Weeds Are Not The Worst Thing In Our Yards(materia Sobre Agrotoxicos)

[CanhamoMAN]

Rachel Carson, the woman who blew the whistle on DDT in her 1962 book Silent Spring, would be proud.

Fonte:The Daily News

April 22, 2009

This week Nanaimo council decided to resurrect a bylaw that would ban cosmetic pesticides. The bylaw has yet to get a first reading, and no doubt there will be some divisive argument from people who want either a pristine lawn or to battle back weed invasions.

But where the real opposition for this bylaw will come from is not so much homeowners or even hardware stores, but pesticide producers.

Nanaimo is now among dozens of Canadian municipalities to move toward banning pesticides. The movement seems to have got the attention of the one of the biggest chemical companies in the world, The Dow Chemical Company.

Dow is threatening to use the North American Free Trade Agreement to sue over the ban. The government has said it will defend the Quebec municipalities that first enacted the bans, but the government here appears to be part of the problem.

Health Canada has approved and said that 2, 4-d, a major pesticide, is safe for use. But then questions have arisen about how Health Canada may not be doing its due diligence as it approves pharmaceutical drugs.

If Health Canada is not policing the drug industry as well as it could, then we have ask how well they are policing the chemical industry.

The result is that any defence in a suit brought by Dow is weakened. There is a real risk of such bylaws being quashed and Canada being forced to pay damages to Dow.

The chemical industry will argue that their products are put through rigorous testing and that safety is a top priority. Unfortunately, we have heard those claims from various industries for decades only to learn too late that either such efforts have failed or were never taken seriously.

One of the main questions that arises is why people need to apply chemicals to make their gardens look pretty. Poisoning plants, and much else in the process, is just not worth it.

The damage is unseen because it's cumulative. A little bit here and a little bit there washes into our rivers and builds up in various life forms. Eventually illness and deformity start to show up, just as Carson documented nearly 50 years ago, and the harm is incalculable.

And we need to remember how that harm is not confined to wildlife. It eventually makes its way through the food chain back to us.

It has to be remembered that chemical companies have also done some pretty great things that have helped increase our standard of living. Killing dandelions is not one of them.

There are any number of ways to have a garden free of weeds, from pulling them to using hot water and products like citrus and vinegar.

And then maybe we can tolerate a certain amount of weeds by changing our view of them from being invasive. As for the dandelion, some people make wine from them and other put the leaves in salads.

Overall there is a very real necessity to recognize the risk presented by the use of such chemicals. A municipal ban is a good way to achieve that because the chemical companies, despite any claims of being responsible, are not about to do the right thing and take such harmful products off the market.

The Nanaimo bylaw has yet to go through its first, second and third readings. With about a year before it is enacted, we all have lots of time to figure out what we are going to do without our cosmetic pesticides.

Since Silent Spring, the chemical companies have worked hard to protect their claims and put out their own spin to diffuse criticism. It's too bad that the good work of such companies is overshadowed by insisting on producing and selling products like cosmetic pesticides.

The city is doing the right thing. We don't face living in a weed-infested world, but even that would be preferable to the continued profusion of pesticides.

[CanhamoMAN]

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