Well, Caltrans got the message: safer highways! Finally! But if your road goes by corporate or state forests, where Garlon and other inadequately tested herbicides are part of a Toxic Demonstration Project, it's a different story. We are inclined to overlook two things: first, when people start noticing the impact of the toxic sprays, big timber will be long gone; second, it's hard to single out impacts on a case by case basis. We'll have to monitor our fish and mammals for the deleterious effects of the sprays to ascertain the level of the toxic load.
Dateline: "New tests for estrogenic effects developed, yet no tests on Garlon." Dr. Gina Solomon of the Environmental Resource Defense Fund feels that Garlon could be estrogenic. Estrogenic chemicals kill sperm and eggs, cause cancers and lead to deformed sex organs.
CDF did a study on Garlon-laced firewood. Garlon, it turns out, sticks around for two years in dead wood. Dr. Solomon agrees that burned Garlon-impregnated firewood could produce dioxins. Dioxins from burning chlorine or chlorinated hydrocarbons are bad news at any level. They corrode our lives with misery diseases like testicular, prostate and breast cancers.
Mendocino county's public pesticide approach isn't very conservative. Our public work supervisors say they need to kill the weeds at the capped landfill and the airports as well as around our graciously lawn-landscaped county buildings. But why go to herbicides? The County could pull landfill weeds as they come up. Steam and torch weeding are effective alternatives for airports. Folks from Pesticide Free Future are funding grants to help the county find alternatives.
The effects of the Retech disaster, potential impacts from the Cold Creek Compost project, centralized garbage collection and the plume from the Masonite mill all fit into a toxic equation:
Your toxic load includes:
- food pesticide residues
- air toxins
- not-so-inert food container inerts
- unlabeled genetically engineered food (including potentially allergenic
food items and antibiotics)
- petroleum-based products (allergic effects include depression, fatigue,
hyperactive behavior and psychotic behavior )
- low-level toxic out-gassing home products (fiber board, insulation and
plastics)
- low-level toxic trucked-in compost contamination in your garden
- herbicide or biosolid watershed contamination.
But the sum is greater than the parts. In estrogenic toxins the effects are exponential (1+1=1000-fold effects). Personal safety calls for home-grown food, personally-produced compost and building non-toxic Class K houses without using most manufactured or processed products. Each thing we do to clear our environment improves our life quality. We can't do it all, but we can do some, as much as we can do.
Get informed. Talk or write about it. The CalTrans solution was the sum of many concerned citizens talking and acting as individuals and in coalition. Civil synergy!
Landscape contractors can remove Pampas Grass in ten seconds with a hoe early on; later it takes 5-15 minutes with a tractor.
Broom? Seeds can't propagate if they never develop. Why not mow the forest roadsides? Washing logging trucks periodically would slow down distribution, as would minimizing re-entry between cuts. If LP's "vegetation management plan" involved integrated pest management (IPM), and if it were ecologically sound and sustainable, it could be successful, but it is driven by the bottom line.
But the real bottom line is the loss of fisheries, soils, long-term quality trees, a diverse forest, drivable roads, county tax revenues, real jobs and our health, not corporate profit., CEO salaries, state general funding from accelerated State Forest harvesting and profits for starving share holders.
Copyright Mendocino Environmental Center 1997
Permission granted to excerpt or use this article if source is cited