New short film reveals teens’ experiences being sprayed with pesticides

Last week Toxic Free North Carolina released our latest Farm Worker Documentary Project film, Overworked & Under Spray. It’s a six-minute piece featuring six high school-aged farm workers’ stories about being sprayed with agricultural pesticides while tending crops in fields across NC.

For two months this summer, full-time Student Action with Farmworkers intern Abi Bissette and I crisscrossed the eastern side of the state. We visited farm worker families in their homes, giving out pesticide safety information and discussing their rights as farm workers. By midsummer we had assembled a group of motivated, outspoken teenagers who have worked cultivating and harvesting blueberries, strawberries, sweet potatoes, green beans, grapes, cucumbers and tobacco.

“You could see the spray coming at you...but we kept on working. The next day I didn't feel so good,” Felix Rodriguez, one of the youth featured in the film, told us during his interview. “I wouldn't feel comfortable talking about pesticides to the owner or supervisor because they'll see you as nagging. They just really want you to work.”

When we asked the youth how they would fix the situation, they had a range of impressively astute answers:  put more inspectors in the fields, get rid of child labor in agriculture, make stronger regulations for crew leaders. But one message we heard loud and clear from everyone interviewed was “enough is enough”. The exploitation of children (or anyone) for cheap food—and the poisoning of the people who work to fill our grocery store shelves—has gone on for far too long. It’s time for eaters of conscience to demand an end to abusive, toxic agriculture.

Here in North Carolina we're actively working to protect children, and all workers, from exposure to toxic pesticides and other dangerous working conditions. Want to take action for farm workers in NC? Check out our website for three simple steps you can take.

My favorite moments of 2010

Looking back at a great year, I can't help reflecting on how much I love being a part of this organization and working with the fantastic supporters who make us what we are.

These were some of the highlights of 2010 for me:

• Getting to be color commentator with our emcee Ryan Parker at the Love Bug 2010. 500 people came to cheer on dozens of local artists as they drew bugs all night!
  
  
• Hearing from child care centers around the state that they want to detox their centers. My co-workers Billie and Ana trained over 300 child care professionals this year!


• Meeting with Congressman G.K. Butterfield, who is now a co-sponsor of the Toxic Chemical Safety Act. You’ll be hearing lots more from us about this ground-breaking federal legislation in the coming months.
  


• Sitting down to lunch with farm workers, the press and supporters as we launched the Harvest of Dignity campaignwith our friends at Farmworker Advocacy Network.
  


• Getting to know the tight-knit group of “Women without Borders,” the farmworker women who are organizing a community garden in eastern North Carolina.
  


• Working with our 106 fantastic volunteers, like superstar Laura Valencia. Our wonderful volunteers put in over 2,200 hours of service to Toxic Free NC this year!

I can’t wait to see what 2011 will bring, and I’m so grateful for all the great supporters who are on board with us for it. Here’s to a bright new year!

We're finalists!

Check it out everyone...our documentary short from last summer is a finalist in the EPA Environmental Justice video contest!

We're so proud of the work done by Laura Valencia, our 2009 intern through SAF's Into the Fields summer internship program, and also extremely proud of all the workers who contributed to the video by speaking up and speaking their minds about pesticides on the job! Also, many thanks to SAF and to the folks at Beehive for helping us make it happen!

Stay tuned for further updates, and in case you haven't seen it yet, here's our video!

This Tuesday: Groceries for a Cause 5% Day for Toxic Free NC at Cary Whole Foods

For more information contact:
Ana Duncan Pardo
919-833-8655

For Immediate Release

Toxic Free North Carolina is Recipient of Whole Foods 5% Community Day

Raleigh, NC - On Tuesday, April 6, Toxic Free North Carolina will be the recipient of five percent of the day’s sales at Whole Foods Market in Cary. Toxic Free NC, a grassroots nonprofit fighting pesticide pollution statewide, is also the focus of the Cary Whole Foods Market’s April Community Spotlight. Staff from Toxic Free NC will be in the store to answer questions from shoppers throughout the day on Tuesday.

Toxic Free North Carolina is a nonprofit organization that has been dedicated to fighting pesticide pollution since it was established in 1986. Toxic Free NC’s three-member staff focuses their work on efforts to safeguard child health, protect farm workers from toxic exposures and strengthen sustainable agriculture in NC. Toxic Free NC engages parents, sustainable farmers, consumers and farm workers across the state through popular education, creative use of documentary and grassroots organizing and advocacy.

Toxic Free NC staff members Billie Karel and Ana Duncan Pardo will be available throughout the day at Whole Foods Market in Cary to answer questions and provide information about their work. For more information about Whole Foods Market 5% Community Day call 919-816-8830.

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Whole Foods Market - Cary is located at 102 New Waverly Place, Cary, NC 27518-7002.

About Whole Foods Market®
Founded in 1980 in Austin, Texas, Whole Foods Market, a leader in the natural and organic foods industry and America’s first national certified organic grocer, was named "America’s Healthiest Grocery Store" in 2008 by Health magazine. The Whole Foods Market motto, "Whole Foods, Whole People, Whole Planet"™ captures the company’s mission to find success in customer satisfaction and wellness, employee excellence and happiness, enhanced shareholder value, community support and environmental improvement. Thanks to its 53,000 Team Members, Whole Foods Market has been ranked as one of the "100 Best Companies to Work For" in America by FORTUNE magazine for 11 consecutive years. In fiscal year 2008, the company had sales of $8 billion and currently has more than 275 stores in the United States, Canada, and the United Kingdom. Whole Foods Market is a trademark owned by Whole Foods Market IP, LP.

gardeners' tool: what's in your fertilizer??

On Saturday my husband came home from the garden store with a little bag of fertilizer labeled "For Organic Gardening!" I was skeptical. Fertilizer is notorious for being full of other contaminants besides the potassium, nitrogen and phosphorous you want out of it.

The bag directed me to the company's regulatory website to read about the ingredients. That website directed me to this one: The Washington State Fertilizer Product Database. Hot dog!!

I looked up the "for organic gardening" fertilizer and discovered that it contained 37.9 ppm arsenic. Arsenic! Just to put that number in perspective, the EPA's arsenic limit for drinking water is 0.010 ppm. That makes the fertilizer levels more than 3,000 times higher than the EPA's limits for drinking water. It was also full of mercury, cadmium, lead, and plenty of other stuff that doesn't belong in my vegetables. And I want to put this stuff on my garden.... really?

Luckily we have a nice big compost pile in our backyard full of rich organic matter for the garden. We returned the bag of fertilizer (and told the store why we were returning it - they were a bit taken aback).

The good news is that you don't need to buy fertilizer additives for your garden - compost is easy to make at home. The bad news is that fertilizer is full of virtually unregulated contaminants. The Washington State database lets you find out what's there - but only after you've bought the stuff. The USDA should crack down on fertilizer makers. The rest of us can learn about organic gardening and make our fertilizer the do-it-yourself way.

Dow Shall Not Trespass

By guest blogger Gary Cohen, President and Co-founder of Health Care Without Harm - www.noharm.org

Twenty-five years ago, a Union Carbide pesticide factory exploded in Bhopal, India, releasing a toxic cloud that killed thousands in its wake. More than 8,000 people died within the first three days of the disaster, while more than 500,000 were exposed to toxic gases that invaded their lungs and spread throughout their bodies. For this reason, Bhopal has been called the Hiroshima of the Chemical Industry.

Twenty-five years later the abandoned factory has still not been cleaned up, but continues to leak poisons into neighborhood groundwater. A recent report by the Bhopal Medical Appeal found dangerous levels of heavy metals and persistent chemicals in the groundwater. Union Carbide executives have never been brought to trial in India, despite attempts by the Indian government to extradite them. And although Union Carbide was bought by Dow Chemical in 2001, the parent company claims no responsibility for cleaning up the mess left behind and has not submitted itself to the Indian criminal case. Rather than addressing its ongoing liabilities in Bhopal, Dow has spent tens of millions on its Human Element ad campaign, which portrays the chemical company as people-focused and caring.

The world has learned a lot about the chemical industry since the Bhopal disaster. We now know that many of the industry’s products are linked to a broad array of diseases in the general population, including asthma, cancer, birth defects, infertility, Parkinson’s disease, endometriosis, obesity and diabetes. Rather than internalizing the consequences of pollution, the industry has externalized health and social costs onto individuals and the American healthcare system, which is being crushed under the weight of ballooning costs, chronic disease and misaligned priorities.

We have also learned that we all carry the by-products of the chemical industry in our bodies. These toxins pass into us from the food we eat, through plastics in everyday consumer products, through building materials in our houses and offices, and through our water and air. The Centers for Disease Control has documented that the average American carries more than 100 toxic chemicals in his or her body. Plastic additives bisphenol A and phthalates, the pesticide 2,4 D, and shampoo additive 1,4 dioxane are among those Dow Chemical products found widely in many people’s bodies. Even children are being born pre-polluted, already filled up with a plethora of toxic chemicals that can act like ticking time bombs, triggering health impacts later in life. Without our knowledge and our consent, we and our children have become guinea pigs in an uncontrolled chemical experiment in which Dow and the other chemical companies are running.

Over the last twenty-five years, the Bhopal survivors’ plight and our own have become much more intertwined. We have all become united in a global web of chemical poisons. We have all been “branded” by the chemical industry, their signature chemicals coursing through our veins and building up in our fat tissue and other organs, whether we live in Bhopal or Baton Rouge.

Given the new political momentum in the country to address environmental issues, healthcare delivery and even corporate negligence, its time to stand up to the chemical contamination of the American people and reassert our basic human rights and religious values. As a society, we should guarantee every American child the right to be born free of industrial chemicals. And as a society committed to freedom, we should defend the freedom of women to breastfeed their infants without passing their life supply of toxic chemicals onto them. We all have a right to a toxics-free future. The laws in our country and at a global level should guarantee these rights and the environmental conditions for our health and wellbeing.

Happy National Farm Safety & Health Week

Working long hours at physically demanding and often dangerous tasks, farmers and ranchers provide for our Nation and countless others across the world. Even as they have faced risks, they have made our agricultural sector more productive and practiced good stewardship of our country's natural resources. This week, Americans express gratitude for the untold benefits we enjoy from their labor, and we honor their achievements by urging continued commitment to the highest standards of safety and health.

While the proclamation evokes images of rolling wheat fields and overall-clad farmers on tractors, what many Americans don't know is that the bulk of the fresh food we eat is harvested by a mostly migrant workforce.

Nobody disagrees that farm work is dangerous. Agricultural workers have the 2nd highest rate of fatalities in the country. Farm workers also face some of the highest rates of chemical injury and skin disorders, and live in some of the worst housing in the nation.

The glacial pace of improvement, though, is often further hampered by workers' geographic isolation, immigration status, and language and cultural barriers. We at Toxic Free NC want to give a special shout-out in honor of our farm worker friends here in North Carolina for National Farm Safety and Health Week. And we also wanted to remind everyone that, while many farm workers already know the rules of workplace safety, they may not always be in control of what happens down on the farm.

That said, please take a minute to watch our new video below. We made it over the summer with the help of our fantastic Student Action with Farmworkers intern Laura Valencia, and it features farm workers from right here in North Carolina speaking directly to the heart of this issue. Enjoy, ¡y que vivan los campesinos!

WRAL Exposé on Farmworkers and Pesticides to Air Tomorrow Night!

For the past several months, WRAL-TV has been working on a documentary piece regarding farmworkers, pesticides and North Carolina's pesticide law. The documentary, entitled "Focal Point - Practical Application" will feature farmworkers talking about their own experiences working with pesticides. Many of our allies from the Farmworker Advocacy Network (not to mention our very own executive director Fawn Pattison) will also be featured discussing loopholes in our state's pesticide policy. Click here for the preview. Looks like some good old fashioned hard-hitting journalism!

WRAL will air its documentary entitled "Focal Point - Practical Application" tomorrow, Wednesday August 20th at 7 p.m. Tune in to see farmworkers and advocates making a powerful case for change!

Earth Day, everyone?

Earth Day is coming up on Tuesday, April 22, and that means the Toxic Free NC team is busy gearing up for events and festivals all over the state. I hope we'll be seeing you at some of them!

Stop by and say hello to our staff and volunteers, color a bug or make a veggie painting like this guy, who had a ball at 5% Day last week, thanks to Whole Foods Market in Raleigh.

The Whole Foods stores in Raleigh and Chapel Hill dedicated their 5% Days last week to Toxic Free NC. We are so grateful to them for the generous donation, and for the chance to talk with so many new people (not to mention smashing beets for the sake of art).

Here's where we'll be celebrating Earth Day this year:

Saturday, April 20
Raleigh: Burt's Bees Planet Earth Celebration
Winston-Salem: Piedmont Earth Day Fair
Goldsboro: Wayne County Earth Day

Saturday, April 26
Fayetteville: Dogwood Festival
Washington: Beaufort County Earth Day

Sunday, April 27
Fayetteville: Dogwood Festival

There are lots more community events coming up where we'll be out meeting folks around the state, and we'd love to see you there. Check out our calendar of events to find one near you. If you're interested in helping us get out the word about Toxic Free NC and alternatives to pesticides, email Billie and let her know you'd like to volunteer with us at an upcoming event.

And happy Earth Day!

Envelope Stuffing Party this Weds!Come on down.

PESTed's having it's semi-annual Envelope Stuffing Party this Weds, Nov 7th, between 5 and 8 pm at our office in downtown Raleigh, and we're looking for volunteers to come help out! You can come for the whole time, or just a portion of it (whatever works best for you). We'll have some delicious food and drinks, and music too. It's a fun and easy way to support PESTed's work, and meet some other like-minded people who volunteer for us.

To RSVP, or for more information, please email us, or give us a call at (919) 833-1123.

Thank you!

100 years of Rachel Carson

This week, many of us in the environmental movement celebrated the 100th birthday of one of our founding inspirations, Rachel Carson.

Carson is best known as the author of Silent Spring, the book that first exposed the harms caused to our health and the environment by the widespread use of chemical pesticides. Silent Spring is credited with launching the modern environmental movement, and has inspired many generations of scientists, activists and authors since.

This week Senator Tom Coburn (R-OK) held up legislation honoring Carson because her work "turned the public against such chemicals as DDT." The resolution was sponsored by Senator Benjamin Cardin (D-MD).

Watch this wonderful interview with scientist and author Sandra Steingraber, discussing Rachel Carson's legacy, on Democracy Now.

From Silent Spring to Silent NightDr. Tyrone Hayes speaks in NC, March 7th & 8th!

I've only ever seen Dr. Tyrone Hayes speak once, but it left an impression. What a smart, well spoken, impassioned, and all around cool guy! What important work he's doing, and what a horrible and fantastic story he has to tell about corporate influence over science!

I'm thrilled to be heading up the team that's bring Dr. Hayes to speak in North Carolina week after next. He'll be giving a presentation titled From Silent Spring to Silent Night: Pesticides, the link between amphibian declines and cancer, and what you should know on the campus of NC Central University on Thursday, March 8th at 7 PM. That morning, he will also be speaking to an audience of Durham middle and high school students at NCCU. It's not too late to register to attend either presentation, so get on it! It's also not to late to register for the webcast: both the morning and the evening presentations will be available by webcast free for about a week after they go up live. This is a great opportunity for classes, church groups, organizations, or anyone concerned about public health and the environment in North Carolina to see Dr. Hayes speak, even if you're too far away to make the trip to Durham!

Please plan to join us, in person or over the Internet, for what promises to be a wonderful and inspiring presentation! Register today at www.pested.org. Thank you!