No Spray Coalition www.nospray.org "Fighting Against Pesticides since 1999"
NOTE NEW ADDRESS: PO Box 739 Peck Slip Station NYC, NY 10272-0739
******************************************************************* TERRIFIC ANTI-PESTICIDES VICTORY: NYC SETTLES 7-YEAR OLD LAWSUIT WITH NO SPRAY COALITION, ET. AL.
City admits that pesticides may remain in the environment beyond their intended purpose and may cause adverse health effects
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For seven years, the No Spray Coalition and other environmental groups have battled the City of New York in Federal Court in opposition to the Giuliani administration's massive and indiscriminate spraying of toxic pesticides, including Malathion.
On April 12, a federal judge signed a settlement agreement in which New York City admits that the pesticides sprayed may indeed be dangerous to human health as well as to the natural environment.
The settlement agreement states that, contrary to the City's prior statements, pesticides
- may remain in the environment beyond their intended purpose - cause adverse health effects - kill mosquitoes' natural predators - increase mosquito resistance to the sprays, and - are not presently approved for direct application to waterways.
This settlement agreement is a tremendous victory for health advocates and a rebuff to the anti-environmental polices of former Mayor Rudy Giuliani.
Thousands of New Yorkers were made seriously sick by the spraying. A number of members of the No Spray Coalition, including several of the plaintiffs, died from pesticide-related illnesses. Many suffer from Multiple Chemical Sensitivities (MCS) or Asthma caused or exacerbated by the spraying. We are very glad that the new City administration has to some degree acknowledged that pesticides are extremely dangerous to human health. They need to be rejected as a way of killing mosquitoes.
In particular, the use of insect repellents containing DEET should never be used, especially on children.
The settlement agreement stipulates that the City meet with the Coalition for two 3-hour sessions. We will be discussing that and other concerns with the City when we meet.
One plaintiff in the lawsuit, artist Robert Lederman, notes that in 1999 and 2000 then-Mayor Rudolph Giuliani and other City officials claimed that the spraying was "safe" and was used as "a last resort" in its effort to kill mosquitoes said to be vectors for West Nile encephalitis.
"This agreement represents the latest rebuff to the notion that Giuliani was a good Mayor," Lederman said. "In 1999 and 2000, while repeatedly spraying the population of NY with pesticides derived from Nazi-era nerve gasses, Giuliani appeared in daily press conferences claiming that the chemicals were completely harmless. The City of NY has now admitted that these chemicals are harmful, that they persist in the environment and that much more caution will have to be used if they decide to ever spray them again."
Attorneys for the No Spray Coalition -- Joel Kupferman, (NY Environmental Law and Justice Project, and National Lawyers Guild), and Karl Coplan and Daniel Estrin (PACE Environmental Litigation Clinic), announced that as part of the settlement the City agreed to pay $80,000 to five grassroots environmental and wildlife rehabilitation groups and meet with the plaintiffs in several sessions to review an extensive list of concerns that the Coalition provided. The Plaintiffs are not permitted, under the terms of the Clean Water Act, to receive a monetary settlement themselves.
The resolution of the lawsuit begins a new phase in our activities. In our letter of concerns to the City, which is officially attached to the lawsuit settlement and available for reading on our website, the No Spray Coalition seeks to win official approval for a proposed "Community Health and Environment Council."
Should the City approve this new Council, it would
- make recommendations on environmental health impacts of pesticide use and alternatives - review and propose alternative, nontoxic control of mosquitoes. - critique the city's official mosquito control plan - offer new plans to replace adulticides with safe materials - assess agents chosen with regard to interaction with all toxins in our living environment.
There is currently no testing of chemical or biological agents in combination, and these chemicals often have synergistic or cumulative impacts on health and the environment that fall below the officially designated danger zone when examined separately.
While we hope that the City would approve the proposal to establish the Community Health and Environmental Council, we recognize that it will probably take another prolonged struggle to achieve that, the next step in our fight to make the City accountable environmentally and health-wise to the people subjected to these toxins.
We expect that the terms of the Settlement Agreement will be especially helpful to those fighting against pesticide spraying elsewhere. Indeed, we consulted with many organizations not only in the U.S. but in Canada and Mexico as well, and we negotiated clauses in the Agreement with the needs of other locales in mind.
The No Spray Coalition initially attempted to get a Temporary Injunction to stop the city from massive spraying of pesticides on July 20th, 2000. Over two days in a federal courtroom in Manhattan, expert witnesses provided riveting testimony concerning the dangers of organophosphate and pyrethroid pesticides to public health and to the environment, as well as to the reckless nature in which the spraying was conducted. One witness had videotaped the spray trucks as they drove down 125th Street in Harlem spraying kids and pregnant women with pesticides; after the judge permitted this to be shown in court, it was aired on all the TV news channels. The lawsuit eventually was narrowed to the City's violations of the Clean Water Act, because citizens cannot sue over FIFRA; it went through various stages up to the Court of Appeals and is now ending, after seven years, with this settlement between the parties.
The plaintiffs in the lawsuit were:
No Spray Coalition National Coalition Against the Misuse of Pesticides Disabled in Action Save Organic Standards - New York (by its president, Howard Brandstein) Valerie Sheppard (Rest In Peace, Valerie!) Mitchel Cohen Robert Lederman Eva Yaa Asantewaa.
Please go to website for full text of Settlement Agreement. (And please be patient with us. If it is not up on the website by the time you get there, it will be there shortly.)
CLICK HERE TO MAKE A MUCH NEEDED DONATION ON SECURE SERVER VIA CREDIT CARD OR PAYPAL http://tinyurl.com/2hpn9x or go to www.nospray.org and click on "Make a Donation" in the top left-hand corner.
website: www.nospray.org hotline: 718-670-7110 email: editor at NoSpray.org listserve: SprayNo-subscribe at yahoogroups.com (you are welcome to join, share your knowledge and gain new insights)
****************************************************** Do You See What I See? Photographer Laurie Tümer shows the hidden paths of pesticides
By Karin Kloosterman 01 Dec 2005
In a segment last fall, Good Morning America simulated pesticide exposure in a New York City classroom. Using a powder visible only under black light, the program showed how far chemicals could spread through an activity as simple as child's play.
The eye-opening exercise wasn't news to Laurie Tümer. The photographer has been making images that expose the presence of synthetic pesticides since 1998, when she suffered near-fatal poisoning after her New Mexico home was sprayed. While recovering, Tümer discovered a muse in the work of Richard Fenske, an environmental scientist at the University of Washington. Fenske uses fluorescent tracer dyes and ultraviolet light to demonstrate how pesticides can spread to agricultural workers' skin, even when protective gear is worn.
By spraying tracers on her shoes and walking through her garden, or superimposing dyes onto landscape-scale canvases, Tümer uses a similar technique to illustrate how and where pesticides travel. The result of her work, a growing collection she calls "Glowing Evidence," is at once startling and stunning -- she compares the patterns in it to constellations. Critics who've seen her images exhibited in Santa Fe have called them eerie, compelling, ingenious, and haunting.
Tümer's 25-year photographic career, including a current collaboration with a blind poet, has focused on "seeing the invisible," and was featured in a 2003 documentary of that name. But as work like hers becomes more visible, she says so-called political art is really nothing new. In fact, she traces her work to cave drawings. Like that ancient art form, Tümer says, her photographs are a forum for processing information, conveying dismay, and warning others.
Go to http://www.grist.org/advice/books/2005/12/01/kloosterman/index.html?source=friend to see a gallery of Tümer's photographs.
- - - - - - - - - - Karin Kloosterman, a freelance journalist and former entomologist from Canada, is currently based in Tel Aviv as a writer for Israel's Jerusalem Post. She has also contributed to Canada's National Post and National Geographic, and can write on topics from bugs to Bedouins.
October, 2006 (Adapted from Rachel’s Health and Democracy News, # 871, Sept. 7, 2006)
****************************************************************** HAZARDOUS CHEMICALS IN SYNTHETIC TURF
by William Crain and Junfeng Zhang
A new generation of synthetic turf is becoming popular in the U.S. The new brands are springier than the old AstroTurf and feel more like real grass. New York City is so attracted to the new synthetic turf that it is installing it in 79 parks, often substituting it for natural soil and grass. (1)
However, the new artificial grass raises health concerns. In particular, most brands include recycled rubber pellets that could contain harmful chemicals. What’s more, we have observed that on many New York City fields, the rubber pellets are commonly present on the surface. When one of us (William Crain) was picking up some pellets by hand, a boy told him that after playing in the park, he finds the pellets in his shoes at home at night. Because the rubber pellets are much more accessible to children and athletes than we had supposed, we decided to analyze a sample for two possible sets of toxicantspolycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs) and toxic metals.
We collected our first sample from a new A-Turf surface in Manhattan’s Riverside Park in May, 2006. To gain information on the reliability of our results, we gathered a second sample in June, 2006 from a different part of the park.
The PAHs were extracted in a Soxhlet apparatus with organic solvents. The metals were extracted by means of nitric acid with the aid of a high-efficiency microwave oven (Marsx Microwave). Both methods were used to estimate the maximum amounts of the chemicals contained in the bulk material (rubber pellets). The analyses were conducted at the Environmental and Occupational Health Sciences Institute of Rutgers University.
The PAH results for our first sample are listed as Sample 1 in Table 1, below. As the table shows, six PAHs exceeded the concentration levels that the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation (DEC) considers sufficiently hazardous to public health to require their removal from contaminated soil sites. (2) It is likely that all six PAHs are carcinogenic to humans. (3)
The PAH results for Sample 2 are also listed in the table. Although the concentration levels in Samples 1 and 2 varied somewhat, the results for Sample 2 replicated the finding that the concentration levels of the six PAHs are above the DEC’s tolerable levels for soil.
Table 1. Concentrations of PAHs (ppm*)
Sample 1 Sample 2 DEC Turf Turf Contaminated Rubber Pellets Rubber Pellets Soil Limits
Benzo(a)anthracene 1.23 1.26 1.0
Chrysene 1.32 7.55 1.0
Benzo(b)fluoranthene 3.39 2.19 1.0
Benzo(a)pyrene 8.58 3.56 1.0
Benzo(k)fluoranthene 7.29 1.78 0.8
Dibenzo(a,h)anthracene 3.52 1.55 0.33
* ppm = parts per million
The analyses also revealed levels of zinc in both samples that exceed the DEC’s tolerable levels. Lead and arsenic also were present, and many scientists believe that these metals should not be introduced into the environment at all.
We want to emphasize that the findings are preliminary. PAHs in rubber might not act the same way as in soil, and we do not yet have information on the ease with which the PAHs in these rubber particles might be absorbed by children or adultsby ingestion, inhalation, or absorption through the skin. However, the findings are worrisome. Until more is known, it wouldn’t be prudent to install the synthetic turf in any more parks.
We have informed the New York City Parks Department of our findings, but as far as we know, the Parks Department has not altered its plans to continue the installation of synthetic turf in numerous parks.
References
(1) New Yorkers for Parks. Spring, 2006. A New Turf War: Synthetic Turf in New York City’s ParksSpecial Report. www.NY4P.org
(2) 6 NYCRR Subpart 375-1, General Remedial Program , Draft Revised June 14, 2006. Department of Environmental Conservation, Table 375-6.8 (a).
(3) International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC) Monographs on the Evaluation of Carcinogenic Risk to Humans, PAHs, Vol. 95, 2006. http://monographs.iarc.fr/ENG/Meetings/92-pahs.pdf
Note on authors’ affiliations:
William Crain, Ph.D., is professor of psychology at The City College of New York and president of Citizens for a Green Riverside Park. Billcrain at aol.com
Junfeng (Jim) Zhang, Ph.D. is professor and acting chair, Department of Environmental and Occupational Health, the School of Public Health, the University of Medicine and Dentistry of New Jersey and Rutgers University. Jjzhang at eohsi.rutgers.edu
*************************************************** STUDENT NOTIFICATION TO BEGIN OF HERBICIDES IN BROOKLYN
We are pleased to note that in response to the No Spray Coalition's persistent suggestions, the Chair of the Brooklyn section of the NYC Dept. of Parks, Julius Spiegel, has told us that he will be sending out letters to all school principals concerning the City's herbiciding of the perimeters of all City parks and playgrounds.
The Parks Department says that it needs to spray because the City has cut personnel by more than 70 percent, and there are not enough workers anymore to weed the sidewalks around the parks in any other way.
Of course, the position of the No Spray Coalition is that this cosmetic herbiciding with Monsanto's RoundUp and other toxins is unnecessary and should simply not be done. We will continue to pressure to achieve that end.
In the meantime, upon seeing the pretty yellow or green-dyed spraying -- the dyes put their to WARN people away from the area -- many children are drawn to it and play in it.
We are hopeful that principals will notify all students to stay away from the herbicided areas.
***************************************************** WEBSITE AND EDITING HELP NEEDED
We are adding a number of new sections to the No Spray website and could use some volunteer help from folks who have website skills. In addition, we need help in simply going through the ton of mostly on-line material on this and related matters every day (much of it on our listserve, SprayNo at yahoogroups.com . Feel free to join it!).
If you would like to help select articles for placement on the website in one of these areas, or edit, forward and follow-up on items for NoSpray Newz, please write to editor at nospray.org.
****************************************************** FINANCIAL HELP NEEDED
While we are very proud that our persistence and that of the wider community has resulted in prying loose from New York City $80,000 for five grassroots environmental and wildlife rehabilitation organizations as part of the settlement agreement, the final resolution of our lawsuit does not relieve the Coalition's all-volunteer participants of our large financial burdens. Please keep in mind that the plaintiffs in the lawsuit ourselves do not receive a cent from the settlement.
We've run this anti-pesticides venture all these years on our activists' shoestrings, accepting no corporate money; we've relied solely on the generosity of ecological activists such as yourself who understand the significance of what we are doing and the importance of continuing with that work.
We have, as you might expect, debts to repay. And we also are hoping to EXPAND our work, produce new literature, reach into new neighborhoods, participate in national and even international gatherings, expose the dangers of pesticides (and those who profit from poisoning the earth), and involve ourselves in related areas of struggle, such the fight against genetic engineering (directly related to pesticides), and the effort highlighted above to document the dangers of artificial/synthetic turf, which is becoming much more widespread (one ridiculous argument we've heard used by the industry is that ithe use of artificial turf will lessen the need to spray pesticides!).
Anything you can donate is greatly appreciated, and will be put to excellent use.
Please help us continue our work!
CLICK HERE TO MAKE A MUCH NEEDED DONATION ON SECURE SERVER VIA CREDIT CARD OR PAYPAL http://tinyurl.com/2hpn9x or go to www.nospray.org and click on "Make a Donation" in the top left-hand corner.
OR, send a check to
No Spray Coalition PO Box 739 Peck Slip Station NYC, NY 10272-0739
Thank You!
************************************* PLEASE SEND STORIES OF THE ANTI-PESTICIDE AND RELATED ACTIVITIES YOU ARE PART OF (or would like to report on) IN YOUR COMMUNITY.
We will add them to the website -- we want the website to be useful for activists and researchers everywhere, not just in New York City -- and send them out as part of the next issues of NoSpray Newz.
****************************************************** SAVE THE PLANET -- SAVE OURSELVES