Where do the chemicals, go, Debra? Once you’ve dumped them into the water, where do they go? The answer is that they remain here with us permanently, in our atmosphere and in the makeup of our planet.

Are you aware of the fact that DDT is oozing out of the melting polar ice cap? Sure, it’s been many decades since they made it illegal here in the U.S., and no one ever sprayed it on the ice, but there it is, nonetheless.

Where will your herbicides go, after you’ve polluted California with them? Certainly not ‘away’, as the manufacturers of such chemicals would perhaps like us to believe. They remain here with us, causing disease and untimely death.

This is not only rational, it is the truth, and no number of papers anyone writes, and no clever turns of phrase about repairing eco-systems can triumph over the basic scientific fact that what we put into the environmet stays with us, in our soil, our clouds, our rainfall our water and our air.

So, yes, indeed, by supporting the use of toxic chemicals in California, you are supporting the poisoning not only of today’s children, but of the children of all future generations.

Please think about that.
Mim

Clearly, you and I will never reach agreement when you compare repairing a broken ecosystem to poisoning children.

And as I have used my true name, feel free to google it and Spartina to get 10+ pages of my work on this invasion.

In answer to your question, yes, it would be preferable to have an ecosystem changed and plants destroyed by the natural invasion of a grass rather than permanently poisoning that ecosystem, all water, all animals, all plants and the air with toxic herbicides.

Please think for a moment about Marin County being the nation’s biggest cancer hotspot. Think about children being born across the country with autism every minute. Think about anyone you know or love who is suffering from chronic fatigue, fibromyalgia, MCS, MS or other environmentally-related diseases. Think about the fact that there is literally no safe water left to drink in America without the most extreme chemical treatments and ask yourself the question you have posed.

Could ANYTHING justify dumping further chemical toxins into our water, into our land, our skies and our bodies…let alone the growth of a grass being seen as justification for such egregious chemical poisoning of our environment?

Whether studies are prepared by the USDA or the JPR, it doesn’t really matter in in the year 2008. Human beings have learned that toxic chemicals cause disease and death in the human body. There are no 2 ways around this, as far as I am concerned, and I am ready to condemn any group that chooses to ignore this hard-learned fact in order to forward their aims, whether those aims are killing plants, insects or animals.

Manual removal of the cordgrass, if it truly presents the threat that has been assigned to it, is the only environmentally-friendly way to approach this situation. Poisoning children should not be an alternative anyone would actually support.

Please, think about that equation.
Thank You.
Mim

Your reference on imazapyr toxicity is put out by the “Journal of Pesticide Reform” and the “Northwest Coalition for Alternatives to Pesticides” and, to put it mildly, is biased in the extreme. Some of the damages you cite occurred after animals were fed the chemical for several days/years. How about doing proper research and tracking down the references to imazapyr listed on the Invasive Spartina Project website? Unless you also mistrust all the data gathered and presented in these documents by the USDA, the Washington State Dept. of Agriculture, and a private environmental scientist.

The question is whether you think a plant like cordgrass that threatens a native species with genetic extinction, and completely changes a natural ecosystem to an unnatural one is preferable to using a low toxicity herbicide to kill it.

One of the previous commenters on this article attempted to leave a second comment which was accidentally deleted by our system. Vegan Reader apologizes for the deletion. If this was your comment and you would like to repost, we will gladly reprint it.

Neither I, my family nor the majority of my readers have had such luck, however. Most of us have been poisoned by pesticides and have suffered permanent damage to our health. This loss of health has turned many of us into researchers, and through that work, we have learned that it is exactly projects like the Spartina Project that lead to countless innocent people falling quietly ill in their homes, many of whom will never lead normal lives again.

It’s understandable, that if you haven’t had the misfortune to experience this yourself, you might wonder what the fuss is all about. You’ll have to try to take it from the sick people that herbicides and pesticides are a threat to life and that, because of this, we feel fully empowered to speak and write of them as a drastic threat.

Please do take a moment to look at the map I’ve linked to in the article. You will quickly see that the Spartina Project is spraying a vast area of water including San Pablo Bay and San Francisco Bay as well as the Pacific Ocean along West Marin’s coastline. To say that the herbicide will stay in one spot and not get into our soil, our groundwater, the water we drink and the air we breathe is simply not correct, Tim. The flow of rivers, the absorption of chemicals that then come down as rainwater, the seepage of toxins into the earth…these are real things and real threats to people and wildlife.

My hope is that you will read the toxicological information I’ve provided in the article. It’s so dangerous to tell people these substances are safe.

So, again, while I am sincerely glad that you have so far managed to keep your health while using herbicides, I feel it’s so important to make you aware that use of pesticides and herbicides has sickened so many of your neighbors and will continue to sicken them until the time hopefully comes when people turn their backs on this country’s present addiction to chemical use.

In regards to the presence of a grass in our water, I am not the first to suggest that manual harvest and use of this grass could create useful, green employment for many workers. This would be the sustainable, non-toxic approach to any abundant resource people discover. Bombing an entire area of the coast of California with toxic herbicides is truly an outdated idea and not in keeping with our state going green.

Thank you for taking the time to comment. Good luck to you.
Mim

I certainly come from a different background than you. I’ve worked in the landscape and gardening industry for over 25 years, and have been working with and around Round-up (glyphospate) for said time span. I’ve never had any health problems, or known anybody in the industry that has developed problems, that could be linked to glyphosphate use. One of the reasons the stuff is so expensive is that it is a safe product, especially compared with what used to be available.

Your articles do come across as inflammatory, and as such, I don’t feel I can trust any of the information you provide(though my friends in Marin appreciate your work). I know that water does not flow uphill, so that anything done in the estuary will not make it’s way upstream to our reservoirs. “Incredibly toxic pesticide exposure” and counties “coated with toxic herbicides” are just not actual facts. I can imagine what you may have said if you’d seen me spot-spraying weeds around an office building. I am judicious in my use of chemicals. Yes, the studies are out there, and I know the properties of the compounds I use. I refrain from the use of pesticides (which are not herbicides) as they are harmful to the environment,and there are alternatives, such as your ant invasion remedies. I believe that if you want to actually interest people in your concerns, stick with the facts, and don’t try to engage them through pure emotion and reactionism. We’ve all had enough of that these past 8 years.

I have been doing landscape maintenance for a property alongside Arrowhead Marsh in Alameda for about 18 years. I have watched the Spartina (I didn’t know what it was)establish itsef along the shoreline path near the Aeolian Yacht Club, where it simply did not exist before. Within a ten year time span, it took over and clogged the mudflats, and started extending into the waters, even encroaching into the yacht club marina. It reminded me of the same problems we have in gardens with bamboo and Bermuda grass.

When it died back, I got curious and discovered the Spartina Project. From what I’ve read, they’re making the best of a difficult situation. From what I’ve seen, this grass could cause some drastic changes to the SF bay shoreline, and, excepting for rampant development, I really like how it is now, and want it to stay that way.

I always prefer an informed civil debate, and will do my part to maintain that atmosphere. However, the original post made no such attempt, but used language that was meant to exploit emotion, rather than providing a reasoned source of information. My tone was in keeping with that original post.

As I said, I have gone through the website. The list of sites to be treated only includes tidal marshes of the Estuary. In fact, the language of the EIR/EIS produced by the Project goes to great lengths to mention that the Spartina grass only grows in salty tidal marshes. That map looks to me to be a very broad estimate of the areas, and they provide much more detailed maps elsewhere on the site.

My main point is that the original post dismisses out of hand the large body of evidence supporting invasive species work, IPM, and what seems to be a sizeable amount of environmental community involvement, University research, and focussed analysis of the Spartina grass project.

Does anyone using herbicides do a good job in your mind? Is there any instance where you would advocate for their use? If you answer no to both, then you are simply promoting an ideological stance, rather than an ecological or human health stance. That is my point.

Did you take a look at the map of the herbicide application areas? Please look and you will see that this project isn’t spraying ‘an estuary’. It is spraying toxic herbicides in virtually every body of water connected to the SF Bay, San Pablo Bay and the entire region of the Pacific Ocean on the shores of West Marin.

Please, do take a look at that and perhaps you will begin to understand why people would be concerned about all the water in their lands being sprayed with poison.

I do welcome debate here, so long as the tone is kept respectful. If you feel that I or one of your fellow readers has made a mistake, you are absolutely welcome to offer a correction, based upon different facts that you have discovered. We are all here to share and learn in an effort to protect our families from toxic assault.

Many of our readers have lost their health due to exposure to pesticides/herbicides/environmental toxins. I would be the last person to suggest that people should not speak with emotion regarding the loss of their health. That being said, I would assert that my above article is based upon the facts I have linked to, and I hope that you will follow those links and see that there is good cause here for both anger and action.

Mim

What an illogical, emotion-based rant. You mention they are spraying in Estuaries, namely the San Francisco Estuary, then say they are contaminating our drinking water. Exactly how much of our drinking water comes from the Estuary? Unless some DeSal plants have been put in recently unnoticed, I’d say none.

Then a whole lot of emotion-based hysteria, name-calling, and out-of context references to non-peer reviewed information.

I don’t know how I came across this post, but if the LBAM folks are all like you, then I’ll revisit my opposition to the spraywork.

Geez!