Courtesy of Liza GrossLiza Gross
If you eat strawberries and live in the United States, there is a good chance that you’ve had strawberries grown in Oxnard, California. Each year, Oxnard and the surrounding Ventura County grow more than 630 million pounds of strawberries—a crop that uses high levels of pesticides, including fumigants, which are among the most toxic.
Writer Liza Gross, a part-time senior editor at PLOS Biology and blogger for KQED Science, Northern California’s public media outlet, spent months sifting through California’s pesticide data to find out how pesticide use was changing around the state. Her feature, “Fields of Toxic Pesticides Surround the Schools of Ventura,” published in The Nation on April 6, 2015, found that even though pesticide use has dropped in some communities over the years, there has been a dramatic rise in use in other communities, including Oxnard, which has a large Latino population and several schools that rest within a quarter mile of the most heavily treated areas in the state. State pesticide regulators say there is nothing to be concerned about.
Here, Gross tells Hannah Hoag the story behind the story:
Where did you get the idea for this piece?
This story was a follow-on to another I’d done, looking at environmental health disparities among minority groups and access to safe drinking water in California. A report out of the University of California, Davis, had looked at decades of nitrate contamination of ground water in California and tied it to agriculture production. This report made it very clear that more than 95 percent of the nitrate pollution was coming from agriculture. But then regulators didn’t do anything about it.
I had been thinking, “How do you actually get regulators to do anything about these disparities?” Maybe there is a way to show how bad it has been over time in specific communities. That might be a way to really shine a light on the problem. Often the regulators are the ones that are failing to protect public health.
I had originally thought I would do something that showed the cumulative impacts—water quality, air quality, and pesticide exposure—and match that to health outcomes. But I ran into problems. How was I going to figure out whether people had been exposed? It would all be correlation. The bigger problem was that many of these towns were tiny and I couldn’t get access to health data because of confidentiality rules.
The environmental health screening tool CalEnviroScreen looks at pollution exposure over a couple of years and a subset of health impacts by zip code. I decided I was going to use that as a starting point to look at 66 of the most hazardous pesticides, and to look at their use over a longer time scale to see which communities had been most impacted. I chose these 66 because regulators identified them as the most likely to drift and cause harm.
You needed a lot of data and the skills to organize the data and analyze it. How did you prepare for reporting this story? Were there sites or organizations that helped you?
In 2011, I did a two-week training course at the New England Center for Investigative Reporting (NECIR) with Joe Bergantino, who broke the Catholic priest sex-abuse story wide open in the 1990s, and computer-assisted reporting wizard Maggie Mulvihill. They provided me with an invaluable framework for doing investigative reporting, including the seemingly obvious but invaluable tip to make sure you don’t get lost in a mountain of material: Stick to a central question and ask yourself who’s benefiting and who isn’t. The corollary to that is always question your assumptions. Every new piece of info should serve to test your assumptions, which could be wrong and lead you astray.
I’m also a member of Investigative Reporters and Editors (IRE), which has a database of tip sheets to help you investigate any number of topics, and tutorials on using Excel and Access to manage your data. My NECIR training came with a copy of IRE’s Computer-Assisted Reporting: A Practical Guide, which I recommend to anyone interested in this type of reporting. And my friend and colleague Peter Aldhous offers invaluable free advice and resources on his website, to help you get started in data reporting. (more…)
