Speakers

Chip Osborne is a nationally renowned organic turfgrass expert and a professional horticulturist with 40 years experience, including 20 years in greenhouse production as the former owner and operator of Osborne Florist and Greenhouse in Marblehead, Massachusetts. As founder and president of Osborne Organics, he has over 20 years experience in creating safe, sustainable and healthy athletic fields and landscapes that are managed cost-effectively. Mr. Osborne has worked with municipalities, assisting in the development and management oversight and consultant for organically managed sports fields and parks in communities, school districts, and universities across the U.S. He has pioneered organic land management programs that both evaluate soil biology (the soil food web) and design strategies for building soil microbial life, which is critical to working with nature to break down organic matter as a natural food source for plants. His analysis and recommendations advise parks managers in maintaining turf and landscapes without petrochemical pesticides and fertilizers. As a part of his work, he evaluates compost for beneficial organisms to determine its value in a management program and measures the ability of the soil in his projects to sequester atmospheric carbon. He has served in elective office as the chair of Marblehead’s Recreation and Parks Commission for 20 years. As a wholesale and retail nurseryman he has first-hand experience with the pesticides routinely used in the landscape industry. Personal experience led him to believe there must be a safer way to grow plants. His personal investigation, study of conventional and organic soil science practices, and hands-on experimentation led him to become one of the country's leading experts on growing organic turf. Chip is a Beyond Pesticides board member.

Avery Kamila founded Portland Protectors to bring together Maine citizens to end the use and sale of synthetic lawncare pesticides and fertilizers in the coastal city. Portland Protectors says, “We strive to protect our kids, pets, bees, soil and Casco Bay from these toxic chemicals, as they drift around neighborhoods and leach into the public water systems.” In 2018, the city of Portland passed an ordinance that over five years phased in restrictions “to safeguard the health, safety and welfare of the residents of the City and to conserve and protect the City’s waterways and natural resources by curtailing the use of pesticides and fertilizers for turf, landscape and outdoor pest management.”  The ordinance establishes organic land care methods as the primary means to care for and maintain public and private property in Portland, including lawns, gardens, athletic fields, parks, and playgrounds. Ms. Kamila was appointed to the city’s Landcare Management Advisory Committee, created by the City Council in the ordinance. As a result of its passage, Portland posts the following on its website: “Using synthetic pesticides and fertilizers harms pollinators and native species. These products cause excess chemicals to run off into our waterways, worsening water quality, increasing ocean acidification, creating algae blooms, and damaging marine life–which also impacts local fisheries and marine businesses.  Plus, pesticides and fertilizers have proven negative effects on our families.  Children are especially vulnerable to chemical exposure from lawn products when they play outside.  Pesticides and herbicides are also linked to cancer in dogs.  By switching to organic lawn and landscape care, we can ensure the health of our community and make our environment more resilient to climate impacts.”

A Colorado native and Colorado State University graduate, Mr. Gratton has been maintaining and transforming municipal landscapes across the Front Range for nearly 15 years. Using his degree in Landscape Horticulture, his work as a parks supervisor has helped the City of Longmont's more than 600 acres become more sustainable with organic maintenance, turfgrass conversions, pollinator gardens, and reimagining traditional landscapes. Mr. Gratton has been managing pilot sites in Longmont Colorado as a part of Beyond Pesticides' Parks for a Sustainable Future program. Of the program in Longmont, Mr. Gratton told the Longmont Leader, “Instead of using pesticides, Longmont, “selects turfgrass with more aggressive rhizomes — underground stems — to outcompete weed seeds, engages in more frequent core aeration and in overseeding to decrease weed pressure dramatically," The city views the organic land management program as part of its overall sustainability efforts to reduce water use, protect air quality, and enhance its ecosystem.

Marcos Orellana, PhD— the United Nations Special Rapporteur on toxics and human rights—is an expert in international law and the law on human rights and the environment. His recent reports in South Africa and Australia capture the significance of his work for environmental justice. Dr. Orellana teaches at the American University Washington College of Law.  

His engagement around the world captures critical truths that are challenges across the globe, such as his statement after a visit to South Africa in September. Dr. Orellana said, “The term 'environmental racism' describes institutionalized discrimination based on race or colour. In pre-1994 South Africa, the distribution of environmental risks and harms disproportionately and often deliberately targeted low-income groups and along racial lines. Today, despite the efforts by Government in setting up institutions and laws to address this legacy of environmental racism, pervasive air, water, and chemical pollution still imposes a heavy toll, especially on disadvantaged communities. Overcoming it will require significant additional efforts, including structural, legislative, economic, and environmental changes." 

His practice as a legal advisor has included work with United Nations agencies, governments, and non-governmental organizations, including on waste and chemicals issues at the Basel and Minamata conventions, the UN Environment Assembly, and the Human Rights Council. He has intervened in cases before the Inter-American Court of Human Rights, the International Tribunal for the Law of the Sea, the International Centre for Settlement of Investment Disputes, and the World Trade Organization's Appellate Body. His practice in the climate space includes representing the eight-nations Independent Association of Latin America and the Caribbean in the Paris Agreement on Climate Change negotiations. He has also served as senior legal advisor to the Presidency of the 25th Conference of the Parties of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change. 

Professor Orellana has extensive experience working with civil society worldwide on global environmental justice issues. He was the inaugural director of the Environment and Human Rights Division at Human Rights Watch. Previously he directed the trade and the human rights programs at the Center for International Environmental Law, and he co-chaired the UN Environment Program's civil society forum. 

Professor Orellana teaches at the American University Washington College of Law. He has also lectured at prominent universities around the world, including Melbourne, Pretoria, Geneva, and Guadalajara. He was a fellow at the University of Cambridge, a visiting scholar with the Environmental Law Institute in Washington DC, and an instructor professor of international law at the Universidad de Talca, Chile. 

Jayson Maurice Porter, PhD, is an environmental historian of Mexico and the Americas and teaches science and technology studies, material culture, and black geographies in Latin America. Dr. Porter focuses on oilseeds, agrochemicals, environmental justice, and ecological violence. He is an editorial board member of the North American Congress on Latin America and a Voss Postdoctoral Fellow at the Institute at Brown for Environment and Society (2022), and he recently began teaching in the Department of History at the University of Maryland, College Park. 

Dr. Porter’s research has traced the history of arsenic mining and use as an insecticide that has left a legacy of poisoning, pesticide dependency, and contamination. As he has written, “Arsenic has remained number 1 on the list of priority hazardous substances in the United States for decades. Nearly a third of the country’s 1,200 superfund sites have arsenic-contaminated water and soil. Most contaminated land resulted from U.S. businesses mining, manufacturing, and using arsenic, which they already shared and practiced across the Americas. Millions of people today in Argentina, Mexico, Peru, Honduras, and El Salvador are exposed to pesticide-related concentrations of arsenic.” 

In “Cotton, Whiteness, and Poisons” (Environmental Humanities, Nov. 2022), by Brian Williams, PhD, assistant professor in the Department of Geosciences at Mississippi State University, coauthor Dr. Porter writes about a U.S. history of “labor exploitation conditioned by racist ideologies” underpinning plantation agriculture. The recognition that dependency on pesticides and fertilizers undermines the economic stability of small farmers, the authors write, “At the Tuskegee Institute’s agricultural experiment station, George Washington Carver recognized that commercial fertilizers were a key source of debt for Black farmers and tenants. He encouraged composting and the use of organic fertilizers found on the farm, writing that “many thousands of dollars are being spent every year here in the South for fertilizers that profit the user very little, while Nature’s choicest fertilizer is going to waste.” 

The authors conclude, “[R]acism saturated the environmental and technological conceptions that shaped the development of plantation agriculture and systemically oriented agrarian development toward extraction, environmental dispossession, and toxicity. Environmental racism, that is to say, is not ancillary to capitalism but a central feature—animating ideas of value, waste, and technological progress. Racism simultaneously values and devalues people, land, and ecologies, while generating and channeling toxicity.” 

In 2022, Dr. Porter stated in Agrochemicals, Environmental Racism, and Environmental Justice in U.S. History (Organic Center, 2022), that “Robert Bullard defines environmental racism as any policy or practice that unequally affects or disadvantages individuals, groups or communities based on their race. Vann Newkirk II adds that environmental racism is the opposite of environmental justice and often ignores or belittles input from the affected communities of color.”