Photo: City of Madison worker applying pesticides along curbs at the Warner Park Center parking lot
A letter by Jim Powell to The Cap Times [editors deletions re-inserted]:
In 2017, I wrote a letter in this paper about how the city of Madison violates its own pesticide policies. In 2014, Maria Powell, executive director of the Madison Environmental Justice Organization, asked if the city of Madison was following its pesticide policies after seeing workers heavily apply pesticides in Warner Park. In the 1990s, elected officials thought that they had effectively banned the use of pesticides but as time went on, institutional memory faded and policies were ignored, as Steven Elbow reported in 2017.
In response [to MEJO’s questions], the city created an Integrated Pest Management Policy Review task force in 2018 that met until last February [(that two years!)], when it stopped due to the pandemic. (Curiously, all other city committees continued meeting virtually.) There is no final report and no recommendations. No elected official has raised any questions and city staff continue to poison our environment unimpeded. Meanwhile two environmental committees — Committee on the Environment and the Solid (Hazardous) Waste Committee — have been eliminated by the mayor. Is there a pattern here?
[The City’s only committee dealing with the environment is the Sustainable Madison Committee. Apparently, “sustainability” and “climate change” are the only way to think about the environment now. Whatever happened to ecology?]
Now the city’s parks department has released its 2019–2020 pesticide use reports. Use of carcinogenic (and widely banned) glyphosate has increased 75% since 2019, along with [increased use of] pollinator-killing Imadacloprid, 2, 4-D and other chemicals [with long environmental toxicity pedigrees]. City staff seem emboldened to use more man-made poisons in a misguided quest to “correct” ecological imbalances.
After seven years of raising questions about the use of pesticides across the city, is it any wonder that we have concluded that no one cares?
[Regarding changes made by the Capt Times: good editing or message dilution? The main point of my letter–it was supposed to be a column– was “Whatever happened to ecology?” The fact that the mayor and council eliminated the two city committees that at least had environmental toxins as their purview and that the remaining committee–Sustainable Madison–with its focus on climate change and sustainability doesn’t have the capacity to also deal with local toxic pollution issues that have been unaddressed for years.]
