The Devil's Harvest by Jessica Garrison

Author:Jessica Garrison
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Hachette Books
Published: 2020-05-05T00:00:00+00:00

In July 2002, Teresa De Anda, the Earlimart woman who had led the charge against pesticides, saw a TV news report that there had been another incidence of pesticide drift in the Kern County farm town of Arvin involving the same chemical: metam sodium.18

The news said that only one person had been hospitalized and downplayed the incident. De Anda didn’t believe it for a minute. Arvin, a desperately poor and blighted town hunched at the southeastern end of the San Joaquin Valley, had a population of about twenty thousand. If residents had been exposed to the same kind of pesticide in the same way, there had to be many more people who were sick, people who were confused and frightened and didn’t know how to advocate for themselves.

She began calling Kern County’s agricultural commissioner, demanding to know whether his office planned to investigate the incident. He put her off, pointing out that only one person had been sickened. Then he put her off again, saying that what was important was how the accident had happened, not how many people had been affected.

Fed up, De Anda got into her car the next day, drove sixty miles south to Arvin, and began going door-to-door. After hitting just a few houses on Judith Street, nearest to the field where the pesticide had been applied, she and the people she was with counted forty-two people who had been sickened. It was like a flashback to Earlimart: they heard about burning eyes and coughing, parents feeling powerless as their children suddenly began to vomit, how all of a sudden a strange odor descended and no one could breathe. But it was worse: county officials hadn’t even done an evacuation. And they still couldn’t be made to care.

De Anda and the others went back to the neighborhood for a second visit to take a more thorough count. But this time they brought a reporter and a cameraman. After the journalist’s interview with a young woman whose little baby had developed asthma after the incident, the case finally got the regulator’s attention.

The California Department of Pesticide Regulation stepped in. Eventually, 250 victims were identified, 84 of whom ultimately sued and won $775,000 from the pesticide company, one of the largest awards of its kind.19

Soon after that, De Anda got a job offer. Californians for Pesticide Reform, an advocacy group working to regulate pesticide spraying, hired her as its Central Valley coordinator. Amid its troubles, Earlimart had created one of the valley’s most effective environmental justice advocates.

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