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Last Updated: Jul 2nd, 2008 - 20:21:03
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With the weather slowly encouraging plant life out of its late winter slumber, it’s only a matter of time before another spring ritual begins — the call of concerned residents hoping Lethbridge will ban pesticide use in its own green spaces and by residents as well.
This year’s campaign surely will get a boost from last month’s announcement in Ontario of that province’s plan for North America’s toughest restrictions on pesticide use trough laws to come into effect in 2009.
Announced on Earth Day, Ontario’s ban will outlaw the use of more than 300 pesticide products, even more than are outlawed in Quebec, the only other province that’s made such a move.
Quebec’s law resulted in some 200 lawn-care products being pulled from store shelves.
Critics of such a provincial or even municipal ban argue politicians have little scientific expertise to determine which substances should be banned, particularly when pesticides are already regulated and deemed safe for use by Health Canada.
And cynics would also point to the long list of exemptions to Ontario’s ban that continues to allow farmers, golf courses and the forestry industry, among others, to use weed and bug killers that homeowners can’t use in their own gardens.
A representative of CropLife Canada, an association representing the pesticide industry, says lawns and gardens account for only four per cent of the pesticide business in Canada. The biggest user is agriculture.
In the announcement, Ontario officials couldn’t say how much a of a difference their sweeping ban would make on the amount of pesticides introduced to the environment. But the ban does send an odd signal — that pesticides aren’t OK in your grass, but they are OK on the food you eat.
That municipalities and provinces would go beyond any restrictions invoked by Health Canada suggests either a troubling lack of confidence in existing regulators’ ability to determine and minimize exposure to what is hazardous or politicians seizing an opportunity to be seen to be taking environmental action that’s more show than go.
There is certainly a gap in what we know about chemicals that are around us or within us. Thousands of chemicals introduced to market a couple of decades or more ago were never subject to rigorous testing. Only since 1994 have new chemicals in Canada been subject to scientific risk evaluation.
In late 2006, the federal government announced a four-year commitment to assess hundreds of other hazardous substances already on the market to determine how long they take to break down, whether they can be passed up the food chain and whether they present a significant risk to Canadians.
Determining how these chemicals affect our health is no easy task. Chemicals can be evaluated one at a time, but they may react different when exposed to other chemicals Canadians have a tough time avoiding.
“With all the untested chemicals in the environment, we’re conducting a vast uncontrolled experiment and children are the guinea pigs,” Dr. Philip Landrigan, director of the Mount Sinai Center for Children’s Health and the Environment, told the May issue of Discover magazine. Landrigan’s work 30 years ago revealed the effect of lead on the health of children, work that contributed to the phaseout of lead from gasoline and other goods.
Landrigan is now involved in a National Children’s Study, which will follow 100,000 children in the U.S. from the time their mothers are pregnant until the children turn 21. The study will cost $2.7 billion and take 25 years, a cost Landrigan compares to the staggering $55-billion annual cost of diseases of environmental origin that will occur in babies born in the U.S. That dollar figure is based on costs associated with just four diseases with already established connections to environmental factors (asthma, lead poisoning, cancer and learning disabilities).
The ambitious study is still more than two decades away from leading science to a better understanding of how our chemical world is affecting the health of its citizens.
Meanwhile, citizens and some governments are taking matters into their own hands, even if they are resorting to small measures that may not tackle the real root of the problem.
© Copyright by Lethbridge Herald.com
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