The decision follows months of protests and lawsuits from residents of Santa Cruz and Monterey counties, and around California, after airplanes sprayed parts of the two counties with the chemicals last year.

"We want to move away from the tools of the past," said A.G. Kawamura, secretary of the state's Department of Food and Agriculture. "Our focus right now is, let's all work together to eradicate this pest."

*     *     *

Not all of the public criticism disappeared with today's announcement, though. Roy Upton of Soquel, with consumer advocacy group Citizens for Health, said he was "ecstatic" to hear his neighborhood will not be sprayed, but questioned the safety of insecticides that the state plans to use on the ground. Upton said he believes the moth is already established in California and any attempt to get rid of it won't work.

Read the whole thing (San Jose Mercury News).

After months of protests, lawsuits and media scrutiny, CBS 5 has learned state and federal officials planned to announce later Thursday that they will scrap plans to spray the Bay Area with a pheromone pesticide to eradicate the light brown apple moth. -- cbs5.com

Yea!

Yesterday might have been the beginning of the end for the California Department of Agriculture’s Light Brown Apple Moth Spraying program. First, a Santa Cruz County judge ruled that the emergency exemption under which the program was being carried out was invalid (meaning they must prepare an Environmental Impact Report before resuming spraying in Santa Cruz County), then the Governor, bowing to public pressure, suspended all spraying at least until mid-August in order to allow some rudimentary tests to be carried out on the safety of the spray.

Unsurprisingly, the Ag Department’s science-free approach didn’t get far in the courtroom. The judge demanded actual evidence that the moth had caused or would cause serious damage – and when they were unable to provide ANY evidence that the moth has caused ANY damage in Santa Cruz County (the most heavily infested county in the state) or anywhere else in California, the judge ruled they had not demonstrated the existence of an emergency.

The Department of Agriculture promises to immediately appeal this ruling, but with the Governor weighing in to suspend the spraying, it looks to us like the program is falling apart. And some very powerful agri-business folks ain’t happy. Not only has the Dept. of Ag fumbled the ball with respect to one (probably not very important) moth, it’s starting to look like this episode may result in new laws requiring future pest eradication efforts to be based on real science and to involve serious public input and oversight.

In other words, the Dept.’s high-handed, wolf-crying approach to the Light Brown Apple Moth, which has already cost them their credibility, may also end up costing the Dept. and industry some very real power – and these aren’t guys who like having their privileges revoked. But what were they expecting? We know these are people who are used to getting their way, but did they actually imagine they could get away with spraying chemicals over large urban areas when they had NO solid evidence that the moth posed a serious threat to anything? That’s not just arrogance, that’s world-class arrogance.

Meanwhile, to get a flavor for how things are going for the Dept. of Ag and the Ag industry in the court of public opinion, take a look at the rapidly proliferating LBAM videos on YouTube.

Here are a couple of the best: 

LBAM Takes San Francisco

Pilot Errors and Exclusion Zones

If you click on the binder link below - it has the latest articles, and websites that can help you find out more information on what to protect yourself if you are stuck in the area during the aerial spraying. Everything is organized by tabs and sub-tabs just click on them to view the websites.

What I've been up to in my blog absence: Went to Vancouver very briefly; working on a commission painting (still!); watching "Torchwood" (fun) and "Battlestar Galactica" (f'ing fantastic -- don't believe me? Read what the New Yorker thought.) And writing a lot of protest letters but more on that in a minute.

Meanwhile here in the studio I've been noticing two things: Baku wants to spend all her waking hours by the sliding screen doors watching and chasing flies, and there is an awful smell wafting around. I thought maybe it was something gnarly going sour in a trash can so I dumped 'em all out, then I thought maybe my paint rinsing buckets and cans had turned toxic so I washed them all out too. Still Stinksville. Finally I put two and two together: flies + awful smell = something dead. Dammit, something crawled under the deck behind my studio and took a dirt nap. And is decaying. And fouling up the joint. So that's really unfortunate.

Other things that stink: the planned aerial spraying of pesticide here in the Bay Area -- planes flying around spraying urban areas to fight a harmless and well established moth that poses no serious threat to agriculture. Brilliant!

What? You think that's crazy? I do too. Read more here, especially if you live in the area and don't feel like sucking up a lungful of evil this summer -- they're planning to start spraying in August. With stuff that has not been tested on humans. Dispersed in little plastic pellets that you can suck into your deep lung tissue. To try and wipe out a moth that has been here for 30 years and hasn't caused a single dollar's worth of damage yet. (The Light Brown Apple Moth, or LBAM to his buds, has been in Hawaii and New Zealand for over 100 years and they don't consider it a pest or do anything to try and eradicate it.)

Interesting tidbit: Stewart Resnick who owns the company that makes the pesticide spray, Checkmate, is a buddy and contributor to Gov. Arnold's campaign to the tune of $144,600. Each spraying will cost about $3.5 million and about $3 million of that will go right to Resnick's company, Suterra. The current plan is to spray us every 30-90 days for 2 - 10 YEARS. So it'll cost California tax payers somewhere in the area of $500 million (five times the projected losses to agriculture even if the moth were to suddenly become a problem). We'll get massively dosed with this crap and Resnick will get rich. You can read more here and here as well.

UPDATE: Gov. Arnold has temporarily halted the planned spraying while they do a toxicity test.  Unfortunately, one of the scarier things is the plastic pellets the spray is encapsulated in, which will not be tested.  Some studies by Knepp and Haferman suggest it will raise air pollution levels.  By adding the deadly burden of aerial CheckMate spraying, Dr. Knepp has calculated that 1480 more deaths from pneumonia and cardiovascular disease would occur within 2-3 days after each spraying.  Similarly the average 17,000 admissions to hospital from pneumonia will increase by 4600.  CDFA intends to spray about 700 square miles, up to 5 nights a month, 9 months a year, for up to 10 or more years. The number of additional deaths will be increased accordingly.  These calculations are based on long-term medical studies involving the effects of particulate air pollution in many large U.S. cities.  Similar statistical studies in the past resulted in the recognition of coal miner's disease, the effects of asbestos, and of tobacco where not all the exposed population is immediately affected.

And so the fight must continue!

It is the duty of our government to solve the problems of our nation NOT by simple, unstudied, stop-gap measures, but by coming up with the BEST solutions that have the most positive effect on residents, and the ecosystem. Aerial pesticide spraying is not a long-term nor viable solution and you MUST invest in more studied, safe solutions to issues like this.

Please pass the information along to all the folks in the Bay Area you know, and sign the petition to stop the aerial pesticide spray for the Light Brown Apple Moth - they need to come up with a better solution than this unstudied stop-gap.

Stop the spraying in the Bay Area now!

Further reading:

Dept of Food and Agriculture will start spraying San Francisco, Marin, the East Bay and other counties on Aug. 1 (and Monterey, Santa Cruz et al. counties JUNE 1), with a chemical pesticide called CheckMate.

Some quick facts about CheckMate:

• Low-flying airplanes will drop CheckMate on us in the evenings, 3-5x/month for a year (and likely longer).
• CheckMate is a chemical pesticide that has not been tested for safety on humans.
• The intention is to eradicate the light brown apple moth, despite the fact that scientists and agriculturalists have testified that spraying is unlikely to work (and that the moth is unlikely to cause
significant damage).
• CheckMate's manufacturer is owned by a financial contributor to Gov. Schwarzenegger, the main political proponent of the spray. If you live in the Bay Area or Santa Cruz counties, you WILL be sprayed.

What you can do to stop it:

• Tell everyone you know by email, phone, letter, tin can, etc.
• Join over 20,000 of your neighbors by signing the petition to stop the spray
• Download this flyer and distribute it to local your businesses
• Contact your legislators and voice your opposition to the spray
• Visit Stop the Spray! to learn more.

Don’t you just love how the State of California, which doesn’t have enough money to fix its roads, maintain its schools, or keep its State Parks open, can still find the cash to fly around in planes spraying untested chemicals on you and your property and can even find a little more of your tax money to use to pay people to lie to you about it?

You don’t love it? Well, apparently, you’re not alone. It’s been several weeks since we last discussed the light brown apple moth and there’ve been some new developments – none particularly promising for the California Department of Agriculture’s spraying program.

First, the big $497,000 no-bid contract that was awarded to PR firm, Porter Novelli (a company that, probably not coincidentally, is pretty well connected with Governor Schwarzenegger) has been suspended. Good idea, since a bunch of PR double-talk isn’t likely to satisfy a public that has real concerns and wants real answers. But that’s not why the contract was suspended.

The contract was suspended because the usual bidding process is only supposed to be bypassed in emergency situations. Most legislators and officials seem to think this means things like contracts to provide relief to victims of major fires, floods and earthquakes. They don’t seem to think that PR “emergencies” qualify. Details, details….

It’s just as well though, since whatever Porter Novelli has been doing with our money since they landed the contract last November, it hasn’t been gaining much traction. Instead, the press (special thanks to the Monterey County Herald for particularly thorough coverage) has been flooded with stories debunking the idea that the light brown apple moth poses a serious threat to California’s agriculture or environment.

The main points seem to be:

1)    The moth is not a serious pest in countries where it is already well established;

2)    There are already something like 85 species of similar moths here that are well controlled by natural predators;

3)    While it is possible that the light brown apple moth might prove to be bigger problem than the 85 similar moths we already have, there isn’t any real reason to believe that it will be;

4)    Evidence is emerging that the light brown apple moth may have been here much longer (50 years?) than previously thought – suggesting that it is already being adequately controlled by natural predators.

But, as we discussed last month, fear of crop damage was never what this spraying program was about. Avoiding restrictions on the export of our produce was the issue from the start.

And that leaves the Dept. of Ag in a pretty tight bind. Because we ourselves declared the light brown apple moth a serious pest (back before we knew we had it), the Dept. of Ag is now under pressure to put some kind of “eradication” program in place to minimize the extent to which we’re going to be subjected to the kinds of export restrictions we’ve imposed on others who have the moth. But how can the Dept. of Ag tell people they’re going to spray them and their property with an untested chemical compound just because they need to put on a show for our international trading partners? They can’t.

So, instead, they attempt to justify a massive, multi-year spraying campaign by exaggerating the danger to crops, home gardens and the environment posed by the moth. Then, when the public calls their bluff by asking to see the science behind the assertions, they panic and call for emergency PR help. And now that blows up in their faces too, as pointy-headed bureaucrats from the State Contracts Office get all nitpicky about the definition of “emergency.”

Perhaps it’s time to simply acknowledge that we have joined Australia, New Zealand, Tasmania, the U.K. and Hawaii as a homeland for the light brown apple moth – acknowledge it and move on to negotiating with our trading partners on the basis of science and common sense. Here at Xasáuan Today, we have a strong suspicion that our trading partners were never going to be impressed with a pseudo-scientific “eradication”program, anyway.

Originally published March 11 2008

People of the world, the US Government is planning to poison more than two million people, in California, using an untested biological "pesticide" this summer. The chemical to be sprayed is classified by the EPA as a "pesticide" and the plan is to douse cities with this chemical designed to stick on everything for 90 days or longer. This application is not a one time event, but will continue every 1-3 months for as long as five years. The pesticide to be sprayed is not designed to harm the light brown apple moth's who it is designed for, but merely to confuse its mating habits. While harmless to moths, the pesticide has been documented to harm humans.

Side effects range from vomiting and flu like systems, to male and female reproductive cycle disruption. One child nearly died from the exposure, and some people have developed asthma from being exposed to this chemical concoction. It is cause for alarm that a chemical being labeled as harmless and "safe" even in minute doses, causes severe health effects in some people. The government is racing to cover up and hide the dangerous health effects so that they can continue their aerial spray plans this summer. Your attention and action on this subject is needed in the most important way.

On January 24th, 2008, United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) Secretary Chuck Conner announced the availability of $74.5 million in emergency funding to combat the light brown apple moth (LBAM) infestation in California (1). President Bush's recent budget proposal sent to Congress sets aside $330 Million to eradicate plant pests, like the Light Brown Apple Moth. With crime, prison crowding, pollution, poverty, budget problems and the like, why should the government go through the effort to try to control the reproductive habits of a moth? While most people say the answer is money, a far more sinister plan seems to be at hand. It is unprecedented to design a long term plan to spray chemicals on people, which are untested for safety. This plan violates a myriad of state, federal and international laws.

In late 2007, there were 643 documented health complaints (www.1hope.org/SPRAYCOMPLES.PDF) from the aerial spray program conducted in Santa Cruz and Monterey Counties. Keep in mind that this documentation is a mere fraction of the real health effects, as no legitimate effort was made to inform even doctors on how to recognize pesticide poisoning. Many doctors also refused to report suspected pesticide poisoning as required by law, and in order for a report to get officially filed, many times the patient had to insist upon it. These health injuries are not being honored in any way, because if they are honored, this sick chemical spray will be seen for what it is. It is a poison to many humans and likely to many other animals as well. I have a difficult time swallowing that a chemical compound designed to disrupt a moth's mating cycle can accidentally create reproductive health problems.

There are many who believe that this spray is not directed at the moth population which the government says is the goal of the spray, but rather that it is directed at humans. There is a growing body of evidence to support this claim, considering that the moth itself does not cause any crop damage. It is similar to the government deciding that we must eradicate all the ants, because ants cause millions of dollars of damage. Like ants, the light brown apple moth is a harmless pest. Another strange observation is the name of the mating disruption chemical Checkmate. In order to pull off the deployment of this biological chemical, a hoax, or reason for aerial spraying had to be created. That reason is called the Light Brown Apple Moth infestation. The second requirement to pull off releasing a massive chemical cloud of disease, is to trick people into believing it is safe. This whole aerial spray program depends on the belief that the chemicals to be sprayed are safe.

No ounce of sanity can explain why the government must insist on violating countless laws to spray people with never before tested chemicals, except as to realize a deadly game is being played.

Unlike the horrible malathion spraying over 20 years ago, which was a one-time ordeal with chemicals that evaporate, this spraying is a time release microscopic device, which will be continuously applied, short of the winter months, for up to five years. Even five years of spraying will at best reduce slightly the moth population, as pest control experts explain that mating disruption technology is used as a small part of an overall pest management plan. Pretty much any pest control expert, except for those on the government take, will tell you that the light brown apple moth cannot be eradicated, and that even if it could, the mating disruption technology is not the best means to do it. Since aerial spraying is to be the sole method of controlling the light brown apple moth in many locations, then even after many years of spraying, the moth will still be alive. It is not sane to spray people with chemicals. That begs attention, there is not any hard evidence that the spray even works at all. In fact on the EPA's own website, there's an article about pheromones released from microcapsules, it states: "The studies show that only a small proportion of the microcapsules actually release any pheromone." (5)

This is now clear and reprehensible evidence of State and Federal Governments attempting to commit a large scale crime against the American people. Let us forget about supposed terrorists for a second whose propagandized images are placed on the television, and lets pay attention to this biological attack planned on our fellow neighbors. The presence of a minuscule pest, is no excuse to douse millions with chemicals. There are NO CROPS IN CITIES! So why are they going to spray cities?

This is a Cover-Up

Does it make sense to douse over two million people with literally hundreds of billions of microscopic balls of volatile chemicals over an extended period of time to try to limit the mating habits of a few thousand moths? Is it legal to do this? Is it ethical? Is it moral? Yet rather than halting the spray plans to investigate the damage it has done to many people, the spray plans continue to grow exponentially.

To see this insanity clearly, let's examine the moth population. In San Francisco County, 3,501 moths total have been trapped and killed over an eight month period. The entire city of San Francisco, whose population is 744,041, is in the proposed spray boundaries. About 744,000 people are to be exposed to 'never tested safe for humans, microencapsulated pheromones' for several years. This is really a needle in the haystack approach to pest control. Keep in mind, each moth found is a moth that has been trapped and exterminated (6). In Alameda County, 431 months have been found in the past 8 months out of 2,327 traps. The moth population in Alameda County is thus sparse at best. Just look out your window. Imagine how many insects are in the tree, the yard, or the local park. I have seen more than 431 ants crawl into my kitchen on a rainy day. So in a giant area of 141 square miles, and the tens or hundreds of millions of insects in that zone, to try to eradicate a few hundred moths by just spraying chemicals everywhere is both ludicrous and unsafe.

The chemicals that were sprayed, and that are planned on being sprayed, have not undergone thorough safety evaluations. And they won't undergo such evaluations in a legitimate way, because if they did, they would prove only one thing - that these chemicals are potentially deadly.

Continue reading Rami Nagel's important message here.

The city council is set to discuss spraying in April.

Be heard

1. E-mail Larry Rosenberg, Piedmont ’s Director of Public Works (lrosenberg@ci.piedmont.ca.us), letting him know that you are very concerned about this untested pesticide being sprayed over our community. He is preparing the City’s response to CDFA’s draft Environmental Impact Report, and in the Post article he invites concerned residents to e-mail him. The City’s letter to CDFA needs to be submitted by March 20, so the time to write him is right NOW! It doesn’t need to be a fancy letter!
2. Write directly to the CDFA, either to their Light Brown Apple Moth Program at lbam@cdfa.ca.gov (again, a simple message is fine), or make your own comments on their draft Environmental Impact Report by the close of the business day on March 20th by sending an e-mail to jrains@cdfa.ca.gov . (The draft EIR is posted at http://www.cdfa.ca.gov/PHPPS/PDEP/lbam/pdfs/docs/LBAM_NOP_020808.pdf).

Dear Editor:

Thank you for your coverage of the proposed aerial spraying for the light brown apple moth. The California Department of Food and Agriculture (CDFA) has now clarified that Piedmont indeed will be part of the spraying, scheduled to begin in August. It is dismaying that the CDFA representatives who addressed our City Council on March 3rd did not come armed with the basic fact of whether or not Piedmont would be in the spray zone. The CDFA’s Action Plan, available on its website, has Piedmont clearly listed.

We are also concerned about the testimony given by the CDFA to City Council, because two of its basic premises are contested: Not only do experts disagree about the scope of the moth infestation, they also do not agree that questions about the health safety of the likely aerial spray product have been resolved. The CDFA’s position is that the light brown apple moth has only recently arrived in California and that the State must act quickly to prevent it from turning into a disaster for our crops, trees and economy. The San Francisco Chronicle, however, reported on March 6^th that top insect and plant experts in the state question not only the timing of when the moth arrived in California, but also the extent of its threat and the necessity to move so quickly to an aerial spray.

In his testimony to the City Council, CDFA’s scientific expert, Dr. Dowling, testified that each of the ingredients being considered for the spray (exact formulation still to be determined) has separately been tested and approved, and therefore should be of no concern. At the same meeting, however, a representative from Cal/EPA testified that testing of the product as a whole has not been completed, and that he could make no assertions about its safety.

Questions about the health safety of the likely aerial spray center not on its main ingredient (a synthetic pheromone that has been used safely in localized applications), but on some of its inert ingredients, which studies have shown can cause lung irritation in higher concentrations. Children, the elderly and those with respiratory conditions such as asthma may be particularly at risk.

We urge Piedmont citizens and leaders to raise their voices on this issue. The CDFA plan to spray heavily-populated urban areas with a product that has not been thoroughly tested for safety would be ill-conceived even if the extent of the moth infestation were undisputed. Until the scientific issues related to both the necessity and the risks of this program are resolved, the only correct course of action for the CDFA is to pull back from its plans to begin widespread aerial spraying in August.

Sincerely,

Margaret Ovenden, Len Gilbert, and others.

Next Steps

1. E-mail Larry Rosenberg, Piedmont ’s Director of Public Works (lrosenberg@ci.piedmont.ca.us), letting him know that you are very concerned about this untested pesticide being sprayed over our community. He is preparing the City’s response to CDFA’s draft Environmental Impact Report, and in the Post article he invites concerned residents to e-mail him. The City’s letter to CDFA needs to be submitted by March 20, so the time to write him is right NOW! It doesn’t need to be a fancy letter!
2. Write directly to the CDFA, either to their Light Brown Apple Moth Program at lbam@cdfa.ca.gov (again, a simple message is fine), or make your own comments on their draft Environmental Impact Report by the close of the business day on March 20th by sending an e-mail to jrains@cdfa.ca.gov . (The draft EIR is posted at http://www.cdfa.ca.gov/PHPPS/PDEP/lbam/pdfs/docs/LBAM_NOP_020808.pdf).

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We were a bit surprised to wake up in the middle of the night last fall to find a plane relentlessly passing back and forth over our house spraying moth pheromones. Especially, since we don’t even live in the area that was supposed to be sprayed. But hey, nobody’s perfect and even in the age of GPS units and so on it’s still probably more than a little confusing to go flying around so close to the deck on a dark night. We’re just happy they didn’t fly into our house.

All this midnight spraying of people and property, was bound to attract attention and it sure enough did. Far more attention than the California Department of Food & Agriculture had been expecting, apparently. And people had questions. Questions like:

Where did the Light Brown Apple Moth come from and how great a danger does it pose to our crops?

How likely is it that the pheromone spray will actually eradicate the moth?

Is the pheromone spray toxic to people?

Is it toxic for plants or other animals?

Will it disrupt the lifecycle of other (native) species with possibly serious consequences?

And, of course, what, exactly, is in the spray anyway?

Had the Dept. of Ag been able to provide some hard facts in answer to these questions, they might have gained public trust and headed off at least some of the controversy now dogging their Apple Moth Eradication Program. But they were monumentally unprepared for the task.

At the first public meetings the Dept. of Ag presented “experts” who, they said, would explain everything. Unfortunately, it quickly became clear that members of the public who’d spent half an hour searching for apple moth data on the Internet were better informed than the Department’s “experts.”

The experts were pretty vague, for example, about which local crops were really at risk. They could not say what the apple moth’s natural predators are, they did not know what, exactly, was in the spray, and they could point to no prior history of use of the product in an urban setting. People left the meetings more worried than when they’d arrived.

The Dept. of Ag has acknowledged these early failings, but instead of realizing that people have serious questions and want serious answers, they’re now spending $497,000 of our tax money to pay a PR firm to sell us on the safety of the program. So far, the new approach appears to be at least as patronizing and as free of actual data as the old.

Meanwhile, like the war in Iraq, the war on the apple moth still seems to have no clear game plan, no reasonable prospect for victory, and no end in sight. But here, as far as we can tell, are some answers to the original questions:

Where did the Light Brown Apple Moth come from and how great a danger does it pose to our crops?

The Light Brown Apple Moth comes from Australia and New Zealand. We hear it is a relatively minor pest down there and that farmers have no great difficulty controlling it. Many years ago, however, the U.S. decided to declare it a major pest. This allowed us to place various restrictions on the importation of fruit from New Zealand and Australia. Restrictions that, perhaps not entirely coincidentally, may have given a little competitive advantage to our own fruit growers.

In spite of the restrictions, the moth has now turned up here, with a population that seems to be centered around Santa Cruz (hey, Australian surfers have been flocking to Santa Cruz for years like moths to a flame, so why not actual Australian moths?). The discovery of the moth on U.S. soil has now given some of our trading partners (Mexico, Canada and China, for example) an opportunity to give us a dose of our own medicine by placing restrictions on some of our produce.

This is the reason for all the vagueness about which crops the moth is expected to devastate. It isn’t fear of crop damage that’s driving the eradication program at all, it’s fear of the economic consequences of losing important export markets. And this is a legitimate fear. The farmers we’ve talked to are all quite worried about it – not one, on the other hand, has expressed any anxiety about the moths themselves.

How likely is it that the pheromone spray will actually eradicate the moth?

Extremely unlikely. In fact, real experts, including the researcher who discovered the moths were here in the first place, believe the moth is well enough established that it can only be “managed.” They do not believe there is any way, using pheromones or otherwise, that the moth can be eradicated.

Eradication may not be important, however. Although eradication is the stated goal of the program, it appears that the most important thing, in terms of staving off produce quarantines, is to be seen to be taking decisive action toward eradication. Perception, as is so often the case, may be more important here than reality.

The massive aerial spraying effort suddenly makes much more sense when understood as a kind of international trade relations theater. The actual outcome is much less important than the show. If we convince our trading partners that we take a tough, no nonsense approach to the moth, we’re hoping they’ll be less apt to place burdensome restrictions on our produce, even if our infestation persists.

Is the pheromone spray toxic to people?

Well, there isn’t any reason to think the pheromone itself is toxic to people, but it comes packaged with a lot of other chemicals and, without knowing much about what they are and without any real studies ever having been done on the effects of spraying the product on people it’s kind of hard to know for sure.

A lot of people reported respiratory problems after the first rounds of spraying, but that could have been just a coincidence. The only way to determine whether there’s a real connection between the symptoms and the spraying would be to conduct a serious scientific survey of the population being sprayed with appropriate controls, etc. Needless to say, this is not being done. Spray proponents are convinced enough of the spray’s safety to consider such a study a waste of time. The sore throat sufferers think the Dept. of Ag doesn’t want to ask a question it doesn’t want to know the answer to.

Is it toxic for plants or other animals?

Again, information is sketchy and hard to come by, but it does appear that it is, in fact, toxic to aquatic invertebrates (i.e. most of the animals living in the tide pools along the Monterey Peninsula shoreline). Since the product will, inevitably, run off into the tide pools and ocean (as well as get directly applied to the shoreline – aerial pesticide application is not an exact science, as we noticed when they sprayed our house), the real question is whether the concentrations will be great enough to cause harm. Will they be? Who knows? The Dept. of Ag, once again, doesn’t seem to have anything to offer but empty assurances unbacked by any type of data.

As to toxicity to other species, that’s another good question.  There just doesn’t seem to have been a whole lot of research …. And no one seems interested in taking this opportunity to conduct research.

Will it disrupt the lifecycle of other (native) species with possibly serious consequences?

Well it certainly is not a chemical “smart bomb” carefully concocted to mimic only the pheromones of the light brown apple moth. In fact, the pheromones of a lot of moths are similar enough that the first round of spraying took place with a mixture designed to combat another type of moth entirely. The reality is that the spray has the potential to confuse and reduce the reproduction rate of a range of species. It is entirely possible that the population of some native moth species will be greatly reduced and (the web of life being what it is) if these moths are an important source of food for birds, the bird population could be affected, which could result in a population explosion of some other type of destructive pest, and so on. There just isn’t any way to know in advance. But pesticide application on an epic scale can certainly result in unanticipated consequences on an equally epic scale.

What, exactly, is in the spray anyway?

One of the weirdest things about this whole episode has been the discovery that the Dept. of Ag reserves the right to spray us all down with chemicals without even revealing to us what the chemicals are. The product’s ingredients, it turns out, are a trade secret.

You might think the government would ask a company to give up its trade secrets and make public its ingredient list before applying the company’s product from the air to entire cities. Considering the staggering amount of the stuff the government is buying, it’s hard to imagine a company refusing those terms. You might also think the Dept. of Ag would see that convincing people a product is safe is futile when they are unable to tell people what the product contains.

This issue became even more surreal when someone accidentally revealed what appeared to be the secret ingredient list on an EPA website. The ingredients, which included at least one potentially toxic compound, were then published in the local press. This caused more concern, the removal of the list from the website, and threats of lawsuits against the press for revealing trade secrets. Then we were told that the ingredient list was for an older version of the product and wasn’t accurate anyway.

The bottom line, though, remains that what, exactly, they’re spraying on us is none of our business and anyone who tries to make it our business is likely to be sued.

And people are less happy than ever. If spraying the Monterey Peninsula last fall was the trial run for expansion of the program into the Bay Area this year, we’d say the Department of Agriculture has a serious mess on their hands.

See Apple Moth Update added 3/15/08!