Session Recordings and Materials

Missed a live seminar? This is the place to find Forum Series recordings. Videos will be posted shortly after the seminars take place.

>> Session 1—October 29, 2025, from 1 — 3:30 PM Eastern (ET)

We are pleased to share—as a teaching tool—a recording that captures the incredible knowledge and work of our incredible speakers who are helping to chart a course for a livable future with scientific research and hands-on work in the field!

They provide a framework for applying a recognition of the value and importance of natural systems, with specific examples associated with the critical roles that bats, birds, and beavers play in effective agricultural and land management—including the use of hedgerows and other habitat-sensitive practices. The inspiring presentations and discussion helps us to rethink our approach to land stewardship, moving away from harmful practices to holistic solutions that support life-nurturing ecosystems and biodiversity.

Featuring: Danilo Russo, PhD, professor of ecology at the University of Naples Federico II, international leader in bat research, and coauthor of A Natural History of Bat Foraging: Evolution, Physiology, Ecology, Behavior, and Conservation, Jo Ann Baumgartner, executive director of the Wild Farm Alliance, renowned expert in ecological farming and land management practices, Sam Earnshaw, author and expert in hedgerow and farmscape installation and management, and Tony Able, chair of the Southeast Beaver Alliance. Jay Feldman, executive director, moderating.

INTRODUCTION FROM JAY FELDMAN: Welcome all to the Forum!

We cannot survive without healthy ecosystems. In working together as people and communities—across the U.S. and around the world—our approach to land management must embrace nature for its extraordinary and exhilarating beauty and complexity, but also to ensure productivity, profitability, quality of life, and environmental and personal health. A sustainable future requires us to respect nature, define materials that do no harm, eliminate petrochemical pesticides and fertilizers, and certify, label, and enforce practices—recognizing that when we support nature, nature will support us.

Our daily objective at Beyond Pesticides is to inform action to empower advocacy with science, policy solutions, and practical implementation of cost-effective alternatives. Conventional, chemical-intensive land management practices are not sustainable. Petrochemical pesticide and fertilizer dependency contributes significantly to escalating crises in health, biodiversity, and climate. These practices have led to entrenched chemical reliance, creating a treadmill with increasing pesticide resistance in the target insects, weeds, and harmful bacterial and fungal populations. Our current conventional land management practices lack resiliency and have become unaffordable, whether it is the growing of our food or the management of our landscapes. Instead of cycling nutrients in tandem with nature, conventional practices contaminate the habitats and ecosystems of the very organisms that offer their ecosystem services for free. The catastrophic decline of pollinators, and insects in general, is not attributable to one chemical or chemical family, but a constellation of chemical mixtures, synergistic effects, and synthetic fertilizers, among other factors.

Rachel Carson warned in her book Silent Spring, “By their very nature, chemical controls are self-defeating, for they have been devised and applied without taking into account . . . . complex biological systems. . .” In this spirit, the United Nations Environment Program states, “Producing food that is both healthy and sustainable demands that we work with—not against—nature.” The solution requires, as the UN says, “reconceiving” the food system.

We can feed the world and embrace nature with organic systems that eliminate petrochemicals on the farm, build productivity, and outcompete chemical-intensive practices. Resilient organic systems generate higher long-term productivity and profitability, according to the Rodale Institute’s 40-year longitudinal study. Other published data show organic production with equivalent-to-higher corn and soybean yields than chemical-intensive practices.

Now, high-tech farming (“precision agriculture”), with the use of drones, satellites, and artificial intelligence, is being touted as a great environmental achievement, focused on soil biology and lower or variable application rates of petrochemical pesticides and fertilizers—thus ignoring holistic and inter-dependent elements in nature. Labeling these practices as “sustainable,” integrated pest management, or “regenerative” undercuts ecosystem health.

We are all here to ensure a livable and just future—and to cultivate a collective concern about (i) daily decisions on the management of our personal and community spaces, (ii) the practices used to grow the food we eat, and (iii) the care that we as a society give to a complex and fragile natural world on which life depends.

>> Session 2—December 4, 2025, from 1 — 3:30 PM Eastern (ET)