Drift Catcher Training Draws Activists from Near and Far
Gustavo Aquirre (left) and Lupe Martinez (far right) of the Center for Race, Poverty and the Environment, practice using a Drift Catcher under the supervision of PAN Scientist Karl Tupper.
Marcos Crisantos from the Farm Worker Association of Florida adjusts the flow-rate on a Drift Catcher. Photos: Stephenie Hendricks
by Chela Vazquez
On February 18, fifteen activists from California, Florida, Maine, Minnesota, Washington, and the Philippines concluded an intensive four-day workshop at the Marin Headlands, north of San Francisco. PAN hosted this “Train the Trainers” workshop to teach participants how to organize and train others to use our pesticide-detecting “Drift Catcher.”
The Drift Catcher is an economical, easy-to-use air-sampling tool designed to give communities the power to detect invisible pesticides in the air they breathe, without waiting (often in vain) for government agencies to do it.
Since 2003, Drift Catchers have been used in California, Colorado, Florida, Indiana, Maine, North Carolina, and Washington State. To date, Drift Catchers have detected pesticides in each of these states except North Carolina. In California, Florida and Washington, the Drift Catchers have found airborne pesticide concentrations that were well above what the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency considers an “acceptible” level of exposure.
Drift Catcher results released so far have revealed potentially harmful levels of chlorpyrifos in the air surrounding farmworkers’ homes in California and Washington State.
The Headlands gathering included anti-pesticide activists, a half-dozen former farmworkers-turned-advocates, two Native Americans from Minnesota’s White Earth Land Restoration Project, two schoolteachers and Dr. Romeo “Romy” Quijano, a physician and environmental crusader from the Philippines.
Quijano told the group how he travels to villages throughout the Philippines treating people poisoned by pesticides. Quijano and his daughter have received death threats for their work. A powerful chemical corporation and a major banana plantation have harassed him with lawsuits (see story in our Fall 2006 issue). Quijano sees the Drift Catcher as an important tool to protect Filipino farmworkers and residents of communities near treated plantations.
Silvia Berrones from Líderes Campesinas, a farmworker women’s self-help network, described how she has watched the steady decline of the health of women who labor in the heat, dust and chemical contamination of California’s fields. “When our people go to the clinic with pesticide poisoning symptoms, the doctor treats it as an allergy,” Berrones complained. “The Drift Catcher will help us document what is affecting our farmworker community.”
Karen Ford, a biology instructor from a high school in St. Augustine, Florida, attended the training session with one of her students, 17-year-old Alex Lowe. Alex and her classmate, ReAnna Green, used one of PAN’s Drift Catchers in a Science Fair project and detected diazinon and endosulfan (two neurotoxic pesticides) and trifluralin (a possible carcinogen) in the air near an elementary school. When the news broke in the local press, school authorities initially tried to dismiss Alex and ReAnna’s research results, but public and parental pressure forced them to hire an outside testing agency to do additional air monitoring.
Community-based environmental monitoring is spreading across the U.S. and globally. Over the last decade, PAN Asia and the Pacific (PANAP) has worked with communities across its region to organize Community-based Pesticide Action Monitoring (CPAM), including local self-awareness, surveillance and response teams. PANAP’s CPAM Resource Centre provides a host of useful resources, including an extensive Asian Pesticide Database.
But people are not just grabbing Drift Catchers to track down the pesticides wafting from farms and orchards. Many local groups in the U.S. and abroad have been collecting pollutant samples downwind from refineries and chemical factories as part of the “Bucket Brigade” movement—using simple plastic buckets as air collectors to trap and test for pollutants.
Denny Larson, the founder of Global Community Monitor and one of the pioneers of the Bucket Brigade movement, was a special guest at the retreat. Larson addressed the roomful of activists, swapping stories and demonstrating the latest improved version of GCM’s grassroots air-sampler.
Citizens armed with Drift Catchers are taking the initiative in sniffing out toxins in the air because they understand that their health is linked to the quality of their environment.
They also know that change will only come if they step up and gather information themselves; work together to hold regulatory agencies, chemical manufacturers, and politicians accountable—and demand that all chemical poisons are eliminated from the air we all breathe.
Chela Vazquez is the coordinator for PAN North America’s Phase Out Fumigants campaign.