"WASHINGTON — For 37 mostly female farm-workers in California’s Central Valley, U.S. policy under Environmental Protection Agency chief Scott Pruitt became personal not long after sunup one day in May 2017.

Picking cabbage that morning, the workers noticed a tarry smell drifting from a nearby orchard. Mouths and lips tingled or went numb. Throats went dry. Soon some workers were vomiting and collapsing.

Officials in California’s farm-rich Kern County, where the workers fell ill, concluded that the harvesters were reacting to a pesticide, chlorpyrifos, misapplied at the neighboring orchard. Five weeks before, in one of his first acts at EPA, Pruitt had reversed an Obama-era initiative to ban all food crop uses of the pesticide, already prohibited as a household bug-killer since 2001."

Ellen Knickmeyer reports for the Associated Press July 4, 2018. [2]

SEE ALSO:

"So Did Scott Pruitt Remake the EPA?" (Atlantic) [3]

"The Myth of Scott Pruitt’s EPA Rollback" (Politico) [4]

"Scott Pruitt Is Out But His Impact On The Environment Will Be Felt For Years" (Guardian) [5]

"Scott Pruitt’s Replacement Expected To Carry On Trump’s Anti-Regulatory Agenda at EPA" (Think Progress) [6]