Marcia Ishii, senior scientist at Pesticide Action Network of North America For me, her book was a lens into the human condition that is a part of farming: It’s not just growing and producing something-it’s about what’s happening to the people on the land, too. Mas Masumoto: The book touched my life directly: I grew up on a farm, in a farm community. How did Silent Spring and Rachel Carson’s work touch your life? This conversation has been edited for length and clarity. Sandra Steingraber is a biologist and author, who blends her gifts as a writer, storyteller, and scientist with advocacy. Sharon Lerner is an investigative journalist who has reported on pesticides, chemical regulation, and the U.S. Anne Frederick is a community organizer in Hawaii, working with communities impacted by agrochemical companies’ expansion.

Marcia Ishii is Senior Scientist at Pesticide Action Network of North America, where she has worked for 26 years as a senior scientist. They include Mas Masumoto, a California organic peach farmer and author his forthcoming memoir Secret Harvests is a tale of family farms and a history of secrets. To explore these questions, Civil Eats hosted a roundtable with some of the field’s leading voices. With pesticides still so rampant, what is the legacy of Silent Spring? How far have we come and how much farther do we have to go to realize the human right to healthy food, and to protect the rights of the farmers and farmworkers growing that food? South America, for instance, has seen an almost 500 percent jump in use during that period. “It had a radical message at the time: raising the alarm about the devastating impact of chemical pesticides and connecting those dots to the profit motive of the corporations behind them.”ĭespite her warnings-and all we have learned since-pesticide use is up 81 percent in the past 35 years, with some regions of the world spiking considerably.

Silent spring