What: Sonoma City Council Meeting to discuss adopting resolution against CDFA’s aerial spraying of California.
Where and When: May 7th at 177 1st St.West at 6:00 pm
Here is the meeting agenda
Please, attend the meeting. If you cannot attend, please email the City Clerk, Gay Rainbarger at: gayr@sonomacity.org
My letter to City Clerk Rainbarger regarding the deadly threat posed to California’s people by CDFA’s aerial spray:
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Dear Clerk Rainbarger,
Over the past several moths, I have been in direct contact with scientists, doctors and media regarding the aerial spraying of the state of California for the light brown apple moth. I am running the most active blog on the web covering this issue, and because of this, have also been in constant contact with countless individuals whose families were gravely sickened by the aerial spraying of the Central Coast in the fall of 2007. I request that this letter be given to Sonoma City Council in their endeavor to adopt a resolution against the aerial spraying of our county and our state.
These are science-based facts, established by independent UC scientists, doctors, researchers, media and statisticians.
1) The CDFA has just been convicted by the superior court of violating CEQA. They broke the law by creating a false ‘emergency’ which enabled them to bypass every law and tenet in place to protect the safety of human health and environment. The CDFA must be regarded as lawbreakers, not trustworthy, honest or law abiding citizens.
2) CDFA has been forced to admit that the light brown apple moth (LBAM) has caused zero damage to agriculture or the natural environment in California. Their fear-mongering threats of a ‘moth of mass destruction’ are based on decades-old reports from New Zealand. As was discovered by Dr. Daniel Harder on his investigative visit to New Zealand, the use there of horrific organophosphates had devastated local bird, bat and beneficial insect populations. Once New Zealand stopped using organophosphates, the birds, bats and other beneficials returned and the LBAM has not been considered a problem since then. California can count on birds, bats and other natural predators to keep LBAM in check, and it is likely that it is the presence of these natural predators here that enabled LBAM to go undetected for decades. CDFA is not correct in saying the moth just showed up last year. UC scientists have calculated that it has likely been here for as many as 50 years.
3) When CDFA states that LBAM will cause millions of dollars in damage to agriculture, they are again using the unscientific and fear-mongering tactics for which they received a Superior Court conviction of violating CEQA. Any damages referred to are not to crops. They are financial damages caused by quarantines and trade embargoes because of the incorrect classification of LBAM as a Class A pest. Modern science has shown that LBAM is not a class A pest and needs to be declassified, thus lifting the trade issues and CDFAs option to received millions in emergency funding from the federal government for their so-called eradication program. Remember, LBAM will not harm our food supply, native or ornamental plants beyond minor, cosmetic damage to leaves. All CDFA’s misleading quotes of agricultural damage actually refer to financial penalties due to incorrect classification of the moth. This is about money, not about our food supply.
4) California Certified Organic Farmers and Whole Foods, after careful consideration, have come out against the aerial spray program. The USDA has promised organic farmers that they can still call their products organic even after being sprayed with toxic pesticides. CCOF, Whole Foods and Organic consumers are smarter than that. Organic means not sprayed with pesticides. CDFA’s plan to blanket California with untested compounds of pesticides, synthetic pheromones and PM10 pollution will put an end to organic farming in California.
5) CDFA consistently refers to Checkmate, the product they are spraying, as a ‘pheromone product’. Checkmate is classified by the EPA as a pesticide. Independent doctors and scientists have stepped forward to explain that the 11 ingredients in checkmate are mutagenic, endocrine disruptors and carcinogenic. A xenochemical in the spray causes breast cancer. The microscopic plastic encapsulation of the pesticide spray is designated as PM10 by the American Lung Association. PM10 is matter that is small enough to be inhaled into the deep lungs of humans from which it cannot be expelled and causes disease and death.
CDFA has repeatedly called Checkmate the safest and most environmentally friendly product they have ever used. Unfortunately, their other products include DDT and Malathion, which also caused death and environmental devastation. Saying something is ’safer’ than DDT is not reassuring, and has no scientific basis, as CDFA sprayed Monterey and Santa Cruz counties without conducting a single long term test of the synergistic effects of long-term, chronic exposure to the pesticide compound. In the words of U.C. scientist Jim Carey, “this is an experiment.”
6) CDFAs illegal 2007 aerial spraying of the Central Coast resulted in human beings experienced adverse health reactions including first-time asthma attacks, violent vomiting and diarrhea, heart arrhythmia and tachycardia, interrupted menstrual cycles for up to three months, recommencement of menstruation in menopausal women over the age of 65, severe sinus and eye irritations.
The infant son of Major Tim Wilcox went into respiratory arrest and nearly died. The family ended up hiding the baby in a military fort in an attempt to protect him from further spraying and the baby is now being kept breathing by means of corticosteroids. Six Central Coast schools were polled following the spraying and the results showed that attendance was halved in the three days following the spray.
The Office of Environmental Health Hazard Assessment was entrusted with the duty of investigating the health damages that had been suffered by Central Coast families. Rather than doing their job, OEHHA failed to contact even one victim or primary care physician in the area, threw out 90% of the reports of pesticide poisoning and announced that they couldn’t find a connection between the illnesses and the pesticide. Media forced OEHHA to confess that they also couldn’t say the poisoning had not caused the illnesses. In addition to the unforgivable harm done to children, men and women on the Central Coast, the local watershed was horrifically fouled with a yellow foam and over 650 sea birds, including the federally-protected Endangered Brown Pelican, washed up dead on the beaches. Local beekeepers reported confusion and deaths in honey bee colonies and residents reported the disappearance of wild birds from their gardens for several weeks following the aerial spray.
7) CDFA has just placed a large portion of the Sonoma Valley under quarantine because of the incorrect classification of the light brown apple moth, which needs to be declassified. They are imposing unfair penalties on growers based on antiquated reports. Worse than this, they have announced that they intend to festoon the area with some 250 toxic twist ties per acre. The twist ties contain known irritants and the warning labels specifically state that the ingredients must not come into contact with eyes, skin or clothing and must not be introduced into water sources. Children, wild birds and wildlife will be playing in and around the trees and bushes where they twist ties are placed. Should your child or pet come into contact with the ties, you are directed to contact your doctor and Poison Control because the substance the twist ties are soaked in is poisonous.
Unfortunately, some 30% of the ingredients on the twist ties are ’secret’. So, your doctor or vet will have no idea what your child or pet was poisoned with. Wildlife will be damaged and vulnerable to predation due to chemical damage to skin and eyes. Additionally, each time it rains, the chemicals will be washed onto the ground and into the ground water and numerous creeks in the Sonoma Valley, in violation of the strict warnings on the product label. The chemicals will be in our water and on our ground. We will track these on our shoes into the house where small children will be playing on the floors. But again, 30% the toxic ingredients are being kept secret, so neither you nor your doctor will understand what the poisons are to which your children have ingested or gotten in their eyes or on their skin. CDFA’s entire program, from aerial spray, to twist ties, to permethrin-coated telephone polls is toxic to humans and is completely unnecessary as, again, the LBAM is considered a forgettable bug everywhere else it lives in the world.
8 ) Following CDFA’s superior court conviction of violating CEQA, Arnold Schwarzenegger announced that the aerial spraying would be stalled while a so-called 6-pack of toxicology tests was conducted. These tests will revolve around short-term reactions only. They will not test for the long-term health damages that will be caused by chronic exposure to pesticides. CDFA will spray 5 nights a month, nine months a year for up to 10 or more years over residential areas. A couple of weeks of short-term testing in no way address the type of chronic pesticide exposure Californians will be subjected to. The tests are totally insufficient, and also suspect as they are being authored by the very agencies which are benefiting financially from the spraying.
It is vital to understand that severe political corruption is at the heart of this as has been exposed by major media. Gov. Schwarzegger has taken hundreds of thousands of dollars in political contributions both from CDFA, and from the spray manufacturer, Stewart Resnick. Governor Schwarzenegger was quoted this week as saying he was confident that he and CDFA could get the Superior Court ruling overturned in order to recommence aerial spraying. Governor Schwarzenegger has begun to refer to himself and CDFA as ‘we’. Rather than being one with the people of California, he has made it quite clear that he considers himself one with CDFA.
7) Aerial spraying of an untested, synergistic pesticide compound over residential areas constitutes a human experiment without consent. Following World War II the civilized nations of the world adopted the Nuremberg Code which declares that no human being will be subjected to experimentation without informed consent. CDFA intends to expose some 7 million Californians to their carcinogenic pesticide compound without consent and in so doing will be guilty of violating the globally-upheld Nuremberg Code 7 million times.
Additionally, our U.S. and California Constitutions guarantee our right to obtain safety. We cannot obtain safety when our air, water, food, land and bodies are being forcefully invaded by carcinogens and deadly PM10. A group of human rights organizations have just published a study citing the 30 US and State laws and acts which CDFA is violating with their enforced aerial spraying. Your constitutional rights protect you from human experimentation without consent.
You will find public documentation of all of the above facts at the following websites:
lbamspray.com
cassonline.org
stopthespray.org
veganreader.com
I urge the City Council of Sonoma to adopt a strong resolution against all aspects of CDFA’s unconstitutional assault on the health and environment of our community. Not one toxic twist tie, not one drop of carcinogenic poison is needed to deal with this moth. Nothing needs to be done. As the Superior Court ruled, there is no emergency. And, the bottom line is, our Constitution protects us from human experimentation without consent.
Thank you.