On the last day of the general assembly, we left from Mals early in the morning to drive down the valley for a visit to the Gluderers’ organic herb business. As our caravan exited Mals and clung tightly to the curves along the gradual descent of the serpentine highway, we found ourselves completely immersed in a sea of orchards just beginning to shed their white blossoms. It was a stunning, blue-sky morning, and the sun to the east captured the steady, linear belch of pesticides trailing tractor after tractor in the orchards that flanked us on every side, as if to highlight the dilemma one last time.
By the time that we got to the Gluderers’ farm, heard their story, saw a sampling of their drift videos, and toured their farm, François Veillerette, the president of PAN-Europe, seemed caught between shock and awe. He looked around at the beauty and the absurdity of what he saw from inside the enormous translucent bubble that covered the Gluderers’ crops. In all of his more than thirty years working on pesticide issues in Europe, he said, nothing rivaled the intensity of the pesticide issues and monocultural takeover that he had seen just in that morning.
Mals is becoming more than a tourist destination. To go to Mals is now an act of solidarity. It is a pilgrimage.
Meanwhile, news around the world continues to validate the concerns of the Malsers. In a report submitted to the General Assembly of the United Nations and the UN Human Rights Council on January 24, 2016, the UN Special Rapporteur for the Right to Food and the UN Special Rapporteur on Toxics transformed the quandaries of pesticide use into an international human rights issue. Point after point, the twenty-four-page report reiterates the precise concerns the Malsers had raised throughout their initiative:
Today’s dominant agricultural model is highly problematic, not only because of damage inflicted by pesticides, but also their effects on climate change, loss of biodiversity and inability to ensure food sovereignty. These issues are intimately interlinked and must be addressed together to ensure that the right to food is achieved to its full potential. Efforts to tackle hazardous pesticides will only be successful if they address the ecological, economic and social factors that are embedded in agricultural policies, as articulated in the Sustainable Development Goals.2
And then the report might as well have been written with the Malsers specifically in mind:
Political will is needed to re-evaluate and challenge the vested interests, incentives and power relations that keep industrial agrochemical-dependent farming in place. Agricultural policies, trade systems and corporate influence over public policy must all be challenged if we are to move away from pesticide-reliant industrial food systems.3
With more than $50 billion of pesticide products sold each year, the pesticide lobby has enormous influence worldwide.4 If the corporate economic power were not enough to confront, the complexities of the science behind risk assessment too often give the upper hand to those who do the science, fund the science, and disseminate the results, whether they are valid or not.
As reported by the New York Times in March 2017 and pursued by a number of other media outlets, a US judge unsealed documents that revealed clear distortion and disruption of scientific evidence related to the health impacts of glyphosate:
The court documents included Monsanto’s internal emails and email traffic between the company and federal regulators. The records suggested that Monsanto had ghostwritten research that was later attributed to academics and indicated that a senior official at the Environmental Protection Agency had worked to quash a review of Roundup’s main ingredient, glyphosate, that was to have been conducted by the United States Department of Health and Human Services. The documents also revealed that there was some disagreement within the E.P.A. over its own safety assessment.5
Although the individual studies all have their particular complexities and true objectivity and independence are at a premium in this research arena, there is an unambiguous preponderance of evidence that pesticides are wreaking havoc upon human and ecological health. The economic costs are extraordinarily high, and the costs to economies we care about are high.
With the link between damages to human and ecological health and basic human rights, a new concept in the judicial lexicon has come to the fore: ecocide, the death of ecological systems. As in any murder case, intent becomes a primary consideration. In the case of multinational corporations, intent is also critical.
The activist community gathered around the issues of pesticides began to tease out whether large pesticide producers might be tried in the International Court of Justice in the Hague for ecocide. Discussions throughout the Pesticide Action Network, including Mals representative Koen Hertoge, began to focus on whether there was a judicial basis for trying Monsanto, the biggest pesticide manufacturer on the planet, for the crime of ecocide. A steering committee that included Mals supporters Vandana Shiva and entomologist Hans Herren, another leader in the fight against pesticides, along with a number of prominent activists from around the world, decided to provide a forum for a tribunal and a concurrent People’s Assembly that would inform and mobilize citizens from around the world about the legal implications of the toxic legacy left in the wake of corporations such as Monsanto.
Three ICJ judges were solicited to review the presented evidence and offer a legal analysis, based both on current international law and prospective law, to determine whether Monsanto might be guilty of ecocide. The judges heard testimony from citizens around the world in the Hague on October 15 and 16, 2016, at the International Monsanto Tribunal. On April 18, 2017, they released their findings after having reviewed the case as they would any other ICJ case, based on six framing questions.6
The verdict? Guilty, on all six charges.
While a mock tribunal may seem to be an exercise in one-sided theatrics, in actuality the review of a case by qualified ICJ judges lays the groundwork for determining whether a future case should be officially deliberated upon by the court itself. In addition, as noted at the end of the summary of findings, it is critically important for international law to give increased primacy to human and environmental rights, and any moves in this direction will mean that deliberations such as the International Monsanto Tribunal will have more positive impacts for the people and ecosystems at risk . . . at least those that have not already succumbed to the dangers at hand.
What the Malsers have already achieved cannot be taken away by a single judicial ruling or a business move. That is the power of what they did in transforming their growing concerns into public education and then into a referendum. From the referendum, they created not only legally justified ordinances but also new networks and initiatives to support a transition toward a healthier food system and a more sustainable and resilient town.
Political activism is a tireless task: Protecting what we cherish requires constant vigilance. But political activism does have a tendency to focus on one battle at a time, whereas rebuilding a foodshed is the work of generations. What has been lost or threatened over the course of decades will likely take decades to restore, although with a strategic, collective vision, communities can move faster in rebuilding what was lost through the slow relinquishing and decay that left the destiny of the foodshed to outside forces and inner apathy.
After I wrote Rebuilding the Foodshed in 2013, I began traveling around the United States, trading ideas with people in communities who were working hard to reclaim and rebuild their food systems and local economies, often with an eye toward equity and justice. I began to wonder if a new approach to politics was emerging in the United States and abroad.
In many of the communities I was fortunate enough to visit, the idea of what I began to call foodshed as new democracy seemed to be taking root. However, I wasn’t quite sure if the phrase was anything more than a pithy utterance and a fleeting notion. I began to share and explore the concept with audiences across the country, asking for their responses, many of which resonated deeply with me. But it wasn’t until I stumbled
onto the story of Mals that I truly came to understand the power and potential of foodshed as new democracy.
The question often tossed back to pragmatic optimists like myself is whether we are being too idealistic in our visions of healthy, sustainable, and just food systems. Harsher critics accuse us of ignoring realities like the necessity of using pesticides and genetically engineered organisms not only to grow crops successfully but for future generations to feed the world. My best response is a simple story.
When I take my family back to visit those vineyards at Brunnenburg Castle in the lower Vinschgau where I spent three summers in a rubber suit and respirator, spraying vines twelve to twenty times in a season under the watchful eye of a mischievous little Tirolean kid, I don’t tell my children not to go barefoot through the vineyard or not to taste the grapes because of pesticide residues. Nik, that cunning Tirolean kid who was my frequent companion on the farm, eventually inherited those vineyards but decided to chart a different path for himself and his family.
Since taking over the vineyard operation a decade or so after I departed, Nik decided to gradually replace almost all of the standard wine grape varieties, the well-known Vitis vinifera options, with PIWI varieties, the newly developed fungus-resistant vines. The result? He never sprays his vines.
Of course, transitioning to organic agriculture is seldom a simple affair, nor is building an organic market, particularly when dealing with consumer taste. Perhaps no agricultural commodity carries with it as many preconceived expectations of taste as does wine, so Nik has taken on the twin challenge of determining which varieties are most successful on his farm and in his cellar.
He began experimenting with PIWI vines and wines in 2004. Unsure of whether his organic aspirations would bear fruit, he decided to use green grafting, a method by which he cut the Vitis vinifera vines several inches above the ground and grafted the new PIWI vines onto the well-established rootstock. Not only did he lose just a single year in production by means of green grafting, but he also had the old Vitis vinifera rootstock in place if the PIWI grapes didn’t meet his growing or winemaking standards.
Nik planted seventeen different varieties in order to see which grew best on his site and determine which would make the best wines. Over the years, he has narrowed his choices and developed local markets for his distinctive wines. The challenge is to avoid shocking the consumer’s palate with something totally new while luring it into a slightly different world of gustatory nuance.
Nik’s experiments and the Mals story are both reminders that transitions take time, and they can even involve some risk. In the process of finding our way to organic or any other ideal, we confront the equivalent of a Buddhist koan: Impatience is our greatest ally, and patience is our best companion.
If I had any reservations about whether a pesticide-free future was possible, I stowed those doubts away on a hot August day in 2016, three decades after hanging up the sprayer hose for the last time at Brunnenburg. I was staying at Brunnenburg for several weeks with my family while researching the story of Mals, and I offered to help Nik for a day on the farm.
Perhaps intentionally, or maybe not, he gave me the task of cleaning out the tractor shed before he brought in some new equipment. He started the old reliable Goldoni tractor and pulled it out of the garage so that I could begin sorting through the decades of junk accumulated in the back, and I found myself throwing away old bits of blue sprayer hose, clamps, and random rubber gloves, some of which looked oddly familiar.
I took the garbage can full of old junk around back of the farmhouse, out of sight of the museum visitors, and there it was: the old sprayer machine from thirty years ago. The tank was covered with cobwebs and not as shiny as I remembered. And on the rear, that faded blue hose was coiled on its rack, cracked and unused.
Sometimes the future is dependent upon what we save from the past, and sometimes it’s more about what we decide to leave behind.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
From the moment that I stumbled into this story with a wonderful group of Green Mountain College graduate students in 2014, I struggled with how to tell a story about a place I cared so much about—as an outsider. I invited Douglas Gayeton to come back with us to the South Tirol the following year to dig deeper into the story and try to find a way to tell it. Little did I realize that Douglas never tells a story in one way. Rather, he tells a story in as many ways as possible: information artworks, photography, video, and writing. Our digging led to yet another trip back to Mals in May of 2016 to collect additional interviews and imagery in 2016, this time with the help of Pier Giorgio Provenzano and Michael de Rachewiltz.
When we first began our collaborative journeys, I could not have imagined how much I would learn from Douglas about storytelling in multiple media. As he put it, “We’re chained to the oars together on this one until we get it done.” This story is far better than it would have been were it not for Douglas’s mentorship on so many levels, and it would be missing a full suite of Toppling Goliath media to accompany it (www.topplinggoliath.org). Sorry about the chains, Douglas—looks like we can’t stop now.
Michael de Rachewiltz has also been a stalwart collaborator and friend, without whom the project probably would have failed . . . or at least we would have made too many cultural and linguistic blunders. And his sidekick, Robert Delvai, isn’t just an amazing mountain guide but also precisely the kind of networker one needs in order to follow the threads of such a complex story.
Pier Giorgio Provenzano is the most tireless, unflappable human being I think I have ever met—not to mention an amazing videographer, editor, animator, and translator. In addition to being one of those people you just want to have on your team in a project that transforms from a frenetic pace to the long hard work of pulling it all together into a cohesive whole, he’s also a Dropbox wizard.
Koen Hertoge and Siegfried de Rachewiltz have been central fact checkers and proofreaders, for which I am very grateful. Koen has gone above and beyond in helping us to gather resources through his PAN-Italia and PAN-Europe networks. Any remaining errors are my fault. I am also deeply indebted to Koen and his PAN-Europe colleagues for allowing me to join them for their annual general assembly held in Mals in May 2017.
I am grateful to the Green Mountain College students who have accompanied me on this journey and hope you feel a part of this book and the accompanying Toppling Goliath project. I am very appreciative to Green Mountain College for the sabbatical and other resources that contributed to the success of this project and to Robin, Eleanor, and Bay for their support.
No one could ask for a better editor or friend (but she knows when to wear which hat—or sometimes both!) than Joni Praded. She was a guiding star from the moment I began thinking about this book project, and she kept me laughing through the (occasionally “stretched”) deadlines.
Although I hope they didn’t bear the brunt of this book project (I think I’m learning how to do this without passing on the occasional stress), I am deeply thankful to Erin, Ethan, Addy, and Asa for the needed quiet stretches. Next time we go back to Mals, I won’t do any interviews, kids. We’ll go play while Mama does her thing!
Deepest thanks go, too, to my Brunnenburg family, for an education that has spanned more than three decades: Mary who “gathered from the air a live tradition” and passed it on; Sizzo for sharing the warp and weft of word and work on the steep slopes; Brigitte who provided the first bread crumb that led me and my students to this story; Patrizia and Graziella for the antics and the contagious laughter that always made me feel at home; Michi for sharing his cultural knowledge, his linguistic expertise, and (begrudgingly) his Goldoni tractor; and Nik for helping me to learn German when he was barely waist-high (even though he did swipe my little yellow German-English dictionary and left me at a loss for words) and now for showing so many of us the path to a pesticide-free future through on-farm research and sheer determination.
Finally, I am extraordinarily indebted to the people of Mals and its vicinity who offered our team a window into their lives and shared food, drink, and laughter. I can only hope that I have captured their stories appropriately and accurately and that this book and the Toppling Goliath project help others discover “the miracle of Mals”!
AN ACTIVIST’S PRIMER
How to Push Back on Pesticides at Home
The citizens of Mals followed five strategies that Johannes Unterpertinger recommends for other communities pushing back against pesticides. Here are Johannes’s five succinct suggestions, followed by an explanation of how they translate to our work in the United States and beyond:
1. Always provide factual and objective information, particularly about the health risks posed by pesticides.
Gathering information that isn’t oversimplified or heavily influenced by industry interests is a challenge. The information that you do find will often be focused on pesticides’ active ingredients. These important active ingredients are regulated and classified, although they often make up only 1 to 5 percent of the pesticide. In contrast, the inert ingredients that constitute the rest of the substance generally are not regulated or listed, and they deserve scrutiny as well. Some of the best resources for scientific information on pesticides and policy include:
http://www.panna.org
http://www.pan-europe.info
http://www.beyondpesticides.org
http://consumersunion.org/topic/food
http://www.ewg.org
https://www.foodandwaterwatch.org
http://www.ucsusa.org/food_and_agriculture#.VyJeXD-hQqY
https://www.nrdc.org/issues/food
2. Invite the world’s best experts (environment, medicine, toxicology) to give public lectures.
A Precautionary Tale Page 24