Safe Ag Safe Schools continues to push for pesticide application notifications.

Members of Safe Ag Safe Schools gather on Sept. 27 in front of the county government building in Salinas to call for an end to applications of the fumigant 1,3-dichloropropene, sold under the brand name Telone.

Sara Rubin here, thinking about how far we’ve fallen, how far we’ve come, and how far we still have to go as stewards of our Earth. This arc is on my mind because 60 years ago yesterday, Rachel Carson published Silent Spring. The book, originally serialized in The New Yorker, famously helped frame and energize the modern environmental movement. Specifically, it revealed the extent to which the pesticide DDT became incorporated into the food web, with impacts to wildlife far beyond the immediate sites where it was applied.

While we have confronted that specific challenge—DDT was banned—there are new challenges that weren’t yet understood in 1962, like the climate crisis. But remarkably, there are still many similar challenges that seem to repeat themselves.

As Carson wrote in Silent Spring: “There is still very limited awareness of the nature of the threat. This is an era of specialists, each of whom sees his own problem and is unaware of, or intolerant of, the larger frame into which it fits. It is also an era dominated by industry, in which the right to make a dollar at whatever cost is seldom challenged. When the public protests, confronted with some obvious evidence of damaging results of pesticide applications, it is fed little tranquilizing pills of half truth. We urgently need an end to these false assurances, to the sugar coating of unpalatable facts. It is the public that is being asked to assume the risks the insect controllers calculate. The public must decide whether it wishes to continue on the current road, and it can do so only when in full possession of the facts.”

This is an excerpt that activists in the group Safe Ag Safe Schools turned to for a press conference yesterday, pointing especially to the concluding words—in full possession of the facts. To that end, they continue to push for an expanded notification system that will alert the public to pesticide applications nearby.

Another tool for enabling the public to be in full possession of the facts is monitoring data connected to pesticide use. Pesticides in California are intensively monitored. County agricultural commissioners track use by county, and the state Department of Pesticide Regulation compiles annual reports on pounds per chemical applied to what type of crop. DPR also gathers air quality data on pesticides in several locations around the state (including in Salinas, Chualar and Watsonville) to show ambient presence of certain pesticides in the air.

There’s a lot of data, and a lot of the time it becomes something like background noise. For a decade, DPR released annual data on its air monitors. And until this year, it looked to members of Safe Ag Safe Schools mostly like, well, just more data. But this year, the California Office of Environmental Health Hazard Assessment (OEHHA) published a new threshold for safe exposure to one particular fumigant, 1,3-dichloropropene (abbreviated as 1,3-D, and sold under the brand name Telone).

When you look at the new safe threshold established by OEHHA—3.7 micrograms per day—and convert the data based on the standard adult inhalation—20 cubic meters per day—you discover that the air monitors have been showing us 1,3-D levels in the air routinely exceeding the safe threshold for over a decade.

“That is alarming information,” says Yanely Martinez of Californians for Pesticide Reform and Safe Ag Safe Schools.

The group is asking the county ag commissioner to stop approving applications of 1,3-D—a highly unlikely outcome as long as it’s permitted for use by the state Department of Pesticide Regulation. But like Carson wrote, public knowledge can be the first step toward more widespread change.

“We are calling on them to not approve 1,3-D applications,” Martinez says. “We really want to protect the public.”

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