Julia Shaw & Ben Greig, Pesticide-Free Cambridge
What made you want to campaign to make your area pesticide free?
Julia: I set up Pesticide-Free Cambridge in 2019 following years of fruitless complaining to the council and other stakeholders about the biodiversity, public health, and disability-access impacts of insecticides and herbicides in both green spaces and the built environment. Feeling particularly incensed by the ugly yellow strips of post-glyphosate die-off every spring and autumn, I contacted PAN UK for advice, and was lucky to have been able to join forces with Ben in 2020.
Ben: I’ve always been passionate about nature but a few years ago decided to become more pro- active and do something to arrest the catastrophic decline in wildlife all around us. In 2019, I co-founded On the Verge Cambridge which does pollinator-friendly planting around the city. This also alerted me to the horrific herbicide spraying on the city’s verges. I emailed PAN UK about their Pesticide-Free Towns campaign in 2020 and they put me in touch with Julia: we’ve been working together since.
How did you start your campaign i.e. finding key allies?
We started our campaign by launching a petition to Cambridge City Council, and setting up meetings with both city and county councillors sympathetic to our aims – some in power, some in opposition. In July 2021, this led to a Lib Dem Motion, demanding an end to council herbicide use. Out of this developed the council’s Herbicide Reduction Plan (HRP), based around a two-ward herbicide-free trial that was launched in spring 2022. A ‘Happy Bee’ community street adoption scheme was also established, which encouraged residents to maintain their own pavements without the use of herbicides. The trial was expanded to four wards the following year, with a hard stop throughout the city this spring 2024 (see campaign timeline here).
Over the years we have become established with a wide range of local groups including On the Verge Cambridge, Friends of Paradise Nature Reserve, Newnham Residents’ Association, Cambridge Climate Justice Coalition, and various residential groups and individuals. We’ve given quite a few talks to local groups, held stalls at climate events and fairs, and collaborated on Happy Bee street activities such as pavement plant surveys and chalking. Collectively, this has helped us to network and meet new allies.
How did you sustain it and build momentum in your community?
- By maintaining constant pressure on Cambridge City Council, and working closely with shadow councillors to keep the momentum going.
- Using the petition to maintain pressure once the herbicide-free motion was passed, holding frequent meetings with councillors and residents groups, and asking Public Questions at council committee meetings.
- Becoming members of the council’s Herbicide-Free Working Group, set up following the 2021 Motion, meant we could influence the choice of alternative weed control methods, residents communication strategies, and the Happy Bee street-adoption scheme.
- Insisting that spraying schedules be pre-published on the council’s website, signage be put up after spraying to warn residents, and spraying operatives be provided with full PPE. Some of these demands were implemented, but we like to think that it was considered simpler to halt herbicide-use than to risk further bad press through an open admission of the chemicals’ toxicity.
- Maintaining our website, blog, and Facebook and Twitter pages, together with meeting frequently with schools, colleges, and businesses, to get our message out to a wider audience.
What challenges did you face along the way and how did you overcome them?
- Tackling stalled communication: maintaining an online record of conversations helped to build momentum and hold people to account.
- Getting the council to acknowledge the public health dimension of urban pesticides as well as to biodiversity in their outputs. Only this year did they finally start to incorporate our messaging on this in their residents’ magazine.
- Countering the misassumption that urban pesticides are only about herbicides and other plant-protection chemicals, while insecticides used in and around the built-environment frequently continue to be overlooked. This is an ongoing focus of our work.
- Allaying stakeholders’ concerns about how to manage ‘pests’ (e.g., ants, wasps) without pesticides, through our Pesticide-Free Guide and training events.
- Challenging the notion that the only valid equality and inclusion dimension of urban pesticides is that represented by the trip-hazards posed by pavement plants, rather than the toxicity of the active ingredients themselves. Our campaign constantly stresses the disability-access dimension of the latter, in light of the disproportionate impact that low-dose exposure to herbicides and insecticides can have on people with ME/CFS, autism, allergies and hypersensitivities.
What would be your advice for someone struggling with their campaign?
Keep shouting, about positive developments such as community street adoption schemes, events, and improvements in council practice, as well as the negative. Find a supportive journalist at your local newspaper who is willing to cover your campaign, and try to engage with your council’s communications teams to ensure that residents know what’s going on. Chalking the names of pavement plants, taking photos before and after herbicide application, and organising community ‘plant safaris’, are simple and effective ways to communicate the biodiversity benefits of eliminating routine herbicide use.
Barnwell Rd, Cambridge (2024), showing mowed borders on verges, with wild grasses and flowers around poles being left intact, and pavement plants left to flourish on cycle path/pavement. Credit Pesticide-Free Cambridge
What next for you and your campaign?
Having successfully achieved a hard-stop on the council’s use of herbicides on public land across the city, we have added leverage for tackling pesticide use by other stakeholders and residents. Our continued collaboration with the council, via our membership of its Herbicide Reduction Working Group, focuses on improving residents communications strategies; tackling ‘rogue’ herbicide-use on public land; and facilitating stakeholder workshops to help other landowners to go herbicide-free.
Other initiatives include our Pesticide-Free Schools campaign, which we launched last year with the backing of the City and County councils, and the combined authority Mayor (alongside City Council’s Environmental Education scheme on which we are helping to deliver the Eco Schools Green Flag Award which last year agreed to our suggestion to incorporate pesticides into their award criteria); and our Pesticide-Free Colleges campaign, in collaboration with Cambridge Climate Society. Our ongoing challenge now is highlighting contradictions between theory and practice in Sustainability and Disability Access policies, and encouraging changes in both.
We believe that pesticides are an intertwined biodiversity, public health, and disability access issue. We are proud that last year, talks with disability advocacy groups led to Sunflower Hidden Disability Scheme listing pesticide-exposure as a trigger for Migraines, and ME/CFS on their website.
Fen Causeway in Cambridge (2024), showing flourishing verges with edges managed through mowed borders. Credit Pesticide-Free Cambridge