As Joel Tyner talked on a busy Rhinebeck street last Friday about the effects of pesticides on health, a thunderclap boomed in the distance. Without missing a beat, Tyner assumed the voice of one of his detractors – or perhaps of God: “There you go, Joel Tyner! Here’s your global warming! Ha, ha!”
After many years of public wrangling, New York State passed legislation eight years ago requiring notification of pesticide applications in schools and daycare centers, as well as authorizing counties and New York City to adopt local laws that establish significant new notification requirements for commercial and residential lawn applications. Ulster did just that in 2007, while the Dutchess Legislature still has not been able to pass a law.
Dutchess County legislator Tyner has been pushing for a neighbor notification law that would require 48 hours notice to nearby residences before commercial applications of pesticides. “It’s sad to say but, unfortunately, we’ve had a bit of difficulty getting neighbor notification passed,” said Tyner, who chairs the county legislature’s Environmental Committee. “We’re not even talking about banning pesticides here. We’re talking about 48-hours notice. Just like Washington, D.C., just like Albany. There’s a ton of common-sense things that just haven’t happened, and unfortunately this is one of them.”
When Ulster County passed such a law last year, some opposition was heard from commercial pesticide applicators. With the recent formation of a new anti-pesticide group in New Paltz, organizer Alice Andrews said she hoped that opposition will be more muted.
“Two years ago the initial reaction was sometimes negative, sometimes curious and sometimes mildly supportive. What I found then was that most people just didn’t know about the potential health risks,” said Andrews, a member of the Village of New Paltz Environmental Conservation Commission and founder of a task force titled the Ban Pesticide Use in Ulster County Alliance (BPUCA). “Two years later I’m finding that people’s reaction to this initiative is much more positive. And not surprisingly, I’m finding more people than before appear to be more informed thanks to the exponential greening of our culture.”
While further legislative movement regionally hasn’t yet gained traction, BPUCA is hoping eventually to make a significant difference.
Humankind’s long global war against the unwanted lower life forms that share our biosphere includes centuries-long jihads against perceived scourges such as rats, mice, birds, weeds and a whole range of insects including mosquitoes, ants, boll weevils, caterpillars, termites and such.
As with every other form of warfare humans have waged in the 20th and 21st centuries, the tools we’ve come up with recently have gotten exponentially more powerful and complex, with a far greater chance of collateral damage and devastating side effects.
The pesticide controversy didn’t end when DDT was banned way back in 1972. Plenty of substances designed to poison our many tiny enemies are still being pumped into the air, soil and water. Many end up sticking around long enough to foul up our respiratory and reproductive systems, tinker with our DNA, compromise our immune systems, and help cancer get the upper hand in our bodies.
The chemical industry, the folks who gave us Bhopal, India (Union Carbide) and Anniston, Alabama (Monsanto), are still at it. Worldwide demand for their products is fierce. Some bugs, such as the mosquito, are our sworn enemies for a number of pretty good reasons – malaria, Dengue fever, West Nile virus and encephalitis among them.
But it’s not always a matter of life and death.
Among the stewards of the world’s more expensive landscapes, even the thought of a nasty critter or ugly plant threatening the artificially green and sterile environment of golf courses and summer lawns engenders systematic overkill. The unseen offenders are treated with regular “preventative” assaults not unlike carpet bombing. In prototypically suburban Long Island, for example, in 1989 the state attorney general’s office determined that 52 golf courses were treated with more than 50,000 pounds of pesticides. That’s seven pounds of pesticides per acre annually, almost five times the national average used in agriculture – itself an awful lot.
Agricultural ministers of the European Union recently passed a tentative agreement that would ban use of carcinogenic or otherwise harmful pesticides; and two major Canadian cities – Toronto and Quebec – have outlawed the sale and cosmetic use of pesticides. Westchester County no longer allows pesticides to be sprayed in its county parks.
Of course, noted Tyner, the local notification laws don’t always impact the largest users of pesticides. “The environmental groups spent five or ten years lobbying for the state law to be passed,” he said. “When finally it was, after so much opposition, the law exempts farms … and it also exempts golf courses. So there’s another whole effort that needs to happen.”
A foothold in New Paltz
Andrews and BPUCA recently presented legislation to the village government mandating municipal organic pest management. According to Andrews, the response was promising.
“They agreed unanimously to pass it after the village attorney takes a look at it and tweaks it,” Andrews said. “I don’t know when this will happen exactly, but I hope it will be very soon – maybe within the month.”
Andrews knew little about the issue until a couple of years ago.
“Two years ago I didn’t know that ... that low-dose exposure to typical home and garden pesticides can increase a person’s chance of getting Parkinson’s by 70 percent. That was in the Annals of Neurology in 2006. I didn’t even know that many of the commonly used lawn pesticides are implicated in autism, cancer, birth defects, neurotoxicity, respiratory and immune-system damage, liver and kidney damage, endocrine disruption, and many other health problems like asthma,” Andrews said. “Now I do. And that’s why I’m doing what I’m doing.”
Andrews started BPUCA with Colleen Geraghty, Jacky Davis-Soman and former New Paltz mayor Jason West.
“About two years ago when (New Paltz Times writer) Erin Quinn wrote one of several articles about this, a lawn company that used pesticides contacted me and asked to come to an Environmental Conservation Commission meeting, but they never showed up,” Andrews said. “The interesting thing is, in the past two years there has been such an unbelievable change in consciousness, green-wise, that I don’t think opposition from a lawn-care company is likely ever to happen. Rather than fighting over this, I suspect the companies are going to go green.”
Ulster County legislator Brian Shapiro, chairman of the Environmental Committee that shepherded the 48-hour neighbor notification law to passage on the west side of the Hudson River last year, said he would support a further tightening of pesticide use laws. For now, state law supersedes local efforts. Localities have the choice of either opting in or out of a pre-written piece of legislation handed down from the state without opportunity for modification.
“Certainly, though, the door is open for discussion,” Shapiro said. “Ulster County is a progressive community when it comes to environmental matters.”
Never give up
Back over in Dutchess County, Tyner plans on submitting to his colleagues his research and a neighbor notification law for consideration in September – in time for Breast Cancer Awareness month in October. He hopes for a vote in November.
In the meantime, Tyner, who in the past has walked 14 miles from Rhinebeck to Poughkeepsie along Route 9 wearing a sandwich board with a message pointing out the link between cancer and pesticide use, has started a cancer survivors’ group: Cancer Survivors Speak Out (CSSO). His mother, he said, survived breast cancer in the early 1990s.
The legislator was on the streets again this past Friday in the busy commercial center of Rhinebeck, this time with a pair of friends, Rich Carlson of Wappingers Falls and Larry Freedman of the Town of Clinton. They conversed with passersby and handed out informational packets on banning pesticides and on another issue close to their hearts: global warming and a nascent effort to try and get the incidence of carbon dioxide in Earth’s atmosphere down to 350 parts per million.
But that’s another story.
One of Tyner’s visitors was a woman with a harrowing real-life tale of what she believes to be the effects of pesticides on her health. “I did have breast cancer,” said Kathleen Gavin, “and I did live next to an apple orchard for 15 years.” The Dutchess County resident declined to identify the orchard, as “I don’t want to do in my neighbors, whom I love.”
Gavin shrugged, more or less blaming the ignorance of those times for her failure to protect herself. “It was not protocol” to worry about such things during the era in question, she said. “I was aware that apple trees were getting sprayed every year.”
Meanwhile, Tyner in Dutchess and BPUCA in Ulster continue to spearhead the campaign to spread the word on pesticides in an effort to eliminate ignorance and complacency. “It’s time Dutchess County followed these good examples and enacted this common-sense legislation,” Tyner said. “Anybody who has access to a computer can Google pesticide and cancer and spend five to six years looking at all the results.”
For more information on Joel Tyner’s efforts, including the pesticide notification initiative, go to www.joeltyner.org. For more information on BPUCA, visit www.myspace.com/banpesticides.