"After decades of pressure from farmworkers and their allies, California launched a statewide system to warn communities before they’re exposed to toxic pesticides. But health concerns remain."
"After a year of product tests that show pesticides in California cannabis products, regulators have yet to update standards. Santa Cruz County commissioners say the delay warrants a “public health emergency” and shifting responsibility to other state agencies."
"The number of butterflies in the contiguous United States declined by 22 percent this century, a collapse with potentially dire implications."
"Butterflies are rapidly fluttering out of existence from coast to coast, according to a new assessment published Thursday, at a rate that scientists worry could upend ecosystems and undercut pollination that sustains America’s crops.
"A US company that was secretly profiling hundreds of food and environmental health advocates in a private web portal has said it has halted the operations in the face of widespread backlash, after its actions were revealed by the Guardian and other reporting partners."
"Pesticide company efforts to push through laws that could block litigation against them is igniting battles in several US farm states and pitting some farm groups against each other. Laws have been introduced in at least 8 states so far and drafts are circulating in more than 20 states, backed by a deluge of advertising supporting the measures."
"The number of monarch butterflies spending the winter in the western United States has dropped to its second-lowest mark in nearly three decades as pesticides, diminishing habitat and climate change take their toll on the beloved pollinator."
"Farmer Rafik Danwade had been pumping more pesticides on his acre-long field in Jambhali village in India’s Maharashtra state, but the chemicals were getting less effective at protecting his 3,200 chili plants from nematodes and other bugs. So Danwade, 56, turned to a practice his grandfather taught him in the 1970s: He planted 1,000 marigolds on the border and alternating rows of the field."
"The Golden Rule doesn’t apply in the Golden State when it comes to protecting Latino and Indigenous farmworker communities from toxic pesticides."
"In Maine, Maryland, and beyond, the industry is using a well-worn playbook to slow legislators’ attempts to get forever chemicals out of food and water."
"Velsicol, a legacy polluter that manufactured pesticides, is proposing to hand over its 83-acre defunct facility in North Memphis to Tennessee as an environmental response trust. Should the Tennessee Department of Environment and Conservation (TDEC) accept a settlement agreement from the company, the state will be left to determine what to do with wide-ranging contamination including a baseball diamond-shaped pile of hazardous waste and a fluctuating groundwater plume of chemicals beneath it."
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