For decades, an anti-regulatory ideology has seeped into our
government like atrazine leaching into our groundwater. But the EPA’s problems
are more directly a result of deliberate interference by industry. Agribusiness
spends heavily on lobbying the EPA and on extensive strategies to compromise research
at the agency, according to exhaustive
reporting by the Intercept in 2021.
But recent weeks have shown that the United States isn’t the only
government struggling to regulate these poisons, 60 years after Rachel
Carson’s death. The European Union announced that it was dropping an ambitious
plan to cut pesticide use in half, following weeks of disruptive
protests by farmers across Europe using tractors to block highways and
railways and burning hay bales and tires. The farmers argued that the new rules
would mire them in bureaucracy and hurt their businesses. Death
threats and right-wing disinformation on the topic didn’t help matters.
European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen, announcing the decision to
abandon the bill, described the effort to reduce pesticides as “worthy” but said
that it had become “a symbol of polarization.”
Those still hoping, in the tradition of Rachel Carson, to
stanch the flow of toxins, can claim some recent victories and momentum. Those
most harmed by pesticides—from human babies to honeybees—are widely loved. It’s
always politically fruitful to evoke that love, as Carson did when she confronted
us with the threat of silencing some of our favorite sounds: the song of the
birds and the leaping of the fish in our streams. That’s probably why in
December, New York Governor Kathy Hochul, not usually a politician feared by
earth-ravaging special interests, signed
the Birds and Bees Protection Act, prohibiting neonicotinoid pesticides, which
are toxic to birds and pollinators, as well as other wildlife. Beekeepers in
Vermont are pushing
for a similar law.