It has been so long since I updated this site, it’s a little beyond embarrassing. The reasons are many: the promotional tour for book and film, teaching two courses, plotting a lot of writing with IPES, etc. But now that I’m working on a big solo book – more on that in the months to come – I’m falling back into the rhythms of research and writing that once used to make maintaining a blog both viable and useful. Watch this space for more.
Meantime, though, I’m doing a bit of research on US industrial agriculture. I was rather surprised to find that there’s no public information at all about how many pesticides the US Environmental Protection Agency has approved. Or rather, it’s only made public if you file a Freedom of Information Act Request. To save you the time, here’s the top-level data on the number of Section 3 registrations from 1975-2022. Is it revelatory? Hardly. But that it’s so hard to find out that the number of pesticides that the EPA has registered since it began is 65,778 – well, perhaps that’s indicative of something. As I say, I suspect there’s more to come.