The Second Edition of
Earth Friendly Alternatives
to herbicides, pesticides, and household chemicals
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FOR
IMMEDIATE RELEASE
March 1, 2005
Stonington Garden Club’s Surprising Success:
EARTH FRIENDLY ALTERNATIVES
to herbicides, pesticides, and household chemicals
Stonington, CT – In 2002, Stonington Garden Club created a concise
guide, Earth
Friendly Alternatives to herbicides, pesticides, and household chemicals,
explaining how to build rich soil, eliminate weeds and pests, safely nourish
lawns, and have a beautiful garden without using health endangering chemicals.
To their surprise, 3,000 copies sold with little effort, the booklet won
two awards, and orders continue arriving from around the country for the second
edition.
“Many people are unaware of the serious health risks of lawn and garden chemicals. Our goal was to educate and make it simple for busy people to relax and putter in their garden using inexpensive, safer options,” says the Editor and club Conservation Chair Gracelyn Guyol. Chapters in the 60-page guide cover environmentally safe ways for improving the soil, garden pest management, deterring animal pests, weed control, lawn care, watering, using plant cures for toxic soil, and household cleaning.
Why is earth friendly gardening so important? As “Chilling Facts” sprinkled through the book explain, toxic chemicals don’t simply disappear. They fall onto people’s skin and into the air breathed, wash into drinking water sources, cover the grass on which children and pets play, and build up over time in human tissue and that of produce and animals in the food chain.
Pesticide exposure in humans has been linked to leukemia, brain cancer, breast and prostate cancer, infertility, birth defects, Parkinson’s disease, and damage to the endocrine, nervous, and immune systems. Children exposed to pesticides from in-home exterminators faced a 2.3 times higher risk of brain cancer. Four lawn applications of 2,4-D a year double a dog’s risk of getting cancer. Cornell University estimates that seven million wild birds are killed annually due to pesticides.
Exposure comes through applying chemicals in the garden and from pesticide residues on food products, in contaminated water, and from airborne mists. In 1950 less than 10 percent of cornfields were sprayed with pesticides but 99 percent were by 1993. Residues remain on corn fed to livestock and poultry that ultimately end up in the local meat market. Pesticides are also routinely sprayed on most fruits and produce. Roughly 2.2 billion pounds of toxic chemicals are spewed into the air, water, and soil each year.
By government estimates, pesticides have contaminated water supplies in 23 states, leaching into aquifers and washing into streams and rivers. This is a major concern because over half of the U.S. population derives drinking water from groundwater sources. In a Connecticut study, 59 sites were surveyed for lawn and tree care pesticide contamination of groundwater, including croplands, orchards, golf courses, and residential areas. Sixty-six percent had detectable quantities of pesticides.
What can one person or one club do? A great deal, say the Stonington group. Purchase 50 copies of Earth Friendly Alternatives at wholesale prices and resell them to educate your club, community, and elected representatives while raising funds to support other conservation projects.
Single copies of Earth Friendly Alternatives sell for $6 plus $1 postage. To order, mail a check to Stonington Garden Club, P.O. Box 385, Stonington, CT 06378. For group orders or wholesale rates, go to www.stonington-gardenclub.org.
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(For a complimentary media copy
of Earth Friendly Alternatives, e-mail
gguyol@ aol.com or call
Editor Gracelyn Guyol at (860) 535-4134. To
reprint a free 1300-word feature, Why
Earth Friendly Alternatives, go to www.stonington-gardenclub.org
and click on the media tab.)
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WHY
EARTH FRIENDLY ALTERNATIVES
to herbicides, pesticides and household chemicals?
By
Gracelyn Guyol
Seventy-five percent of health care expenditures go to treat chronic conditions in the United States today. What is causing so many Americans to be perpetually sick?
Part of the answer lies in the soil. A 1992 Earth Summit Report indicates that 85 percent of the minerals found in North American topsoils 100 years ago are no longer present. The general decline of nutrients in 40 foods examined over a 50-year period showed an 81 percent decrease for a single element. What underlies this decline? Commercial fertilization of soils that only replenish nitrogen, phosphorus and potassium, not the macro and micronutrients found in land farmed using nature’s own organic techniques. So, even if you avoid empty calories in junk food and eat a healthy diet, the foods themselves may not contain sufficient vitamins and minerals required by the body to grow, repair, cleanse, and function properly.
Another part of the answer is food and water contamination. Sandra Steingraber, author of Living Downstream, was only 29 when she developed cancer. An ecologist by training, she began searching for answers, first in her native state of Illinois, then across the nation. Her book is an amazing revelation of the toxic environment we have created over the past fifty years through industrial and agricultural pollution.
Did you know that in 1950 less than 10 percent of cornfields were sprayed with pesticides but 99 percent were by 1993? Did you know that pesticides have contaminated water supplies in 23 states, leaching into aquifers and washing into streams and rivers?
The government estimates over 16,000 active landfills have been sopped with industrial and agricultural hazardous wastes, most located near small towns. According to the Environmental Protection Agency, the contents of all will eventually breach their linings and penetrate the soil, as many have already. The industry itself estimates that 2.2 billion pounds of toxic chemicals are spewed into the air, water, and soil each year.
Is it just a coincidence that all types of cancers rose 49.3 percent during the same period? On a graph, the steady upward momentum of non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma, for example, follows a similar line. Evidence of an association between herbicides and non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma comes from several places. Vietnam veterans have high rates from exposure to defoliants as do farmers in Canada, Kansas, and Nebraska who use the weed killer 2,4-D. In a Swedish study, exposure to phenoxy herbicides increased one’s risk of lymphomas sixfold.
In 1938 childhood cancer was rare. This is not so today and several studies have linked childhood cancer to home pesticide use. Children in Denver whose yards were treated with pesticides were four times more likely to have soft tissue cancers than children living in households that did not use yard chemicals. In another study, researchers found statistically significant associations between the incidence of brain tumors in children and the use of pest-repelling strips, lindane-containing lice shampoos, flea collars on pets, and weed killers on the lawn.
Animals are not immune. Four lawn applications a year containing 2, 4-D, double a dog’s risk of canine malignant lymphoma. Every year seven million wild birds are killed due to use of pesticides by homeowners. According to EPA’s National Home and Garden Pesticide Survey, 82 percent of U.S. households use pesticides of some kind.
Herbicides are deliberately toxic and kill by a variety of different mechanisms. Some interfere with plant hormones. Others inhibit photosynthesis. These actions do not stop once sprayed on the ground. Traces of triazine herbicides are now found in groundwater as well as in about 98 percent of all Midwestern surface waters. They poison plankton, algae, aquatic plants, and other organisms that form the basis of the freshwater food chain, including the fish we eat.
Triazines have effects inside the human body too. They gain entry as contaminants in drinking water and residues on food. Three of the triazines—cyanazine, simazine, and atrazine—are classified as possible human carcinogens. Atrazine is a known endocrine disrupter, impacting the function of hormones. It is restricted for use in Germany, the Netherlands, and several Nordic countries. In the U.S., however, it is used on about two-thirds of all cornfields. Simazine is used on lawns and fruit crops—oranges, apples, plums, olives, cherries, peaches, cranberries, blueberries, strawberries, grapes, and pears. Until 1994 it was used to kill algae in swimming pools and hot tubs.
Exposure to these endocrine disrupters comes not just through consumption of produce but also from eating meats, poultry, and eggs because herbicides are extensively used on the corn products fed to animals, remaining in their tissue.
Hormonal shifts contribute to many ailments, and herbicides are just one potential cause. Xenobiotics or xenoestrogens are foreign substances from outside the body that have a hormone-like and estrogen-like activity in the body, impacting hormone balance and function. Nearly all xenobiotics and xenoestrogens are derived from petroleum oil.
If asked if we had ever been exposed to petroleum oil contamination, most of us would say no. But petroleum is used in millions of products including plastics, medicines, clothing, foods, soaps, detergents, household cleaners, pesticides, microchips, and even perfumes. According to John Lee, M.D., in his book What Your Doctor May Not Tell You About Menopause, the majority of xenoestrogens from petroleum mimic the action of estrogen. Something about their molecular structure contains a “key” that fits into human hormone receptors. Xenoestrogens are considered more potent than natural estrogen made by the ovaries. In fish, some estrogenic substances are potent even at nanogram doses. (A nanogram is a billionth of a gram, about the relationship of a grain of sand to an Olympic swimming pool.)
Nearly all petrochemical pesticides, herbicides, and fungicides are powerful xenobiotics. In addition to being highly estrogenic, they are fat-soluble, nonbiodegradable, and difficult to avoid. The major source of human intake is from animal fats, particularly red meat and dairy fats. These xenoestrogens accumulate in our fatty tissues—the breast, brain, and liver—and cause estrogen dominance.
As recent studies have proven, too much estrogen increases your risk of cancer. It also contributes to degenerative conditions that are common today: endometriosis, breast cell stimulation, increases in body fat, salt and fluid retention, depression and headaches, low thyroid, low sex drive, increased blood clotting, impaired blood sugar control, loss of zinc, and reduced oxygen levels in cells.
Hormones start affecting every animal shortly after it begins life as a fertilized egg. They control growth and development, influence behavior, and profoundly affect the nervous system, the reproductive system, and the immune system. Do hormonally-active industrial chemicals interfere with naturally-occurring hormones and cause disease? In 1999, the National Academy of Sciences concluded: “Taken together, the results of animal and human studies indicate that prenatal exposure to PCBs (polychlorinated biphenyls) can affect neurologic development…. It has been well documented that HAHs (halogenated aromatic hydrocarbons) such as TCDD (dioxin), PCDFs (polychlorinated dibenzofurans), and PCBs, affect immune response and they appear to affect all functional arms of the immune system….”
Is it so surprising then that two-thirds of Americans are chronically ill? We have unwittingly contaminated our food chain, drinking water sources, and home environment over the past fifty years through the use of these toxic chemicals, steadily undermining our immune system and innate ability to heal.
What can we do? Earth Friendly Alternatives to herbicides, pesticides, and household chemicals is a concise, 60-page guide published by the Stonington Garden Club on how to build healthy soil, eliminate weeds and pests, and garden without chemicals. Available for $6 at www.stonington-gardenclub.org., it also gives specific recipes and environmentally safe products for household cleaning.
Educate yourself, your garden club, elected representatives, and your community about the dangers these chemicals pose to human health, pets and wildlife, the food chain, and water sources. We can make a big difference through collective, “grass-roots” efforts.
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(Permission is granted to reprint this article without charge by
simply contacting the author at gguyol@aol.com
or (860) 535-4134.)
Gracelyn
Guyol is Editor of Earth Friendly Alternatives and Conservation Chair of Stonington Garden Club, Stonington, CT.
She lectures on alternative health and is writing a book, Healing
Without Drugs: Bipolar Disorder and Depression.