Fateful Harvest: The True Story of a Small Town, a Global Industry, and a Toxic Secret - Hardcover

Wilson, Duff

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0060193697 ISBN 13: 9780060193690

Publisher: HarperCollins, 2001

Synopsis

Quincy, Washington, had been a sleepy northwestern farming town until its rest is disturbed by a shocking secret beneath its once-fertile fields: chemical manufacturers are disposing of leftover toxic waste by selling it to unsuspecting farmers as fertilizer. The tainted fertilizer -- containing arsenic and cadmium, lead and dioxins-is believed to be destroying crops, sickening animals, and endangering the nation's food supply. And owing to a gaping regulatory loophole, it is completely legal.

Up against the secrecy and greed of powerful corporations, a local lifelong tomboy and mother of four will make an impassioned stand. Patty Martin begins a fateful journey that will lead to her election as mayor, but also invite the resentment of most of her neighbors for daring to confront the industry that has been Quincy's lifeblood. Martin is joined by a small number of brave farmers who bring ingenuity, outrage, and an investigative reporter to the fight against seemingly insurmountable odds to expose the truth. They learn that toxic waste is turned into fertilizer around the world, spread on food-growing land, absorbed by plants, and, ultimately, consumed by all of us.

Duff Wilson, whose Seattle Times series on this story was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, here provides the definitive account of a new and alarming environmental scandal. Fateful Harvest is a gripping study of corruption and courage, of recklessness and reckoning. It is a story that speaks to the greatest fears -- and ultimate hope -- in us all.

About this title

Review:

The basis for Duff Wilson's Fateful Harvest was formed from his Pulitzer Prize nominated series "Fear in the Fields--How Hazardous Wastes Become Fertilizer". Arsenic, cadmium, lead and beryllium are industrial by-products so toxic it is illegal to dump them into the air or water. Yet, through a loophole in "the crazy semantics of waste disposal", these same hazardous wastes are being applied to the food we eat. And until a small-town mayor from a farming community in Washington state became suspicious, nobody knew. Mayor Patty Martin is a whistle blower as extraordinary as Karen Silkwood and Erin Brockovich--smart, persistent and courageous and overwhelmingly dedicated to her cause even when the town that elected her turned against her. Martin's obsession with hazardous waste in fertilizer began when she met Dennis DeYoung, a local farmer whose land was rendered infertile after the Cenex/Land o' Lakes company paid him to spread the residue from their fertiliser rinse pond on his land. But there was more than fertiliser residue there--it was a witch's brew of hazardous metals, cancer-causing chemicals and even radioactive materials that hadn't been produced by the company itself. DeYoung and Martin wanted to know how they got there and why.

While the articles prompted a modicum of action in Washington state and elsewhere, complacency allows the practice to continue even now. Expanded into book form, this impassioned expose about an alarming trend takes on even more power as Wilson and Martin ask questions the Environmental Protection Agency has been unwilling to answer: Why should there be a limit on the amount of lead in paint and dioxin in cement but not in the fertiliser spread over farmlands and gardens? And is there a correlation between the widespread use of toxins in fertilisers and the phenomenal rise in childhood illnesses and cancers since the early 1980s? --Lesley Reed

Review:

"This is Erin Brockovich squared. An industry behaves with supreme irresponsibility, and a local resident sets out to do something about it. She's aided by a reporter, who tells the inside story of what investigative journalism really entails. Read it now so you'll be ready for the movie."--Bill McKibben, author of The End of Nature"As I read Fateful Harvest, I was torn. I didn't know if I was more enthralled by the story or horrified by what Duff Wilson has uncovered. Whether you grab this book for the gripping tale or for the toxic truth about what is ruining our nation's farmlands, you won't be able to put it down."--Sherry Sontag, co-author of Blind Man's Bluff: The Untold Story of American Submarine Espionage"Duff Wilson has documented a horrifying tale of toxic waste turned into fertilizer that is contaminating the food supply. This is efficiency gone mad. Coupled with a corrupt system willing to turn poisons into profit, it makes unwitting victims of us all. What I always wonder is what the bosses of these companies eat. Perhaps they are more highly evolved and simply live on their own press releases. Woe to the rest of us who need clean food."--Nichols Fox, author of Spoiled: Why Our Food Is Making Us Sick and What We Can Do About It

About this edition

• Publisher: HarperCollins
• Publication date: 2001
• ISBN 10: 0060193697
• ISBN 13: 9780060193690
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 336