A Precautionary Tale

by Philip Ackerman-Leist

  By the time the sun crested the highest peaks, Mals was fully “woke.” Word of the banners had spread from village to village, and townspeople were already making the rounds with their cameras and cell phones, taking photos and gathering in their usual cafés to exchange impressions. No matter what one thought about the messaging—and not everyone was happy to have the town’s laundry aired in such a dramatic fashion—everyone marveled at the stealth and surprise of it all.

  Banners hung from hotel balconies, farmers’ fences, shop windows, village entrances, and in front of one of the more prominent World War II–era bunkers—anywhere that would attract attention or add an element of irony.

  Hollawint.com was stamped, stenciled, or painted on almost every banner, leading viewers to the new website to discover that women and mothers were on the move. Hollawint’s Facebook page touted a colorful statement of intent: “Everyone is talking about it. It’s best if we talk TOGETHER about it: our quality of life, our habitat, our children, our local products, our health, our future, and the diversity of our landscape.”

  In the spirit of Pope Francis and his namesake, St. Francis of Assisi, even Abbot Markus at Marienberg agreed to having a banner hung prominently in front of the abbey, just outside its new pesticide-free vineyards.

  It was a fitting precursor to yet another campaign in the works, one that would wake up people the world over. The idea of countering an insurgency through direct democracy was gaining ground.

  The women of Hollawint had written their wishes across the landscape. Now it was time to find a way to post them on a ballot.

  CHAPTER 11

  Manifesto

  “The environment is really the first factor in medicine.” Elisabeth Viertler shook her head, thinking back on where she grew up. Her family’s house was in the middle of apple orchards farther down in the valley, and it wasn’t something that she’d really thought much about until she finished medical school and opened her pediatrics practice in Mals.

  As she settled in and had the opportunity to appreciate the freshness of the air and the openness of the landscape, she began to wonder about all of the pesticides sprayed in those orchards and how it was that she and her family never really questioned the potential health impacts. Then again, few members of the medical community in South Tirol were questioning the heavy pesticide use—at least not out loud, in public—until very recently. From Elisabeth’s perspective, “The agriculture and fruit industry are an important part of South Tyrol’s economy, and when you grew up around it and saw it all as common practice, it takes some time until you start questioning it . . . The causalities are really only becoming clear to me now.”

  With her straight brown hair falling across the shoulders of her white doctor’s coat and her stethoscope always at the ready, Elisabeth is a soft-spoken clinician whose entire office complex feels like a cocreation between her and her patients of the last fifteen years. The walls of every room are completely covered with children’s artwork—so densely hung that it rivals the taped tapestries adorning most elementary school classroom walls and virtually disguises the primary function of the examination room. Graced with hand-drawn toothy smiles and scenes of forests and flowerscapes and imagined contraptions, her clinic is a place of wellness, complemented by the sun streaming in from the walls of windows and toys positioned strategically from the waiting room to the examination table. She even dares to open her balcony doors so that the fresh air can pour in—a rebellious medical act, but Elisabeth is interested in health and not convention.

  Primum non nocere. First, do no harm. As someone who appreciates the best of Western and Eastern medicine, Elisabeth has long been in search of ways to restore balance within the human body, and she began to realize that the principles of regenerative agriculture and holistic medicine were parallel in philosophy and approach. Pesticides not only knocked agricultural and ecological systems out of whack, but also posed serious risks to humans. Suddenly what went on outside her clinic mattered as much as what she did inside her examination room.

  Like Margit Gasser, Elisabeth dreaded the notion of Mals becoming a landscape like the one in which she’d grown up farther down the valley. So in doctorly fashion but with a nontraditional approach, she began to think about a prescription. This time, however, it would be a prescription for the Upper Vinschgau. And such a novel prescription warranted the expertise of a first-rate pharmacist. Fortunately, one was within easy walking distance. Elisabeth and Johannes Unterpertinger were about to conjure up the biggest remedy of their lives.

  While Hollawint’s supporters were stenciling the last of the banners on July 30, Elisabeth and Johannes invited all of the “doctors” of the Upper Vinschgau to pen a complementary document: a manifesto by medical doctors, dentists, veterinarians, biologists, and pharmacists calling “for the protection of health and the sustainable stewardship of soil, water and air.”

  People with doctoral degrees, particularly in the sciences, tend to be held in the highest regard in South Tirol and throughout Europe, and their concerns are not easily swept under the rug. So the eclectic group—bound by their education and interest in human and animal health and biological systems—gathered in Mals to fine-tune a document that politicians and lobbyists in Bozen and beyond would take seriously. It read:

  PREMISE: We regard the property of individuals as inviolable and hold that everyone can do and allow what they wish, within the limits of the law, on their land. But this is the point: on their land! And not on the land of their neighbors, and still less on the land of an entire community. The age-old principle of law must apply to all: “The freedom of the individual is limited by the rights of our neighbors.”

  And the right of neighbors to unspoiled air, water and soil and to undamaged health is being endangered by synthetic chemical pesticides and massively violated as a consequence of drift.

  IN VIEW OF THE FACT that large numbers of synthetic chemical pesticides and insecticides are being used in conventional and integrated fruit-growing,

  IN VIEW OF THE FACT that none of these substances can be classified as “non-hazardous” and that, on the contrary, there are scientific grounds to believe that some of them are carcinogenic, while many are harmful to health, hormone-disruptive and mutagenic,

  IN VIEW OF THE FACT that fruit-growing in the Upper Vinschgau Valley is increasing and that, owing to the constantly blowing wind (see for example the trees growing at a slant on the area of the “Malser Haide”), no application of pesticides is possible without massive drift over a range of several kilometers, meaning that the substances will be blown over every field and into every village, affecting both private and public establishments and facilities such as schools, kindergartens, playgrounds, cycle paths, and so on,

  IN VIEW OF THE FACT that clean air to breathe is a necessity for life and consequently part of the human right to health, and that a large proportion of the pesticides is absorbed through the respiratory tract and the skin,

  IN VIEW OF THE FACT that, owing to their physical sensitivity, the unborn and children are especially vulnerable to poisoning,

  With this manifesto we are expressing our deep concerns regarding the health hazards, and with our signatures we call upon the mayor of the “Upper Vinschgau” catchment area and all those in power in South Tyrol to implement serious alternative production methods up to and including the prohibition of the use of synthetic chemical pesticides and insecticides, in particular on the Malser Haide catchment area.

  It was signed by fifty-one of the most well-respected members of the Upper Vinschgau—almost every doctor of science in the region. Against the backdrop of Hollawint’s banner campaign, the release and spread of the manifesto over the next few days created a frenzy in the region. If there was any doubt beforehand, it was now clear: The Malsers were taking a stand, and they were not falling for the temptation of Big Apple. “Crop protection” had somehow taken priority over the pr
otection of humans and their environment, and the signers of the manifesto listed some of the dangers associated with pesticides below their statement.

  A key element of the statement was a long-standing fundamental concept in European philosophy and law: “The freedom of the individual is limited by the rights of our neighbors.” This concept began appearing in various forms in the late eighteenth century and was fundamental to German philosopher Immanuel Kant’s thinking about an individual’s rights under law.1 Including this statement as a foundational element of the manifesto linked the basics of jurisprudence with the expert scientific opinion of the manifesto’s signers.

  Furthermore, their public call for the mayor to protect their health was yet another strategic move to provide the mayor with the justification to invoke his powers under European law to do what was necessary to guarantee the safety of his citizens. It wasn’t that Ulrich Veith, the mayor, needed convincing. He simply needed justification and support from as many angles as possible. While the Malsers were increasingly united, they were also threatening the status quo. And the power and money behind the status quo rivaled any monetary resources the Malsers could muster. Their strength lay in pointing out the absurdity of the status quo and their right to determine their own healthy future.

  The signers of the manifesto were also proponents of the precautionary principle, a concept that places the burden of proof for safety upon those who create or manufacture elements of risk, as opposed to requiring the public—citizens, NGOs, or the government—to prove the danger of a suspected risk. That question of who bears the burden of proof (the public or those who create the risks in question) is nearly as deep a divide between Europe and the United States as the Atlantic Ocean.

  In Europe the precautionary principle serves as a fundamental basis for generating sound public policy; public health and safety generally trumps potential threats to it. In the United States, however, dangers have to be established through what is generally termed risk analysis, meaning that “acceptable levels of risk” are established. Any challenges to those risks have typically arisen through the slow-grinding cogs of policy and judicial action, and both avenues are highly dependent upon scientific evidence, which can be hard to pay for but easily bought. Precaution tends to be more of an afterthought than a guiding principle in the United States, and more of a guiding light in Europe.

  Environmental lawyer Carolyn Raffensperger, one of the leading proponents of the precautionary principle in the United States, not only summed up its utility but also shed insight on how it was so central to the pesticide-free campaign in Mals:

  As we define it today, the precautionary principle has three core elements: the threat of harm, uncertainty, and precautionary action. I think the big surprise of the precautionary principle is the paradox of action. Taking a precautionary approach doesn’t mean stopping everything or not doing anything or blocking progress. It means looking for alternatives, using democracy, and reversing the burden of proof from those who have been harmed to those who pollute.2

  With the multitude of questions posed by pesticides, those persons impacted by their use find themselves not just caught in clouds of drift but also the fog of a cocktail of uncertainties.

  Johannes has a simple way of explaining these cocktails of uncertainty, simply by going to the website for AGRIOS (Arbeitsgruppe für den integrierten Obstanbau in Südtirol) and downloading the PDF of their guidelines for integrated fruit production with pome fruits (such as apples and pears), available in German, Italian, and English.3 The 2016 version of the guidelines is forty-six pages long. Johannes points out that seventeen of those pages focus solely on which chemicals are dedicated to the treatment of specific diseases, pests, and conditions and how they should be applied—all in table format.

  One has to admire the extraordinary research and care put into the creation of a highly useful document. Those who work within those guidelines are farmers playing by the rules; those who work outside that framework are the so-called black sheep of the industry. However, more than seventy active ingredients are listed for use in those seventeen pages of pesticide application guidelines.

  To be fair, it has to be said that integrierte Obstanbau, integrated fruit production—generally referred to as integrated pest management, or IPM, in English—was in many ways a positive development in the fruit industry when it first began to emerge as a guiding approach in the 1970s.4 IPM encouraged farmers to work together with researchers to find ways to manage fruit operations more holistically, taking into account soil health, climatic conditions, disease and pest life cycles, plant nutrition, improved pruning techniques, and other elements that could minimize chemical inputs by managing the orchard ecosystem through biological and mechanical means. In addition, to combat the increasing resistance of pests, diseases, and weeds to chemical interventions, farmers were encouraged to switch from using single chemicals to utilizing and rotating multiple chemicals for those specific “problems.”

  IPM, therefore, tried to address the overuse of pesticides and reduce problems with pesticide resistance. However, the practice left farmers on the pesticide treadmill and introduced another complexity into the toxicological quagmire: The experts were recommending a far broader spectrum of pesticides than ever before. It was already difficult enough to ascertain the toxicological impacts of the predominantly used pesticides, but suddenly regulators were faced with even more pesticides to test for safety, simply as single substances. With the push for integrierte Obstanbau (doesn’t “integrated fruit production” sound much better than “conventional” or “industrial” agriculture?), researchers also needed to consider the combined effects of these different pesticides, even if the doses of each are considered small. Yet that kind of comprehensive scientific testing is extremely difficult and in its early stages. Simply testing the combined effects of two pesticides in isolation is difficult enough, but it is virtually impossible to test the number of potential combinations that can actually occur.

  Toxicologist Irene Witte had made it clear to her audience in Mals that those combined effects could be classified into three potential reactions: antagonistic, additive, and synergistic. Two or more pesticides could react in an immediately antagonistic fashion, creating potentially dangerous or lethal situations for humans and other organisms. Two or more substances could also have an unanticipated additive effect through their combination. Finally, they could react synergistically, creating unforeseen consequences even in relatively small doses.

  The cocktails of uncertainty spark another significant concern too often overlooked in discussions of pesticides. The synthetic chemicals of concern tend to be the “active ingredients” in pesticide products. They are the chemicals whose names we’ve heard but can barely remember, much less spell—and also the ingredients that take care of the -cide part of the equation. They put an end to the target organisms.

  In most pesticides the active ingredients make up only a small overall percentage of the product. The remaining ingredients are usually classified as “inert” or “inactive.” They often make up as much as 95 to 99 percent of the product, so they are not insignificant. However, they often are not identified and labeled. In fact, many are considered trade secrets. Got pesticide poisoning? You better hope that the poisoning hotline you call has been given a list of the inert ingredients. However, that is not the real concern.

  The inert ingredients are there for a reason. They are intended to improve the performance of the pesticide in some fashion, acting as stickers, spreaders, penetrants, or emulsifiers, or working in other ways.5 The problem is that some adjuvants are designed to ensure that the active ingredient can penetrate cellular walls and even organelles (hardworking cell components that carry out a number of important biological tasks) in order to inflict the intended damage to the target, be it a plant, an insect, or another organism. These adjuvants can therefore do the same in nontarget organisms, such as humans or other animals. Cel
l walls and organelles contain critically important parts, such as DNA and other genetic material, that often have a negative charge; they are available for bonding with whatever may come their way with a positive charge, such as a pesticide’s active ingredient. The result? Genotoxicity, a phenomenon only recently being explored. One researcher aptly dubbed the result, “a molecular bull in a china shop.”6

  If those AGRIOS tables are the bible for IPM, they are red flags for scientists like Johannes. According to the AGRIOS instructions, he explains, pesticides from captan and chlorpyriphos to dithianon and mancozeb can be applied from twelve to fourteen times in just one year as individual substances. “Now in the same time period, with between twenty-­five and thirty different pesticides being sprayed, you get an enormous combined amount that is beyond evil. The industry has defined a toxicological value for each individual substance, so naturally the industry should also clarify the facts on how an approved value is reached.” This single value is sometimes exceeded, he states, but not normally. “However, on average, in the types of fruits and vegetables that are treated, one can find eight, nine, or ten, even twelve, thirteen, or fourteen different pesticides, which, in the totality of their combined active ingredients, are still totally unexplored. Every pharmacologist, every physician, strictly warns of consuming something like this. One can see the long-term effects.”

  In the end, the concern expressed by the doctors of the region was not just that property lines were breached with pesticide drift: Bodies were also transgressed. The issue of “chemical trespass,” the unwanted intrusion of chemical substances into a person’s body, couldn’t be solved with hedgerows, buffers, or new spray techniques. And no one wanted their children to be born “prepolluted” as a result of pesticide exposure. Advances in scientific research are beginning to show how pesticide exposure can potentially impact not just parents, their children, or the unborn, but also the genetics carried forward by the generation in utero.