24
Dec
Holiday Season and New Year Greetings for a Renewed Spirit Working to Protect Health and the Environment
(Beyond Pesticides, December 24, 2024 – January 2, 2025) We wish you a healthy and happy holiday season! The health and environmental challenges that we face as families and communities across the nation and worldwide require us to stay engaged. The stark reality of the challenges ahead energizes us at Beyond Pesticides to strengthen our program—now, more than ever!
And, we trust that you, like us, want to push forward for a livable future. In this context, please see our annual report and summary on the important work that we are doing, and please consider a contribution to Beyond Pesticides during this holiday season.
While the threats of health, biodiversity, and climate crises grow exponentially, the solutions we have advocated for decades are now within reach. We know how to produce food and manage land without petrochemical pesticides and fertilizers, as organic food is widely available. Beautiful parks, playing fields, and schoolyards do not require toxic chemical use. At the same time, the regulatory system underperforms, as existential health and environmental problems escalate.
And, we know that individual steps that we take to stay healthy, as important as they are, cannot protect us and the natural world, on which we depend, from involuntary petrochemical exposure through ongoing contamination of land, air, and water. The science is telling us that we can no longer tinker with chemical reduction strategies that fall short of protecting our health, biodiversity, and climate.
Your support enables us to move forward with our bold program.
A strategy for curtailing threats to health, biodiversity, and health
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.
To meet the existential health, biodiversity, and climate crises, we provide real-time support to people and organizations, from local to global, with up-to-date scientific findings, policy critiques, and timely initiatives, empowering strategic action with knowledge on:
- The current and looming threats to human health and ecosystems and the dire consequences of inaction or measures that fall far short of what is necessary; and
- The path forward to eliminate the use of petrochemical-based pesticides and fertilizers, including the constellation of toxic materials used in food production and the management of homes, gardens, parks, playing fields, and schools.
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.
Our programs bridge 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, 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.
It is imperative that, as we focus national attention on meaningful systemic change, we simultaneously address the disproportionate risk to people of color communities and workers, from landscapers to farmworkers. Disproportionate harm to people of color from toxic petrochemicals is a continuing crisis and can only be solved when we transition away from dependency on them and use stops. The manufacture of petrochemical fertilizers and pesticides also creates a major environmental injustice for predominantly Black and Brown communities where production facilities are often located.
We start with the science—calling for the urgent need to act
With science made accessible to nonscientists, we empower people to advocate effectively with decision makers, elected officials, and all those responsible for directing or managing the choice of practices and products. Our Daily News, published on our website, focuses on the compelling scientific justification for eliminating pesticides. Our journal, Pesticides and You, provides a compendium of scientific research as a breathtaking warning from the science community that our laws are not adequately protective and the shift to organic is urgently needed. Our recent issue, Meeting the Existential Challenges: Empowering Action for Change with Science, shows the preponderance of science.
With our daily monitoring, we maintain robust scientific databases that offer tools to empower local activists and more to take action in their communities, schools, workplaces, and homes as “tools for change”—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).
Elevating our voice and networking for change—taking a stand!
In the face of the chemical industry and related service providers wielding tremendous power across all 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.
We advance systemic change, advocating policies and practices to change the underlying conditions associated with land management that contribute to the existential public health, biodiversity, or climate crises. In this context, we issue an Action of the Week throughout the year that targets opportunities to integrate this thinking into the public policy debate at the local, state, national, and international level. While we comment on specific chemicals and actions before regulatory agencies, we characterize them as poster children for what is wrong with toxic pesticide and fertilizer dependency. In these actions, we point to the unreasonableness of the harm that is being allowed by policy and regulatory decisions, given the availability of organic alternatives.
Having worked with organic systems since our founding in 1981, we also 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.
Our work is multidimensional and collaborative— building on our organizational history!
When Beyond Pesticides was founded in 1981, we knew that we needed to forge a new path that rejected the reliance on petrochemical pesticides and fertilizers, while the laws protected the chemical industry more than people, workers, and environment. With stronger government and chemical and allied industry alliances on the horizon, our community-based campaigns to transition to organic land management are critically important.
We call out compromises that are unacceptable, given the existential crises. Several weeks ago, EPA announced that it would allow the continued use of the highly neurotoxic insecticide chlorpyrifos on crops that are among the most extensively grown and used in the world—soybeans, wheat, cotton, citrus, sugar beets, and numerous fruits and vegetables. EPA described the canceled uses as a victory. However, here is our response to the media: The compromises associated with petrochemical use and the public’s health are unconscionable given the availability of cost-effective and productive alternatives. . . With decisions like this in the aggregate, the toxic load on people and the environment is unsustainable.
Forging a Path Towards a Livable Future, Together!
Despite the challenges, we draw optimism from our community-based work, showing the path forward. We ask you to support us in expanding our grassroots work and voice, which speaks through our hands-on experience to build a sustainable future that eliminates the use of toxic pesticides and fertilizers. When the chemical industry and its allies in elective office seek to undermine public health and environmental protection, we push back with the same empowered grassroots network, calling out unacceptable harm, given the viability of the organic alternative for the common good. 
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!
For more information and to discover actions that have defended democratic decision making to adopt organic land management on public land, informed action, and meet the challenges of 2025, please click on the image above or the link to access the Year in Review page for 2024.
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!
Thank you for considering support for Beyond Pesticides this year! Please mail your tax-deductible donation to our office or donate securely on our website!
All unattributed positions and opinions in this piece are those of Beyond Pesticides.
