EPA Bans Highly Toxic Pesticide

A toxic bird-killing, worker-poisoning pesticide will no longer appear in our food after an EPA decision to ban the chemical concoction. Tests have shown carbofuran to be highly toxic to mammals, marine animals, freshwater fish, birds and other creates and causes damage to the nervous system in humans, including respiratory paralysis and death.

From NRDC:

Initially, EPA had said that although uses of the pesticide in the U.S. would be cancelled, it would still be allowed as a contaminant on imported coffee, sugarcane, rice, and bananas. This would have meant that the manufacturer, FMC Corp., could still sell carbofuran in other countries that grow these foods  for U.S. markets, thus putting at much greater risk those foreign workers, their families, and their environment. Today’s decision will prevent all food contamination, including imports.

There are still two non-food uses of carbofuran that will remain: spinach seeds and pine seedlings will still be allowed to be treated with a granular form of carbofuran. EPA said that its future intentions are to cancel these uses as well, although today it is only the food uses that are being cancelled.

Isn’t it sad how we get all worked up over incidences in which the EPA actually, you know, does its job, protecting the environment and such? We got used to the EPA being not just ineffective but at times counterproductive under the Bush administration, so now every time Obama’s EPA makes a halfway decent decision we’re cheering them on like rabid football fans.

Link [NRDC]

Exposure to Pesticides Linked to Parkinson’s Disease

If you live near a farm sprayed with a combination of pesticides, you may be at greater risk of developing Parkinson’s disease. New research has found that, when mixed, two common pesticides called maneb and paraquat have ill health effects that may explain the increased rates of Parkinson’s among farmers and rural residents.

From The Daily Green:

The scientists found that people who live within 500 meters of a field sprayed with the pesticides maneb and paraquat in combination, but not individually, had a 75 percent higher risk of Parkinson’s disease relative to controls. Being exposed to the mixture at a younger age resulted in an even higher risk. Individuals potentially exposed to these pesticides when they were 60 years old or younger were 5 times more likely to be diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease.

These results are predicted by studies which showed that exposing rodents to maneb and paraquat together resulted in reduced motor activity, nerve cell loss and decreased levels the neurotransmitter dopamine in certain areas of the brain as observed in Parkinson’s patients. Animal studies also predicted Costello’s finding that effects of these pesticides would be more important when exposure occurred at a younger age. (See trade names and other information about maneb and paraquat. Maneb is sold as Manzate among other brand names. Paraquat is sold to consumers as Ortho Weed Killer among other brand names; its use is banned in several Scandinavian countries.)

If you’ve ever known someone with Parkinson’s disease, you know how devastating it can be. Studies like this really make you wonder about all of the chemicals we’re surrounded by on a daily basis. As the study points out, current safety evaluations are performed on chemicals individually, not when they’re combined – but we’re exposed to a combination of all kinds of different chemicals. Who knows what other modern health ills can be attributed to such chemical cocktails.

Link [The Daily Green]

Keep Drinking Organic Milk: It’s Making a Difference

Organic farming is better for the environment than conventional farming: that much is already well known. But no one has actually put a number on just how many pounds of destructive chemical fertilizers and pesticides have been avoided thanks to a percentage of consumers choosing to buy organic food: until now.

The Organic Center, a non-profit based in Colorado, created a calculator that helped them determine that 40 million pounds of fertilizer was avoided in 2008 thanks to organic milk production in the U.S. The organization hopes that its Microsoft Excel-based calculator will be used by consumers, farmers and food companies to get an idea of how big an impact switching to organic can have.

From GreenBiz.com:

The 761,000 acres of organic feed cropland or organic pasture also dodged the use of 758,000 pounds of pesticides. Cows also given 1.7 million fewer drug treatments, including antibiotics and hormones.

There were roughly 120,000 milking cows on organic dairy farms in the U.S. last year, according to the Organic Center.

“This calculator gives us the means to uniformly measure the extent to which organic dairy operations prevent toxic materials from entering our air, water, soil, and in some cases, our food and drinking water,” Charles Benbrook, the Organic Center’s chief scientist, said in a statement.

Curious about how the calculator works? Check out the Organic Center’s report, “Shade of Green: Quantifying the Benefits of Organic Dairy Production.”

Of course, the chemical companies will probably figure out some way to spin this. Like the oil companies, they’re getting scared about the fact that public opinion is turning against them – so scared, they sent Michelle Obama a letter berating her for not using pesticides and chemical fertilizers in the White Houste veggie and herb garden. Amazing.

Link [GreenBiz.com]
Photo credit: Flickr User Royalty-Free Image Collection

Who’s Who in Green: Rachel Carson

Rachel Carson is regarded by many as the godmother of the environmental movement. It was her book, Silent Spring, that sowed the seeds of passion for protecting the environment – and she wrote it in 1962, years before hippies brought the concept of ‘saving the earth’ to mainstream consciousness.

Carson grew up in the rural river town of Springdale, Pennsylvania and earned degrees in marine biology and zoology before becoming a federal scientist and Editor-in-Chief of all major publications for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service in 1936. The job combined both of her lifelong passions: nature and the written word.

Much as she loved science, the work she did for the government must have been a bit dry; she began turning her government research into lyrical prose in her free time, first as an article entitled ‘Undersea’, which was published in the Atlantic Monthly in 1937, and then in a book, Under the Sea-Wind (1941).  Two subsequent books, The Sea Around Us and The Edge of the Sea, made her famous as a naturalist and science writer. In 1952, Carson resigned from her post at the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service to devote her time to her writing.

Through the remainder of the 1950s Carson wrote two more books about the wonders of nature, Help Your Child to Wonder and Our Ever-Changing Shore. In 1957, Carson began closely following federal proposals for the widespread spraying of pesticides, and her then-unpopular belief that such human actions could have an intense negative effect on the earth led her to focus the remainder of her career on pesticide overuse.

Carson had been concerned about the use of synthetic pesticides since the 1940s, but it was the USDA’s 1957 fire ant eradication program that led her to devote her research and her next book to pesticides and other environmental poisons. She began by gathering examples of environmental damage attributed to DDT and found a community of scientists who were documenting the physiological and environmental effects if pesticides.

Unsurprisingly, Carson was attacked by the chemical industry and some government officials as an alarmist when her book, Silent Spring, was published in 1962. In the book, Carson argued that pesticide use had effects far beyond the mere eradication of harmful insects from croplands. Silent Spring addresses the effects pesticides have on natural ecosystems as well as human poisoning, cancer and other illnesses attributed to pesticides.

Despite the efforts of the industry, Silent Spring went on to gain a wide audience.  Angry critics launched attacks on her personal character, with one calling her “a fanatic defender of the cult of the balance of nature” and another, former Secretary of Agriculture Ezra Taft Benson, concluding that the fact that she was attractive yet unmarried must mean she was a Communist.

But, such criticism didn’t hold back Carson’s book. Silent Spring became a rallying point for the budding environmental movement in the 1960s, opening many people’s eyes to the fact that progress did not need to come at the expense of the environment. It also inspired the campaign to ban the use of DDT in the United States.

Today, Carson’s name also lives on in the form of the Rachel Carson Prize, awarded to women who have made a contribution to the field of environmental protection.

Rachel Carson’s Green Score: 96,331

Ant Problem? Tackle it with Green Solutions

Once you start seeing ants around the house, it seems like it’s a never-ending problem – unless you want to resort to dangerous chemicals, which can be toxic to kids and pets (not to mention the environment). There are actually some fairly easy, humane, green ways to kill ants – or if you’re really a softie, to divert them away from your house.

Your mileage may vary with these four methods from wikiHow, and which one you choose might depend on your ability to stomach ant violence. Method 1 involves pipe tobacco, glue, baby powder, red pepper, chalk and lavender – check it out on the wikiHow page. The following three methods are a bit simpler:

Method 2: Fill a spray bottle with highly concentrated soap water. When you see ants, just spray them and they’ll be dead on contact. Wipe up the carcasses with whatever they were trying to eat. Within an hour, any stragglers will have dissipated.

Method 3: Collect a large number of ants from one ant hill (easy to do just leave some food in a container, return after 2 hours and you should have heaps. Drop all the ants in the container onto another ant hill and the ants will start fighting each other resulting in many casualties.

Method 4: Spray 3 parts dish soap and 1 part water on them and they will die instantly.

Method 3 seems kind of cruel but fun for those with suppressed homicidal maniac tendencies. If you’re too squeamish to kill them, one tip is to place a partially open jar of honey up in a tree in your backyard. The ants will seek out the honey instead of raiding your home in most cases.

Link [wikiHow]
Photo credit: Flickr user striatic

Long Lasting Tees Don’t Make Golf Eco-Friendly

I don’t know much about golf, but apparently wood tees don’t last very long – they splinter and leave litter all over the grass. A company called Eco Golf has created the Endurance Tee, which outlasts wood tees 10 to 1.

The company explains it:

Since the Endurance tee is so long lasting tee box litter is virtually eliminated.

The final benefit of the endurance tee is that it is manufactured with degradable materials. The tee will breakdown over time and when placed in active compost the process is greatly accelerated.

We’re glad to see golfers greening up their tees, but considering they’re using it in the middle of a giant carpet of pesticide filled grass cut by giant gas mowers sitting where natural lands used to be, it feels a bit small. It’s akin to a NASCAR team switching their cell phone service over to Working Assets- a nice gesture but a drop in the bucket in the big picture.

Golf could definitely get a lot greener. Many golfers and golf course owners are taking steps to help. While we’d prefer an untouched plot of land to a golf course any day, golf courses can provide certain environmental benefits in urban and suburban areas as a substitute for more concrete and asphalt – or to clean up disused sites like quarries and mines. We know that golf courses aren’t going to disappear, so we’d like to see more care being taken in making sure they aren’t all chemical-filled resource hoggers. You can get more info about greener golf at Golf and the Environment and Beyond Pesticides.

Link[EcoGolf] via [iGreenSpot]