5.

Trouble in Paradise

The island of Kauai is so beautiful it can make you twitch. The great green slabs thrusting up from the central mountains look like they could be hiding another Machu Picchu; the island’s lush, rolling piedmont drops into beaches so famous for their waves that locals have been known to remove uninvited surfers with their fists.

Kauai is also a place where you can see a guy dressed up as the Grim Reaper—black cape, flaming red death mask—standing by a major intersection with a sign that says “Monsanto Sucks!” It is an island where anger at giant chemical companies is so intense that a man who is both a professional surfer and a professional mixed martial arts fighter recently ran for mayor on an anti-GMO platform and got 40 percent of the vote.

Tiny Kauai, perched at the far western edge of the United States, has become ground zero for the global debate over genetically modified food and the spraying of their attendant chemicals on cropland. It is a place where, for years, multinational agrochemical companies have developed the GM seeds that circulate around the globe, but kept their experiments—especially their use of pesticides—secret from the people who live just down the road. And it is a place where a ragtag group of activists have fought these companies to a draw. Like other communities around the world that have fought the agrochemical conglomerates, the people of Kauai feel they are bearing a chemical onslaught their bodies and their beloved island ought not to have to bear. They argue that their land is being used for the good of company profits, that GMOs are really just a vehicle for chemical companies to sell the world more pesticides, and that their fight is a microcosm of the global GMO battle itself. Indeed, when it comes to the global food system, with all its perils and promises, the rest of the world is watching Kauai. Because just as GMOs and their attendant pesticides can spread around the world, so can resistance.

When I arrived in Kauai, the guy at the rental car agency asked me why I had come to visit. “I’m writing a book about GMOs,” I told him.

“Huh,” he said. “Good idea. Lots of pesticides being sprayed over on the island’s west side. A guy I work with just lost his dad over there. It’s strange how many people are telling stories like that. I’m glad I work inside.”

When I pulled into my hotel, the woman at the check-in desk also asked me why I had come. I told her.

“My husband works for a fertilizer company, and he says all this stuff about GMO companies is nonsense,” she said. “Closing these companies down would be taking food right out of people’s mouths. I just try to keep quiet.

“Be careful who you talk to—you might end up starting a fight.”

A few hours later, I found myself sitting in the passenger seat of a beat-up Toyota pickup truck being driven by Jeri DiPietro. We had bumped along an endless series of potholes down a long dusty road, finally pulling up next to an abandoned sugar mill, its exterior walls overgrown with trees and weeds. A pair of rusted-out truck chassis sat rotting in front. Behind them, a squat conical building had been emblazed with a line of graffiti: “It all started here.”

Behind us, across the dirt road from the abandoned mill, a series of squat plastic silos filled with a yellowish liquid sat baking in the sun.

DiPietro had come to this place—an experimental farm operated by the agribusiness giant DuPont Pioneer, to see if she could figure out what the company was spraying on its fields. She carried with her a series of maps showing the locations of company fields, amended with thick lines of Magic Marker that showed acreage and field boundaries (Pioneer 4,500; BASF 900; Syngenta 3,000; Dow 3,500 + 500), as well as their proximity to local rivers and towns and the pesticides being used there.

“There is a field in Kamakani on the west side—all we have is Google Earth to see where the fields are,” DiPietro told me. Chemical companies have fields “within 450 feet of a preschool, and one of the chemicals they use is paraquat, which has been banned in thirty-six countries. Right on the label, it says that paraquat is fatal if inhaled.”

DiPietro has been involved in the anti-GMO fight on Kauai since 2002, long before most people on the mainland had ever heard the term. Because the companies running these experimental fields are not forthcoming about their locations, or what crops they are growing, or what they are spraying on them, DiPietro had to create the maps herself. She assembled them from her explorations driving the island’s dusty red back roads and looking for the tiny spray sheets the companies post alongside their fields. She has seen plenty of signs noting the chemicals being used: atrazine, lorsban, “other.” (As toxic as atrazine and lorsban are, she says, it’s the chemicals marked “other” that bother her the most.)

“It’s supposed to be against federal law to spray lorsban in winds over ten miles per hour and to spray any restricted-use pesticides in windy conditions,” DiPietro said. Here on Kauai, “it’s always blowing like this.”

Because the fields themselves are shielded from public view, the spray sheets are plainly not intended for the public either. They are posted to advise company workers to stay off the fields for twenty-four to forty-eight hours after a spray. This is serious business: the EPA recently announced it is considering banning chlorpyrifos, another commonly used chemical on Kauai that has sickened dozens of farmworkers in recent years, including at least ten Syngenta workers who were hospitalized in Kauai in January 2016. The workers had walked onto a cornfield twenty hours after it had been sprayed—just four hours earlier than recommended.

DiPietro had driven me by the Grand Hyatt Kauai and the Poipu Bay Golf Course, within easy drifting distance of the experimental farm. Did the golfers know what was being sprayed across the street? Would they care if they did? How about the surfers? The retirees drinking piña coladas or doing yoga on the beach? It is this lack of available information—about chemicals that are well-known health hazards being sprayed in close proximity to places where people live, work, and play—that has driven DiPietro and a host of others on Kauai to take their fight straight to the companies themselves.

A notably gentle woman, DiPietro shielded her dark hair and dark eyes beneath a baseball cap that read “Kauai Has the Right to Know.” She had been to this experimental farm many times before and was not, apparently, a welcome presence. As we sat in her cab chatting, she looked in her rearview mirror and saw a white four-by-four coming up fast behind her. She sat tight. “Looks like we’ve got a visitor,” she said.

A white pickup pulled up next to DiPietro, and a bull-necked man with fury on his face glared out from beneath a ball cap.

“Get the hell out of here and don’t come back,” he seethed. “And no more pictures!” The man was enraged, his voice was full of threat, and DiPietro did not try to argue. But she did not seem intimidated so much as resigned. She’d been through this ritual before. She pulled off down the road.

—

LAND USE ON KAUAI has a long and complex history, one that is tied up with centuries-old sugar plantations and an enormous cultural and economic gap between wealthy landowners and native and immigrant laborers. In 1920, several hundred Filipino workers staged a strike against the sugar plantations, protesting wages that amounted to less than a dollar for twelve hours of work. As they gathered, policemen climbed a nearby bluff and fired on the crowd. In what came to be known as the Hanapepe Massacre, sixteen Filipino workers were killed as they fled into a stand of banana trees. The workers were later blamed for the violence: 130 were arrested; 56 were found guilty of rioting and were imprisoned.

A few decades later, chemical companies began testing defoliants for use in the Vietnam War. “We’ve been a place for Monsanto to experiment for fifty years,” a woman named Fern Rosenstiel told me. “They tested Agent Orange on this island right near where I was born.”

King Sugar, as the industry was known, dominated the island’s economy for 150 years, placing great wealth in a very few hands but also creating a plantation culture that many say remains in place today. Descendants of the sugar workers from Japan, Portugal, Polynesia, and the Philippines remain in sizable numbers throughout the state. Crippled by foreign competition, Kauai’s sugar industry began to collapse in the 1980s and 1990s, and many companies picked up and left. Big Agribusiness has more than stepped into its ample footprint. The companies still hire descendants of the people who worked on the plantations—Chinese, Japanese, native Hawaiians—and these people are happy to have the work. But they also hire a lot of temporary workers from places like Malaysia.

“Their ancestors were brought here to divert rivers for the benefit of the white people who ran the pineapple plantations and the sugarcane plantations,” Rosenstiel said. “Forty million gallons of water still goes out of the Waimea River through diversion, straight out into ocean, because they’ve never restored the diversions.”

Some 14,000 acres of Kauai’s land are leased to the global agrochemical conglomerates DuPont Pioneer, Dow, Syngenta, and BASF. The corporations chose Kauai because its tropical climate enables them to work their fields year-round. Company workers can plant experimental fields three seasons a year, which can cut in half the time it takes to develop a new genetically altered seed.

The “experiments” taking place on these fields consist of planting genetically engineered seeds—primarily corn—and then dousing the fields with a variety of pesticides to see which plants survive. The chemicals will kill all the weeds and some of the corn plants themselves. Between 2007 and 2012, DuPont Pioneer sprayed fields on Kauai with ninety different chemical formulations with sixty-three active ingredients, and sprayed as many as sixteen times a day, two out of every three days during the year. Statewide, Hawaii leads the nation in the number of experimental fields, with more than 1,100. Studies show that companies use seventeen times more of the highly toxic “restricted use” pesticides on experimental plots than do farmers on traditional fields.

The use of these chemicals has become necessary, at least in part, because softer, “general use” pesticides like glyphosate have begun to lose their effectiveness. Chemical companies must now engineer new seeds that will resist other, more intense chemical compounds. Dow, for example, has used its Kauai fields to develop new corn and soybean seeds that are resistant to the herbicide 2,4-D—once an active ingredient in Agent Orange that’s been linked to reproductive problems and cancer.

If a corn plant can survive the chemical sprays—and if the sprays successfully kill every other plant on the field—the resistant seeds will be moved along the development pipeline; one day, this corn’s progeny might end up spread across the vast cornfields of Iowa, and Nebraska, and Illinois. More than likely, the harvest from these plants will end up sweetening soft drinks or feeding the millions of cattle and pigs that supply the country’s bottomless appetite for inexpensive meat.

Because GM crops have been legally declared to be the “substantial equivalent” of conventionally farmed crops, the island’s farms are not required to file Environmental Impact Studies. And because of a variety of legal loopholes, including the shroud wrapped around “proprietary information,” companies are not required to tell the public much of anything about what they are spraying, or where, or when.

Since they lease their land from the island’s handful of large private landowners (Steve Case, the founder of AOL, owns 38,000 acres of former plantation land known as Grove Farms), the companies are largely shielded from public view. Because the companies get their spraying permits from the federal government, and not from the state or the county or the local planning boards, they do not feel obliged to answer to local complaints. And because their work is regulated by the federal government, the companies say that local laws do not apply to them. They stick to this logic even when their research takes place on thousands of acres of state land.

For the people who live on Kauai, however, the fight over GMOs and pesticides is just another chapter in a long struggle over the use and misuse of their land. They say the companies have refused to divulge what chemicals they use on their fields. They say that when people complain to the companies, they get no answers. When people complain to their elected officials, and the elected officials complain to the companies, they also get no answers. By fighting even basic disclosure laws, the companies are shutting down any possibility of understanding what consequences their chemical sprays might be having on the health of the local community. Activists, doctors, local politicians—they all want information, and they aren’t getting any.

“For me, this is about the impact on our community, not on whether Doritos have GMOs or not,” Gary Hooser told me. For years, Hooser, a county councilman (and thus one of the island’s highest-ranking public officials), has tried to extract information from the chemical companies. He has had very little success. “I have issues with corporations controlling the food supply, but that’s also not what this is about. This is about industry causing harm. I asked them politely, and in writing, for a list of the pesticides they used, and they said no, they were not going to give it to me. They were very polite.”

If chemical companies on Kauai are outwardly uncooperative, their behind-the-scenes influence on the regulatory agencies charged with overseeing their work is virtually complete. Pushing states (and the federal government) to cut regulatory staff has long been a primary industry objective. Here’s what this looks like in Hawaii: because of budget cuts, the state Department of Agriculture has only one employee assigned to review pesticide inspection reports. Although the department is responsible for overseeing the federal Clean Water Act, it has no statewide program for testing pesticide use in soil, air, or water. The single position on Kauai meant to monitor toxins in agricultural dust has been vacant for a year. Meanwhile, the state’s health department has no programs to test for pesticide contamination in the soil, air, or water.

Kauai’s sole pesticide inspector says she hasn’t gotten around to reviewing most reports in several years—in part because so many concerned people have been asking her for spray records. “I’ve had so many requests that I haven’t had a chance to work on any of my cases for so many years,” she said.

As for federal oversight, the nearest EPA office is 2,000 miles away in San Francisco.

All of this means that when Gary Hooser asks companies for records about what they are spraying, he finds himself circling in an endless bureaucratic whirlpool. When he asked the state to provide a spreadsheet listing the sales of restricted-use pesticides used by Dow, DuPont Pioneer, Monsanto, BASF, and Syngenta on the island from 2002 to 2004, his request was denied. The disclosure records “are believed to contain confidential business information (CBI) or trade secrets,” the state’s pesticides program manager wrote Hooser. The decision made it impossible for Hooser or anyone else to determine “what chemicals are being used, by whom, at what geographical locations,” Hooser said.

State law requires that companies seeking federal permits to test GMOs or experimental-use pesticides must file a copy of the request with the state. But when Hooser asked the state health department for copies of these requests, he was sent a grand total of eight.

“I said, ‘There must be a problem—there must be more,’” Hooser told me. A couple of months ago, he asked again. This time, the health department said they had “a roomful of these things.” We haven’t even opened the boxes, the state people told Hooser, “but you’re welcome to come by and look.”

Although the state has an entire storeroom full of boxes, “literally nobody at the state looks at these documents,” Hooser said. “Nobody. And most are highly redacted.”

Companies point to reams of paper to show how regulated they are, but Hooser found that no one was checking up on them. “The state inspects them maybe five times a year, and they spray 220 days out of the year, and an average of eight to sixteen times a day. It’s a tragedy. They look me in the eye and say they are inspected on a regular basis, and 43 percent of the state inspection logs are redacted.”

A Hawaii Department of Agriculture (HDOA) log shows that in 2011 and 2012, the state made 175 inspections on Kauai, but more than a third of these reports had been redacted, the names of companies, employees, and alleged violations crossed out. The log has this note attached: “On two separate occasions, Kaua‘i County Councilmember Hooser has requested in writing from the HDOA ‘the nature of the violations and investigations without the accompanying company identification.’ This information has not been provided.”

When Hooser finally got his hands on a list of restricted-use pesticide sales from the state Department of Agriculture, “the core data shocked the hell out of me,” he said. “Restricted use” means the chemicals (in this case including alachlor, atrazine, chlorpyrifos, methomyl, metolachlor, permethrin, and paraquat) are more dangerous—and thus more tightly regulated by the EPA—than general-use pesticides like glyphosate or 2,4-D.

“Ninety-eight percent of the restricted-use pesticides were being used by just four companies. They were using atrazine by the ton. Paraquat. Eighteen tons a year of twenty-two different kinds of restricted-use pesticides on this island only.” All these chemicals didn’t just disappear, Hooser knew. Some were taken up into plants, but some trickled into the island’s soil, the water, the air itself.

State records show that between 2010 and 2012, the agrochemical companies purchased 13 tons (plus nearly 16,000 gallons) of restricted-use pesticides on the island. Pest control companies used an additional 74,000 pounds, mostly to kill termites and ants.

Other records show that between 2013 and 2015, companies sprayed 18 tons of restricted-use pesticides. During this period, companies also used some seventy-five different general-use pesticides, but because of lax enforcement codes, no information was available for how much was used.

Six of the seven restricted-use pesticides are suspected of being endocrine disruptors, which means they may cause sexual development defects in humans and animals, according to the EPA. Four of the seven are also suspected carcinogens. And between them, the seven have been linked to, among other things, neurological and brain problems and damage to the lungs, heart, kidneys, adrenal glands, central nervous system, muscles, spleen, and liver. And these are only the most toxic of the lot. As we have seen, even general-use pesticides like glyphosate and 2,4-D have recently been declared “probable” and “possible” human carcinogens in their own right.

A study published in March 2014 in the British journal The Lancet found that chlorpyrifos, a neurotoxin that is restricted in California and many countries, is one of a dozen commonly used chemicals that “injure the developing brain” of children.

Recent hair sample testing of children living near the Kauai test fields indicated exposure to thirty-nine different pesticides, including eight restricted-use pesticides. “It’s unconscionable that pesticides are being found in the hair and bodies of our children,” said Malia Chun, the mother of one of the girls tested. “State and federal officials have a responsibility to ban chlorpyrifos and make sure our children are protected in our homes and schools from these hazardous chemicals.”

But it wasn’t just chlorpyrifos. Children were exposed to “a cocktail of pesticides, and the consequences of exposure to such mixtures over a lifetime are not known, nor is the issue of exposure to such mixtures currently evaluated by our regulatory agencies,” said Emily Marquez, an endocrinologist and staff scientist at the Pesticide Action Network.

Also in the cocktail: permethrin, a suspected carcinogen thought to compromise kidney, liver, reproductive, and neurological function. When combined in the body with chlorpyrifos, permethrin has been shown to be “even more acutely toxic,” according to E. G. Vallianatos, a twenty-five-year veteran of the EPA and author of Poison Spring: The Secret History of Pollution and the EPA.

Another ingredient in the cocktail: atrazine, the second most widely used herbicide (behind glyphosate) in the United States. A known carcinogen, atrazine is sprayed on half of all corn crops and 90 percent of sugar sold in the United States—which is why it is commonly used on experimental fields in Kauai. “A little bit of poison to an adult is a lot of poison to a developing baby,” Dr. Tyrone Hayes, an endocrinologist at the University of California, Berkeley, told an audience on Kauai recently. The poisoning of a young child can cause health problems that can last a lifetime, Hayes said; his own research has found that frogs exposed to barely detectable levels of atrazine developed both male and female genitalia.

On Kauai, frustration with chemical company behavior grew most acute in the town of Waimea, on the island’s west side. In 2000, residents of the town filed a formal complaint claiming that pesticide-laden dust was blowing into their homes from experimental fields operated by DuPont Pioneer. They got nowhere.

Six years later, sixty students in a Waimea school went to their health office complaining that a “chemical smell” was making them nauseous and dizzy. Some students fainted. Others were seen covering their noses with their T-shirts. Nearly three dozen were sent home. A local reporter noted that several of the children “had their heads in their hands and tears in their eyes.”

The school is situated just a few dozen yards from experimental fields leased by Syngenta. Firefighters, police, a hazmat team, and officials from the state health and agriculture departments descended on the school to examine students and take samples from the nearby fields.

At first, company and state officials blamed the outbreak on a malodorous plant called Cleome gynandra, also known as wild spider flower or (more accurately) stinkweed. “It does stink and as a company we certainly hope the children are feeling better,” a Syngenta official said.

Though it is eaten (boiled) in some parts of the world, stinkweed has been known to cause headaches and even nausea in some people who are particularly sensitive to it. But Gary Hooser, who was a state senator at the time, was not convinced. He started making phone calls. He wanted the company, or the state, to tell parents what chemicals were being applied to the crops near their children’s school. Neither state officials nor Syngenta would tell the senator anything, and repeated attempts by local reporters “to compel authorities to release the information were unsuccessful.”

Company claims about stinkweed contamination struck some scientists and doctors as disingenuous. Given that the company fields were so close to the schools and to local homes, a few things were beyond dispute. There was no questioning the presence of restricted-use pesticides, or that dust from these pesticides routinely migrates into residential properties, or that the chemicals have a well-documented connection to childhood neurological problems, including autism, ADHD, and fetal brain defects, wrote J. Milton Clark, a professor at the University of Illinois School of Public Health and a former senior health and science adviser to the EPA, who examined the evidence for an island task force on pesticides.

There was no evidence to support the stinkweed theory, Clark wrote. “Symptoms of dizziness, headaches, nausea, vomiting, and respiratory discomfort are consistent with exposure to airborne pesticides,” he wrote. The children’s symptoms “were far more likely related to pesticide exposures than from exposure to stinkweed.” If the companies continued spraying, Clark recommended that local health centers near agricultural fields be given kits “to quickly test for organophosphate poisoning.”

It took nearly six years for state health officials to formally weigh in on the incident. When researchers from the University of Hawaii sampled the air around the Waimea Canyon Middle School, they indeed found evidence of stinkweed. But they also found five pesticides, including chlorpyrifos, metolachlor, bifenthrin, benzene hexachlorides (BHCs), and even DDT, which has been banned in the United States for four decades. Although the chemicals were found in amounts below EPA health standards, the presence of agricultural chemicals was clear evidence of “pesticide drift,” according to Hawaii’s Department of Agriculture. How many years these chemicals—and perhaps dozens of others—had been drifting into Waimea homes and schools was not addressed.

To Gary Hooser, Waimea’s pesticide drift was just part of the problem. The larger issue was the way companies seemed to consider themselves beyond the reach of public oversight. “The failure to release the information about what is sprayed out there only increases the public’s mistrust that something harmful is being sprayed,” Hooser said at the time. “They know what was sprayed out there and they should tell the public.”

What the island needed—and what the medical community began demanding—was information about the chemicals being sprayed in their communities. Frustrated by the lack of quantitative data about pesticide use, a group of west-side physicians wrote that they had “many qualitative examples that point to a higher than normal incidence of many ailments and disease processes occurring in our patient populations.” They’d seen birth defects involving malformations of the heart that were occurring at ten times the national rate. Miscarriages, gout, cancer, hormonal imbalances—all were occurring at unusually high levels, the doctors wrote, noting that Hawaii had not had surveillance for birth defects since 2005. They called for epidemiology studies by the CDC and Hawaii’s Department of Health to better understand the causes.

“We all share a deep concern for the health of our patients and the concern of what may be happening to our community by being exposed to this unique cocktail of experimental and restricted-use pesticides on an almost daily basis,” the Kauai doctors wrote. “We need to understand what chemical toxins are being sprayed, how often they are being sprayed, and how close our patients live to the specific areas being tested with these pesticides. It is unconscionable to allow open-air testing of new combinations and untested chemicals in any location that cannot guarantee the separation of the testing and any unwilling or unknown exposure potential to the public.”

The doctors’ worries reflected conclusions in a major study by the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP), which contended that a growing body of evidence points to associations between pesticide spray exposure in young children and a range of diseases, from childhood cancers to autism. On Kauai this was especially worrisome for the children of people who work in the fields, said Dr. Lee Evslin, a pediatrician on the island. The AAP “never had a mandate about pesticides before, but they have now placed it in our laps,” Evslin said. “This body carries a lot of weight, and they are basically saying to the pediatricians of the world, ‘pay attention to this. These are dangerous substances.’”

Margie Maupin, a nurse practitioner on the island’s west side, said the presence of so many pesticides—and so little information—had left her unable to do her job properly. “Thousands of reputable studies have already been done that show pesticides are known hazardous toxins,” she said. “The probability that these pesticides will hurt a lot of people on the west side, I believe, is high. Some health care providers are already seeing signs of serious illness and disability now, and we are at a loss for how best to protect our patients from this onslaught of known, dangerous exposure.”

Taking the Companies to Court

When I visited Waimea, I met a man named Klayton Kubo, who has been raging about clouds of dust for fifteen years. When we first sat down at a picnic table in the town center, Kubo refused to talk to me. Too many people around, he said, looking over his shoulder. The companies know who I am.

Instead, we drove to the top of a nearby ridge, parked, and walked along a dry path overlooking the town. To our left, in the near distance, we could see fields operated by both DuPont Pioneer and Dow. Tractors were working the fields, with red dust rising behind them. Perhaps six miles away, the largest of the plumes rose hundreds of feet into the air.

“If you think this is bad, you should come back during a trade winds day,” Kubo said. “It’s fucking insane!

“Two hundred yards outside my living room window, I can see their facility. The wind comes this way, we get it. The wind goes the other way, we get it. And right in the middle is a school and a town.”

Kubo pointed at the plume in the distance. “What you see right there? That’s what’s in my kitchen,” he said. “I scrape the stuff off my glass-top stove. That’s why I’ve been grumbling the longest.”

As we walked down the hill, an official-looking white pickup truck drove by. “Ha! Syngenta!” Kubo shouted. “Don’t fuck with my truck!”

In 2011, more than a hundred of Klayton Kubo’s neighbors filed a lawsuit against DuPont Pioneer claiming that dust from the company’s fields was damaging their property. Despite more than a decade of complaints and a formal citizen petition seeking relief from pesticide-laden dust, the lawsuit claimed, Pioneer’s GMO operations continually generated “excessive fugitive dust” and used dangerous pesticides “without taking preventative steps to control airborne pollutants as promised by Pioneer and as required by state and county law.”

“The community is covered,” the plaintiffs’ lawyer Gerard Jervis said. Residents are “living in lockdown, unable to open their doors or windows.” The suit pointedly did not make any health claims, though Jervis said local residents complained frequently of asthma and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease.

A company spokesperson defended Pioneer’s practices. “We operate our facilities on the islands with the highest standard of safety and environmental responsibility and we plan to vigorously defend our case.”

At the beginning of the trial, when residents alluded to health problems they attributed to the dust, the judge in the case reminded his attorneys that the case was about property damage only. The case was not about the effects the chemicals might be having on their health.

Jervis reminded the court that the EPA requires that applicators must not allow spray to drift from fields into private property, parks and recreation areas, woodlands, or pastures. He also noted that the state’s air quality study did not even try to look for more than thirty pesticides that have been used at the GMO test fields since 2007, including two of the most heavily used and dangerous: methomyl, an insecticide, and paraquat, a weedkiller that (like atrazine) has been linked to Parkinson’s disease and (also like atrazine) is made by Syngenta. Paraquat has been banned both in Switzerland, Syngenta’s home, and across Europe.

As the Waimea lawsuit proceeded through its paces, worries about pesticides on Kauai continued to grow. A local Kauai diver discovered a massive die-off of up to 50,000 sea urchins. A biologist for the state Department of Land and Natural Resources speculated that the chemicals sprayed on GM seeds might have been a cause, because when it rains, the loosened red topsoil on treated land flows into streams and rivers that eventually flow out into the ocean and onto coral reefs.

“Kaua‘i produces more GMO seeds than anyplace,” Don Heacock, the biologist, said. “Now, there are a whole bunch of people in the genetic engineering camp that say GMO crops need less pesticides, but the new wave of crops is more toxic than ever before. The Bt corn is meant to kill. It has an insecticide protein in the corn. In the Midwest, they found that the residue from GMO corn is related to aquatic insect deaths, which are food for baby fish.”

That same winter, the internationally renowned environmentalist Vandana Shiva traveled from New Delhi to Kauai to speak to anti-GMO activists. “I think your island is truth-speaking to the world that GMOs are an extension of pesticides, not a substitute or alternative to it,” she said. “[Hawaii] has become like a nerve center for the expansion of destruction. GMOs are not a safe alternative to poisons, they are pushed by a poison industry to both increase the sale of the poisons and simultaneously monopolize the seed.”

Evoking the 1984 disaster in Bhopal, India, when a chemical leak from a Union Carbide plant (now a subsidiary of Dow Chemical) killed and injured tens of thousands of people, Shiva said that chemical manufacturers had long since transformed themselves into the biotech industry. “War and agriculture came together when the chemicals that were produced for warfare lost their market—and the industry organized itself to sell those chemicals as agrochemicals,” Shiva said.

Energized, activists on Kauai decided to take their animus against the companies to the streets. In December 2012, Fern Rosenstiel, who grew up near Agent Orange test fields, organized a small protest by the Kauai airport. She was joined by Dustin Barca, a professional surfer who, at the age of twenty-six, had become a successful professional fighter in mixed martial arts. Surfing and fighting had made Barca famous on Kauai and around the state, and he decided to leverage his fame to galvanize people against the chemical companies.

Barca had an idea. That same month, during the Pipeline Masters surfing competition on Oahu, he made headlines just by standing on the beach.

“There were 30,000 people on the beach, millions more [watching] on TV,” Barca told me. “Me and this little kid carried around a bright red and yellow banner that said ‘Monsanto’s GMO Food Poisons Families.’ That was my first, initial move to get the word out, on the north shore of Oahu, the most famous surf spot in world.”

When I met Barca, he, like Klayton Kubo, refused to talk in public. He didn’t know who might be watching. But even more than Kubo, Barca is used to fighting. He has the wiry frame of a welterweight. He is missing teeth. His ears have been so damaged they have turned inside out. Ever since he’d entered the political fray, he’s had people videotaping him, he said. At a recent anti-GMO rally, he confronted a man taping him with a video camera. “I told him, ‘Whoever sent you is going to have to do better than that,’” Barca said.

“Are these companies good for people or nature? How can we tell if they don’t give us the information?” Barca said. “We know what they’re doing. They’ve admitted they’re spraying 2,4-D near our communities, and the trade winds blow every single day. We’ve gone so far into a place where everything is done behind closed doors. It was the same thing that Dole and others did to overthrow the queen. History repeats itself. You just have to know the blueprint to catch it.”

Emboldened by the anti-GMO energy he felt at the surfing tournament, Barca decided to see just how much energy he could leverage across the state. He and Rosenstiel set about organizing marches on all five islands where companies were testing GMOs and pesticides.

On Oahu, close to 3,000 people turned out for a rally in the pouring rain. “I thought, ‘Holy shit, that’s a lot of people who feel like I feel,’” Barca said. “That set up the momentum.

“We went to a different island every Saturday. First was Honolulu. There’s a town there that is the Waimea of Oahu, surrounded by Monsanto experimental fields. We went to a high school over there. You literally walk fifty feet behind their fields. All the kids are running around, these are experimental fields. There are giant aerial sprayers. They can spray 250 times a year, dozens of times a day.”

As word spread, the anti-GMO crowds continued to turn out in droves: 300 came out on Molokai, one of the smallest of the islands; 1,500 on the Big Island; 2,000 on Maui.

Meanwhile on Kauai, with anti-GMO energy reaching a peak, Gary Hooser found himself in a bind. If he encouraged activists to stand out in front of expensive tourist hotels, holding up signs saying that Kauai is “Ground Zero for Experimental GMOs,” his community stood to lose tourism dollars. He decided instead to introduce a bill that would force companies to do what they so far had refused to do: disclose what they were spraying, on what crops, and in what fields, “to see if we have anything to be afraid of.” The bill also sought to create no-spray buffer zones around schools, homes, and hospitals. His bill carried criminal sanctions for companies that refused to comply; Hooser hoped this would at the very least encourage whistleblowers.

“People were concerned with pesticides and GMOs, so what was I supposed to do?” Hooser told me. “I met with the companies, asked them to give me their data, asked them to help me separate the wheat from the chaff, and the companies wouldn’t tell me anything. They wouldn’t respond to my questions. They lied to me. They were telling me they ‘only use what other farmers use.’ No other farmers use this stuff, and not in anything like the toxicity or the volume. The more they lied, the more I dug into it, and the more angry I got.”

Industry executives claimed the bill’s disclosure rules were unnecessary, unfair, and pseudoscientific. Alicia Maluafiti, the executive director of the Hawaii Crop Improvement Association, a biotech trade group, called Kauai’s move “a pretty pissy bill.”

“It’s not about community health, it’s not about pesticide use, it’s about getting rid of these companies,” she said. She called the pesticide disclosure bill “fearmongering by Mr. Hooser and the extremists on Kauai.”

Companies dismissed complaints by repeating that both GMOs and pesticides were highly regulated by the government. Genetically engineered products “have been out there for seventeen years now,” said Mark Phillipson, Syngenta’s head of corporate affairs in Hawaii. “There have been 3 trillion meals served that have had genetic-engineered components in them, and not one reported incident, acutely or long term, associated with GM causing an allergen or toxicity issue.”

During the hearings on the bill, hundreds of people from both sides showed up to voice their opinions, many of them wearing colored shirts to show which side they were on.

“We made shirts with red and yellow, representing the strong in Hawaiian tradition. They wore blue,” Dustin Barca told me. “It was almost like the Bloods and the Crips.”

Companies urged their employees to show up en masse to counterbalance the protesters. “The companies bussed workers in here so we couldn’t even get in to testify,” Rosenstiel said.

Indeed, the battle caused a lot of collateral damage in the Kauai community. “We had a number of doctors come forward—a clear majority of pediatricians signed a letter supporting the bill—but even they paid a political price,” Hooser told me. “These doctors get hammered. They didn’t say they ‘know illnesses are caused by this spraying,’ they just said they were concerned. But the pushback by the companies, their bloggers, the media stuff, it’s been intense.”

During one hearing, a councilman asked an official from the state Department of Agriculture if there was any evidence of pesticide drift. Complaints do come in, the official said, and the state goes to houses, swipes the windows, and sends the samples out for testing. When the investigation is complete, the neighborhood is notified. The whole process—if it actually gets completed—can take two years.

What if it’s a pregnant woman or a child who’s being exposed? Gary Hooser wanted to know. What good is a two-year lag in the testing to them?

As the vote neared, Rosenstiel and Barca helped organize another march. Some 4,000 people marched to the Kauai County Building to support the bill. Some wore gas masks. Others wore death masks. Many wore red T-shirts with yellow letters saying “Pass the Bill.”

Finally, after a hearing on the bill that went on for nineteen hours straight, the Kauai County Council passed Hooser’s bill, 6–1. The mayor vetoed the bill, but the council overrode his veto. It was official: Kauai’s anti-GMO activists had pushed their elected officials to pass a bill requiring some of the world’s most powerful companies to disclose what pesticides they were spraying and where. In a very real sense, the vote was a watershed.

Yet within weeks, DuPont Pioneer, Syngenta, BASF, and Agrigenetics Inc. (a company affiliated with Dow AgroSciences) sued the county in federal court. Their argument: Company farming practices adhere to state and federal laws. Local laws have no jurisdiction over them.

In August 2014, federal judge Barry Kurren agreed with the companies that the state pesticide law preempted any county law regulating pesticides.

An attorney representing two of the companies said she was very pleased. “This is what we told the county when they were discussing it initially,” she said. “I think they wasted time, effort, and money trying to fight for a law they had no right to pass in the first place.”

Gary Hooser saw the ruling differently. “We passed the bill with a democratic process, with thousands of citizens involved,” he told me. “We got the votes like we were supposed to. We overrode the mayor’s veto. And they sued us for the right to spray poisons next to schools.” The anti-GMO forces on Kauai have appealed the judge’s decision; it is now awaiting a hearing in federal court.

Before the dust from the political fight could settle, Dustin Barca, the surfer and professional MMA fighter who had done so much to organize the anti-GMO rallies, decided to make one last public push: he ran to unseat the mayor who had vetoed Hooser’s bill. During the campaign, he ran—literally, ran—around the island; three marathons, back-to-back. Although he didn’t win, he did pull 40 percent of the vote.

“This was totally untypical of me,” Barca told me. “I just had a voice in my heart and my head that said, ‘You have to do something about this right now.’ I threw my whole selfish life away and went into selfless life. I’m not doing this to get rich or famous. I could be making millions fighting in the UFC [Ultimate Fighting Championship]. I’m here for my kids. No other reason.”

About this time, the state Department of Agriculture and Kauai County agreed to set up a fact-finding effort to look into pesticide use. They recruited nine volunteers with backgrounds in agriculture, environmental health, and toxicology. Kauai County split the $100,000 cost of the study with the state Department of Agriculture.

“The big question, the meta-question if you will, is: Are people being harmed from pesticides being sprayed by GMO companies?” said Peter Adler, a veteran mediator who will oversee the project. “We hope to really present some pretty rigorous inventories of what we know, what we don’t know, and what we need to know still and find out. People are talking at their conclusion levels and we want to get down to: What’s the data? What’s the evidence?”

For local residents, there were other “meta-questions,” like whether they should have a say in how their land is used, and how they can protect their own neighborhoods. They have had some victories: in May 2015, a federal court jury awarded $500,000 to fifteen Waimea residents who claimed the red dust from DuPont Pioneer fields caused “loss of use and enjoyment of property.” The verdict said that DuPont Pioneer failed to follow generally accepted agricultural and management practices from 2009 to 2011; the jurors found the “seriousness of the harm to each plaintiff outweighs the public benefit of Pioneer’s farming operation.”

Ten days after the verdict, DuPont Pioneer shut down its 3,000-acre experimental field operation in Kekaha. It plans to consolidate it with operations on Oahu.

At the end of April 2015, Gary Hooser flew to Switzerland to speak at a Syngenta shareholders meeting in Basel. He wanted to ask the company to stop using chemicals in his district that are already illegal in the company’s own country—indeed, across the company’s own continent.

The company did not welcome him. On his blog, Hooser recently wrote:

Syngenta did not want me there and was working on many levels to prevent me from speaking, but legally there was nothing they could do to stop me . . .

I asked them to withdraw from their lawsuit against the County of Kauai, to honor and follow our laws, and to give our community the same respect and protections afforded to the people in their home country of Switzerland. I pointed out that their company uses highly toxic Restricted Use Pesticides (RUPs) in our community, including atrazine, paraquat and four others that they are forbidden by law from using in their own country.

We are not going away and we will not tap out. So long as these companies continue to disrespect and disregard the wishes of our community, we will continue the battle to make them comply.

Fern Rosenstiel, who had organized so many of the marches on Kauai and the other islands, accompanied Hooser on his trip to Switzerland.

“For me, this island is the trunk of the tree,” Rosenstiel told me. “If we can get these companies off this island, if we can cut this tree down, it will cause a positive worldwide reaction. I’ll be here until the day I die, or until these guys are gone.”