Ghostworkers and Greens: The Cooperative Campaigns of Farmworkers and Environmentalists for Pesticide Reform by Adam Tompkins

Author:Adam Tompkins [Tompkins, Adam]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Labor, Political Advocacy, Public Policy, Sociology, History & Theory, Labor & Industrial Relations, Environmental Conservation & Protection, Social Science, Infrastructure, Political Science, Political Process, Business & Economics, Nature, Environmental Policy, General
ISBN: 9781501704215
Google: d45HDwAAQBAJ
Goodreads: 27888047
Publisher: ILR Press
Published: 2016-03-24T09:30:52+00:00

7

FROM THE GROUND UP

Fumigants, Ozone, and Health

Cesar Chavez stayed up late to review court documents on the night of April 22, 1993 in the home of a former farmworker in San Luis, a small Arizona border town not far from where he had grown up. After spending the day in the Yuma County Superior Court giving testimony to defend his union in a lawsuit, he drove past some familiar places of his youth. He broke a three-day fast that night, sharing a vegetarian dinner with a few staffers and their host before retiring to his bedroom to read. He showed signs of tiredness, but nothing to raise concern. Chavez, however, never woke.1

Six days later, a three-mile-long procession of thirty-five thousand mourners followed Chavez and his pallbearers on the funeral march from Delano to the UFW’s Forty Acres compound. Union flags, banners, chants, and songs filled the streets. Farmworkers alternated with celebrities and political allies to carry the simple white pine casket hewn by Chavez’s brother Richard.2 Luis Valdez, founder of El Teatro Campesino, closed the ceremony with a promise to Chavez. He said: “We have come to plant your heart like a seed … the seed of your heart will keep on singing, keep on flowering, for the cause.”3

In the wake of his passing, the Natural Resources Defense Council commended Chavez’s work on pesticides and expressed hope that cooperative efforts with the UFW to safeguard the health of farmworkers and protect the environment would continue to grow. Co-founder and executive director John Adams and attorney Al Meyerhoff, an NRDC attorney who had begun his legal career at California Rural Legal Assistance in 1972, characterized Chavez as a “visionary … [who] far before the concepts of ‘environmental justice’ became popular … understood that preserving human dignity and protecting the earth’s resources are necessarily intertwined.”4 The organization dedicated a 1993 report entitled After Silent Spring: The Unsolved Problems of Pesticide Use in the United States to the memory of Chavez for his commitment “to protecting farmworkers and the rural poor—those most exposed to the hazards of pesticides.”5 The report noted that the volume of pesticides used in the United States had nearly doubled in the thirty years since publication of Carson’s seminal book, climbing from an estimated annual figure of 540 million pounds to more than one billion pounds per year in 1991. It summarized the continuing health and environmental threats associated with pesticide use, arguing that the shortcomings of existent regulatory law failed to keep dangerous pesticides off the market.6 The report maintained that regulations to “protect farm-workers are wholly inadequate and should be dramatically overhauled.”7 The NRDC asked Arturo Rodriguez, successor to Chavez, to speak at the press conference announcing the release of the report.8

To illustrate its point about the inadequacies of current regulations, the NRDC used the example of methyl bromide, a pesticide targeted in the Wrath of Grapes campaign. The UFW tried to force California grape growers away from the fumigant with the boycott, but that effort proved unsuccessful.

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