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.

Pesticide Drift and the Pursuit of Environmental Justice PDF

The list of books you might like