A Moment in Washington

I was in Washington DC last week, where I attended a conference on regenerative agriculture and visited Capitol Hill to talk to Congressional staffers. This is not anything I expected to be doing three years ago, but there I was.

One topic in the air that day was pesticide liability shields. The chemical industry is lobbying hard to insert provisions into legislation that would effectively prevent anyone from suing them for damages caused by their products. Foremost among them is glyphosate, the most widely used herbicide in America, also sprayed on crops before harvest as a desiccant.

I could easily write a long article on the damage glyphosate causes to human and ecological health, but what I have observed on Capitol Hill is that the main problem isn’t that legislators need to be persuaded of its harms. That is no more useful than reasoning with an addict about how his addiction is making him sick and ruining his marriage, and it is useless for the same reason. Our system is addicted to glyphosate. Agricultural logistics, contracts, insurance, lending, and infrastructure has evolved around it.

That system, however, isn’t working—not for consumers, not for the soil, and certainly not for the farmers. That gave me an idea for a better approach to tackle the glyphosate issue, so I wrote it in an op-ed that you can read here.

This publication, the Epoch Times, has a mostly conservative readership, and I am finding that regenerative agriculture has broad appeal across the political spectrum. Most of the people I’ve been talking to in Washington who are active on the pesticide issue are in Democratic circles, yet the conference I attended was hosted by the Heritage Foundation, a right-wing organization. This left-right convergence isn’t that surprising, given the fact that no one wants pesticide residues in their food. Perhaps this issue can help catalyze a broader political realignment that extends to other issues that, like pesticides, affect everyone regardless of their political identity.

A memorable moment for me in Washington that day came in the office of Congressman Rouzer of North Carolina. Our group of three were going back and forth with the policy staffer on pesticides and factory farming, It was a kind of “agree to disagree” situation, until one of our group, Kelly Ryerson, shared a personal story of loved ones who died from Roundup exposure. You can debate facts, but you cannot debate a story. The staffer, whose name was Bubba, was emotionally touched. For a moment we were all human together. We were in the sacred space called “not having an answer” and “not knowing what to do.” Because in fact no one really knows how to extricate ourselves from this mess. I’m talking about the big Mess. The condition of humanity on earth. Since no one really knows, an excellent starting point is to know we don’t know; to stop pretending we have the answers. The older I get, the more I think we don’t even have the right questions.

Whatever the answers may be, I think in that moment that even Bubba understood that glyphosate is not one of them.

The more I learn about how the system actually works in Washington DC, the more obvious it is to me that I, also, don’t know what we should do. Certainly I have my opinions, but the magnitude and complexity of the polycrisis dwarfs anything practical I can conceive.

I’m OK with that. We would not be here, with all our hope and idealism, if there were not a way to attain the impractical. Somehow, the synchronicity of our small and insufficient steps will lead us on the path we cannot see.