What I’ve Learned From Herbicide-Free Campus
Written by Annapurna Holtzapple
During my sophomore year in college, I started working in UC Berkeley’s Associated Student Union (ASUC) Office of Sustainable Land Use Policy, an office under the student government’s “Eco” Senator. Through this work, one of the first projects that I encountered was Herbicide-Free Cal. I immediately fell in love with its mission, one that was intertwined with politics and environmental health, and one that would make Berkeley’s campus a healthier place for everybody; for the groundskeepers who take care of our school, for the students who nap on the glade, for the water that runs off our grounds into storm drains into the ocean, for the pollinators and ecosystem as a whole.
After my sophomore year, I chose not to return to the ASUC, but instead directed my energy into this campaign and joined the Herbicide-Free team. Over the past three years of working and organizing with this campaign, I have learned invaluable lessons and skills in campaigning. Moreover, working with Herbicide-Free Campus has been akin to a capstone for my interdisciplinary Society & Environment major in college, bringing together in dynamic practice the critical emphasis of my studies: that environmental and human health and well-being are deeply intertwined, one cannot thrive without the other.
Herbicide-Free Campus is about environmental justice, about not only recognizing and drawing attention to the fact that aggressive agrochemicals are used on our campus but also to the dangerous consequences and implications of their use. Pesticides and other toxic chemicals are commonly understood as a major risk to individuals and communities near the agricultural industry, and these severe health consequences disproportionately affect minority groups such as people of color and migrant farmworkers. This campaign also forces us to confront the issue that those same power dynamics and structural oppressions are at work on our own campus; the injustices and politics, as well as disproportionate risks of chemical spraying, are also tangled up with the health of our school’s community.
I learned that this project is not simply about pushing the administration to change the way we operate, but about becoming engaged with restructuring how we care for our campus. Similar to the challenges of reshaping our world to address the climate crisis, this project represents a much smaller scale of reshaping how we contribute to caring for our landscaped areas. Simply mandating the end of chemical use would overwhelm our groundskeepers and landscaping team, who are already often overloaded and under-supported. Instead, a crucial piece of this movement depends on engaging students to participate and assist in doing this work together. Through working with Herbicide-Free Cal, I have learned a lot about privilege and access, specifically the privilege and power that we have as students, and about how to articulate those complex or uncomfortable realities. I learned that this kind of activism was not just ending a harmful practice but about working to change and restructure it entirely.
I have loved this work, and it has been an honor to be on this team during my college years. My major is interdisciplinary and focused on environmental politics, and while I’ve been lucky to always love my classes, it can feel impossibly overwhelming to sit in a lecture hall all day focusing on the overwhelming environmental justice problems of the world. Learning how deeply entrenched we are in fossil fuels, capitalism, and neo-colonial power dynamics that exploit people and the planet can feel claustrophobic. Recognizing how big these systems are can sometimes leave me feeling defeated and helpless, like these issues are entirely too big to tackle. I’ve found that working with Herbicide-Free Campus gives me the chance to feel like I am a part of tangible change. While it may seem small, being able to pull weeds alongside people who up until that day may have been strangers, gives me a way to battle the panic of that all-encompassing doom. To know that however little they may seem, these actions do have direct and meaningful benefits. Baby steps.
I now walk around campus, quietly knowing that I was able to be part of the team that helped to end the use of glyphosate on our campus, that everybody who shares this space is now healthier and safer because of it. It has been an incredible journey to watch this organization grow, to see how this mission spread from Berkeley to the other UCs and is now operating all across the country. From Mackenzie’s tenacity and hard work, I have learned that sometimes actions for good simply need a place to start, that you don’t have to tackle everything at once. It comes back to the very crux of this work, which is motivated by knowing we are all so interconnected that spraying chemicals on the grass has impacts on every single one of us, and so too does the act of trying to protect it.
When organizing workdays or creating awareness campaigns, I’ve become comfortable with coordinating large groups of students, directly engaging with the administration, and that showing up for what you believe in sends a message. I’ve learned that in addition to the feeling of accomplishment and action that activism has, there are also many moments of frustration, and I’ve also learned how to prioritize pushing through those moments to refocus on why we are doing this. I’ve learned that compassion and integrity in leadership are invaluable, and I’ve seen how important it is to communicate clearly and effectively, how to organize and reach out to ask and advocate for the next step that needs to be done.
But most importantly, as Mackenzie and Bridget have taught from the beginning, working with Herbicide-Free Campus has taught me a lot about being cognizant of privileges and using them for collaboration. For working towards a shared vision. It is something that I can carry with me in all the work I do, and something I hope to incorporate in my future activism.
Annapurna Holtzapple graduated this May from UC Berkeley’s College of Natural Resources. She majored in Society & Environment with a concentration in Global Environmental Politics and double minored in Forestry and in Food Systems. Annapurna has directed the ASUC Office of Sustainable Land Use Policy, conducted research with the Center for Law, Energy and the Environment and the Center for Local Sustainable Development, and interned with the UC Gill Tract in partnership with All Power Labs researching soil supplementation and carbon farming with biochar. She currently works with the Herbicide-Free UC Campaign, writes for the Student Environmental Resources Blog, The Leaflet, and is a founder of Berkeley's Epsilon Eta Chapter. In her free time, she loves backpacking, reading, and playing soccer.