We're not able to attend the Pesticide Action Network's Toxic Taters Community Health Summit on Saturday, but share this notice for those who are able to make it.
Toxic Taters Community Health Summit with Sandra Steingraber in Perham Saturday Nov. 16 uploaded by Sally Jo Sorensen on Scribd
Bill Moyers described guest speaker Sandra Steingraber:
Ecologist and author Sandra Steingraber is an internationally-recognized authority on environmental links to cancer and human health. Called “a poet with a knife” by Sojourner magazine, Steingraber has received many honors for her work as a science writer. She was named a Ms. Magazine Woman of the Year, and the Sierra Club has heralded her as “the new Rachel Carson.” Carson’s own alma mater, Chatham College, selected Steingraber to receive its biennial Rachel Carson Leadership Award. Steingraber received a Hero Award from the Breast Cancer Fund in 2006, and the Environmental Health Champion Award from Physicians for Social Responsibility, Los Angeles, in 2009.
Steingraber has testified in the European Parliament, before the President’s Cancer Panel, and has participated in briefings to Congress and before United Nations delegates in Geneva, Switzerland. She has also been invited to speak throughout the United States and Canada at conferences on human health and the environment, and has been invited to lecture at many universities, medical schools, and hospitals. Her bladder cancer diagnosis at age 20, and her belief that this diagnosis was caused by toxins in her environment, is a frequent subject of her talks.
Steingraber’s highly acclaimed book, Living Downstream: An Ecologist’s Personal Investigation of Cancer and the Environment, was the first to bring together data on toxic releases with data from U.S. cancer registries. It won praise from international media including The Washington Post, Publishers Weekly, The Lancet, and The London Times. Another of Steingraber’s books, Having Faith: An Ecologist’s Journey to Motherhood, was both a memoir of her own pregnancy and an investigation of fetal toxicology. The Library Journal selected Having Faith as a best book of 2001, and it was featured in Bill Moyers’ 2002 documentary Kids and Chemicals.
In Steingraber’s most recent book, Raising Elijah: Protecting Children in an Age of Environmental Crisis, she describes the challenge of raising children in a world where toxic chemicals are legally permitted circulate in our economy, and makes the case that our ongoing environmental crisis is fundamentally a crisis of family life. A columnist for Orion magazine, Sandra Steingraber is currently a scholar in residence in Ithaca College in Ithaca, New York.
Toxic Taters organizer Willa Childress wrote in an email:
Sandra Steingraber is an amazing researcher, activist, and ecologist who speaks very eloquently on human health and the environment. We are very lucky to have gotten a grant to bring her to this event and are excited to bring regional leaders to talk on health, agriculture, and the environment. It’ll be a convening of rural activists, farmers, researchers, and health practitioners . . . . The event is in Perham this Saturday from 1-4 PM. Sandra speaks from 1:30-2:30 . . .
The Toxic Tater Coalition describes itself:
We are in the potato-growing areas of central and north central Minnesota. We came together starting in 2005. We have experienced health effects from pesticide drift. We have also seen health effects on animals, both domestic and wild. Our water has become polluted with high nitrate levels.
The pesticides that are harming us and our environment are drifting from potato fields owned by Ronald D. Offutt, or RDO, the largest potato grower in the world and one of McDonald’s leading potato suppliers.
Two groups, Minnesotans for Pesticide Awareness and a group from the White Earth Nation, have used Drift Catchers to monitor the problem of pesticides drifting into our communities. In 2012 Pesticide Action Network released a report documenting the findings from our Drift Catching. The data showed that our communities are breathing chlorothalonil, a fungicide widely used on potatoes, as well as several other chemicals.
This isn't all potato pie-in-the-sky.
The McKnight Foundation reported in Toxic Taters? How a Determined Group Got a Potato Supplier to Change its Ways:
Pesticide Action Network (PAN) is part of a global network working to protect public health and the environment from the harms of pesticides, and to promote ecologically sound and socially just food and farming.
PAN challenges the global proliferation of pesticides, defends basic rights to health and environmental quality, and works to ensure the transition to just and viable systems of food and farming. . . .
Conventionally-grown potatoes are one of the most pesticide-intensive crops in the Midwest. As documented in PAN’s 2012 report Pesticide Drift from Minnesota Potato Fields, drift-prone fungicides like chlorothalonil — which has been linked to cancer — are commonly found near homes in rural communities in northern Minnesota. In 2014, PAN’s Midwest Organizers Linda Wells and Lex Horan helped the Toxic Taters Coalition officially kick off its campaign of calling on McDonald’s to source potatoes from producers who don’t expose rural communities to fungicide drift.
PAN, Toxic Taters, and Food and Water Watch delivered 20,000 petition signatures to McDonald’s during the corporation’s shareholder meeting in St. Louis, Missouri. The effort succeeded in getting the Toxic Taters Coalition’s campaign squarely on McDonald’s radar. The Coalition also had a very public dialogue with RDO, the largest U.S. producer of potatoes McDonald’s primary potato supplier. In part due to this public pressure, RDO announced a move away from using chlorothalonil, a very drift-prone fungicide, and Minnesota officials have put the brakes on a proposed expansion of RDO’s potato production in the state.
Photo: Taters. We've grown our own since reading about the commercial potato industry's use of industrial ag chemicals.
If you appreciate our posts and original analysis, you can mail contributions (payable to Sally Jo Sorensen, 600 Maple Street, Summit SD 57266) or use the paypal button in the upper right hand corner of this post. Those wishing to make a small ongoing monthly contribution should click on the paypal subscription button.
Or you can contribute via this link to paypal; use email [email protected] as recipient.
Comments