A strange-bedfellows coalition — ranging from environmentalists to men’s rights influencers — is rallying around U.S. Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.'s effort to restrict the pesticide atrazine, long tied to reproductive and developmental health issues.
Hiroko Tabuchi reports for The New York Times.
In short:
- Atrazine is banned in over 60 countries due to links to cancer, birth defects, and hormonal disruption, but remains widely used in U.S. agriculture and found in drinking water.
- Kennedy’s Make America Healthy Again (MAHA) commission aims to spotlight pesticide harms in an upcoming report, aligning fringe influencers and mainstream activists in a push against Big Ag.
- Despite pressure from farm lobbies and former chemical industry officials in government, advocates say they are launching a health-focused political realignment with deep voter appeal.
Key quote:
“These pesticides cause reproductive damage, and we have a reproductive crisis in our country today."
— Zen Honeycutt, founding executive director of Moms Across America
Why this matters:
This coalition — moms who want clean air and water for their kids, people concerned about endocrine disruptors, and a certain strain of male influencers concerned about the effects of toxic chemicals on "masculinity" and sperm counts — is potentially powerful. And that has Big Ag and the chemical lobby nervous. This campaign against atrazine might be the blueprint for a new kind of politics. But ag and chemical lobbyists now have friends in high places within the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and elsewhere in the Trump administration who have in the past pushed back on efforts to restrict pesticides. As Lori Ann Burd, senior attorney at the Center for Biological Diversity, told The New York Times, it's shaping up to be an "epic battle."
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