42nd National Forum Series — 2025 (Virtual)
The Pesticide Threat to Environmental Health
Advancing Holistic Solutions Aligned with Nature
Session 2: STAY TUNED!
Session 1: October 29, 2025, 1:00 - 3:30 PM Eastern (ET)
INTRODUCTION—A CALL TO THE FORUM
We are all affected by how land is managed, food is grown, and nature is protected. Different experiences and perspectives may bring us to care about health and the environment and the devastating adverse effects of pesticides and toxic substances. However, ensuring a livable future requires us to cultivate a collective concern about daily decisions on the management of our personal and community spaces, the practices used to grow the food we buy, and the care that we as a society give to complex and fragile interrelationships that sustain the natural world on which we depend.
This 42nd National Forum, The Pesticide Threat to Environmental Health: Advancing Holistic Solutions Aligned with Nature, challenges us—as concerned families, residents of our community, purchasers of products, advocates for policy, decision makers, and workers—to think holistically about ways we can join together to solve the existential threats to health, biodiversity, and climate for which petrochemical pesticides and fertilizers are major contributors.
We must literally build our strategies from the ground up. Whether we live in a rural area, a city, or suburb, we are all intricately linked by the environment that we share. And for this reason, the Forum is intended to focus on how we can and must, in a practical way, embrace the natural systems that serve as the foundation for life.
We start the Forum with case studies on what is being done now to integrate nature into the food production system in ways that are beneficial to the organisms in the environment and the health and economy of the areas where they live. The speakers will talk about their research and practical experience in identifying practices that embrace nature with a collaborative spirit and teach us about the value of bats, birds, and beavers in productive agricultural and land management systems, exemplifying the path forward in all aspects of modern life.
The costs of conventional agriculture, reliant on petrochemical pesticides and fertilizers, have proven to be unsustainable, with incalculable trillions of dollars in present harm and future catastrophic losses, or externalities, associated with current toxic products and practices that are widely used, but unnecessary to our productivity and quality of life. The focus of this Forum session calls for a reorientation, replacing toxic practices with the nurturing of natural systems that sustain life.
The speakers at the Forum give us an opportunity to step back, widen the lens, and think about redefining our relationship with nature in all aspects of our practices and advocacy.
Plan Now to Join Us as we come together to empower effective action and chart a path for a livable and sustainable future. You are part of the solution! Registration provides access to all sessions of the Forum.