A chemical reaction in your lawn?
by admin - February 12th, 2010.Filed under: Uncategorized.
What happens in a lawn maintained with synthetic fertilizers and pesticides? As the title suggests, a chemical reaction. I recently attended an event sponsored by the Canadian Cancer Society and carried out at Uvic. The speaker was Paul Tukey, a one time gardener now advocate against chemicals on lawns. Paul has started a business call safelawns.org that is dedicated to teaching people the harm believed caused by chemicals in lawns. Paul sprayed pesticides for years until it affected his health. He has been told that even if he is never exposed again to these poisons, the level now in his body will never diminish! Never! And he is concerned that this exposure may have been a cause of the health problems his son faces. Paul created an excellent documentary film entitled Chemical Reaction. The movie centers around a small ontario town (sorry, forgot the name) that banned pesticides, only to have that challenged by the big corporations. It took years in the courts before the Supreme Court backed the citizens! Now this one little town that could has paved the way for municipalities across the country to enact legislation that stops the madness. The big producers in the US, upon be confronted by Canadian towns saying no, set about passing legislation in most US states that prevents individuals, towns or cities from ever passing any local bylaw/law that would prevent big corporation from selling their pesticides. An in Canada, these large companies have joined together to sue the Canadian Government, under the Free Trade Agreement because the highest court has prevented them from selling their product within our border. That is one interesting battle. In a day and age when we know these poisons are created to kill life forms, (whatever form it may be and however small but it is life), and that dead life is consumed by organisms down the chain, killing them, and here we are a life form that eats the sprayed plants. Something not right about that picture. The argument that these pesticides don’t cause harm. C’mon. At least give me a wink to let me know I know you are full of it. C’mon.
The following is a quote from Heide Hermary’s excellent organic horticulture bible ‘Working with Nature’:
“The following figure from Food and Agriculture Organizations of the United Nations are already outdated, but I have been able to find only very little current information. According to these statistics, between 1980 and 1990
-pesticide resistant weed species increased from less than 10 to 110 (increased to 270 by the year 2000)
-pesticide resistant fungus species increased from 100 to 150
-pesticide resistant insect species exceeded 500′
If you understand how to enhance the living soil you will understand that sick plants rarely are attacked by insects. Not always, but rarely. So the idea of spreading poison on a plant to kill the insects, which fall to the ground and kill the micro organisms that will feed on that insect, and so on, is crazy. Such action will only lead to soil and plants that are chemically dependant.
Now about synthetic fertilizers, here is another comment from Heide.
“In Canada, whenever a product is sold with the claim and purpose to supply plant nutrients, the product must be registered under the Canadian Fertilizer Act. This Act and accompanying Regulations apply to fertilizers only. A different Act and Regulations apply to pesticides only. Many substances contained in fertilizers and pesticides are not claimed to be either plant nutrient or pesticides, even though they may be used for that purpose, and consequently are largely unregulated in this country. Under both of thes Acts any substance that is not claimed to be an active ingredient (either a plant nutrient or a pesticide) is considered to be ‘inert’.”
Proper Practices.
I wrote a blog about the proper ways to organically feed and thus enhance your landscape and I invite you to view that but in short, mulch. Mulch the grass with a proper mulching lawn mower. Apply mulches on your gardens and flower beds. Proper mulching cuts down your maintenance by 50-75% . Not to mention the invaluable benefits to the soils. Colin, Feb.2010
safelawns.org Paul Tukey “Chemical Reaction” was the documentary
pesticidefreebc.org