“This movement is about a cultural shift in the way we manage landscapes and tend to the soil. For the sake of future generations, we must do better.”
-Mackenzie Feldman, Executive Director
Herbicide Free Campus envisions a toxin-free world created by student action.
Our Mission
Empower the next generation of environmental leaders to create safer, more sustainable living and learning environments for all, by starting locally and advocating for organic land care on their campuses.
Our values
Collaborate. Actively work to incorporate everyone’s voice. Tenaciously seek out involvement and engagement from all stakeholders.
Advocate. Be vocal. Uplift and highlight the voices of those most impacted. Keep pushing until everyone has been granted the human right to health and safety.
Re-imagine. Think Radically. Look around, imagine the most positive version of the world, and think, discuss and listen to potential ways to get there, then act.
Empower. Give students the tools they need to make positive change and encourage them to stand up against inequity, injustice and antiquated ideals.
What - WHo - Where - How - Why
WHAT
We are an organization that supports groups of students who want to eliminate synthetic herbicide use on their campuses. Through building strategic student movements, spreading awareness and working with groundskeepers and landscape maintenance departments, we provide a structure for students to create real, tangible change on their campuses.
WHO
We are a coalition of students, professors, scientists, experts, non-profits, community members, environmental lawyers, and social justice organizations that work directly with groundskeepers and school campuses. We provide real solutions to help end our dependencies on synthetic herbicides and build a culture around using safe and viable alternatives. Through our network, we help school campuses implement action plans that can result in the change of campus landscape management, the re-training of groundskeeping staff, and a phase out / replacement/ transition away from of all synthetic herbicides
Organic conversion of “The Glade”, the largest open green space on UC Berkeley’s campus.
WHERE
As young people, we believe that college campuses serve as pivotal sites for social and environmental change. Universities are regarded around the world as hubs of knowledge, information, research, and technology that we are taught will lead to our collective success as a society. Therefore, we must hold our college campuses and the larger university systems they represent to the highest ethical standards as they serve as beacons of socially accepted knowledge, practices, research, and conduct. If young people can be inspired by their capacity to learn and impact positive change while being supported by their universities, there is no limit to the benefit they can bring to greater society as the future leaders of the planet.
While our project began on a college campus, UC Berkeley, in 2017 and therefore has been quickly replicated at other college campuses, our goals also include supporting high schools, middle schools, elementary schools, and other public and private lands to achieve herbicide-free status.
HOW
In 2017, our team spearheaded a campaign to end synthetic herbicide use while we were students at UC Berkeley. In 2018, we were able to bring in and work with experts on a pilot project to convert two sites on campus to all-organic and have since converted a total of 11 spaces on campus. Using our experience, we empower students with coaching, materials, strategic planning, and organizational structures to achieve this same success at their schools. We provide students with the tools and resources they need to build a student movement that will put pressure on their university through petitions, direct action, meetings with administration, and more. Additionally, we connect students with a nationwide network of peers who are also working diligently to achieve the elimination of synthetic herbicides on both their campuses and in their communities. By cultivating the will to transition to an herbicide-free campus, we create the space for experts to come in and enact the tangible changes needed to convert campus spaces.
WHY
Modern science has proven time and time again that synthetic herbicides cause extreme and significant detriment to all living organisms as well as our natural environment. Unlike the European Union, the United States lacks a “precautionary principle” approach to the way chemical substances are regulated in agriculture and land use management by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). This means that chemicals are actively applied and considered safe until proven harmful.
A vast majority of the people directly exposed to synthetic herbicides have historically been people of color, undocumented immigrants, migrant workers, and other socioeconomically vulnerable peoples working in industrial agriculture or large-scale landscape maintenance roles. These members of society and the positions they hold are underpaid, underrepresented, have little to no visibility, and therefore are treated as disposable. Proper protection, training, and access to information about the substances they are forced to apply is often absent or not made available in the proper languages. This leads to the direct and frequent exposure of millions of black, brown, indigenous, and lower-income peoples to toxic chemicals that have been linked to numerous cases of cancer, various forms reproductive and developmental harm, liver/kidney damage, neurotoxicity, and more.
Dewayne “Lee” Johnson won a $289 million settlement in the Johnson vs. Monsanto trials after the jury ruled the husband and father of two developed non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma after years of applying synthetic herbicides such as Roundup in his job as a groundskeeper.
Requiring a cheap and underrepresented labor force to apply synthetic herbicides without communicating the risks and potential damages to human lives is a human rights violation. It perpetuates a colonial structure of exploitation of non-white and low-income communities for the advancement of corporate profiteering on synthetic herbicides that are fabricated on a massive industrial scale. Because recent media coverage has finally shed light on the toxicity of synthetic herbicides through court cases such as Johnson v. Monsanto, Hardeman v. Monsanto, Pilliod v. Monsanto, and more, it is now a liability for institutions to continue the use of these chemicals and the associated exposure to the general community. Even so, propaganda about the safety and viability of these chemicals continues to normalize exposing our communities and environments to toxic substances. For these reasons, banning synthetic herbicides is a social, political, and racial justice issue.
Furthermore, synthetic herbicides are petroleum-based, meaning their production involves the consumption of fossil fuels and contribution to climate change. They have been linked to current levels of environmental toxicity that has brought us into the third global mass extinction of animals, and historical records of soil degradation, topsoil loss, soil and water contamination, instability in small agricultural communities, urban food deserts, urban sprawl, and much more. For these reasons, banning synthetic herbicides is an environmental, economic, and climate justice issue.
Using hands, not herbicides!