21
Dec
Best Wishes This Season! Please Donate for a Strong Beyond Pesticides
(Beyond Pesticides, December 21-31, 2018)  As we look ahead to the new year, we wish you good health, extend our appreciation for your being a part of the Beyond Pesticides network, and ask you to consider a contribution to Beyond Pesticides. Your support is critical to our program and deeply appreciated.
We approach the new year with a sense of optimism that we will advance our collective will to solve devastating environmental problems. We believe it can be done! But, it takes us all joining together with a strong voice and unified action to stop hazardous practices, while putting safe and sustainable alternatives in place. With your support of Beyond Pesticides, we strive to reverse the destructive environmental and public health path that we’re on.
As a grassroots organization, we work with community-based campaigns and organizations to put organic land management practices in place—in our parks, on playing fields, school grounds, and throughout communities. Together, we eliminate practices that contaminate waterways, put poisons in the air, degrade and destroy life in the soil, and expose us to pesticides that cause or contribute to a range of dreaded diseases like cancer—Parkinson’s, diabetes, reproductive disorders, autism, and more.
- We can change the current course—take the glyphosate/Roundup out of communities, remove the bee-toxic pesticides, eliminate pesticides that kill the soil and aquatic food webs, as well as our gut microbiome—and begin to restore the health of people and the environment.
- We can do this without spending more moneyat the community level because life-sustaining management of our parks and communities utilizes ecosystem services by supporting ecological balance and cycling nutrients in the soil, instead of relying on expensive, synthetic, fossil fuel-based, toxic pesticides and fertilizers.
- We work on the interconnectedness of issues and stress holistic solutionsto the range of seemingly insurmountable environmental problems that we face. We do this through our efforts to push for an urgent transition to organic practices from chemical-intensive land and building management in communities across the country.
- We are helping to establish model communities that show it can be done, like in the city of South Portland, Maine. There, the city council passed a law a couple of years ago to eliminate toxic pesticides throughout the entire municipality, and this year began implementing it with information, factsheets, staff training, plan development, and the launching of a terrific website.
We are making progress in advancing our strategic goal to eliminate toxic pesticide use, with examples in dozens of communities nationwide that are establishing organic land management programs. Your support will help us to reach more communities in the next year.
With your support, we (i) develop community plans to transition to organic management practices, (ii) nurture complex biological communities in nature, in all its beauty and public health and environmental benefits, (iii) train local government staff to understand and adopt soil-based cultural practices for managing parks and playing fields, (iv) protect local and regional waterways, and (v) create an alignment and alliance with the business community (like the local ACE hardware store in Maine, where the owner has transitioned the store’s lawn and garden department to advance organic practices and products).
Your support helps Beyond Pesticides bring to communities the resources necessary to put the organic changes in place. Your support helps us to stop pesticide use and advance organic practices with our programs that:
- Make science on the pesticide problem and solution understandable to the public;
- Support and empower people in their communities;
- Influence decision makers; and,
- Implement on-the-ground practices in communities nationwide
Please check out the latest issue of our journal, Pesticides and You. Our feature article, Pesticide Exposure and the Obesity Pandemic, exemplifies the importance of getting the science out, and this issue adds more evidence of the need for the organic transition.
To further align our work with the medical community, we are co-convening the 37th National Pesticide Forum, Organic Strategies for Community Environmental Health: Eliminating pesticides where we live, work, learn, and play, with the Center for Children’s Environmental Health at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mt. Sinai, April 5-6, 2019 in New York City. Please consider joining us!
Thank you for considering supporting Beyond Pesticides at the end of the year. For a $150 donation, we will send you Beyond Pesticides’ organic canvas tote bag or our new Organic Landscape sign that displays our blue dragonfly logo.
All best wishes for the holiday season and new year!
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