Mothers for Organic (continued)

5) Organic agriculture protects wildlife.

My most beloved landscape, the Illinois River valley near Peoria, is an ecologically diminished place. Poisoned by insecticide run-off, the river's fingernail clams disappeared in 1955. The diving ducks that depended on the clams for their food source soon followed. Ring-necks. Canvasbacks. Scaups. They are all gone now. Then, poisoned by herbicide run-off, the river's lush vegetation vanished from the shallows. Wild celery. Coontail. Sago. The seeds of these aquatic plants fed the river's dabbling ducks. And so they vanished too—the wigeons and the gadwells. By the time I was born in 1959, the riverbank near my home had become an eerily silent place. I learned to identify native Illinois ducks not by direct observation but by studying stuffed specimens in ornithology labs. I learned their calls by listening to instructional tapes. I felt myself a natural historian of ghosts.

New studies identify pesticides as a leading suspect in the ongoing decline of North America's frog populations. For example, trace exposures to certain common weed killers emasculate male tadpoles. They do so by stimulating an enzyme that converts male hormone into female hormone. Thus altered, male tadpoles metamorphose into hermaphroditic adults.(5) Similarly, nitrates from synthetic fertilizers can trigger deformities in developing tadpoles or kill them outright—at levels well below their legal limits in drinking water.(6)

Faith and I are sometimes kept awake April nights by the shrill EEP! EEP! of the spring peepers who inhabit the wetlands out behind our cabin. Peepers are a cricket-sized species of tree frog with a piercingly loud method of finding suitable mates. The peepers' cries, which signal the advent of spring more reliably than any bird song, are soon joined by the quieter ZZZIPPP...ZZZIPPP of the chorus frog, whose call most closely resembles a finger drawn over the tines of a comb. Later in the season comes the loudspeaker JUG-O-RUM of the bullfrog, whose booming pronouncements make Elijah jump and laugh out loud. I want the songs of frogs to remain as familiar to my children as the lullabies we sing together. I want my grocery-buying habits to help sustain the annual spring amphibian festival in our backyard. Let frogs keep us up all night. No more animal ghosts.

6) Organic agriculture promotes public health.

Farmers have higher rates of certain cancers than the general population. So do farmer's children.(7) An emerging body of evidence suggests that exposure to pesticides on farms may be part of the reason.

Other studies have revealed possible links between agricultural use of pesticides and birth defects. For example, according to a recent California study, living near agricultural fields where pesticides are sprayed raises the risk of stillbirths due to birth defects. Researchers found the largest risk among babies whose mothers lived within one mile of such areas during their first trimester of pregnancy. Similarly, a Minnesota study found that the children of farmers, as well as those born to families living in agricultural areas, have elevated rates of birth defects. Similar findings come from Iowa.(8)