Man of Tomorrow by Jim Newton

Author:Jim Newton
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Little, Brown and Company
Published: 2020-05-12T00:00:00+00:00

The Mediterranean fruit fly is a nasty little creature. It is around one-quarter of an inch in length. Its torso is black and silver, and its wings have orange patches. Its head is topped by an ugly, bulging set of red eyes. It lays its eggs in fruit, and they hatch a few days later, destroying the fruit as they grow into larvae for another week or so, then emerge as flies to repeat the cycle. The medfly causes trouble because it voraciously infests apples, apricots, avocados, bell peppers, cherries, all types of citrus fruits, coffee, eggplants, figs, grapes, kiwifruit, mangoes, olives, papayas, peaches, pears, persimmons, plums, pomegranates, tomatoes, and walnuts, to name a few. The United States Department of Agriculture considers it “the most important agricultural pest in the world.”23 Once infected, fruit falls early and decays, ruining it for market. Moreover, the flies breed rapidly and spread widely, so infestation can quickly overcome whole regions and the entire yield of some crops.

The fly is a perennial threat to California and other Mediterranean-climate growing areas, so farmers and agricultural inspectors vigilantly look out for it. On June 5, 1980, two of the critters turned up in the backyard of a home in San Jose. (The same day, a single fly was discovered in Northridge, a suburban community in the San Fernando Valley, part of Los Angeles, but that infestation received far less attention, perhaps because the area included less farmland and was farther from the state’s breadbasket, the Central Valley.)24 Within days, more flies were found in the Santa Clara Valley, near where Brown had briefly been in college—at the time of the infestation it was the heart of both Silicon Valley and a dwindling but still important mélange of farms and orchards. State officials hastily conferred, then ordered a quarantine on crops from three counties in the Santa Clara Valley while they struggled to devise a broader response.25

Brown hesitated. The interests on both sides were powerful and loud. Agriculture demanded swift action: spread of the bug could devastate crops and shut California markets to imports for fear of spreading the infestation. Environmentalists were equally impassioned: aerial spraying, which farmers demanded, could expose hundreds of thousands of Bay Area residents to harmful pesticides, chemicals strong enough to damage the paint on cars and kill fish in streams. Brown was naturally sympathetic to environmental arguments, but he could hardly ignore agriculture, one of his state’s most significant and influential constituencies—and one, given Brown’s support for the United Farm Workers and the Agricultural Labor Relations Act, that was already wary of the governor.

Brown’s quandary was ratcheted up by Washington, where the newly elected president, Ronald Reagan—a familiar foe, both of Jerry and his father—was installed. Reagan’s Department of Agriculture insisted that California take strong action to thwart the medfly lest the pest find its way into the state’s export crops and take hold in other states. By the end of July, federal officials had placed their own quarantine on a 105-square-mile

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