By Jeanne Roberts
Posted on Aug. 26, 2011. Listed in:
History is rife with examples of chemicals released on an unsuspecting populace before thorough evaluations of their safety and efficacy have been performed. A classic example is the drug Thalidomide, released in the late 1950s and most commonly used to treat morning sickness in pregnant women.
At least 10,000 babies were born to women using Thalidomide. Most were missing normal limbs, often in tandem – that is, missing two arms, or two legs. If limbs developed at all, they were vestigial – what one doctor called “flippers”. Other defects included missing ears, irregular or lopsided facial development, and internal organs on the outside of the body. It became one of the worst medical disasters in modern times.
Similar failures to investigate or warn the public include sunscreens, which the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, or FDA, knew were dangerous long before it released its data. Or consider BPA (bisphenol-A), an additive that makes plastic rigid and is currently known to cause estrogenic side effects in children; girls begin menstruating at seven, and boys fail to develop normal testicles. And then there’s diethanolamine, orDEA, another hormone disruptor which can even cause birth defects.
The danger isn’t limited to humans, either. Animals are equally at risk, and so is the botanical world. For example, consider DuPont’s new weed killer, Imprelis– sales of which were suspended once an Indiana greenskeeping firm and a Pennsylvania homeowner filed a class action suit.
Truth be told, the suspension wasn’t an act of conscience on DuPont’s part. A week after the announcement, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) actually banned the sale of Imprelis.
A good thing, too. No one knows how much greenery is now brownery (or, most likely, deadery) since the release of Imprelis in 2010. Moreover, Imprelis is an equal opportunity killer, decimating every kind of evergreen from the humble white pine to the beloved blue spruce. Other landscaping features like shrubs are also under attack. Word on the street suggests that even willows and poplars have fared badly.
It’s a problem that need never have occurred, if only the EPA hadn’t issued conditional approval for its use without thoroughly investigating its effect
Of course, it is now evident that neither the EPA nor DuPont actually tested this
product. I mean, come on, how can you miss it when a tree starts dying? Of course, DuPont, which says it is working with customers to investigate the damage (titter, titter, wink, wink), has also announced that it feels the class action suit is unwarranted. Well, of course they would say that, wouldn’t they?
Lawyers for plaintiffs (the ones doing the suing) advise documenting tree deaths rather than simply replacing the dead or dying trees. One prominent lawyer has called DuPont’s release of Imprelis as an environmentally friendly weed killer “highly reprehensible”.
I think that’s an understatement, particularly in light of the fact that another evergreen species, the whitebark pine – which should be slated for listing as an endangered species but isn’t thanks to inadequate funding – is being eaten to extinction by pine bark beetles, which are thriving thanks to global warming.
