TAC activist and community organizer Sylvia Broude discusses the environmental and public health hazards of pesticide spraying by the Massachusetts Highway Department at a press conference in Worcester. Below:Sylvia Broude helped youth and other residents at Lake Cochituate, in Natick, Mass., speak out against pesticides in their lake.

Sylvia Broude and the New England-based Toxics Action Center (TAC) work side-by-side with neighborhood groups fighting environmental pollution in their communities. Sylvia provides strategic assistance to local activists as they confront threats to public health, including the growing use of toxic pesticides.

When the Bush administration tried to derail local opposition to pesticide use by exempting aquatic pesticides and certain aerially sprayed pesticides from the protections offered by the federal Clean Water Act, TAC joined NELC’s court challenge to the new regulation (see Bush administration Undercuts Clean Water Act, page 3).

Why are community groups so concerned about pesticide use?

Pesticides are typically composed of highly toxicchemicals that can persist in the environment. In addition to “active” ingredients—the synthetic chemicals developed specifically to kill a particular set of species—most pesticides also contain “inert” ingredients, used as binders or surfactants, that are themselves toxic but are rarely disclosed to the public.

Aerially sprayed pesticides, such as those used to kill adult mosquitoes, create the risk of direct exposure to people—frequently children—who are outside during spraying. In addition, these chemicals usually end up in our water, either through runoff or by drifting into lakes, streams and wetlands.

Some of the aquatic pesticides used most frequently to kill off weeds in lakes and ponds have been linked to cancer, birth defects and other health problems like attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD). This is of particular concern in towns that draw their drinking water from lakes targeted for pesticide applications.

We were recently alerted to a situation in which a high school playing field in Connecticut was sprayed with 2,4-D, a major component of the notorious Agent orange herbicide used during the Vietnam War.

How pervasive is the use of pesticides?

In Massachusetts alone, well over 200 lakes and ponds each year are treated with aquatic pesticides. Last summer the Massachusetts Department of Public Health and the state Mosquito Control Board approved the spraying of over 400,000 acres with pesticides to control mosquitoes—this was in addition to all the local mosquito spraying authorized on a town-by-town basis.

Adding to the inundation of toxic chemicals, railroads throughout the state and the Mass. Highway Department regularly spray powerful, broad-spectrum herbicides to kill off plants growing along railroad tracks and highways. And to this one has to add all the toxic pesticides used in agriculture, lawn and garden care.

We are swimming in an ever-expanding soup of pesticides that are more toxic and more persistent than most people realize.

Aren’t pesticides effective at solving real problems like invasive weeds and disease-carrying mosquitoes?

These problems are real, but we need to seek more proactive strategies for solving them. Pesticides aren’t nearly as effective solving these problems as they’re advertised to be.

For example, dumping weed killers into a lake will certainly kill off invasive, non-native species of weeds—but it will wipe out native plants, too, destroying habitat for fish and other local species that depend on them and thus making it even easier for invasive weeds to come back with a vengeance in subsequent years. This creates a cycle of dependence: once you start down the pesticide road, it’s hard to go back.

Mosquito spraying has similar limitations. Aerial spraying is almost completely ineffective in heavily wooded areas, where many mosquitoes breed. And there is some evidence that mosquito populations rebound faster and stronger after widespread spraying, possibly because spraying also affects the mosquito’s predators and competitors.

Are there any alternatives to chemical pesticides?

Yes. In most cases, safe, long-term solutions that get at the underlying problems, rather than the symptoms, already exist. The problem of out-ofcontrol aquatic weeds, for example, is usually caused by excess nutrient runoff from lawn fertilizer, the introduction of non-native plants, and the man-made expansion of natural lakes and ponds (in which sunlight reaches to the bottom of shallow new basins).

Long-term solutions therefore include: measures tocontrol nutrient runoff; washing plant fragments off boats before they can be put into a lake; deepeninglake basins; and drawing down water levels in the off-season.
other non-toxic control methods exist, too.

I worked with a group of lakeside residents in Natick, Mass., who convinced the town board of health and the local conservation commission to reject a state-sponsored plan to dump the pesticides fluridone and diquat
into Lake Cochituate, which is located in a state park and provides drinking water for the town.

Instead of using chemicals, some residents are organizing an effort to hand-pull weeds; others have begun a pilot project, in conjunction with a technology company and a Tufts University professor, to study the effectiveness of solar-powered water circulators in controlling weed growth; and now the state is seeking a grant to pay for the introduction of native, weed-eating weevils, whose population will rise and fall with
weed levels.

Mosquito control is another area where toxic alternatives are both safe and effective at slowing the growth of mosquito populations and the spread of disease. Municipalities and pest control boards need to adopt non-toxic preventive control strategies, like spreading bacteria that only kill mosquito larvae and applying a type of soapy residue to the surface of swampy areas that keeps larvae from maturing.

How will the Bush Administration’s new interpretation of the Clean Water Act, which removes many toxic pesticides from the definition of water pollutant, affect the communities you work with?

One of our biggest challenges is that most state and local agencies with authority over pesticide spraying are biased in favor of pesticide use as first option, rather than as a last resort. They put few limits on spraying and frequently encourage unnecessary pesticide use.

The federal Clean Water Act offered one of the few tools private citizens could use to resist the push for pesticides. Unless pesticide users complied with a Clean Water Act discharge permit, any discharge of an aquatic pesticide into a lake or pond and any mosquito spraying over bodies of water was illegal—until now.

A couple of years ago, Toxics Action Center and NELC helped activists in Downeast Maine use the threat of a Clean Water Act citizen enforcement suit to end aerial pesticide spraying by Maine’s two biggest blueberry growers, because spray drift was going directly into rivers that are home to endangered Atlantic salmon.

The farm lobby and the pesticide industry are now trying to expand the Bush administration’s new pesticide exemption even further, to exempt all agricultural spraying from Clean Water Act requirements.

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