The Garage of Death

1
The Garage of Death

• Better Living Through Chemicals

2
Creepy Crawlies

• What bugs give you the heebie jeebies?
• What was the biggest bug you have ever killed?
• Why are we so afraid of insects?

3
A Better Way to Kill

• How do your parents or neighbors get rid of pests
  using less lethal means?
• Why are organic foods becoming so popular?
• If we hate pesticides so much, why do we use them?

4
Follow the Money

• Pesticides are a 30 billion a year industry
• The industry grew after WWII. Guess why.
• Draw a line between Iraq and Dow Chemical. What
  links the two?

5
Some History

• The following text excerpts come from
• Industry Attacks on Dissent From Rachel Carson
  to Oprah published in Dollars Sense
• Forty years after the publication of Silent
  Spring, corporations are still producing
  poisonsand still trying to keep critics from
  fighting back.
• By LAURA ORLANDO
• http//www.dollarsandsense.org/archives/2002/0302o
  rlando.html

6
Black gold, Texas tea

• Before World War I, about half of the industrial
  products in the United States were made from
  renewable resources, such as plant-, wood-, and
  animal-based materials. In the 1920s and 1930s,
  oil and chemical companies like Union Carbide,
  Shell, and Dow expanded their interest in
  petrochemical manufacturing. The petrochemical
  industry, strengthened immensely by World War II,
  replaced renewable materials with synthetic
  organic compounds made from the by-products of
  oil and natural gas for instance, synthetic
  rubber replaced natural rubber, chemical
  detergents replaced animal-based soaps, and
  polyester replaced cotton. In the 1950s and
  1960s, the thriving plastics industry accelerated
  the shift even more. Today, 92 of the materials
  used for U.S. products and production processes
  are nonrenewable.

7
The War at Home

• In many cases, the processes used to manufacture
  synthetic products created toxic wastes, and
  often the products themselveseither intact or
  when dissipated into the environmentwere harmful
  to life. Among the most lethal of these products
  were synthetic pesticides. Before 1940, most
  pesticides were made from plants a few were made
  from toxic metals like arsenic and mercury. But
  the synthetic chemicals created for chemical
  warfare during World War II were found to be
  highly effective weed and insect killers. So in
  1945, with strong government backing, these
  poisons entered commercial markets. Within ten
  years, synthetic pesticides had captured 90 of
  the agricultural pest-control market. Pesticides
  such as dichloro diphenyl trichloroethane (DDT),
  dieldrin, and aldrin were dropped from planes
  like bombs over Dresden. State and federal
  government agencies blanketed neighborhoods with
  poisons in an attempt to eradicate pests like
  gypsy moths and Japanese beetles.

8
Government Industry

• Rachel Carson understood the forces at work in
  government and industry. Having served on the
  staff of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service for
  16 years, she was well aware of government's role
  in promoting and defending chemical poisons. "The
  crusade to create a chemically sterile,
  insect-free world," Carson wrote, "seems to have
  engendered a fanatic zeal on the part of many
  specialists and most of the so-called control
  agencies." We were living, she said, in an era
  "dominated by industry, in which the right to
  make a dollar at whatever cost is seldom
  challenged. When the public protests, confronted
  with some obvious evidence of damaging results of
  pesticide applications, it is fed little
  tranquilizing pills of half truth. We urgently
  need an end to these false assurances, to the
  sugar coating of unpalatable facts."

9
Were smarter now, right?

• The facts about chemical production today are
  sobering. The world uses five billion pounds of
  pesticides every year, with almost half used in
  the United States. According to the Federal
  Emergency Management Agency, as many as 500,000
  U.S. products pose physical or health hazards and
  can be defined as "hazardous chemicals." U.S.
  industry uses 70,000 different chemical
  substances, but there is little or no attempt to
  assess their health or environmental impacts.
  Each year, over 1,000 new synthetic chemicals are
  introduced in the United States. But only a small
  fraction of these are tested for carcinogenity or
  endocrine disruption, and there is little
  understanding of how they interact with each
  other. The list of known poisons is long and
  troubling. It is as if we have forgotten, or have
  never known, "that which is good."

10
Mr. Totahs Garage of Death

• Here are a few products currently in my garage
  along with their active ingredients.
• Roundup Glymphosaten
• Weed-B-Gon Dimethylamine (salt of
  dichlorophemoxyacetic acid)
• Snail Slug Killer Pellets Deadline
  Metaldehyde
• Giant Destroyer (for gophers) sodium nitrate,
  sulfur, charcoal
• Drano sodium hydroxide
• Bug-B-Gon Diazinon
• Raid imiprothrin, cypermethrin
• Orthene Systemic Insect Control Acephate
• Bug-Geta Plus Carbaryl metaldehyde
• Ortho Crabgrass Killer calcium acid,
  methanearsonate
• Ortho Malathion Xylene Malathion

11
Why you should check your garage

• EPA sharply restricts consumer use of diazinon,
  nation's 2 selling home and garden insecticide
• Diazinon called unsafe for home use but will
  remain on store shelves for at least another
  three years
• EPA scientists found the product exceeded safety
  standards by a wide margin. The action follows on
  the heels of the EPA's June 8 announcement
  banning Dursban, the nation's 1 selling home bug
  killer.
• Both diazinon and Dursban are organophosphates,
  nerve gas derivatives originally developed during
  World War II. These chemicals were identified as
  top priorities for regulation by the EPA after
  the FQPA passed, due to the high risk that they
  present to the developing brains and nervous
  systems of infants and children.
• From http//www.ewg.org/reports/diazinon/pr.html

12
A Better Way

• Integrated Pest Management
• Definition (from http//cipm.ncsu.edu/)
• Integrated Pest Management is the coordinated use
  of pest and environmental information along with
  available pest control methods, including
  cultural, biological, genetic and chemical
  methods, to prevent unacceptable levels of pest
  damage by the most economical means, and with the
  least possible hazard to people, property, and
  the environment". Proceedings of the National
  Integrated Pest Management Forum. 1992. American
  Farmland Trust

13
If Youre going to San Francisco

• Be sure to wear flowers in your hair (treated the
  IPM way)
• Four-hundred hungry goats and tons of corn meal
  mulch prevent weeds from taking over City parks
  and watersheds, giant heaters kill termite
  colonies deep inside of building walls, and
  donut-shaped devices floating in City ponds
  release mosquito-eating microorganisms. San
  Francisco is pioneering environmentally sound
  ways to manage urban pests, and other city
  governments are taking notice.
• San Francisco adopted an Integrated Pest
  Management (IPM) ordinance in October 1996, which
  commits the City to a pest management approach on
  its own property that minimizes the use of toxic
  chemicals and gets rid of pests by methods that
  pose a lower risk to public and environmental
  health.