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Throughout 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 human health and the environment, and built support for the amendment of pesticide policies and the alteration of pesticide use practices. Their efforts led to the passage of more stringent regulations to better protect farmworkers, the public, and the environment. Environmental organizations and farmworker groups also acted as watchdogs, monitoring the activity of regulatory agencies and bringing suit when necessary to ensure that they fulfilled their responsibilities to the public. These groups served as not only lobbyists but also essential components of successful democratic governance, ensuring public participation and more effective policy implementation.
Adam Tompkins is Assistant Professor of History at Lakeland College Japan in Tokyo.
"With meticulous research and forceful arguments, Ghostworkers and Greens offers a strikingly original analysis of the relationship between farmworkers and environmentalists in responding to the threats of chemical insecticides from 1962 to 2011. Adam Tompkins draws on an impressive array of sources—archives, legislative hearings, media reports, and scholarly accounts from history, sociology, and political science."
Frederick R. Davis, Florida State University, author of Banned: A History of Pesticides and the Science of Toxicology:
"Ghostworkers and Greens portrays the parallel goals of environmentalists seeking to restrict excessive and harmful pesticide spraying on industrial farms and migrant farmworkers seeking a measure of social justice and relief from abysmal working conditions that include exposure to toxic chemicals. This important book demonstrates the significant connections between farmworkers and environmentalists in the quest to evaluate and limit the unintended consequences of the long-standing chemical dependency in American agriculture including threats of pesticides to people and ecosystems."
Erik Loomis, University of Rhode Island:
"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."
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