Silent Spring?

Conventional-farming advocate Barry Bushue, for example, lives on a 70-acre farm east of Portland, Oregon, and grows crops such as strawberries, raspberries, pumpkins, and tomatoes. As Bushue expressed it in his speech, he was there that day speaking "as a farmer" but also as the president of the Oregon Farm Bureau, a branch of the American Farm Bureau Federation, of whose interests he was "privileged" to represent, namely the endorsement of "crop protection" techniques involving herbicides, fungicides, and pesticides. These methods are essential, Bushue argued, because there "are times when the only way we can save or protect a crop is by using crop protection." For him, the devastating crop losses resulting from these situations are economically unsustainable, a notion that seems to represent one plank of the pro-pesticide platform, that pro-organic legislation places unfair financial constraints on farmers.

Another plank in that platform, that pesticides can be beneficial to human health, was expressed alongside the economic one in a letter sent by a group of Republican senators to the chairwoman of the Senate Agriculture Committee that same week.¹ In it, these representatives from Kansas, Georgia, Mississippi, and Kentucky expressed how "farmers, ranchers, foresters and agribusinesses throughout the nation" were concerned with the current permit process and that "state and local officials have made clear that this is not merely a regulatory burden but could endanger public health as we enter mosquito season." According to this formulation, current pesticide regulations could allow for specific pest populations to grow unchecked and become a health hazard.

What I thought was interesting was how these pro-pesticide arguments seemed to have revised the meaning of sustainability to be more anthropocentric. In order for their claims to hold, the needs of humans would have to be privileged over the environment's, while at the same time, the health of humans would need to be unaffected by pesticides. In consideration of this, I couldn't help but remember a recent study finding that a group of 7-year-old children who were prenatally exposed to a certain class of pesticides called organophosphates had lower IQs than children who weren't by an average of 7 points.² All of the women and children involved lived on or near farms where pesticides were sprayed, and their exposures was determined by levels of metabolized pesticide in their urine.

I'm not sure how a pro-pesticide advocate would respond to this study's data, but it seems to indicate real damage to agricultural communities by pesticides, not to mention to the environments they affect.³ Attending to these conditions, while I can sympathize with Bushue that "economics has to be a part of any sustainable farm," I can't help but feel that certain entities — including safe air and water and healthy ecosystems — might be priceless.

Image Credit: Wikimedia

1. Abdullah, H. & Hotakainen, R. "Some Fear EPA Is Going Too Far in Regulating Pesticides." McClatchy Newspapers. May 6, 2011.

2. Bouchard, M.; Chevrier, J.; Harley, K; Kogut; K; Vedar, M; Calderon, N; Trujillo, C; Johnson, C; Bradman, A; Barr, D; & Eskenazi, B. Prenatal Exposure to Organophosphate Pesticides and IQ in 7-Year Old Children. Environmental Health Perspectives. April 21, 2011.

3. Carson, R. Silent Spring. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1962.