371: Philip Ackerman-Leist on Pesticide-Free Communities

Documenting the first town-wide pesticide-free ordinance in the world.In This Podcast:On a trip overseas, a professor of Sustainable Agriculture & Food Systems stumbled onto a story worth telling about the first community in the world to ban pesticides. Philip Ackerman-Leist was able to document this endeavor from almost the very beginning and he shares the reasons why anyone who cares about their community needs to understand what happened and why it is so important.Philip is Professor of Sustainable Agriculture & Food Systems at Green Mountain College in Vermont, where he established the college’s organic farm, sustainable agriculture curricula, and the first online graduate program in Sustainable Food Systems in the United States.He and his wife Erin live on a remote off-grid farm in Pawlet, Vermont with their three children, where they raise grass fed American Milking Devons cattle. He is the author of Rebuilding the Foodshed: How to Create Local, Sustainable, and Secure Food Systems and Up Tunket Road: The Education of a Modern Homesteader.  His newest book is A Precautionary Tale: How One Small Town Banned Pesticides, Preserved its Food Heritage, and Inspired a Movement, Published by our friends at Chelse Green Publishing.Go to https://www.urbanfarm.org/2018/07/28/371-philip-ackerman-leist/ for more information and links on this podcast, and to find our other great guests.