming?’”
One thing that gives me hope in our movement is the groundswell of activism that started around the acute exposure incidents in schools, when teachers and students were hospitalized, and that it has really evolved. There’s still very much a grassroots movement in the streets, but there’s also a political savvy that has evolved, too. A lot of the folks who first mobilized around these basic protections have gotten involved in local politics. For example, the Maui County Council is majority progressive for the first time in the political history of Hawaii. They’ve been able to pass the most stringent organic public land management ordinance. There’s a lot of great news at our local level, which we know is also threatened by preemption at the federal level.
Mas, are farmers more open to the lessons of Silent Spring? What do you see as its legacy for farmers?
Masumoto: Farmers are obviously close to working with nature and understanding things like climate change. What Silent Spring showed was the power of stories, and Carson captured the story of pesticides for a broader public, but it penetrated rural sectors and farmers, too. Out of the book was this idea that there are new directions we have to start taking. I’m seeing more and more farmers talking about and looking at soil life and biology. Dirt isn’t just dirt and lifeless. They’re starting to look at it through a different lens—that’s a quantum leap. That’s very important, because suddenly you see life in the soils, you see life around us, we’re growing life! With that comes this idea that our goal as farmers is not to kill what we don’t see and don’t know.