Description
Book SynopsisThroughout the twentieth century, despite compelling evidence that some pesticides posed a threat to human and environmental health, growers and the USDA continued to favor agricultural chemicals over cultural and biological forms of pest control. In Ghostworkers and Greens, Adam Tompkins reveals a history of unexpected cooperation between farmworker groups and environmental organizations. Tompkins shows that the separate movements shared a common concern about the effects of pesticides on human health. This enabled bridge-builders within the disparate organizations to foster cooperative relationships around issues of mutual concern to share information, resources, and support.Nongovernmental organizations, particularly environmental organizations and farmworker groups, played a key role in pesticide reform. For nearly fifty years, these groups served as educators, communicating to the public scientific and experiential information about the adverse effects of pesticides on h
Trade Review
Adam Tompkins provides a useful addition to the literature on alliances between environmentalists and workers in this study documenting the shifting coalitions between greens and farmworkers to fight pesticide poisoning in the Southwest and Florida. Noting that neither movement could defeat the agricultural and chemical lobbies on their own, he argues "that bridge-builders transcended differences between organizations and ably negotiated the cultural terrain of diverse movements to foster working relationships" (p. 10). In doing so, Ghostworkers and Greens is an important story in this growing body of scholarship.
-- Erik Loomis, University of Rhode Island * Oxford University Press Journals: Environmental History *
Tompkins builds a compelling argument that respective organization leaders sought and achieved significant, if still limited, cooperation in campaigns to regulate pesticide use in the U.S.... Tompkins' close attention to the interplay between policy dynamics and organizing strategies has timely insights not only for scholars of labor and environmental issues, but also for organizers who seek to build strategic coalitions across groups.
* Polar: Political & Legal Anthropology Review *
Table of ContentsConfronting the Consequences of the Pesticide Paradigm
1. Sowing the Seeds of Chemical Dependency
2. Hidden Hands of the Harvest
3. The Budding Movement for Pesticide Reform, 1962–1972
4. Movements in Transition: Environmentalists, Farmworkers, and the Regulatory State, 1970–1976
5. A Different Kind of Border War: Arizona, 1971–1986
6. Resisting Rollbacks: California, 1982–1990
7. From the Ground Up: Fumigants, Ozone, and Health
Diversity and Unity in the Pesticide Reform Movement
