22
Dec
Holiday Season and New Year Greetings as We Move Ahead Together for a Sustainable Future
On behalf of the Beyond Pesticides team, we wish you and your loved ones a happy and healthy holiday season! We deeply appreciate the vital community-based work taking place across the country as we join together to confront the existential health and environmental challenges of our time.
Meeting the challenges ahead with a transformative strategyÂ
Beyond Pesticides shares the vision of people and communities that are striving to ensure a future that protects health and sustains life. We are facing existential crises—the climate crisis, biodiversity collapse, and severe public health threats—from cancer to neurological, reproductive, and endocrine system effects, including brain and behavioral impacts. To reverse these threats —which we can do— we advance model organic solutions that eliminate billions of pounds of fossil fuel-based pesticides and synthetic fertilizers and nurture biological systems that take dangerous pollutants out of our environment, protecting health and the ecosystems that sustain life.  Â
- Our audacious goal: to phase out petrochemical pesticides and fertilizers by 2032.
- Our solution: to provide hands-on assistance, funded by our supporters, to assist in the transition to organic land management in community parks, playing fields, and schoolyards.Â
- The path moving forward: Advancing sustainable, organic practices and policies to solve the pesticide poisoning and contamination problem and the range of existential adverse effects in partnership with local communities and governments.
Over this past year, the urgency of our work has never been more palpable. Our daily collaboration with communities across the country—via the Parks for a Sustainable Future program—to adopt organic land management policies and practices in public spaces (parks, playing fields, and schoolyards) defined the path forward as a model to eliminate toxic pesticides and fertilizers, protect children, pets, and families, and sustain local ecosystems.Â
Our program bridges policy and practice—reframing strategies that go after an endless list of toxic chemicals—and advancing a holistic approach that recognizes complex biological communities, the importance of soil microbiota, complex biological communities, and ecosystem services in the context of broader human health and environmental protection. By developing organic systems plans and training parks and public works departments on organic-compatible practices and products, we engage in a systems approach that works with soil biology, enriches nutrient cycling, and cultivates more resilient landscapes that meet community expectations while delivering long-term cost savings.Â
It is imperative that, as we focus national attention on meaningful systemic change, we address the disproportionate risk to people of color communities and workers, from landscapers to farmworkers.Â
Elevating science that calls for the urgent need to actÂ
Local science-based advocacy is vital, in tandem with practical hands-on support, to drive the changes critical to a livable future as scientific facts coupled with action advance the adoption of solutions within our reach. Believing in the empowerment of advocates and decision-makers, our team provides up-to-date information on the independent, peer-reviewed scientific literature on our website and on a daily basis, five days a week, published in our Daily News blog in articles that analyze complex scientific findings, judicial rulings, regulatory decisions, and legislative action. Â
In addition, our unique databases offer tools to empower local activists and more to take action in their communities, schools, workplaces, and homes—including our Gateway on Pesticide Hazards and Safe Pest Management, Eating with a Conscience (on ecological and worker effects), What the Science Shows (pollinators), Pesticide-Induced Diseases Database, and ManageSafe (how to manage homes and gardens without pesticides). Our updated resources, such as the health and environmental effects in our 40 Most Commonly Used Lawn Pesticides, are “tools for change.† Â
Elevating our voice and networking for changeÂ
In the face of the chemical industry and related service providers wielding tremendous power across levels of government, and agencies not keeping pace with the escalating environmental and public health challenges, it is the communities and their elected officials that have chosen to actively engage in democratic decision making to protect the health of their residents. Â
As a key example, during the 2023 National Forum in November—Forging a Future with Nature—a mom and advocate from Maine spoke side-by-side with a parks supervisor from Colorado to share what change looks like—from two of dozens of our partner communities!
Our work in collaboration with these communities is a bright spot at a time when solutions may seem out of reach. In these perilous times, your support helps us to elevate these voices and empower grassroots-based strategies that lead the way in the face of federal and state inaction. Â
Online, our Action of the Week platform provides our network with one concrete action that can be taken each week to have our collective voice heard to advance specific actions that are protective of public and worker health, eliminate toxic pesticide use, and put in organic, sustainable, and regenerative practices and policies.Â
Taking a standÂ
Having worked with organic systems since our founding in 1981, we know that this change can be achieved. We continue—through campaigns such as Keeping Organic Strong—to push for the growth of organic agriculture as the only acceptable and foundational form of land management for the future.   Â
[Plus, with a 43-year+ history of successfully advancing systemic change, we know the solutions are within our grasp!]Â
Our team at Beyond Pesticides looks forward to continuing to partner with you in the new year to meet the existential environmental and public health challenges with truly organic solutions through policy, science, and action—one day at a time for ourselves and for future generations. Â
For more information and to discover actions that have defended democratic decision making to adopt organic land management on public land, informed action, and met the challenges of 2023, please click on the image above or the link to access our Year in Review page for 2023.
It’s a fact. Your support makes our work possible. 
A special thank you to all our donors and supporters this year. Without your engagement and incredible generosity, it would not be possible to lead the transition to a world free of toxic pesticides. Our team provides up-to-date information about the health and environmental hazards of pesticides, pesticide regulation and policy, holistic nontoxic management systems, and cutting-edge science—free of charge to the public. This program is not possible without the generosity of people like you! Â
Please make your secure tax-deductible donation at bp-dc.org/donate2023 or by clicking/scanning the QR code below!
