Dear Whole Foods Team:

This week, I spoke with one of your representatives, Jess, at corporate headquarters regarding a rumor which turned out to be false - a rumor that Whole Foods intended to come out in favor of the pesticide poisoning of the people of California in the light brown apple moth aerial spraying public health crisis.

I was really relieved when Jess told me that Whole Foods certainly hadn’t come out in favor of the spray, but I was pretty surprised to learn that your corporation doesn’t yet feel informed enough about this situation to take a stand. Jess invited me to write to you to share what I know, and I am doing so because I feel that Whole Foods can no longer afford to claim a neutral position in this turmoil.

I will offer you 5 reasons why I believe Whole Foods needs to come out strongly against the pesticide poisoning of the people and state of California.

1) It affects your best farmers. As I’m sure you do know, CCOF, after careful consideration, has announced that it does not support aerial spraying of urban populations. Organics are the reason people trust Whole Foods, and we are depending on your farmers to feed our families. We need you to support your organic suppliers who have been put in a terrible position by the actions of the California Department of Food and Agriculture and the incorrect classification of the moth. Don’t leave your valuable organic farmers hanging out there on their own. Jump in and back them, support them, help them get the moth de-classified. Do whatever it takes to defend and help your precious organic farmers. It looks very odd to California that Whole Foods isn’t leading the fight to defend organic growing practices in California.

2) The spraying will affect millions of your neighbors - at least 7 million Californians and countless tourists, many of whom are loyal Whole Foods customers. We are being treated like the casualties in a war zone here, regrettable but powerless. We have been deprived of our constitutional right to safety and hundreds of families have already been sickened by the unpardonable spraying of Santa Cruz and Monterey Counties in 2007. Whole Foods’ neighbors and customers are being severely damaged by pesticide exposure. We are living in terror here with planes flying over our heads, raining documented carcinogens down on our bodies against the will of our local governments who are trying to protect us from harm at the hands of the State. This is really happening. We have supported Whole Foods in our communities, but if Whole Foods insists on staying neutral, we will understand that you do not reciprocate that support and consider our suffering unimportant to your company.

3) The spraying affects Whole Foods’ staff. Your California stores can expect to experience epidemic pesticide poisoning, resulting in staffing shortages. We do not want to see the good people whom we have come to trust in the Whole Body, Produce, Deli departments and at the registers come down with the horrific short-term illnesses and long-term chronic diseases caused by the documented ingredients in the spray. Aerial spraying of urban populations creates a hazardous working environment for all workers, including Whole Foods’ staff. We are looking to you to protect your valuable staff from this in your 25 stores in Northern California.

4) The spraying puts an end to the concept of organic food in California for any conscientious consumer. Though we have been told by the USDA that farmers can continue to sell produce under the organic label after their products have been aerially contaminated with pesticides, we do not recognize such products as organic. We come to Whole Foods for local or state-grown organic produce and products. As we are certain you must have heard by now, we are asking produce department staff if the products on Whole Foods’ shelves were sprayed with Checkmate in 2007. If they were, we will not buy them. After a long and happy relationship trusting Whole Foods’ products labeled organic, we are being forced to withdraw that trust. After managing our budgets so that they stretch to paying top dollar for organics at Whole Foods, we will lose our motivation to spend extra for food that is contaminated with pesticides and particulate pollution. We are hoping to see Whole Foods take a lead in protecting the integrity of the organic label and demanding that organic farms not be aerially sprayed. Our trust depends on it.

5) As the old adage goes, being silent about a crime is the same as being guilty of it. Numerous lawsuits are now pending in California accusing the state of criminal actions against the people. Spraying untested substances on human beings without consent violates both our state and national constitution as well as the Nuremberg Code. The people of California intend to prosecute our government officials for breaking the law. Whole Foods has created an important and trustworthy public image of supporting public health, fair trade and human rights. If Whole Foods is loyal to national law as well as global codes of ethics, it will be intolerable to them to remain silent in the face of this assault on the people of California. We are your supporters, your customers, your neighbors. We are being assaulted with chemicals known to cause damage to eyes, skin and lungs in the short term and to cause cancers and other diseases. We are being subjected to chronic pesticide exposure which will be enforced on us up to 6 nights a month, 9 months out of the year for up to 10 years or more. We ask how Whole Foods can possibly remain neutral in the face of such a violation of the basic rights of mankind?

If the aerial spraying is not halted, the picture of California will be of sick and dying customers buying carcinogenic food from sick and dying farmers and staff. This is not what we want for our country. We do not believe this is what Whole Foods wants either, but until you examine your consciences and decide what you do want, we are left watching and waiting.

Time is running out for us. In 6 weeks, the spraying will recommence in California. Outraged protest from powerful Whole Foods might save our communities from permanent health damage, so we are writing to you, praying that you will honor the relationship of trust we have all entered into with your corporation when you first opened your doors in our neighborhoods. Please, care about us. We need your help.

For pertinent information, please investigate the following:

Here is an informative town hall meeting video from Berkeley:
http://youtube.com/watch?v=4Rlf9vns1uE

Here is an interview with Michael Lynberg, a private citizen who began documenting the pesticide illnesses:
http://youtube.com/watch?v=n7Q6pmLX3po

Here is a CBS news video on the spraying:
http://youtube.com/watch?v=1uzxyhnLuyE

You can watch many other videos about this public health crisis here:
http://youtube.com/user/LBAMspray

Here is a document compiled by the Environment and Human Rights Advisory listing 23 Human Rights Violations the spray presents:
http://www.lbamspray.com/00_Documents/2008/EHRA.pdf

Here is a web page documenting the known health damages caused by the ingredients in the spray:
http://hopefortruth.com/

Here is a report compiled by two respected UC scientists documenting the Light Brown Apple Moth in New Zealand and its negligible effects:
http://lbamspray.com/00_Documents/2008/HarderNZReportFINAL.pdf

Here are several websites that are covering the anti-spray people’s movement:
http://www.lbamspray.com
http://www.cassonline.org
http://www.stopthespray.org

This letter has been published at veganreader.com, and our readership will be eagerly hoping for a reply from you. Thank you for your time.

The main question I have been attempting to find an answer to over the past few weeks is whether the Bay Area’s emergency services are prepared to deal with a potential public health crisis when the pesticide planes start flying over the cities in August, exposing nearly 7 million residents to known toxins.

The SF Chronicle has just published an answer to my question with their article, SFs Emergency Responses Fail to Meet Goal.

Here are the quick facts you need to know:

• The 911 call center, plagued with problems from low morale to a proliferation of calls from people who don’t speak English, is the weakest part of San Francisco’s emergency medical response system
• Since 2004, 439 people have died waiting for emergency services to arrive
• Fifty-seven percent of the time, the 9-1-1 call center has failed to meet the city’s goal of dispatching urgent medical calls within 2 minutes

OEHHA Dismisses Respiratory Damages - 9-1-1 Calls Them Priority Emergencies!

The Office of Environmental Health Hazard Assessment has dismissed, out-of-hand, the hundreds and hundreds of reports of asthma, difficulty breathing, wheezing, coughing and respiratory failure following the 2007 spraying as unimportant without having spoken to a single one of the doctors or patients invovled. This article goes so far as to refer to these health harms as ‘minor self-reported symptoms’.

9-1-1 emphatically disagrees. As the Chronicle article states:

In San Francisco, the most serious emergency medical calls fall into two categories
- Echo and Code 3. Echo-priority calls require immediate resuscitation, such as cases
of stopped breathing, choking, drowning, severe allergic reaction and cardiac arrest. Code 3-priority medical calls, such as severe hemorrhage and difficulty breathing, are also presumed to be life-threatening.

As this quote shows, both difficulty breathing and severe allergic reactions are considered to be life-threatening by emergency responders.

This means that the night the planes start flying over California cities, dumping documented irritants and toxins on millions of people, and those people begin experiencing the same symptoms that were experienced in 2007 including difficulty breathing, heart abnormalities, severe allergic skin rashes and choking, 9-1-1 will classify those symptoms as Echo or Code 3 Priorities and attempt to rush ambulances to the victims.

But Will Help Arrive?
As the SF Chronicle article indicates, emergency services in San Francisco are understaffed and experiencing numerous problems that are causing serious delayed response times.

As we know, no one died in Santa Cruz or Monterey when the residents were sprayed with the 11-chemical pesticide compound. However, symptoms were severe enough for people to seek urgent care. Baby Jack Wilcox became delirious, his eyes rolled back into his head and he went into respiratory failure. Other residents believed they were having heart attacks because of racing or irregular heart beats. Others began to choke as the airborne microscopic capsules lodged in their lungs. Symptoms of this severe, potentially-life-threatening kind merit 9-1-1 calls.

What can we expect in San Francisco, when the spray enters the bodies of residents and they begin to react adversely to it? As our earlier article Health Math of The Moth Spray determined, .1% of the families in Monterey and Santa Cruz were able to report their illnesses. Though this in no way represents the many families who were unable to find a way to report their symptoms or seek medical aid, it is a number we can work with.

San Francisco has a population of some 760,000 people. If .1% of San Franciso households begin to experience symptoms of respiratory failure, heart failure, choking, etc. in one of more family members the night the spraying starts in August, this could potentially generate 760 9-1-1 calls. Is SF’s 9-1-1 ready to handle this?

Statistics indicate a resounding ‘no’.

As the Chronicle article explains, San Francisco’s 9-1-1 handles about 50,000 priority emergency calls annually. This means about 137 calls a night - certainly not 760 of them. And, if on a normal night, 57% of callers experience a delayed response, as indicated by the Chronicle article, what will happen if the lines are suddenly jammed with hundreds of unexpected emergency callers starting in August?

Imagine this scenario: your husband has an actual heart attack on August 1st. You are desperately trying to get through to a 9-1-1 operator, but the operators are all occupied taking calls from hundreds of people who have just felt their throats and lungs close up from pesticide poisoning. The understaffed emergency responders simply can not get to your call fast enough and consider your husband’s heart attack of equal priority to the heart arrhythmias being experienced by all the neighbors who are experiencing pesticide poisoning. Like the people in Monterey and Santa Cruz, the neighbors, hopefully, will not actually die…but your husband may well do so because no one will come to his aid quickly enough in the chaos of the tsunami of calls flooding the 9-1-1 switchboard.

Now, let’s add this to the scenario: it’s the evening of August 2nd. Everyone in San Francisco has been exposed to their first dose of particulate plastic pollution (See American Lung Association) and toxic chemicals. Many of the 9-1-1 operators, ambulance drivers, firemen, doctors and surgeons have called in sick because of their first symptoms of pesticide poisoning. Now every public service in the City is critically understaffed, but the 9-1-1 phones keep on ringing as more and more families fall ill. Imagine that August 2nd is the night your husband has a heart attack. Imagine that your 9-1-1 call receives no response at all because of the critical staff shortage created by CDFA exposing the entire city to known irritants and toxins.

Maybe you try, frantically, to get a hold of someone in Berkeley or Oakland…only to discover that everyone there has been sprayed as well. In fact, you realize you are sitting on a lonely island in the middle of a sea of sprayed cities, each of which is experiencing a critical shortage of public servants in their already-overtaxed emergency services departments.

Does lawless chaos break out over the cities now? Are police, wheezing and coughing, experiencing listlessness and confusion, attempting to get into their squad cars, having to stop to vomit by the roadside as they try to rush to the neighborhoods where panicked, unaided citizens have lost their marbles while their loved ones fall ill and the planes keep passing over, over, over their homes again and again? Are the criminal elements in the cities using this evening of mayhem to begin shooting and looting? Are the bridges blocked as tourists who, moments earlier, were coming out of restaurants and theaters downtown begin to run to their cars to get out of town as the planes pass by and the spray begins falling down on them? What if, God forbid, someone goes really nuts and starts shooting at the planes? Are the police prepared to respond to airplanes crashing into apartment complexes and high rises? Or, are the police all hunched over in their cars, coughing and vomiting uncontrollably?

This worst case scenario presents a ghastly picture of a night of mayhem in the densely populated Bay Area. The trouble is, we’re not talking about a single night of chaos here. We’re talking about up to 5 consecutive nights of toxic aerial pesticide bombardment happening every 30 days, 9 months out of the year for up to ten years or more. We are talking about a chemical assault that is sure to make people sick, sure to make people crazy and sure to change the SF Bay Area into one of the world’s most dangerous places to be.

For all of CDFA’s talk about the wondrous safety of their untested chemicals, we know what happened in Santa Cruz and Monterey, and not one word has been spoken, not one conference has been held, to my knowledge, to address the very real emergency public health crisis that may erupt in San Francisco and all of the cities surrounding it when the spraying begins to make people ill.

Are our police, firemen, paramedics, nurses and doctors being prepared by the state for a region-wide emergency? Every one of us remembers the chaos of the Sept. 11th attacks and the horrific flooding of New Orleans. No one was prepared. Once again, here in the Bay Area, despite the fact that we know trouble is coming, no one seems to be preparing.

And This Is Only The Short-Term
Let’s look 10 years into the future in the Bay Area. Perhaps, by then, after some 450 nights of being sprayed over the decade, people have gotten used to the sounds of pesticide planes in city night skies. Perhaps, after 450 exposures to pesticides, people in the Bay Area consider wheezing, coughing and rash-covered skin a norm of life. What other things may have become a norm in the Bay Area, after 10 years of chronic, daily pesticide exposure?

1) An extraordinary number of our children under the age of 10 live with ever more bizarre birth defects from the documented mutagens in the spray which cause genetic mutation
2) Our women citizens pretty much expect to die of breast cancer after 10 years of exposure to the xenochemical in the spray which is a known cause of breast cancer
3) We haven’t seen a sea bird at Ocean Beach in years now, since the spraying started
4) The last of the frogs in the marshes in Marin disappeared a long time ago
5) Golden Gate Park is called Desert Park now because the honey bees stopped coming to pollinate the rhododendrons, the tulips, and all the other flowers. The honey bees are gone.
6) Organic food is a distant memory now - Whole Foods is likely out of business after all the lawsuits convicting them of selling chemical-laced produce to people as ‘organic’
7) We may be trying to chemically create water, because the San Francisco Bay and all of the rivers in California now consist more of plastic and surfactant foam than H2O.

Are these norms the people of the SF Bay Area, Santa Cruz and Monterey are prepared to embrace? Ag Secretary A.G. Kawamura says we should just learn to tolerate the aerial spraying and its effects on us.

“When will it become obvious to the public that environmental alarmists take whatever position stands in the way of human progress?” asks Dr. Jay Lehr, science director for The Heartland Institute.

Is the worst case scenario picture I have painted the kind of human progress you want to see in San Francisco, in Albany, in Berkeley, in Marin in all of the 9 counties set to be fouled and poisoned with substances bearing warning labels that call it a federal crime to introduce them into water sources and firmly warn that they must be kept away from children, not inhaled by humans, not applied to skin?

And, more immediately, are our public servants - our doctors, paramedics, firemen and police officers prepared for what will happen in the summer of 2008, when CDFA begins spraying human beings in the name of human progress? Will these valued and vital public servants step forward now to defend us from the public health crisis CDFA intends to create?

I want to know who is prepared. I want answers to my questions. We are now only a few weeks away from the first spray date.

I’ve been up all night waiting to see if any news would break about the hearing that happened tonight in San Francisco:

Here is a CBS article for you to read

I wish it had provided a bit more detail, and I am so hoping someone may have filmed the event.

It sounds like Mirkarimi was very upfront in his opposition to the spray, and from what I hear, Sandoval asked many pointed questions. In sum, it looks like Mirkarimi introduced his resolution against aerial spraying and added an amendment requesting that the SF City Attorney begin investigating legal action. I hope this is a roundabout way of saying that San Francisco is going to sue the state.

I am eagerly waiting to hear from a friend who was at the hearing. From the above article, it doesn’t look like the much stronger and better resolution was considered - the one banning all toxic assaults on the Bay Area, be they aerial spraying, permethrin on telephone poles, twist ties or sticky traps. The truth remains, this moth does no meaningful harm to anything in the state of California…not one drop of poison is needed. We can simply ignore it and life will go on as it was the day before they found the first moth.

It is ag practices that have gotten us into this mess to begin with. Less than 100 years ago, most farms were organic, and California needs to turn back to the time-honored methods of small farms, poly-culture, crop rotation and the creation of diverse environment rich in insects, birds, bats, wild creatures and lush, mixed vegetation. We could be living in paradise here…but the chemical corporations would be out of business.

Please if anyone can share any other details about the SF hearing, I would so appreciate it! Thank you.

The CDFA and USDA intend to spray us but have made no attempts to treat the medical emergency they are creating seriously. Will 7 million gas masks be provided for the men, women and children who will be forced to inhale particulate plastic, carcinogens, tumorigens and mutagens starting in June 2008? Will gas masks even offer us any protection from the particulate plastic, deemed to be a potentially fatal hazard by the American Lung Association?

CDFA needs to answer these questions!

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