A Precautionary Tale

A Precautionary Tale introduces readers to an unlikely group of activists and a forward-thinking mayor from the tiny town of Mals, who came together to ban pesticides by a referendum vote—making it the first place on Earth to accomplish such a feat, and a model for other towns and regions to follow. For hundreds of years, the people of Mals had cherished their traditional foodways and kept their local agriculture organic. But Mals is located high up in the eastern Alps, and the conventional apple producers, heavily dependent on pesticides, were steadily overtaking the valley below. Aided by climate change, Big Apple crept further and further up the region’s increasingly warmer valleys and mountainsides, its toxic sprays drifting with the valley’s ever-present winds and falling on the farms and fields of Mals—threatening their organic certifications, their grain-growing renaissance, and their thriving tourism economy, as well as their health and that of their livestock. The advancing threats gradually motivated a diverse cast of characters to take action—each in their own unique way, and then in concert in an iconic display of direct democracy in action. As Philip Ackerman-Leist (Rebuilding the Foodshed) recounts their uprising, we meet an organic dairy farmer who decides to speak up when his hay is poisoned by pesticide drift; a hairdresser whose salon conversations mobilized the town’s women in an extraordinarily conceived campaign; and others who together orchestrated one of the rare revolutionary successes of our time and inspired a movement now coursing its way through Europe, the United States, and beyond. With a foreword by the world-renowned environmental leader Vandana Shiva, this book is a clarion call for others to follow in Mals’s footsteps.