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The ongoing nature of pesticide drift despite efforts by the agricultural industry, environmental regulatory agencies, and alternative agrifood movement to make agriculture more environmentally sustainable—as well as the conflicting stories told about the problem—raise fundamental questions that must be examined to understand this environmental problem and it's solutions. For environmental justice,understanding the intersection of pesticide drift and environmental justice requires that we recognize it as not only a technical problem but also a social one, rooted in systems of inequality and oppression.

Pesticide drift is a complex, technical problem best understood by medical and environmental scientists. First, the study of pesticide drift includes analyzing the countless ways in which pesticides move through, change in, and interact with the environment. The nine hundred- plus pesticide active ingredients registered for use in California are manufactured into over thirteen thousand different formulations, in which various amounts of different pesticides are mixed together and applied with innumerable “inert” ingredients that help the pesticide reach and/or adhere to its target.

All of these various formulations interact with each other and the ever- changing environments into which they are applied in countless ways, most of which are poorly understood. Also, pesticide drift analysis includes studying pesticide exposure, such as the various pesticides’ different routes of exposure (dermal, dietary, or inhalation) and the extent to which some human populations (especially children and farmworkers) are subject to higher rates of exposure. Finally, analysts must take into account the actual health effects of exposure to the various pesticides, where every pesticide interacts with the human body in its own way, produces or contributes to its own collection of health problems, interacts in unknown synergistic or cumulative ways with other environmental toxins, and affects certain sensitive populations (children, fetuses, the elderly, the ill, and the chemically sensitive) more than the “average” body. Pesticide drift must be understood as a social problem as much as a technical one, and the intersections between these social and technical dimensions explain the continuation and invisibility of pesticide drift.

The legal status issues, language barriers, political disenfranchisement, and other forms of social marginalization widespread in farm working communities tend to obscure pesticide exposures and other problems. Environmental regulation consequently has been bounded by a narrow interpretation of pesticide drift as a series of isolated, unfortunate events requiring minimal regulatory change.