A3
THE DAILY ASTORIAN • MONDAY, DECEMBER 17, 2018
A toxic pesticide escapes ban under Trump administration
Records show it
sickens people
By TONY SCHICK
Oregon Public Broadcasting
Julie
Madison-Jamil
didn’t expect she’d need a
cooler just for hauling dead
birds to necropsies.
In 2016, she and her hus-
band, Danish, moved into a
fi xer-upper lot outside Ore-
gon City with dreams of a
small organic egg and veg-
etable farm. They fi lled the
property with bantam chick-
ens, silkies, sweetgrass tur-
keys and guinea fowl.
Since then, they have
unexpectedly lost dozens
of birds to ailments includ-
ing liver damage and can-
cer. The necropsies have not
solved the mystery, but Mad-
ison-Jamil thinks she has.
Their property is sur-
rounded by Christmas tree
farms. Those farms rou-
tinely spray pesticides to kill
weeds and insects that dam-
age trees.
“You can taste it. You
can smell it,” she said, when
spraying happens nearby. It
burns her throat and gives
her headaches.
Early on, Madison-Jamil
had little hard proof con-
necting those chemicals to
her own symptoms or the
death of her birds. But her
hunch led to quarrels with
the Christmas tree growers
nearby. She complained fre-
quently to them and about
them. She posted scath-
ing reviews on their social
media pages urging people
to buy artifi cial trees instead.
Then last year, one of the
formal complaints she sub-
mitted to the Oregon Depart-
ment of Agriculture turned
up something she found
interesting: chlorpyrifos.
Chlorpyrifos is a chem-
ical the U.S. Environmen-
tal Protection Agency was
close to banning because of
its potential harm to chil-
dren and farmworkers. That
was before President Don-
ald Trump took offi ce. Two
months before the chem-
ical showed up on Madi-
son-Jamil’s farm, his admin-
istration reversed course on
a ban, rejecting the recom-
mendations of the agency’s
scientists.
The chemical has been
crucial to Northwest crops,
despite studies showing its
potential for bodily harm.
Environmental groups have
wanted it banned for more
than 10 years. Dow Chem-
ical, which introduced it
in 1965, and others in the
industry say its approved
uses are safe and question
the science showing nega-
tive health effects.
Chlorpyrifos remains in
use, its fate now dragging
out in the 9th U.S. Circuit
Court of Appeals, and poten-
tially in the Supreme Court
after that.
18 reports
Twenty months have
passed since the EPA
reversed course on chlorpy-
rifos. In that time, the pes-
ticide has generated at least
18 reports of pollution,
unsafe exposure of human
and animals and contamina-
tion of nearby crops in Ore-
gon and Washington state,
records show.
Here is a sampling: Inves-
tigators determined the pes-
ticide drifted from a Christ-
mas tree farm onto Madison
Jamil’s property. Chlorpyr-
ifos also poisoned crayfi sh
after running into a creek
in Hermiston. A laborer in
Wenatchee,
Washington,
was sickened by drift while
performing farm work. Two
county workers in Dallas
were exposed to a cloud of
it while trying to clean out a
culvert. A father in Quincy,
Washington, was so con-
cerned about chlorpyrifos
being applied to a neigh-
bor’s fruit trees that he pur-
chased the orchard to make
sure the spraying stopped.
To be sure, chemical
drift and exposure incidents
are not unique to any one
pesticide.
Chlorpyrifos, in particu-
lar, catches the attention of
health offi cials because of
its widespread use, its acute
toxicity and the fact that it’s
been linked to diminished
Tony Schick/Oregon Public Broadcasting
Chal Landgren is a Christmas tree expert with Oregon State University.
memory and verbal com-
prehension, lower IQs and
higher rates of attention defi -
cit and hyperactivity disor-
der and impulsive behavior
in children who have been
exposed.
“It’s not just about one
chemical, albeit if you had to
choose a chemical, one sin-
gle chemical that’s out there
in use, chlorpyrifos would
be at the top of my list,” said
Joanne Bonnar Prado, epide-
miologist for the Washing-
ton Department of Health.
Prado cautioned that ban-
ning one harmful chemical
does not necessarily mean
it will be replaced by a safer
alternative. On orchards,
chlorpyrifos was preceded
by the now out-of-use azin-
phos-methyl, which was
preceded by DDT. Before
DDT, farmers sprayed lead
arsenate.
“I’ve been in the fi eld for
30 years and I’ve seen what
had been thought of as rela-
tively innocuous turn out to
be not so not so safe,” Bon-
nar Prado said.
In the absence of federal
regulation, at least two states
— California and Hawaii —
announced their own restric-
tions on chlorpyrifos. Ore-
gon and Washington state
have not. Washington Attor-
ney General Bob Ferguson
has joined several states in
a lawsuit asking the EPA to
ban chlorpyrifos.
The go-to chemical
Chlorpyrifos use has been
on the decline nationwide,
but its use has not dropped
as rapidly in the Northwest.
It is particularly import-
ant in Pacifi c Northwest
agriculture because of the
region’s crop diversity, said
Scott Dahlman, a pesticide
industry lobbyist in Oregon.
It is one of few insecticides
that is effective and govern-
ment-approved for use on
almost all of them: Christ-
mas trees, grass seed, hazel-
nuts, asparagus, pears, can-
nabis, wheat and more.
“Something like Christ-
mas trees, very key this time
of year, one of the only insec-
ticides they have to use is
chlorpyrifos,” said Dahlman,
who works for a pro-chemi-
cal organization that goes by
the name, Oregonians For
Food and Shelter.
Dahlman’s group fi led a
brief in the court case over
chlorpyrifos, arguing against
a swift ban he fears would
leave farmers without time
to fi nd alternatives.
The Pacifi c Northwest
produces about 8 million
Christmas trees every year,
shipping them across the
country and internationally.
Without the ability to con-
trol aphids or other pests,
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stands of grand, noble or
Douglas fi r could become
grayed, blackened, twisted
or otherwise blemished
enough that some could be
unsellable.
Chlorpyrifos is used com-
monly enough that when
investigators found it on
Madison-Jamil’s property,
they contacted three nearby
tree farms before determining
which had sprayed that day.
“It’s not particularly
pleasant to be around. But
it works on aphids,” said
Chal Landgren, a Christ-
mas tree expert with Ore-
gon
State
University.
“Nobody wants to wear res-
pirators and Tyvek suits out
spraying. That’s a concern
for growers, applicators,
everybody.”
Landgren said he’s been
exploring alternatives. Some
of those include using non-
toxic solutions to prevent
pests from reproducing.
Right now, alternatives
to chlorpyrifos are roughly
four to fi ve times as expen-
sive, he said.
Growing without insecti-
cide can be done.
In 2012, Landgren helped
start a program to certify
farms that produce more
socially and environmen-
tally responsible Christmas
trees.
On a crisp Decem-
ber morning at Green Val-
ley Farm, in Molalla, Ore-
gon,
farmhand
Grant
Robinson was cutting and
baling Christmas trees for a
last-minute shipment.
The farm shipped 9,000
trees this year. None of them
were sprayed with chlorpyr-
ifos or any other insecticide.
“We just let the trees grow
the way God intended them
to. I’d rather have that in my
house than a tree that’s full
of chemicals any day,” Rob-
inson said.
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