RAMPANT USE OF PESTICIDES

[hughjorgan]

The chemicals allowed to be sprayed according to the labels now a days are far less nasty than what has been used in the past. The WSDA does a good job of educating and regulating the use of pesticides in the state.

On what actual knowledge do you base that statement?

Like Farmin4u you mentioned as a licensed applicator we have to continue our education by taking so many credits, if you would have taken the time to go to the WSDA website I linked to in my post a while back you can see the licensing requirements and find a wealth of other information. These classes are tought by professionals in the industry and by highly educated employees from the WSU and it is done all over the state.

I don't dispute your knowledge of the training you have to go through to do your job. What I dispute is the safety of Atrazine. We know it's an immunotoxin. We know that in water supplies it causes birth defects, breast cancer and cervical cancer in humans. We know from research that Bruce has done that in the area where hoof rot is being found that 2.5 times the normal application of the chemical is being used on the clear cuts. And we know that after spraying, it's unhealthy for humans to enter an area for a given period of time. We can assume therefore that's it's also unhealthy for other animals, especially when they're there to feed.

I have no problem with people making their living spraying chemicals when they're as educated and current in their field as you obviously are. I have a problem with hyper-application of those chemicals and the fact that in spite of compelling evidence, our government still allows the use of Atrazine. I also mourn the fact that the air quality and global warming Nazis have made it necessary for the timber companies to poison the forests instead of burning the slash, reintroducing beneficial carbon back into the environment and creating a healthier environment and forage for our wildlife.

Most pesticides will have warnings of when it is safe for people to enter an area that has been sprayed, that is why we have to post when we spray areas and document our application in case some one has a reaction to it.

The state has their own list of approved chemicals that is more restrictive than at the federal level. Just because the federal government deems a chemical safe, the state can deem it hazardous and restrict its use in the state. If the science the supports the claim that is brought about atrazine, you could lobby the WSDA to add it to their list.

[farmin4u_98948]

Yes mistakes have been made in the past. Our Veterans were not protected at all when Agent Orange and other defoliants were used in the jungles. My first car was a Ford Pinto. Remember those with the gas tanks unprotected in the back. We are no longer in that area. Atrizine was miss used in the past and yes people were harmed. This is now a complete different time. As you can see on the Label below. Atrizine had to be relabeled
in 2006. Its a very safe and effective herbicide when used correctly.

Once again, Thank you for reading my rant.  Farmin 4 U 98948

Atrazine has long been a mainstay of corn, sorghum and sugar cane farmers because it's effective in controlling a broad range of yield-robbing weeds, is safe to the crop and fits a variety of farming systems. Its ability to increase yields is critical as demand for food and alternative fuel increases.
   Science & Safety
Atrazine passes the most stringent, up-to-date safety requirements in the world. In 2006, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) re-registered atrazine in 2006, based on the overwhelming evidence of safety from nearly 6,000 studies.
   Drinking Water
Atrazine poses no threat to the safety of our drinking water supplies. In 2008, none of the 122 Community Water Systems monitored in 10 states exceeded the federal standards set for atrazine in drinking water or raw water.
   Amphibians
The latest, cutting-edge research shows that atrazine has no adverse effect on frogs. In reviewing the research in 2007, EPA went so far as to say, "the data are sufficiently robust to outweigh previous efforts to study the potential effects of atrazine on amphibian gonadal development" and "there is no compelling reason to pursue additional testing."
   Stewardship
Syngenta's stewardship of atrazine - from watershed management to farmer education - is unsurpassed in the industry.

[bbarnes]

i guess this brings up another interesting point,about our state being more strict then the feds.If thats a fact then why doesn't the FOREST SERVICE  spray any timberlands?They have banned all chemicals in the forest because of there danger.As far as TREPONEMA being the cause there were traces found in three,of the 43 ELK that were killed by WDFW.One of which was on the east side,in a unaffected area with no hoof rot.There were also the same number that tested positive for LEPTOSPIROSIS.Most of us that have been involved from 06 to present day,have know there is some underlying problem here,that someone doesn't want hunters to know.Just look at the lack of funds,put into this.A measly 54,000 dollars on the biggest wildlife disease in the states history.For a wild game species that in the last 4 years probably brought in 120 million dollars to WDFW.Also they wont let any third party try and figure it out,they seen to be the only one who could figure out our fisheries.In my opinion this has become more than a,hoof rot elk issue.

[snowpack]

FS sprays roadsides.  I've seen them even spray right to the bridges over creeks.  Most of the posters they nail up have specific weeds on the hit list.

[bbarnes]

Guest: The failure of the EPA to protect the public from pollution
Can we trust the EPA to do what is in the public’s best interest? Not if history is any guide, writes guest columnist E.G. Vallianatos.


By E.G. Vallianatos
Special to The Times

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M. RYDER / OP ART

Author event

E.G. Vallianatos will talk abut the EPA and his book at 7:30 p.m. Sunday at Town Hall Seattle. Tickets are $5.

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@Vlad The Impaler The GOP's illogical rejection of science is mind-boggling to me and a growing embarrassment for this... (April 13, 2014) MORE
The EPA is, in my opinion, not doing as much as it could or needs to to insure that the environment doesn't continue to... (April 13, 2014) MORE
@Thought Criminal This comment is an excellent reason to vote Democrat. The GOP/TP would place our nation's children... (April 13, 2014) MORE
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MINING companies asking to dig for gold and copper in Bristol Bay, Alaska, threaten to destroy a great salmon fishery and the indigenous community that has long depended on it. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency says it will consult the Clean Water Act to guide its decision on whether to prohibit or license the mining.

Can we trust the EPA to do what is in the public’s best interest? Not if history is any guide.

We know that the greatest crisis facing the U.S. at the dawn of the 21st century is the steady deterioration of the natural world. The toxification of nature by poisons, the warming of the Earth, and epidemics of cancer and other diseases are the most serious manifestations of a broken regulatory system that does violence to public health and the natural world.

I worked at the EPA from 1979 to 2004, through five administrations both Republican and Democratic, and watched firsthand how industry expertly subverts an agency charged with protecting our health, our drinking water and the air we breathe.

I collected thousands of letters, memos, reports and scientific studies, and talked to dozens of colleagues over two decades. I witnessed the countless ways that industry manipulates our government, with dire consequences.

With highly placed industry appointees in both the White House and Congress, chemical and agricultural giants essentially control the actions of the EPA.

The agency routinely shrinks from enforcing the law. It does little to bring bad practices to an end, overlooks evidence of wrongdoing and ignores the rapid increase of cancer and other diseases corresponding to the spread of toxic-chemical use and pollution. It fails to keep companies accountable.

Here’s how it works. Corporate lobbyists meet almost daily with EPA scientists and managers, muscling their science and pressuring them to see the world through industry eyes. This task is made easier when, as often happens, industry’s chief lobbyists are former EPA political appointees, and senior EPA officials are former industry heavyweights.

Pesticide companies, for instance, hire senior EPA officials because those officials know how to craft strategies that will ensure the flow of toxins into the market and the profits derived from them.

Former government officials are able to persuade their former colleagues to be more lenient in their scrutiny of data provided by industry, which ensures that new and more dangerous pesticides continue to be “registered” and enter the market.

This revolving door is an opportunity for corruption and industry hegemony over would-be regulators. For example, Linda Fisher, a Reagan administration appointee in the EPA’s pesticide and toxics kingdom, joined Monsanto.

But the official who started the revolving door at the EPA was William Ruckelshaus, now a strategic director at Madrona Venture Group in Seattle. He served the EPA with distinction as its first administrator. In 1972, he banned DDT, not a small achievement. But after leaving the agency in 1973, he was hired as senior vice president of Weyerhaeuser, the giant timber company based in Federal Way.

Ruckelshaus returned to the EPA as a Reagan appointee in 1983, then left the agency and took board positions at Monsanto, Cummins Engine, the American Paper Institute and worked with a group of companies, Coalition on Superfund, that lobbied for the weakening of the country’s toxic waste laws.

Ruckelshaus also became the chief executive officer of Browning-Ferris, a huge waste-management company in Houston. When Ruckelshaus resigned from the EPA in 1985, he was earning $72,000, according to a 1989 report in The Nation. Browning-Ferris Industries hired him at a minimum salary of $1 million, according to the same report.

To be sure, the EPA is not the only federal agency where senior officials come from or leave for private-sector positions. Senior officials from the Federal Communications Commission and the Securities and Exchange Commission, for instance, have jumped to positions at companies they regulated while working for the federal government.

Another pathway to corruption goes through science. The captains of industry and EPA scientists speak the same technical language of science — which by its very nature is often ambiguous, evolving and incomplete.

But chemical companies are expert at presenting their data in a favorable light, emphasizing so-called economic benefits and downplaying the dangers of the chemicals they want to license.

With industry constantly browbeating Congress to shrink the size of the EPA, it becomes logical for EPA managers to encourage agency scientists to think of their own well-being first, trumpeting the economic benefits of new chemicals and downplaying worries that might prevent a new product from reaching the market.

EPA scientists quickly learn that challenging the corporate agenda can bring career-ending payback — their decisions would be questioned, their promotions and careers would be put at risk.

They don’t ask many questions when they evaluate industry data about new pesticides, for example. The EPA’s industry bosses handpick the scientists to collect data or — inside the agency — to adopt industry information and rubber-stamp it as government policy. A product labeled “EPA Approved” thus loses any real integrity.

Any president and his appointees at the EPA could have stopped this process of corruption, but they have so far chosen to favor the industry. But when the pesticide makers alone make about $40 billion a year, bales of money end up in re-election war chests of politicians who promise to continue doing industry’s bidding.

Undoing industry influence over the EPA is crucial. The EPA must be redesigned to be independent.

A new EPA could look a lot more like the Federal Reserve. This means the president merely nominates the EPA administrator for, say, a 10-year term. The administrator, not the president, would appoint EPA senior officials. Then law should shield the EPA from industry influence, forbidding companies, members of Congress and White House officials from lobbying the EPA.

Second, all chemicals in the market should be tested for public-health and environmental effects. The chemical industry must not have the right to test its own products, as it does now. Fraud has plagued many industry testing laboratories. An independent organization must become the national testing facility.

Third, the revolving door between the industry and EPA must be closed. This is because when political men and women leave the government for positions in industry — or when industry people move into government — they carry their influence with them.

Finally, whistle-blowers — who see the corrupting influence of industry from inside — need real protection. Only with these changes would we be able to return the EPA to its original mission: protecting our bodies and our world.

E.G. Vallianatos, with McKay Jenkins, is the author of “Poison Spring: The Secret History of Pollution and the EPA,” published by Bloomsbury Press in April.



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[bbarnes]

I guess this article above just puts over sight and safety into a different light.

[bbarnes]

40 Years After the Pinto's Debut, Remembering its Exploding Gas Tanks
 RSS
Jim Motavalli
MAR 24, 2011 (Archives)
8 Comments

Mark Dowie, the dogged investigator who broke the story of the Ford Pinto's exploding gas tanks way back in 1977, was then Mother Jones' business manager. A sobering tale, it charges that the Ford Motor Company ignored evidence that an $11 plastic tray could have prevented its cars from bursting into flames (and killing at least 27 people). It was Dowie's first big story for the magazine, published after a six-month investigation.


The Ford Pinto was vulnerable from the rear. (Flickr/Joost J. Bakker photo)
Dowie, whose most recent book is Conservation Refugees: The Hundred-Year Conflict between Global Conservation and Native Peoples (MIT Press), found his smoking gun in a scene right out of a movie. All the Presidents' Men, perhaps? According to Dowie, Ford created a blizzard of paperwork in its lobbying effort against a federal rear-end collision standard. In an era long before digital records, his sleuthing led to a row of huge filing cabinets at the Department of Transportation, where he was told he could take his time.

It took a week going through those files for Dowie to unearth a Ford memo entitled "Fatalities Associated with Crash-Induced Fuel Leakage and Fires." In it, Ford's director of auto safety estimated that equipping the Pinto with the $11 part would prevent 180 burn deaths, 180 serious burn injuries and 2,100 burned cars, for a total cost of $137 million. Paying out $200,000 per death, $67,000 per injury and $700 per vehicle would cost only $49.15 million.

Later analysts have speculated that the memo isn't quite as cold-blooded as it appears, and that Ford was merely quoting existing federal data. But its existence, and Dowie's story, were enough to deep-six the Pinto and leave it with a stigma for all time. Images of rear-ended Pintos turning into fireballs, are seared on the collective memory. Here's a video of one such rear-end crash test:



The plantiffs in a lawsuit over one fatal 1972 Pinto crash case were initially awarded more than $127 million by a jury, though that amount was substantially reduced by the judge in the case. Another case resulted in a $30 million settlement. The Pinto is not remembered fondly, and it's become a symbol of auto safety compromises. Luckily, today's Fords are much better-built.

Dowie today has mellowed a bit about the Pinto, which is celebrating its 40th birthday (1971 was the first year). In fact, Dowie would rather drive a repaired Pinto than an equally infamous model, the Chevrolet Corvair (brought down by Ralph Nader). "The Pinto was actually a pretty reasonable car, except for that one flaw which you can fix with an $11 part," Dowie said. "It was a fabulous vehicle that got great gas mileage."

As we talked, Dowie surfed the Hemmings Motor News online want ads and found a Pinto that had been a Car and Driver project car. A bit steep at $24,900. An excellent 10,000-mile original, in mint green, however, was $12,500 at a dealer in San Diego. Some cheaper ones are here. Mark Dowie and the Pinto, reunited again after all these years?

[bbarnes]

The above story is a fun fact about how things get done,after the fact.And how costly law suits are,when there are wrongful deaths.I wonder how deep the pockets of timber company's are?

[jackmaster]

the fact here is that we shouldnt be using any pestacides and herbacides, go back to leaving more leave trees and slash burning, all will benefit, the wood companies and most and best of all is all the animals and birds, grouse will rebound and deer and elk will have far better feed, just flat outlaw all sprays and there wont be any problems..... i know i dont have a bunch of supporting documents or anything but what i do have is a memory of what it use to be like when timber outfits used slash burning and controlled burns to control weeds and what not, and the clearcuts were alot better off to boot, cleaner and far better forage for the animals

[singleshot12]

  in a perfect world

We should all be using H20 to run our cars and machines too but we all know why that will never happen also

[bowbuild]

The chemicals allowed to be sprayed according to the labels now a days are far less nasty than what has been used in the past. The WSDA does a good job of educating and regulating the use of pesticides in the state.

On what actual knowledge do you base that statement?

Like Farmin4u you mentioned as a licensed applicator we have to continue our education by taking so many credits, if you would have taken the time to go to the WSDA website I linked to in my post a while back you can see the licensing requirements and find a wealth of other information. These classes are tought by professionals in the industry and by highly educated employees from the WSU and it is done all over the state.

Being a licensed applicator.....that is not the WHOLE truth. You do NOT have to do continuing education, you came simply retest every five yrs. That is the truth.

As to regulating pesticides, I disagree, they do not do a good job at regulating pesticides. I have infact been working witth the department to "hopefully" change that on the pesticide side of things....herbicides is a whole different story that needs to be regulated more....in my opinion. There are very few RUP'S (restricted use pesticides) Most of your restricted use pesticides are dictated by federal law...very few state restricted pesticides in comparison as the state tends to follow the federal mandate.



Bowbuild

[buckhorn2]

I live on the wet side I spent a lot of time in the forks creek area there used to be a lot of grouse and No Hoof rot. I watched bags of pesticides piled up and then helicopters dropping it I don't know if it has any bearing at all of why there aren't the grouse there used to be or what causes hoof rot but something causes it. I live around cranberry bogs and have went to wolf kill to pick up chemicles to be put on the bogs almost every bag we loaded had pictures of a skull and crossbones they had to test the water in the drainage ditches and found what ran into the water. Now it is much more restricted and we still have cranberrys so think it may work in the forrest.

[farmin4u_98948]

BOW-BUILD. Dude. We all have strong convictions about wanting to have a safe envornment. That being said its impossible to single one thing out and say "THATS THE PROBLEM" . Yes I could go and retake my applicators test every 5 years but it does me no harm to go to meetings and get informed about what is changing in my industry. The only thing constant in our world is CHANGE. Some for the better and some for the worse. Never is common ground found in the middle. The pendulum swings back and forth. Over reaction on both sides is the result. Try to look at the other side of the argument. Federal managed resorces are the most mismanaged of all. Private industry is always more effecient. You cannot compare private forest management to that of the federal government. And once again. Thank you for your passion. Farmin 4 U 98948

[bowbuild]

BOW-BUILD. Dude. We all have strong convictions about wanting to have a safe envornment. That being said its impossible to single one thing out and say "THATS THE PROBLEM" . Yes I could go and retake my applicators test every 5 years but it does me no harm to go to meetings and get informed about what is changing in my industry. The only thing constant in our world is CHANGE. Some for the better and some for the worse. Never is common ground found in the middle. The pendulum swings back and forth. Over reaction on both sides is the result. Try to look at the other side of the argument. Federal managed resorces are the most mismanaged of all. Private industry is always more effecient. You cannot compare private forest management to that of the federal government. And once again. Thank you for your passion. Farmin 4 U 98948

I am not sure you took what I wrote in the right context. I was simply saying that applicators are NOT forced to have continuing education, and infact my personal feelings are that a lot of times it is NOT always necessary to sit in a class to be able to read the label....the label IS the law, so therefore if you can correctly interpret the label, and follow directions.....in my opinion...... what's the point, especially if you do repeated applications of common chemicals YOU are dealing with on a daily basis.

I personally feel that chemicals have their place...obviously with what I have chosen as a career. On the other hand......regulation at times is too lax, other times to darn restrictive. Do people that believe the chemicals are the source of ALL the elk issues have a point....maybe yes, maybe no. Chemical applications to wide areas of forest with multitude of species present, is not MY PERSONAL idea of substainability....but I don't own it.

I feel Weyerhauser/green diamond, and others are doing what is best for their profitability, not necessarily what's best for the environment....but that is just a opinion.

I personally feel a huge responsibility when applying chemicals that the "average Joe" does not understand, for that matter does not care about.....it is MY JOB to care, and not turn a blind eye to what I know morally is wrong. Caring what goes on out there shows your professionalism in my opinion.

Bowbuild

[KDB]

 If you are concerned about your safety and herbicide applications; then maybe you should stay off their private lands.