02
Dec
On Giving Tuesday, Beyond Pesticides Appreciates Your Support
(Beyond Pesticides, December 2, 2025) A personal and heartfelt message from Jay Feldman, executive director, for the holiday season! During this holiday season, I’m writing on behalf of Beyond Pesticides’ staff and board of directors to wish you a Happy Holiday. We celebrate with you our shared commitment to the values and principles that protect the well-being of people and the ecosystems on which life depends. In reflecting on the steps we are taking at Beyond Pesticides to confront existential health and environmental threats, I believe we, together, are pursuing a meaningful path forward—and I am thankful for that.
If you can, and in honor of Giving Tuesday, please consider a gift sometime during this holiday season on our secure website at bp-dc.org/give2025. Your support of any size makes a tremendous difference! Thank you!
Before the specifics, I think it is important to say that with the current challenges being endured by the people of our country and around the world, threats to a sustainable future can be overshadowed by the crises that impede daily survival. At Beyond Pesticides, I am thankful we recognize the immediate support needed in this regard, at the same time that we move ahead with the urgent work to ensure a sustainable future. We move forward, while affirming that we must collectively work to uphold scientific integrity, democratic institutions, academic independence, fair elections, social justice, equality, independent courts, and the rule of law.
I am thankful that:
- There is an organization like Beyond Pesticides that focuses without equivocation on reversing the threats to health, biodiversity, and climate that are substantially elevated because of the continuing and unnecessary reliance on petrochemical pesticides and fertilizers. We have spotlighted over the last four decades the organic solution that has grown from an idea to a reality.
- We know how to operate productive and profitable farms and manage parks, playing fields, and schoolyards without toxic chemicals that contribute to debilitating and deadly diseases, biodiversity collapse, and dramatic disruptions to our climate—that this is a current reality. We work every day to support organic agriculture and directly assist communities, through our Parks for a Sustainable Future program, in eliminating toxic chemicals in land management—and, in the process, eliminate emissions from their production, stop exposure through their use, and repair the environment and health in partnership with nature.
- We are able to focus our resources, without equivocation, on empowering advocacy with people and organizations across the country and worldwide—ensuring that scientific findings in real time are made accessible to inform the need for urgent action to eliminate pesticides and fertilizers and put in place ecological-based practices.
- We no longer use the word “reduce” and, instead, define our efforts to “eliminate” toxic pesticide and fertilizer use. Our strategy distinguishes Beyond Pesticides from campaigns against individual pesticides or pesticide families, which historically is an approach that leaves us confronting new chemical replacements and more complex problems. We are careful to shine a spotlight on flawed and outdated statutes and regulations that do not integrate into their standards the viability of organic practices as a social good to meet the urgency of the moment.
- Beyond Pesticides has a history of experience. Our history is an important guide for us; a history that calls for a bold strategy that questions underlying norms that have brought us to this perilous point of catastrophic environment and health threats. As the threats mount, the strength of our nationwide and worldwide movement and the examples of cost-effective alternatives grow stronger.
- Beyond Pesticides uses holistic thinking. For us, to think and act boldly is to advance a holistic solution that challenges the assumption that toxic chemicals are a tool that can be managed with mitigation measures and restrictions that somehow make them acceptable. The science tells us, and history confirms, that pesticide restrictions have failed and that pesticides (mostly pesticides uses) withdrawn from the market after long negotiations between EPA and the chemical industry are replaced with new chemicals and new problems. Genetically engineered herbicide-tolerant crops were supposed to reduce pesticide use, but resulted in an explosion of weed killers, including the use of glyphosate (Roundup) linked to non-Hodgkin lymphoma. Neonicotinoid insecticides, systemically integrated into the plant through its vascular system, were supposed to protect us from pesticide drift in the air, but they end up in the plant’s pollen, nectar, and guttation droplets and indiscriminately poison foraging insects—causing dramatic declines in bee populations.
- The National Forum Is Cutting Edge. At this year’s 42nd annual Forum, The Pesticide Threat to Environmental Health: Advancing Holistic Solutions Aligned with Nature (2nd session December 4), we ask: Should we accept partial restrictions of pesticide use, despite the availability of cost-effective alternatives that stop the toxic assault and help to prevent the most serious associated diseases that invade and attack our bodies, our loved ones, our families, and our communities—with breast cancer, prostate and testicular cancer, pediatric cancer, infertility, and more?
- We collaborate with grassroots people and organizations. We build our strategies together from the ground up, empowering strategic local action with science and technical organic land management know-how, while answering calls daily from people who want to get involved.
Whether we live in a rural area, a city, or suburb, we are all intricately linked by the environment that we share. And for this reason, our program is intended to focus on how we can and must, in a practical way, embrace the natural systems that serve as the foundation for life.
Sincerely and all best wishes for the holiday season,
Jay Feldman
Executive Director
All unattributed positions and opinions in this piece are those of Beyond Pesticides.
