A Precautionary Tale
Page 17
Johannes’s round wire-rimmed spectacles fit tightly on his head, and his broad grin lifts his cheeks repeatedly throughout the course of a conversation. That conversation, by the way, will be rapid-fire, whether in Tirolean dialect, high German, or Italian. And bystander beware: Give him a few feet of extra space, since he is armed with a blended lexicon of Teutonic and Mediterranean gesticulations that will animate any conversation.
The only child in his family, Johannes was, by his own reckoning, the Erbprinz, the destined inheritor, so he was “programmed from the beginning to be a pharmacist—there was never any choice.” The pharmacy in Mals formed a strong part of his family’s identity, but it had also played a central role in the town ever since its establishment in 1807. Its location beside the town’s main square and a stone’s throw from the town hall and the main church add to the pharmacy’s central role in the town’s commerce and communications, and Johannes was generally happy to be fully in the mix of things.
However, he had always found joy in getting away from the shiny, sterile environment of his father’s pharmacy for a healthy reprieve on his mother’s family farm. He worked there every summer prior to his required military service, even spending five seasons in a hut on the high pastures. He’d milked ten cows, brought in hay, and harvested rye and wheat to supplement the cattle feed. As he put it, “I’ve gotten my hands dirty and my feet have been in the manure.”
Although he eventually had to focus on the demands of managing the business after he completed his doctorate in pharmacy in Florence, Johannes continued to cultivate his connections with the local landscape by working a Streuobstwiese that he had inherited from his mother just above the town of Mals, at an elevation of 3,281 feet (1,000 m). He grows his own grain there, planting spelt for three years and then rotating to rye for one year before leaving it fallow for the fifth year. He also grows potatoes, carrots, berries, apricots, plums, and apples. Those activities keep him attuned to the cycles of nature, as well as the deep agricultural traditions of the region.
Being a village chemist in an isolated rural area is by nature a much different occupation than that of a pharmacist in a city or a drugstore chain. A pharmacist has to be everything, he explains: “A pharmacist is, in a way, a doctor, a veterinarian, a therapist, a counselor, a first-responder . . .”
And sometimes a spokesperson, as it would turn out.
There was an irony in Johannes’s new position as spokesperson for the activists in Mals. While a pharmacist is well prepared to dispense chemicals in minute doses that will help people find their way to comfort and overall health, a pharmacist isn’t necessarily prepared to address the prescribed doses in parts per million or parts per billion related to pesticides—or, as they are known in the industry, “crop protection.” Nonetheless, as it turns out, a pharmacist is one of the best-equipped members of a community for understanding the unknowns and the potential hazards of such unprescribed and unrequested dosages.
Johannes’s pharmaceutical training included various courses in toxicology, and knowing what he knew, he couldn’t remain silent, particularly given the excessive levels of pesticides used in the South Tirol. While the usage rates vary from farm to farm, statistics indicate the average application of pesticides in the area to be approximately 31 pounds per acre (35 kg/ha),1 while according to Johannes some fruit farmers use as much as 44 to 53 pounds per acre (50–60 kg/hectare) on an annual basis.
Despite these stark statistics, the apple lobby and its cronies were masters at adopting, or co-opting, language and motifs that were meant to mollify concerns about the poisoning of air, water, land, and—at the top of the food chain—humans. Pestizide (pesticides) became Pflanzenschutzmittel (plant protection products), Konventionelobstbau (conventional fruit production) turned into Integrierteobstbau (integrated fruit production), and the nearly decimated Marienkaifer (ladybug) somehow found its way on the labels and logos of almost all things apple in the South Tirol.
Johannes’s training meant he had to challenge the conventional viewpoint:
As a pharmacist, you will prescribe medicine to people that can obviously also have side effects, interactions, contraindications—and here the expert academic says “the dosage makes the difference.” However, as a patient you go to the physician voluntarily, and the doctor will, to the best of their knowledge and belief, decide what medicine you alone require and at what dosage, and you are then still free to decide if you want the medicine or not. If, however, entire areas of healthy people are sprayed with pesticides, with poison, against their will, then there is no comparison.
Although he is adamant about his views on the necessity to protect human health whenever possible, Johannes is also a political realist. He describes the Upper Vinschgau as a place long defined by boundaries of all kinds. Not only is Mals at the junction of Switzerland, Austria, and Italy, but it is also a place where Italian, Tirolean dialect, high German, and Romansch (an ancient language used in isolated communities in the Alps, it is suspected to be a relic of Roman legions left in the area) are intermingled. And it’s a place where the Catholic Church and the Calvinists collided and established boundaries of influence during the Reformation.
Therefore, he understands that boundaries are porous, whether they are cultural, linguistic, nationalistic, religious, or ecological; and he understands that apple cultivation isn’t likely to be stopped altogether. But he and others were unwilling to accept the poisoning of the environment that came with chemical-intensive orchards.
By the end of 2012, it was clear to the concerned citizens of Mals that things weren’t going to change if they didn’t up their game. Plans for the two research orchards in Laatsch continued to move ahead. They were to be placed in contrasting locations and with opposite orientations to determine whether orchard rows should be aligned with or counter to the prevailing Vinschgerwind in order to mitigate drift. As plans evolved, it turned out that one of the orchards would also be dedicated to testing out apple varieties best suited to the upper elevations and the other to stone fruit varieties that could be grown in the area. It was a classic case of the fox guarding the henhouse—from the inside. If it wasn’t clear before, it was now: The research had everything to do with testing how to advance “modern” agriculture in the Upper Vinschgau, and little if anything to do with testing pesticide impacts.
In an effort to address the growing tensions, the South Tirolean government and other interested (and invested) parties began to develop new spraying guidelines and buffer requirements in December of that year. Perhaps it was a lack of imagination, but by the time the recommendations were developed, 3 meters—less than 10 feet—from the trunk of outermost trees was determined to be a sufficient buffer between an orchard and another agricultural enterprise. Three meters wasn’t going to do much on days with any wind and on parcels with no protective hedges or solid fencing. It was too little, too late. But it also spoke to the near-impossibility of developing suitable buffers in an area where land parcels are tiny and agricultural holdings spread out over many individual plots of land. Where one orchard or farm ended, another began.
When trying to dissect a movement, who better to ask about cause and effect than a pharmacist? I asked Johannes if he could clarify for me when he thought the movement for a pesticide-free Mals really gained traction, so he invited me to join him at his home for lunch one day. I met him in the pharmacy at noon, and he slipped off his white lab coat and went to lock the door for the long lunch pause. We made our way up an inner stairway to the door of his living quarters, guarded on the other side by an enormous dog with a tail that seemed to flog more than wag. Bono was ready for a walk, but Johannes gestured for me to take a seat in his Stube while he gathered the basics on a big cutting board: homemade bread made with spelt he had grown himself, along with Speck, cheeses, and olives.
He convinced Bono to relax for a few minutes while he explained how he and his compatriots hit a final tipping p
oint in the whole process. Taking a moment to secure his glasses on his nose prior to his verbal sprint, he launched full-speed into a retrospective on the factors that would transform 2013 into such a dramatic year in Mals: “It started ten years ago when people from the lower and middle Vinschgau came and, for little money, bought what was, at the time, our very inexpensive land. Of course we couldn’t prevent anyone from growing fruit or vegetables—we just wanted them to do it organically so that no one would be harmed by the pesticides.” Some townspeople expressed concern and began to dialogue with the new apple growers. “But the discussions didn’t help much, and then also the municipality of Mals produced a leaflet in which they said that we’ll have to find a modus vivendi—a way of coexisting,” he went on. “In fact, it featured a picture of a cow with fruit orchards in the background.”
It would have been one thing, he explained, if those who wanted to spray grew high hedges around their plots, contained their spray within those hedges, and used spray guns instead of spray machines so that they didn’t create spray drift. “Then everyone could do whatever they wanted,” said Johannes. “But nobody complied with that. We took over three hundred samples, every one of which we found pesticides in—captan, chlorpyrifos, mancozeb, and so on. And at that point, we decided that it’s not helping—all the good and reasonable talk, all the pleading, all the meetings—nothing helped. It just kept going on and on and on.”
Some of the conventional apple farmers were doing their best to work with their neighbors, but the overall mind-set among the leaders of the apple industry didn’t seem to be shifting. The strategy of gathering constituents of different perspectives together to discuss the growing encroachment of conventional apple plantations and the consequences of their pesticide use hadn’t changed the status quo. One farmer’s “crop protection” was fast becoming another farmer’s death knell. And Mals had only so many farmers to lose before the takeover by Big Apple was a fait accompli.
Something had to change. On February 25, 2013, forty-seven residents of Mals, with the support of twenty-five others who couldn’t attend the meeting, gathered together to form Promotorenkomitees für eine pestizidfreie Gemeinde Mals, Advocacy Committee for a Pesticide-Free Mals, to advance the collective agendas of Adam & Epfl, Umweltschutzgruppe Vinschgau (USGV), Bioland, the organic farmers of Mals, Kornkammer, and other looser affiliations. Big Apple had joined hands with lobbyists and politicians, so it became increasingly critical for these less powerful groups to begin to develop a united front. It was time to demonstrate that they weren’t, in the words of Peter Gasser, “a bunch of green crazies.”
At that meeting they elected Johannes to be their spokesperson. It was a vote of confidence that would put him and his colleagues directly in the path of some of the most powerful interests in the region—and it would forever change their lives, not to mention the way that the world thought of this virtually unknown Alpine town of just over five thousand citizens. In fact, the work of the Advocacy Committee would transform Mals into an international model of grassroots activism and direct democracy within less than two years. The miracle of Mals was about to unfold, but not without some serious hurdles and painful attacks from outside interest groups.
The new committee couldn’t have selected a better spokesperson, and they would gradually learn that the townspeople also could not have elected a better mayor for pulling off what would be a series of coups, thanks to the highly organized guerrilla tactics of the townspeople. The group’s extended efforts to promote civil discourse would be put to the test time and again, and Johannes would suffer the bruising effects of being the point person for what Big Apple and its allies felt might be but the first municipality in the province to begin to protest the extraordinarily high use of pesticides in the South Tirol—by conscientious farmers as well as the inevitable black sheep. After all, it was only a matter of time before enough concerned citizens realized they weren’t isolated in their opinions and began to speak out. Even if they weren’t particularly concerned about pesticides, many people were lamenting the destruction of the region’s traditional agriculture.
Knowing that they would lose even more ground in the coming year, the Advocacy Committee began to discuss their next steps. Thanks to the strategic change to the municipal code in May of the previous year, if the citizens of Mals approved a referendum supporting a pesticide ban in their town, then the municipal council was required to take up the issue. However, drafting a version of such a referendum that would be legally acceptable was beginning to look complicated, and it was hard to tell how popular it might be among the majority of citizens in Mals.
There tends to be a certain caution about expressing one’s political opinions in public in South Tirolean culture, so it was difficult for the group to ascertain whether they were in a minority regarding their concerns about Big Apple’s advances and the dangers of more chemical-intensive agriculture in the Upper Vinschgau. They dared to hope that a slim majority of citizens might share their concerns, but even a slim majority felt optimistic. Nonetheless, to develop a strategy forward, they needed to have some sense of what others were thinking.
“Nichts besorgt ein Politiker mehr als Nummern im Schwartz und Weis.” Nothing worries a politician more than numbers in black and white. That was the advice a politician had given Peter Gasser at one point, and it became a guiding star for the next big move of the gathering constellation of activists. In March the USGV decided that they would hire a polling firm to gather data from a solid sampling of Mals citizens regarding their views on the changing face of agriculture in the Vinschgau. What they discovered startled everyone: 84 percent of the Malsers polled viewed intensive fruit production to be detrimental to their future, and 70 percent of the respondents supported the exclusive use of organic resources in local agriculture.2
Suddenly, the future seemed much brighter—or at least the vision of the future embraced by the local citizens. It remained to be seen whether they were in charge of their own destiny or not. They were working within a complex environment. The power players in the South Tirol had no interest in their pesticide-free vision, but they were all beholden to the Italian national law, as well as European Union (EU) regulations. They were advocating for local control within three concentric legal circles: the South Tirol, Italy, and the European Union. It was a challenge to know who the ultimate allies would be—those close to home or farther away.
Fortunately, in that same month a court order in the nearby Italian province of Trentino overturned a previous court decision between the Trentino farmers’ association and the township of Malosco. In the court’s reversal of the judgment, Malosco was granted the authority to forbid the use of the two most toxic categories of pesticides in the EU (T = Toxic, and T+ = Very Toxic) and to push forward enhanced buffer zones in the town.
The Advocacy Committee was beginning to sense that there was not only hope but also some national precedent for using the legal system to protect human and environmental health from rampant use of pesticides. Trentino was the only province in Italy with a higher overall pesticide use than the South Tirol. It used more than twice the amount of fungicide but, on average, slightly less insecticides and acaricides (arachnid poisons). In fact, the two provinces’ excessive uses of pesticides made the rest of Italy look like amateurs in “crop protection”; South Tirol and Trentino used between two and five times the amounts applied by farmers in the other provinces.3
The Advocacy Committee in Mals and the leading activists from Malosco began to share and compare knowledge and strategies. Suddenly the Malsers didn’t feel quite so isolated. What they were doing made sense, despite messages to the contrary from farther down the valley.
Connecting with the Malosco initiative was one of several strategies that the Advocacy Committee would follow to advance their cause. Networking to build a web of people and organizations they could call on would prove crucial, as would tapping outside expertise, and consistent m
essaging through a single spokesperson. Johannes published a weekly email newsletter to supporters that went out first thing every Friday morning, with updates on the initiative, related news from near and far, new scientific research, and announcements of upcoming meetings. On the community-education front, the Advocacy Committee held more than twenty public meetings in less than two years, often featuring leading international experts not just on pesticide science and policy but also on organic agriculture, sustainable economic development, and methods of direct democracy.
Johannes described the overall strategy for garnering and galvanizing local support for a pesticide-free Mals: “To reach the goal you need objective, hard facts, facts that are hard as nails; it just has to be consistent and true, the whole thing. You need the best experts—so the best judicial experts, the best lawyers, as well as the best toxicologists, environmental physicians, pharmacists, physicians, biologists.” Bringing in those experts also offered an opportunity to capture media interest and tell the Mals story to anyone who would listen. Sometimes that meant going outside the South Tirol. Not everyone wanted the story told inside the province, so the Malsers went to a neutral party . . . known in that part of the world as Switzerland. One of the committee’s first official events was to bring in Hermann Kruse, a toxicologist from the University of Kiel, who tackled the question of how dangerous pesticides in fruit production really were. His presentation was scheduled for the evening of April 26 in the Mals Cultural House, and it proved a rousing success, but for more than the turnout and the information shared.
That morning an article appeared in the Südostschweiz Zeitung, a respected newspaper in Switzerland. The headlines in the paper version were enough to give the entire tourist sector in the South Tirol heart palpitations: Giftige Gefahr in Südtirol: Spritzmittel verseuchen Ferienregion Vinschgau, Toxic Danger in the South Tirol: Pesticides Spoil the Vacation Region of the Vinschgau. The headlines in the online version simply added a further sensation of cardiac arrhythmia, translating to “South Tiroleans defend themselves against the poisoning of their homeland: The Upper Vinschgau in South Tirol is considered an idyllic holiday region—Now the massive use of pesticides in orchards threatens to destroy paradise.”4