Fateful Harvest: The True Story of a Small Town, a Global Industry, and a Toxic Secret.

• Author: Larson, Vanessa
• Position: New and Noteworthy

Fateful Harvest: The True Story of a Small Town, a Global Industry, and a Toxic Secret, by Duff Wilson (New York: Harper Collins, 2001). "Who in the world would think to look for toxic waste in plant food?" writes investigative journalist Duff Wilson in the prologue of Fateful Harvest. Based on an expose series that Wilson wrote for the Seattle Times, the book is an eye-opening account of how citizens in a farming community in Washington state found out that hazardous industrial wastes are being put into fertilizers. In the small town of Quincy, Mayor Patty Martin watched some farmers' fields become unproductive, horses die after eating contaminated hay, and cases of cancer and chronic lung problems increase, galvanizing her to lead a small group of farmers in a fight with local business interests to discover the truth about what farmers were putting on their fields. They found heavy metals including lead, chromium, and cadmium in their fertilizers and, more alarmingly, discovered that this was legal. In the name of "recycling," industries were paying fertilizer companies to take their hazardous wastes, thereby avoiding the high cost of disposing of these wastes in special dangerous-waste landfills. Fertilizer companies then made the wastes into "products" and advertised the fertilizing ingredients...