Tomorrow, the California Department of Food and Agriculture will be making public their Light Brown Apple Moth Draft Programmatic Environmental Impact Report on their website. This afternoon, I listened to a telephone briefing regarding the release of this draft report. It was a listen-in-only call with the option for Q&A at the end.

For those Californians who have spent the past 2 years of the lives living in terror as a result of the CDFA’s policy of forcibly exposing citizens to pesticides in their scandalous and widely-criticized pursuit of the LBAM, I’ll cut this short. You’ve agonized plenty, I think.

Statements were made during the briefing by CDFA Assistant Secretary of Public Outreach, David Pegas, and a colleague that the findings of their environmental impact report indicate – to put it in a nutshell – that nothing the CDFA plans to do will have any negative environmental impact. Yes, the report includes aerial spraying, twist ties and telephone splats, but (surprise, surprise) none of these activities were judged to be harmful by the company that conducted the report.

In the Q & A, only 2 questions were asked, one of which requested clarification of whether aerial spraying was covered in the report and the CDFA rep stated that it was covered and that the report attests that it would have no environmental impact. The words ‘forested regions and agricultural lands’ were used. This means if you live near woods or a food growing region (and most of us do in California), here comes the specter of aerial spraying again.

Ironically, the Draft Programmatic Environmental Impact Report will apparently warn of one circumstance that would have a negative environmental impact – and this circumstance would be not doing anything about it. My bet is that the report goes out of its way to warn of the ‘devastation’ that would occur should CDFA not be allowed to continue with their pesticide program and very oddly, the representative cited that failure to eradicate the LBAM would result in increased noise. I’m almost positive I heard that correctly. It’s hard for me to keep from being flippant when the noise of moths is being cited as justification for their extermination.

This is just a brief preview of a report which I haven’t read. It’s going to be 1500 pages long and I know many of us will be reading it. All I can give you today is a crystal-ball prediction that all of the wording in that report will have been very carefully orchestrated to promote CDFA’s money-making plan for continuing their ruinous LBAM program and will do everything to ignore the fact that modern human beings know that pesticides kill.

If you have any other news about the Draft Programmatic Environmental Impact Report, please do comment. Frankly, I’m totally disgusted.