The pesticides used in orchards and farm fields in places like eastern Washington endanger the health – and even the lives – of immigrant farm workers.
Also in this issue: While Congress debates whether Utah Gov. Mike Leavitt should take over the Environmental Protection Agency, the agency itself plows ahead in an anti-environmental direction.
It’s time for some solidarity
Our cover story focuses on farm fields and orchards in Washington state, where the plentiful harvest has an ugly, hidden cost, with workers often dangerously exposed to toxic pesticides. It’s an outrageous situation that nonetheless is typical around the nation. Between the lines, freelance writer Rebecca Clarren, who is a former HCN editor, finds larger…
What child labor laws?
Note: This article is a sidebar to this issue’s feature story, “Harvesting Poison.” WENATCHEE, Wash. — José and Luis are only 10 and 11 years old, but they are already expert cherry-pickers. With three summers of experience working in the orchards with their father, they know how to pluck the cherries without harming the tree…
Harvesting Poison
In the little-seen world of immigrant farmworkers, pesticides are a constant threat — and for the workers, the only options are shutting up or getting out.
Enough partisan divisiveness
Tweeti Blancett’s article on fighting the gas drilling was timely, after just hearing Alan Greenspan expound on the need for increased drilling to improve our economy (HCN, 6/9/03: Why I fight: The coming gas explosion in the West). I appreciate her clarification that this is not a partisan issue. Nearly all issues these days seem…
Too little land, too many people
Although I think it is useful to consider the environmental impacts of rock climbing (HCN, 7/7/03: Invasion of the rock jocks), I have to wonder about the story’s lack of context. Of course, there are fewer plants and animals on a cliff face that climbers frequent. That seems quite obvious. However, out of all the…
City at the end of its rope
Anyone who has lived in Albuquerque, and sworn a curse upon the city and all its planners, visitors and inhabitants while broiling in traffic, and then eaten chile rellenos at sunset while watching the Sandia Mountains turn pink, knows that love and hate, beauty and grit, stand shoulder to shoulder in this desert city. Longtime…
Calendar
The 12th annual Symposium of the California Exotic Pest Plant Council runs Oct. 2-4 in Kings Beach, Calif. Land managers and researchers will speak on “Planning Weed Management for Ecosystem Recovery.” Call 510-525-1502 or visit www.caleppc.org. The University of Montana is sponsoring the 27th Annual Public Land Law Conference and Plum Creek Lecture Series in…
Water law for dummies
There’s nothing worse than being stumped during a dinner conversation while attorneys and professors quarrel over the intricacies of water law. Now, Coloradoans can dive right into those debates, thanks to a new booklet that translates state water law into plain English. The Citizen’s Guide to Colorado Water Law, by the nonprofit Colorado Foundation for…
Living in two worlds
Like many American Indian children, Viola Martinez — a Paiute Indian from California’s Owens Valley — was taken from her family and sent to a government boarding school in the early 20th century. There, she was to be “civilized” and trained as a maid. But instead of giving in to the system, she decided to…
Follow-up
Environmentalists aren’t the only ones opposed to mining in the wilderness. Citing “quality of life” concerns, more than 50 business owners in Sandpoint, Idaho, officially opposed the Forest Service’s plan to allow a copper mine beneath Montana’s Cabinet Mountains Wilderness Area (HCN, 2/18/02: Battle brews over a wilderness mother lode). The downstream businesses include an…
Good gear or good luck
Gail Binkly is one lucky girl to have survived camping for nearly 20 years in a $19.95 tent (HCN, 8/4/03: When did we become such gear-toting wimps?). She joins countless others having copious amounts of good luck who climb to the summits of the 14,000-foot mountains around us wearing shorts and a T-shirt and without…
Keep fire wild
Ray Ring’s wonderful story on fire in the West (HCN, 5/26/03: A losing battle) catches the deep tension we still have between a wild and tame West. Fire, just like grizzlies, drought, pine beetles and volcanoes, is a powerful force that has shaped Western ecosystems for millennia. One side of our Western culture has struggled…
Hell’s fires burn in the Northern Rockies
If hell has mountains, they must look like the Northern Rockies. As my fire spotter and I fly an insignificantly small airplane over our territory in western Montana, we weave through brown tendrils of wind-shredded smoke that curl around granite peaks. Sudden explosions of dark ash rise into the air above stands of trees as…
Who’s at the helm?
The EPA hasn’t had anyone at the wheel for three months — but it’s been charging full steam ahead
Extinction – by the clock
It isn’t easy being a cheerleader for a bottom-feeder, but I’m feeling up for the task. Montana’s two varieties of sturgeon — a miraculous, prehistoric fish that feeds at the bottom of lakes and rivers —have recently been given an expiration date, an official prediction of when they’ll become extinct. A doomsday clock all their…
Timber companies borrow a tool from environmentalists
Conservation easements help protect private forests — and keep logging jobs alive, too.
Heard Around the West
NEVADA The satirical newspaper The Onion spoofed the Burning Man celebration in the Black Rock Desert, reporting that everybody was too spaced out to bother going. But in fact, some 30,000 people turned out in late August to “burn the man” — a 77 foot-high neon-colored effigy made of wood. Flames shot 150 feet in…
Reckless rancher cuts sweet deal in D.C.
Bush administration orders local BLM office to back off
Reweaving the river
Farmers and ranchers — not ‘yuppie environmentalists’ — work on a Colorado restoration
Dear Friends
THE WRITE STUFF The season’s beginning to change here in Paonia, and with crisper days we’ve also got fresh editorial blood for the fall. Hailing from tropical Kailua-Kona, Hawaii, new HCN intern Pua Mench moved to Hawaii’s “polar” opposite to attend Carleton College in Northfield, Minn., where the temperatures dipped to minus-40 degrees. Eventually, she…
Healthy workers, healthy label
Note: This article is a sidebar to this issue’s feature story, “Harvesting Poison.” The Bailey family grows more than cherries on their 1,500-acre orchard in The Dalles, Ore. The fourth-generation farmers are also trying to nurture worker-friendly conditions. They offer employees decent housing, such as modular trailers and small brick houses, equipped with showers, toilets…
Connections to your kitchen
The next time you reach for these three popular foods, consider this sampler of the chemicals commonly applied to them in the fields, and the potential impacts to farmworkers’ health if the pesticides are used improperly. Apples Azinphosmethyl (AZM), a pesticide, can cause nausea, convulsions, weakness, respiratory distress, headaches, eye injuries and neurological damage that…