I have had the pleasure of taking part in a number of interesting discussions over the past week regarding the future of the anti-LBAM spray movement in California. Friends, neighbors, scientists and politicians are discussing positions to take in the face of the California Department of Food and Agriculture continuing to insist that the light brown apple moth can and must be eradicated. During the past year, we have repeatedly heard from independent scientists that eradication is neither necessary nor possible for this basically harmless insect, and yet CDFA continues to march forward like an army of zombies, armed with their chemical weapons, declaring that they can and will cover California with pesticides, toxic lab substances and genetically engineered insects.

Because, for me, the heart of the issue has always been a human rights one, the resounding question posed is: Who Has The Right To Poison Me?

In a nation where poisoning humans and wildlife is illegal, I am left with a simple equation regarding CDFA’s past and present intentions towards the people and animals of California.

say no to pesticide

How can we get California to recognize and admit that civilization has now learned that pesticides harm and kill lifeforms and are poisonous? How can we get California to profess that anyone caught in the act of spraying, splatting or dusting pesticides is, in fact, poisoning his neighbors?

I believe if we want to reform our beloved but toxic state, pesticide = poison is the basic equation we need to be teaching from kindergarten upwards with zero tolerance for any man who poisons citizens.

I Take It Personally

My husband and I are finally on the verge of escaping a situation in which our neighbor, an alcohol grower, has subjected us to bi-monthly poisoning, 9 months a year, for all of the years we’ve lived here.

My husband, a non-smoking, healthy, young man has suffered severe lung problems including pneumonia, bronchitis and recurrent pleurisy. At one point, his doctor thought he had cancer because of a mass found in his lung. It turned out to be a patch of pneumonia that was slow in clearing up, but for several months, I lived in an agony of fear that my young and dear husband was going to die of lung cancer. Our medical bills were so high, we are still trying to pay them off.

As for myself, also a young person but one in poor health with several auto-immune illnesses, I have been repeatedly sickened and even hospitalized following my neighbor, the poisoner’s, spraying of his vineyard and my home. This has increased our medical debt.

We have been driven from our home, night after night, and have had to pay for hotel rooms too many times to count over the past few years. We have been unable to work on spray days, losing money we badly needed. We have suffered severe loss of health and income.

Our pleas to our neighbor, the poisoner, fell on deaf ears. We were laughed at, yelled at, sneered at and told we were crazy. When my husband called the winery in question to ask that they begin notifying us of their spray dates because his wife (me) was being sickened by the spraying, the manager scoffed, “what, is she allergic to air?”

Obviously, you know and I know that alcohol growers are not spraying their fields with air, but this is the reception with which we met as we lost our health, drained our bank account and fled into the night to escape being poisoned.

So I take it personally. And we have no recourse because California’s laws protect the alcohol grower, the poisoner, and not us. I take it very personally that CDFA is now taking the same line across California, asserting they will fill our habitat with poison, calling it anything but poison.

Pesticide is poison and the aerial spraying, ground spraying, twist ties, telephone pole splats and traps in CDFA’s arsenal are all poisonous. California needs to rethink the equation, rethink the very basic question: is it legal to poison people?

The answer to this question is found in our already-existing laws. So, the work is simply to get California to designate pesticides as poisons and pesticide users as poisoners. The law will then know how to deal with them.

But, of course, it won’t be easy. Please take a look at this map I’ve spent hours creating over the past year. This is Highway 12 which runs between Santa Rosa and Napa in the famous ‘Wine Country’ of Northern California. People think this is a romantic place to live, but it’s actually a toxic hazard zone. The blue spaces on the map encompass the vineyards all along HWY 12. You can zoom in and out on the map to see how the alcohol industry has used up every last inch of available space for their industry. Though a couple of vintners are trying to grow organically amidst this ugly, conventional sprawl, it’s really impossible to grow anything organic along HWY 12 because of the unending, chronic dumping of pesticides up and down the highway for miles and miles.


View Larger Map

And people live here. Thousands and thousands of them. And all of them are being poisoned.

Looking For A Fight?
I have sensed that most of us have emerged from CDFA’s recent announcement regarding not spraying over urban areas knowing we are still in a battle. No one feels settled. No one is satisfied with the idea that while CDFA may not fly their planes right over the TransAmerica building, they may be spraying Golden Gate Park, Mount Tamalpais, Rodeo Lagoon or other ‘non-urban’, neighboring areas.

We know that air moves and that we’ll be breathing in what’s in the air, no matter where it is sprayed. With China’s pollution hitting the West Coast and DDT melting out of the polar ice caps, 21st century people know that our air and water is recycled again and again through our lungs and bodies and that toxins in one place mean toxins everywhere.

If you’re sick and tired of being made ill by toxic pollution and the threat of further toxins, I believe your fight is clear here. I believe it comes down to the simple, blue equation I started with and the work ahead is in changing the mentality of Californians to match the modern understanding of pesticides as poisons. CDFA may be the worst students in the class and it may take a long time to get them to learn this lesson, but the rest of us are already protected by a constitution that guards our safety and a set of state and national laws that punish poisoners. We just need to connect dots A and B. I think this is our fight.