An examination of political conflicts over pesticide drift and the
differing conceptions of justice held by industry, regulators, and
activists.
The widespread but virtually invisible problem of pesticide drift--the
airborne movement of agricultural pesticides into residential areas--has
fueled grassroots activism from Maine to Hawaii. Pesticide drift
accidents have terrified and sickened many living in the country's most
marginalized and vulnerable communities. In this book, Jill Lindsey
Harrison considers political conflicts over pesticide drift in
California, using them to illuminate the broader problem and its
potential solutions.
The fact that pesticide pollution and illnesses associated with it
disproportionately affect the poor and the powerless raises questions of
environmental justice (and political injustice). Despite California's
impressive record of environmental protection, massive pesticide
regulatory apparatus, and booming organic farming industry,
pesticide-related accidents and illnesses continue unabated. To unpack
this conundrum, Harrison examines the conceptions of justice that
increasingly shape environmental politics and finds that California's
agricultural industry, regulators, and pesticide drift activists hold
different, and conflicting, notions of what justice looks like.
Drawing on her own extensive ethnographic research as well as in-depth
interviews with regulators, activists, scientists, and public health
practitioners, Harrison examines the ways industry, regulatory agencies,
and different kinds of activists address pesticide drift, connecting
their efforts to communitarian and libertarian conceptions of justice.
The approach taken by pesticide drift activists, she finds, not only
critiques theories of justice undergirding mainstream
sustainable-agriculture activism, but also offers an entirely new notion
of what justice means. To solve seemingly intractable environmental
problems such as pesticide drift, Harrison argues, we need a different
kind of environmental justice. She proposes the precautionary principle
as a framework for effectively and justly addressing environmental
inequities in the everyday work of environmental regulatory
institutions.
