🎬 Paraquat Ban Rally: Video Chapter & Transcript Guide

Total Run Time: 31:46

 

Emcees: Jessica Hernandez (EWG), Zach Hardy (MJFF), and Deborah Swerdlow (Parkinson's Foundation)

 

About this Event: A public health rally in support of the New York State bill championed by Senator Peter Harckham and Assemblymember Linda Rosenthal to ban the use and sale of the toxic herbicide Paraquat in New York State.

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Video Chapters

• 0:00 – Welcome & Introduction | Jessica Hernandez (Environmental Working Group)

• 0:37 – Senate Bill Sponsor Remarks | Senator Peter Harckham

• 4:47 – Medical & Expert Perspective | Dr. Rebecca Gilbert

• 8:30 – Assembly Bill Sponsor Remarks | Assemblymember Linda Rosenthal

• 13:40 – Living with Parkinson's | Mike Mooney

• 19:00 – The Power of Storytelling | Sarah Teale (Emmy-nominated British-American documentary filmmaker)

• 25:40 – Care Partner Perspective | Nancy Eson, Jud Eson

• 26:33 – The Silent Clock: Personal Testimony | Jud Eson as read by Nancy Eson (Full transcript below)

• 30:30 – The Agricultural Impact | Wes Gillingham (Organic Farmer)

 

Featured Testimony: Jud Eson as read by Nancy Eson (26:33)

"I’ve lived in Albany my entire life. For years, I walked these halls here at the Empire State Plaza, developing computer applications for the Public Service Commission. I spent my career building systems to help this state run. But fifteen years ago, my own internal system began to fail.

At 58—an age when I should have been planning leasure activies for the rest of my life—I was diagnosed with Parkinson’s. An incurable, degenerative brain disease.

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I retired a year later. And while I am grateful to New York State and Social Security for supporting my retirement, we have to be honest: there is a heavy cost to that. There is a cost to the taxpayers, and a much deeper, more painful cost to my family.

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I’m grateful for the doctors who treat me, and for the speech-to-text software that gives me a voice now that my own handwriting has become a ghost of what it once was.

The day I was diagnosed, I turned to 'Dr. Google,' searching for an answer to one question: Why? Why me? I wasn't a farmer. I worked at a desk. I had a normal suburban lawn—maybe a few too many dandelions—but I wasn't out there soaking the earth in chemicals. Back then, the answer was always, 'No one really knows."

I eventually stopped asking 'why me' so I could focus on living life as fully as possible.

 

But today, we do know why. We know that chemicals like Paraquat don't strike like lightning. They don't make you sick in an hour or a week. They wait. They accumulate in your body for twenty or thirty years, a silent ticking clock, until the day the alarm goes off.

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I was born eight years before Paraquat was introduced to the world, and I am grateful for those clean years.

 

But I am here today because I want more for the people I love.

I want Paraquat gone—not for me, but so I never have to see my children, my grandchildren, or your families face this same diagnosis.

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Let’s stop this at the source. Pass the ban on Paraquat!

Thank you."