A 2021 federal ban on chlorpyrifos – a widely-used pesticide with neurotoxic properties that has harmed people and wildlife for decades – is a massive environmental win due in large part to the efforts of nonprofit organizations and community groups over the last 20 years.
Two 11th Hour Project grantees, Californians for Pesticide Reform (CPR) and Pesticide Action Network (PAN) — were instrumental in pressuring elected leaders to stand up to corporate interests and phase out use of the chemical. CPR and PAN also engaged in grassroots science with California farmworker communities to document the harmful impacts of chlorpyrifos through air monitoring projects and biomonitoring. In an op-ed in Civil Eats, Margaret Reeves, a senior scientist at PAN and Ángel García, organizing director for CPR, share their experience about “the power of community organizing:”
This historic moment is built on the collective actions of many, they wrote. On a consistent basis, teachers, farmworkers, youth, mothers, and grandmothers travelled from all over the Central Valley and gathered in living rooms of homes in agricultural communities like Lindsay, California. They wrote, “Together, we shared our stories in English and Spanish, brainstorming campaign activities and building people power. Everyone there knew someone who had a child with a learning difficulty. Some worked in the fields, some had been dealing with pesticide drift around their homes, and others had simply moved into developments on former farmland where chlorpyrifos had been sprayed in the past.”
“These meetings brought together people from a range of backgrounds, people who would never have rubbed elbows outside of that space, but in which they shared a common concern, and were no longer isolated from one another. We were all united in demanding that our rights and our health be protected.”
CPR and PAN engaged in grassroots science with community members to document the direct body burden faced by individual representative community members. They coordinated several community-based air monitoring projects with California farmworker communities to record air exposures using PAN’s Drift Catcher. PAN also worked with the community to do biomonitoring—gathering urine samples to determine elevated levels of chlorpyrifos in people’s bodies.
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