by Max Sano and Jay Feldman
With the current existential health, biodiversity, and climate threats, organic land management is a bright spot for the sustainable future envisioned by Beyond Pesticides. Founded in 1981, Beyond Pesticides began tracking the science of pesticide hazards and questioning dependency on toxic, fossil fuel-based pesticides as unnecessary to achieving effective land management, both in agricultural and nonagricultural contexts. The organization, which grew out of a series of site visits and field hearings to document the limitations of labor standards necessary to protect farmworkers, was created to bring together environmentalists, public health practitioners, farmers, land managers, farmworkers, and consumers.
Nearly a decade before its founding and less than 20 years after the publication of Silent Spring, many important laws governing clean air, water, food safety, and pesticides had been adopted. However, these statutes’ focus on mitigating risks of harm to health and the environment have fallen short, according to Beyond Pesticides. Instead, the organization pursues a precautionary approach that is codified in organic standards that grow out of the Organic Foods Production Act, a law it helped to write that establishes a systems approach to nurture soil microbial life, build organic matter, and cycle nutrients without synthetic inputs. The approach is cross-cutting in eliminating petrochemicals that contribute to public health issues, biodiversity decline, and the climate crisis by releasing toxic substances and greenhouse gases into the environment and reducing the earth’s capacity to draw down atmospheric carbon, methane, nitrous oxide, and fluorinated gases. Beyond Pesticides tracks the overall hazards associated with pesticide use through a number of its databases, including the Pesticide-Induced Diseases Database, which documents independent peer-reviewed studies that link pesticides to a range of chronic diseases including cancer, reproductive harm, neurological illness, respiratory disease, autism and learning disabilities, Parkinson’s, Alzheimer’s, and diabetes. Because many of the pesticides are endocrine disruptors, the effects have been shown to cause adverse multi-generational effects.
Whether a health crisis borne out of chemical-induced diseases, the collapse of life-sustaining biodiversity, or the dramatic catastrophes caused by greenhouse gases and rising temperatures, the interconnectedness of the root causes of these crises requires solutions that are holistic and nurturing of humans’ relationship with nature—an interrelationship that has been neglected as a matter of policy and practice. In October 2023, an editorial in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) captures the urgency of the climate and biodiversity crisis in Time to Treat the Climate and Nature Crisis as One Indivisible Global Health Emergency. The authors state: “Over 200 health journals call on the United Nations, political leaders, and health professionals to recognize that climate change and biodiversity loss are one indivisible crisis and must be tackled together to preserve health and avoid catastrophe. This overall environmental crisis is now so severe as to be a global health emergency.”
Beyond Pesticides publishes numerous factsheets that catalogue pesticide hazards to health and the environment. Its factsheets, including 40 Commonly Used Lawn Pesticides, cites that 21 pesticides are probable or possible carcinogens, 20 are linked with birth defects, 28 with reproductive effects, 39 are neurotoxic, 33 cause liver or kidney damage, 18 are sensitizers and/or irritants, and 24 have the potential to disrupt the endocrine (hormonal) system.
Regarding environmental effects, 21 are detected in groundwater, 28 have the potential to leach into soils and water, 28 are toxic to birds, 39 are toxic to fish and aquatic organisms, 33 are toxic to bees, and 18 are toxic to mammals. Beyond Pesticides’ Children and Pesticides Don’t Mix factsheet points to the data establishing elevated rates of pesticide-induced illnesses among children because of their elevated vulnerability due to small body size and exposure potential relative to body weight. The organization’s website is content-rich, with a comprehensive focus on adverse impacts from people to pollinators, waterways to wildlife, and information on alternative strategies for managing lawns, landscapes, and gardens without toxic inputs.
Beyond Pesticides’ work to advance organic agricultural, public, and residential land management systems within an organic policy framework recognizes that toxic pesticides are not needed to achieve food productivity or beautiful landscapes. To do this, the organization supports grassroots organizations and people as change agents to put in place practical solutions and policy reform. Beyond Pesticides is unique in hosting a national information desk on how to navigate the hazards of pesticide spraying in communities and providing hands-on training to facilitate organic policies and practices in local jurisdictions and states nationwide. Through its Parks for a Sustainable Future program, Beyond Pesticides provides hands-on horticultural support and helps to underwrite municipal programs to convert parks and playing fields to organic management.
In implementing organic methods, Beyond Pesticides adheres to a holistic approach that ensures that all the terms currently being used to advance regenerative and sustainable practices are built on a foundation of defined and enforceable organic standards contained in the federal organic law. Federal organic law is unique in that the Congressionally mandated National Organic Standards Board is a federal advisory board with teeth; what that means is all Board recommendations for allowed substances are binding, as required by statute. Organic standard setting is participatory, with open comments that have a history of strengthening standards to ensure integrity, trust, and accountability in the system. The organization pushes for clear and meaningful definitions of proposed solutions to the current crises, pointing out that several states are now advancing the term regenerative without the clarity and enforceability it says are needed.
Local campaigns to advance local organic land management ordinances in Maine, a call to action on a bee-killing neonicotinoid insecticide restrictions in Oregon and Connecticut, or similar actions nationwide is empowered by Beyond Pesticides’ daily science and policy tracking through its website’s Daily News. In doing so, the program contributes to communities’ sustainability and public health goals. Beyond Pesticides sees organic land management as a social good—one that requires a societal investment—for a livable future. For more information visit: Beyond Pesticides.
Max Sano is the senior policy and coalitions associate at Beyond Pesticides. Max holds a B.A. in Environmental Studies, Government, and Middle East Studies at Franklin & Marshall College and a M.A. in Food Studies, Policy, & Advocacy at New York University. He represents Beyond Pesticides in coalitions across the United States and bridges connections with the broader climate movement. Max has years of experience in intersectional climate action, serving on the advisory board of Resilience Youth Network and founder of the climate storytelling training nonprofit, The Greenzine. His work has been recognized by the UN Food & Agriculture Organization, Riley’s Way Foundation, Udall Foundation, Posse Foundation, Aspen Institute, among others.
Jay Feldman is a co-founder and executive director of Beyond Pesticides, with a 40-year history of working with communities nationwide on toxics and organic policies and practices. Jay has successfully fought to remove from the market hazardous pesticides and helped draft pivotal local, state, and federal organic law, including the Agricultural Productivity Act, which established sustainable agriculture programs at USDA, and the Organic Foods Production Act, which created the USDA organic certified food label. In 2010, he was appointed by the Obama Administration to a 5-year appointment to the National Organic Standards Board, where he served as chair of the Crops Committee. He is a recipient of Rodale Institute’s Organic Pioneer Award, 2021. He has written extensively, testified before the U.S. Congress and state and local legislatures, been published in major newspapers, and appeared on national and local news networks and talk shows, while editing Beyond Pesticides’ quarterly journal Pesticides and You and Daily News
