LIHUE — While Kauai beekeepers celebrated the canceled registration of some pesticides in the Federal Register, some remain concerned about threats to their honey.
That’s after the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency announced the final notices of cancellation on the registration of 12 neonicotinoid pesticides.
Kauai beekeeper Jimmy Trujillo said neonicotinoids have “long been identified as the leading culprit” of colony collapse, but not the only one.
“We’ve been finding more and more about the effects of lesser harmful (chemicals) — as far as toxicity,” Trujillo said. “People write off Roundup or glyphosate as an herbicide, but we’re finding it disrupts their ability to navigate and digest.”
He continued: “While the EPA’s canceling of neonics is welcome news, beekeepers, on the mainland especially, are still concerned about the high levels of herbicides and pesticides in their honey.”
The move was required as part of a December settlement in a case involving the Center for Food Safety.
The second half of the settlement will play out in coming years: EPA is required, for the first time, to analyze and address the impacts of the entire neonicotinoid pesticide class on endangered species under the federal Endangered Species Act.
Neonics are chemically related to nicotine, and interfere with the nervous system of insects. Bees and other pollinators are exposed to the chemicals through pollen, nectar, dust, dew on plant leaves, and in the soil where some bee species nest.
“Today’s cancellation of these neonicotinoid pesticides is a hard-won battle and landmark step in the right direction,” said George Kimbrell, CFS legal director and lead counsel in the case. “But the war on toxics continues: We will continue to fight vigilantly to protect our planet, bees and the environment from these and similar dangerous toxins.”
Bennette Misalucha, executive director of the Hawaii Crop Improvement Association, said members of HCIA will continue to stringently follow all federal and state laws for safe pesticide use, but the decision could make it harder to control pests.
“Because of Hawaii’s tropical environment, crop-protection products are important in helping control insects, diseases, weeds, and other pests that threaten our homes, our health, the environment and food supply,” Misalucha said.
Trujillo was part of a 2018 study with several other Kauai beekepers and scientist Carl Berg in which Kauai hives were tested for glyphosate. Glyphosate was found in roughly one third of tested beehives, with concentration readings from a single hive as high as 314.6 parts per billion. There is no tolerance limit for glyphosate in honey in the United States. In the European Union, the tolerance level is 50 parts per billion.
“Hawaii was progressive in getting the chlorpyrifos ban,” Berg said.
Gary Hooser of Hawaii Alliance for Progressive Action said the EPA ban, coupled with Monsanto losing multiple court battles in its defense of Roundup and state chlorpyrifos bans, all represent a “significant pushback against the chemical companies.”
“Clearly these pesticides are not safe, and clearly these companies have been misrepresenting the facts surrounding the health and environmental impact of their products, which they use by the ton here on the Garden Island,” Hooser said.
The CFS case was originally filed in in 2013. In May 2017, a court ruled in the plaintiffs’ favor. The plaintiffs included CFS, Sierra Club, Beyond Pesticides, Center for Environmental Health, Pesticide Action Network, and four commercial beekeepers.
“Neonics represent an enormous threat to our bees and pollinators,” said Neil Carmen, pollinator liaison for The Sierra Club, a plaintiff in the case. “Taking these products off the market is absolutely necessary.”
•••
Jessica Else, environment reporter, can be reached at 245-0452 or jelse@thegardenisland.com.
Aloha Kakou,
The Hawaii Crop Improvement Association is of course, and to be expected, to be out for themselves, self righteous about the poisons they use that ends up on the land, waterways, the air, and the ocean reefs and marine life. They are a “For Profit” enterprise afterall. They may claim they are helping the people…in the long run they are killing us.
It’s a queer aspect they take on living things using poison to improve crops intended to feed the life loving and seeking people of our population….it’s a considerable oxymoron, along with stupidity and insanity, mixing poison with our foods as if it was as natural as the clean air and water we need to put in our bodies.
A few concepts that they expect us to tolerate while they walk, and spray, right over our heads…one is expecting us to accept their reaping huge $$$ PROFITS while sewing poison everything into the food, the bees in this case, and all other creatures they consider in the way, including we the People and our precious bodies and lives…all of us “Targets of their Poison”, the Targets they ignore being the evolved life forms of God’s Creation these last collective millions of years vs. their, the Poison Profit People, historically recent Pseudo $$$ Science converting petroleum from oil wells and coal mines into deadly chemicals that are put on and into our foods, as well as poisoning and killing off God’s flying and crawling creatures, all to avoid blemishes and bite marks on food that can be merely cut away by food preparers at home or restaurant…these same bites and blemishes on the food have never been shown or known to cause cancer in humans; while the whole Argument over these pesticides, herbicides, insecticides, etc., is the Cancers being caused in the people and what else we do not know yet, and the poisoning of our flora and living microbes in our digestive tracks and the inflammation to our brains it causes.
The simultaneous increase in these chemicals in and on our foods, not just the crop poisons but all the rest of these Profit Poisons as well, that are allowed in and on our foods are not only on the increase in numbers, but so is the increase in the cancers, and other diseases, as well as the known damage and death to our micro “bugs” living in our intestines that are responsible for our continued healthy living.
These “bugs”, there are trillions of them in our body, are what are now known as our MICROBIOME, and which we require for living…and they are being killed and mutated by these pesticides, insecticides, and herbicides…while the suicides of our youth are out of control.
You see these Agricultural Poisons are known to ultimately cause inflammation in the brain which is now liked to Autism and suicides, as well as Alzheimer’s, dementia, depression, and so and so forth as the discoverers line up.
When the fruits and vegetables get blemishes on them and we use poison to prevent that, when our teenagers get blemishes on their faces do we choose to poison them as well? Yeah we do poison the kids for acne.
The Hawaii Crop Improvement Association would be more accurately called the Hawaii Crop Profit Association. and excluding the farmers, just how many of these people are there that the few of them are allowed to poison the majority of us.
Is it the political lobbyists and the $$$ they distribute to our “trusted” elected officials who ultimately sway the laws that allow the few to poison the many.
The discovery of Petroleum and its conversion into Petrochemicals was an enormous ill step taken by mankind, a now known wrong turn in the human road of life. It has produced more poisons on earth that are rapidly deteriorating life itself. The Plastics, the Cancers, the scores and scores and more of other and new diseases, especially those effecting children and youth, the reduction of life span, the use of more Petrochemicals as medicines to cure the very diseases brought about by Petrochemicals…now that is another definition of stupidity and insanity…using chemicals to “fight” diseases brought on by the use of chemicals.
The medical professions are crippled by their being reduced to the use of a poison “pill for every ill” forced on them by the Petrochemical Pharmaceutical Companies…the same petrochemical companies that are poisoning our bees and other food pollinators.
And if you have ever flown into the big cities of the world on their petroleum based, and caused, smoggiest days of yellow air pollution, that is air unsuitable for all oxygen breathing/needing creatures and us humans? That yellow air is Petrochemicals unfit for living beings of every specie.
And right here at home we feel the impact in another pressing way. The Windward side of all the Hawaiian Islands experiences the freshest cleanest air in the entire world. The hydrolysis of sea water, breaking down water molecules into Oxygen(2) and Hydrogen(1), brings us this fresh Oxygen during Tradewinds, coming onshore. While it brings us fresh, that air and other lifestyle benefits bring us more incoming population..
This and other qualities of life that Kauai has over other places, are bringing 45% of all new home and land purchases bought on Kauai are by offshore people: International, US, and interisland, probably Oahu.
While many other countries do not allow Americans to buy the homes and land of these other countries, but we, in our Freedom based Nation, allow foreigners to buy our homes and land at the lifestyle peril of our own people, the born and raised who will have to forfeit family and friends to afford a place of their own…only elsewhere…a jet ride away…Aloha…!
To pick at the singular poisons in our environment is like a doctor trying to diagnose one of the 27,000 singular maladies, diseases, and malfunctions a human body can suffer…all the while a singular diagnosis is made, your body is still suffering from a hidden, undiagnosed, multi combination of illnesses micro and macroscopic and hidden from the limited skills of the doctor and the few tools the doctors have at hand, even in hospital, to uncover your body’s failure(s). It is Blind Faith, advertisements, and lack of education that bring people repeatedly back to more drugs, more chemicals and petrochemicals.
So too, the causes of Disease, while one Cause does bring on an ill effect or disease, what we are facing today, everyone of us, is a modern, first time in history, COCKTAIL COMBINATION of Petrochemicals hidden, sprayed, irrigated, injected, covered, bathed in, swallowed, breathed, stirred into, dispensed, prescribed, over the countered, and breast fed via Mommy’s Milk…more petrochemicals than have ever been known to life on earth since the beginning of time.
Our food, air, land, water, oceans, children and ourselves are being poisoned by Petrochemicals and other manmade combined chemicals that are poisoning all and causing sickness and disease unheard of until this Chemical Cocktail Combinations of petrochemicals that are everywhere on earth, and even in bees and their hives as this very informative article has informed us of.
It is, but is not only, the Roundup, the Glyphosate, the Chlorpyrifos, the Crop Associations, Big Pharm, Big Food, etc.,it is the combination of all the above that we must immediately begin to reverse their existence as we are not, as living creatures, fit or adapted to live alongside of or have these chemicals in our bodies and food and air and water.
As the petrochemicals have increased among us, it is time to decrease them, and adapt to our earthly needs in a manner compatible with life; and not recklessly and wreckfully allowing $$$ Profit to be the driving force behind invention and discovery…when the safe Driving Force should be Respect for Nature, Life, and the Aina, etc.
There are Laws of Nature, we must as a specie, respect and honor those Laws for the benefit of all living things, it is our duty being at the Top of the Chain both in Hawaii and as the dwellers of Earth to protect ourselves, our descendants, and the other species we share Earth with.
We are intelligent enough to adapt to every need while still following the Laws of Nature. Stop buying and using poison. To replace poison we may need a Modern Think Tank of people, students, scientists of nature to rethink our approach to solving problems. Petrochemicals and other chemicals have become the Quick Fix profitable approach to our problems, and a scourge to our Health and Life Longevity.
As they say we need a paradigm shift, a new way, to turn over like a leaf.
Mahalo for reading,
Charles
You can pretty much drink all pesticides, otherwise they would not sell them to any crazy uncle to use indiscriminately. County workers spray them all along roadways and they are present in all of our foodstuffs. By default this means that they are completely non toxic. Otherwise they would be illegal,
Aloha Kakou,
The Hawaii Crop Improvement Association is of course, and to be expected, to be out for themselves, self righteous about the poisons they use that ends up on the land, waterways, the air, and the ocean reefs and marine life. They are a “For Profit” enterprise afterall. They may claim they are helping the people…in the long run they are killing us.
It’s a queer aspect they take on living things using poison to improve crops intended to feed the life loving and seeking people of our population….it’s a considerable oxymoron, along with stupidity and insanity, mixing poison with our foods as if it was as natural as the clean air and water we need to put in our bodies.
A few concepts that they expect us to tolerate while they walk, and spray, right over our heads…one is expecting us to accept their reaping huge $$$ PROFITS while sewing poison everything into the food, the bees in this case, and all other creatures they consider in the way, including we the People and our precious bodies and lives…all of us “Targets of their Poison”, the Targets they ignore being the evolved life forms of God’s Creation these last collective millions of years vs. their, the Poison Profit People, historically recent Pseudo $$$ Science converting petroleum from oil wells and coal mines into deadly chemicals that are put on and into our foods, as well as poisoning and killing off God’s flying and crawling creatures, all to avoid blemishes and bite marks on food that can be merely cut away by food preparers at home or restaurant…these same bites and blemishes on the food have never been shown or known to cause cancer in humans; while the whole Argument over these pesticides, herbicides, insecticides, etc., is the Cancers being caused in the people and what else we do not know yet, and the poisoning of our flora and living microbes in our digestive tracks and the inflammation to our brains it causes.
The simultaneous increase in these chemicals in and on our foods, not just the crop poisons but all the rest of these Profit Poisons as well, that are allowed in and on our foods are not only on the increase in numbers, but so is the increase in the cancers, and other diseases, as well as the known damage and death to our micro “bugs” living in our intestines that are responsible for our continued healthy living.
These “bugs”, there are trillions of them in our body, are what are now known as our MICROBIOME, and which we require for living…and they are being killed and mutated by these pesticides, insecticides, and herbicides…while the suicides of our youth are out of control.
You see these Agricultural Poisons are known to ultimately cause inflammation in the brain which is now liked to Autism and suicides, as well as Alzheimer’s, dementia, depression, and so and so forth as the discoverers line up.
When the fruits and vegetables get blemishes on them and we use poison to prevent that, when our teenagers get blemishes on their faces do we choose to poison them as well? Yeah we do poison the kids for acne.
The Hawaii Crop Improvement Association would be more accurately called the Hawaii Crop Profit Association. and excluding the farmers, just how many of these people are there that the few of them are allowed to poison the majority of us.
Is it the political lobbyists and the $$$ they distribute to our “trusted” elected officials who ultimately sway the laws that allow the few to poison the many.
The discovery of Petroleum and its conversion into Petrochemicals was an enormous ill step taken by mankind, a now known wrong turn in the human road of life. It has produced more poisons on earth that are rapidly deteriorating life itself. The Plastics, the Cancers, the scores and scores and more of other and new diseases, especially those effecting children and youth, the reduction of life span, the use of more Petrochemicals as medicines to cure the very diseases brought about by Petrochemicals…now that is another definition of stupidity and insanity…using chemicals to “fight” diseases brought on by the use of chemicals.
The medical professions are crippled by their being reduced to the use of a poison “pill for every ill” forced on them by the Petrochemical Pharmaceutical Companies…the same petrochemical companies that are poisoning our bees and other food pollinators.
And if you have ever flown into the big cities of the world on their petroleum based, and caused, smoggiest days of yellow air pollution, that is air unsuitable for all oxygen breathing/needing creatures and us humans? That yellow air is Petrochemicals unfit for living beings of every specie.
And right here at home we feel the impact in another pressing way. The Windward side of all the Hawaiian Islands experiences the freshest cleanest air in the entire world. The hydrolysis of sea water, breaking down water molecules into Oxygen(2) and Hydrogen(1), brings us this fresh Oxygen during Tradewinds, coming onshore. While it brings us fresh, that air and other lifestyle benefits bring us more incoming population..
This and other qualities of life that Kauai has over other places, are bringing 45% of all new home and land purchases bought on Kauai are by offshore people: International, US, and interisland, probably Oahu.
While many other countries do not allow Americans to buy the homes and land of these other countries, but we, in our Freedom based Nation, allow foreigners to buy our homes and land at the lifestyle peril of our own people, the born and raised who will have to forfeit family and friends to afford a place of their own…only elsewhere…a jet ride away…Aloha…!
To pick at the singular poisons in our environment is like a doctor trying to diagnose one of the 27,000 singular maladies, diseases, and malfunctions a human body can suffer…all the while a singular diagnosis is made, your body is still suffering from a hidden, undiagnosed, multi combination of illnesses micro and macroscopic and hidden from the limited skills of the doctor and the few tools the doctors have at hand, even in hospital, to uncover your body’s failure(s). It is Blind Faith, advertisements, and lack of education that bring people repeatedly back to more drugs, more chemicals and petrochemicals.
So too, the causes of Disease, while one Cause does bring on an ill effect or disease, what we are facing today, everyone of us, is a modern, first time in history, COCKTAIL COMBINATION of Petrochemicals hidden, sprayed, irrigated, injected, covered, bathed in, swallowed, breathed, stirred into, dispensed, prescribed, over the countered, and breast fed via Mommy’s Milk…more petrochemicals than have ever been known to life on earth since the beginning of time.
Our food, air, land, water, oceans, children and ourselves are being poisoned by Petrochemicals and other manmade combined chemicals that are poisoning all and causing sickness and disease unheard of until this Chemical Cocktail Combinations of petrochemicals that are everywhere on earth, and even in bees and their hives as this very informative article has informed us of.
It is, but is not only, the Roundup, the Glyphosate, the Chlorpyrifos, the Crop Associations, Big Pharm, Big Food, etc.,it is the combination of all the above that we must immediately begin to reverse their existence as we are not, as living creatures, fit or adapted to live alongside of or have these chemicals in our bodies and food and air and water.
As the petrochemicals have increased among us, it is time to decrease them, and adapt to our earthly needs in a manner compatible with life; and not recklessly and wreckfully allowing $$$ Profit to be the driving force behind invention and discovery…when the safe Driving Force should be Respect for Nature, Life, and the Aina, etc.
There are Laws of Nature, we must as a specie, respect and honor those Laws for the benefit of all living things, it is our duty being at the Top of the Chain both in Hawaii and as the dwellers of Earth to protect ourselves, our descendants, and the other species we share Earth with.
We are intelligent enough to adapt to every need while still following the Laws of Nature. Stop buying and using poison. To replace poison we may need a Modern Think Tank of people, students, scientists of nature to rethink our approach to solving problems. Petrochemicals and other chemicals have become the Quick Fix profitable approach to our problems, and a scourge to our Health and Life Longevity.
As they say we need a paradigm shift, a new way, to turn over like a leaf.
Mahalo for readingñ,
Charles
I am glad to read this article, because I was losing hope for Kauai’s West Side.
The gmo companies use by far the most pesticides (Syngenta, Corteva, Dow, Monsato, Dupont-Pioneer, etc.),
not to mention restricted use pesticides by the ton. They are destroying our gorgeous island and it’s peoples.
Up to this point, I thought there wasn’t much pushback. I am so relieved to read this.
All the other islands push back I think with these companies. I am glad to know that someone cares about Kauai’s west side.
But as the above commentary also states, it is ruining ALL (everyone who lives here) our air, water quality, fish, reefs, reproduction, children’s futures (reproductive harm).
Thinking it is safe because it is legal is not correct. They just don’t have published studies of reproductive harm, water pollution, etc. YET.
Until now, with this court ruling and bee research, there was no legal precident set. Now there is precident.
This is huge!
Have there been recent developments in this pesticide battle?
I would like to become involved and learn more.
Thank you for this article and comments..
I just wanted to add,
DDT used to be legal. It caused grotesque malformations in fetuses.
That is a case of an outlawed pesticide.
But the effects of these newer pesticides could be slightly more subtle, but causing reproductive harm neurologically and in the heart as well of our unborn babies and young children. I believe that there was some research suggesting this, but I cannot site it offhand.
Thank you.