Renewable Energy Roundup in Fredericksburg
Published in the Sun October 7, 2012

Johnny Delirious took off his hat, pointed to his very bald head, and said, “We need to think round.”  Mr. Delirious was only one of the many speakers at the 12^th annual Renewable Energy Roundup and Green Living Fair in Fredericksburg last weekend who advocate for a radical shift in how we think about building homes.

 

Building square houses out of sticks is a technique of the past, claims Mr. Delirious.  Johnny’s company, Monolithic Constructors Inc., builds domes for homes, churches, gymnasiums.  The domes are made by spraying polyurethane foam and concrete in the inside of a giant inflatable form.  The resulting structure is so tough it can withstand a direct hit by an F-5 tornado, and Johnny had pictures to prove it.  He also claimed that the domes are fireproof, bulletproof (good for survivalists), and that one unfortunate dome had been pulled intact out of a crevasse after an earthquake.  Johnny goes by the name Delirious because twenty years ago he turned down the opportunity for a liver transplant for hepatitis C but survived anyway.  I found his arguments for domed structures more persuasive than his medical advice, but there was no denying his enthusiasm for both topics.

 

Other speakers at the fair were less colorful but no less passionate about new ways to tackle 21^st century problems.  Peter Pfeiffer, renowned Austin architect and green building scientist, used the USDA’s food pyramid to demonstrate the relative importance of various energy efficiency techniques.  Just like whole grains and vegetables should make up the bulk of our diets, sensible measures such as shading windows, radiant barriers on roofs, and living in appropriately sized homes provide far more bang for the buck than sexy additions like solar panels.  As attractive as solar panels may be, they are like dessert, and should only be considered after the rest of the home’s energy efficiency diet is healthy.

 

Janet Meek, retired US diplomat to Korea and Djibouti and former midwife, was in Fredericksburg to testify to the benefits of living in a cob home.  Cob is a mixture of mud and straw.  Because air conditioning is by far the largest consumer of electricity in a Texas home, Janet had made the principled decision to build her dream home in Hunt without air conditioning.  Her cob walls are hand formed and two feet thick.  But lest you get the wrong idea, this home is not a hut such as might be seen in National Geographic, but rather should grace the pages of Southern Living.  During the hot part of summer Janet lets the house ventilate at night, and then she closes up to keep the cool in during the day.  Janet admits that when the outside temperature rises above 100 degrees, the practical solution is to relax on the porch with a cold drink.  During the summer of 2011 the interior of the house reached the high 80s, but with ceiling fans it felt much cooler, and her electric bills are next to nothing.  Most of the time she is well acclimated and comfortable, as were our ancestors for thousands of years.  Her spare bedroom has a small air conditioner for guests who have not yet adjusted to the low carbon lifestyle.

 

Kindra Welch, the architect who designed and built Janet’s house, said the majority of homes built in the US these days are in a “Race to the Bottom Line.”  She means that today’s houses are often built fast and cheap, and designed for profit in the short term.  In her opinion we should be looking at things in the context of 1000 years.  Builders should consider the life cycle of the materials used and the cumulative effect on the environment.  There are three possible qualities for any building: Good, Fast, and Inexpensive.  You can have any two, but not all three.

 

The Roundup was not just about green building.  Alternative energy was also a topic of interest.  Gary Krysztopik, an electrical engineer, has been building electric cars in San Antonio for six years.  Gary says that a car can be run on the same amount of electricity that would be required just to refine the equivalent gasoline, eliminating the energy costs of exploring, pumping, spilling, and transporting the oil.  According to Gary, “We are better off buying foreign cars that run on US electrons than buying US cars that run on foreign oil.”

 

The Roundup featured innovators in solar energy, biodiesel, water conservation and rainwater harvesting, wind energy, and organic farming.  Attendees ranged from engineers to hippies to hippy engineers with a few survivalists in the mix.  It was a great opportunity to think outside the box, or as Johnny Delirious would say, “Think round.”

West Nile Virus and how to avoid it:  published in the Sun Sept. 22, 2012

Evil, blood-sucking pests, mosquitoes are responsible for more human misery, disease, and death than any other insect.  Yellow fever, malaria, dengue, encephalitis, and now West Nile virus are all transmitted by mosquitoes.  As someone who has suffered a bout of malaria, I would shed no tears if mosquitoes were an endangered species, but alas, they are thriving.  (To be fair, mosquitoes are an important source of food for bats and birds, but we are not discussing that virtue today.)

 

Texas is currently the epicenter of a small epidemic of West Nile disease; more than 1200 confirmed cases and 50 deaths in Texas this year.  Forty percent of all the cases in the US have been in Texas.

 

Mindy Powell, a registered nurse, told me about her 80 year old relative in the Dallas area who recently died of the most severe form of West Nile, called neuroinvasive because it attacks the brain.  One day this active outdoor enthusiast and fisherman thought he might be getting a cold, but rapidly worsened.  He called his daughter to come over.  By the time she arrived, her father was unable to walk.  At the emergency room he became confused and lost consciousness.  After three weeks in the ICU on a ventilator, he passed away.

 

Dr. Virginia Headley, epidemiologist with the Williamson County and Cities Health District (WCCHD), stated that six people in Williamson County have had the neuroinvasive form of West Nile this year.  Of those six, one died and two formerly independent elderly adults are in nursing homes recovering.  More commonly, people infected with West Nile virus get a fever and other symptoms, but the brain is not affected, and they eventually recover.

 

For every person who is diagnosed with West Nile fever, at least 4 others are infected but never know it because they have no symptoms.  We know this because donated blood from healthy people is checked for antibodies to the virus.  Between 2003 and 2008, the CDC analyzed all the donated blood in the US and discovered that about 1% of the population had already been infected.  A study in Houston found that among homeless men who had lived outside for a year, more than 16% had developed antibodies to West Nile.  Once you have had the virus and recovered, you are probably immune, but it might be too soon to know if the immunity lasts for life.

 

So what can we do to control this situation?  Pesticides can be sprayed in an emergency, but pesticides only knock down the adult mosquito population temporarily and are not practical in rural areas.  Pesticides don’t get at the root cause which is too many nice breeding places for mosquitoes.  As Dr. Chip Riggins, executive director at the WCCHD, explained, “Aerial spraying is an adjunct to other things.  You can spray all day long and if you don’t have the public helping, it won’t work for long.”

 

Last week’s rain provided lots and lots of stagnant water to breed mosquitoes.  Some kinds of mosquitoes can go from an egg to a biting adult within 5 days, especially in warm weather, so we will start to see mosquitoes now from the recent rains.

 

I decided to take a trip around my house to see if I could find any breeding areas, supposing of course that I would not, because who wants to think that her own home is a public health hazard.  Immediately upon stepping out, I saw that the birdbath was teeming with wiggly mosquito larvae.  Disgusted, I dumped it out.  Next I found a bucket with water in it and a saucer under a plant.

 

Deborah Marlow, deputy director of environmental health services, has been interested in ecological methods to control pests since her college days.  Deborah studied mosquitofish, a minnow also known as Gambusia affinis, as predators of mosquito larvae.  A Gambusia minnow can eat its body weight in larvae every day.  A dozen mosquitofish can keep an abandoned swimming pool mosquito free for months.  My friends Bob and Janine Hall also use mosquitofish in their aquaponics gardens and horse troughs.  Janine said she bought the minnows at McIntire’s nursery several years ago and doesn’t even have to feed them.  They not only live off the mosquito larvae but they reproduce prolifically.  Whenever the Halls build a new aquaponics bed, Janine just dips some more mosquitofish out of the horse trough.  The mosquitofish are not sensitive about water quality either.  The only time the minnows ever died was the year it stayed below freezing for three days straight and the horse trough froze into a solid block of ice.

 

Mosquito dunks are another way to control larvae in standing water that cannot be drained.  The dunks contain spores of Bacillus thuringiensis israelensis, called Bt for short.  When the spores are eaten by a mosquito larva, a toxin paralyzes the larva’s intestine, causing it to die of starvation or septicemia.  Luckily, birds, fish, and animals are completely resistant to the toxin in Bt.  In 1959, an intrepid group of volunteers ingested a gram of Bt daily.  Some of the volunteers inhaled an additional dose as well.  After five days of this regimen all the volunteers were completely unaffected.  I don’t think you would be allowed to do an experiment like that these days.

Mosquitofish in a pond at McIntire's Garden Center

Clint Hawes at The Feed Store demonstrating mosquito dunks

Bill Stump checking a gutter for standing water

 

Tips for Avoiding West Nile Infections (from DSHS and CDC websites)

 

1.  Use insect repellent containing DEET, picaridin, or oil of lemon eucalyptus.

 

2.  Dress in long sleeves and long pants when you are outside.

 

3.  Stay indoors at dusk and dawn, when mosquitoes are most active.

 

4.  Drain standing water where mosquitoes breed.  Common breeding sites include old tires, flower pots, and clogged rain gutters.  Toys, buckets, and tarps that aren’t pulled taut can also collect water. 

 

5.  Make sure mosquitoes cannot enter rain barrels.  Use mosquito dunks or Gambusia minnows in water features and ponds.

 

6.  Install or repair screens on open windows.

 

7.  Remove brush and debris where adult mosquitoes hide.

 

OUR Ecovillage

Published in the Sun September 8, 2012

Forced to survive on the produce from my own vegetable garden, I would certainly starve to death within one season.  I’ve never plucked a chicken, or butchered a hog, or even milked a cow with any success.  So why is the idea of homesteading so appealing to me, and to so many of my grocery store dependent peers?  Why do city dwellers yearn for a piece of rural property with poultry and fruit trees and a family harmoniously doing rustic chores?

 

My completely unsubstantiated theory is that humans have an evolutionary need to band together in small groups and work for food.  If you live in the city, food is everywhere; more food than you could possibly eat.  The thrill of the chase is gone.  Where is the satisfaction in buying a hamburger at a drive-up window?  By relying on agribusiness for nourishment, oil companies for energy, and Hollywood for entertainment, we have accepted the role of hungry baby birds, helplessly waiting with open mouths to devour what others regurgitate.

 

True self-sufficiency is not realistic in modern society (thank goodness) but we still have an urge to work together with friends and family; to plant, to build, to sweat, and to high five each other at the end of the day and say, “We did that ourselves.”

 

Last week I visited an ecovillage in British Columbia.  As described on the website, an ecovillage is a settlement in which “human activities are harmlessly integrated into the natural world in a way that is supportive of healthy human development and can be successfully continued into the indefinite future.”  This particular ecovillage, created in 1999, is called OUR (One United Resource) Ecovillage, and seems to have been started as a commune devoted to sustainable lifestyles.  At first 10 to 20 semi-permanent members were growing their own food and building small artistic houses out of cob, a mixture of clay, straw, and sand.  They planned to be a demonstration center where others could learn techniques of living close to the land, but nobody anticipated how wildly popular the concept would be.  The number of visitors and temporary residents exploded, reaching 10,000 a year.  People were coming from all over the world to see what was going on, revealing a tremendous hunger for getting back to nature.

 

 

Arriving at the gate of the 25 acre farm on Vancouver Island, my family and I were announced by a noisy flock of turkeys.  Patrick Jackson came out to greet us.  With a lovely South African accent and wavy blonde hair tied into a ponytail, Patrick looks like the aerial performer he used to be.  Patrick and his family have lived at the ecovillage since 2008, so he is an old-timer.  His job is to keep the legion of transient and unskilled volunteers working productively on the many building and agricultural projects that are in various stages of completion.

 

Patrick leads us to the outdoor dining area where a vegetarian lunch is just being served.  We have a bowl of onion soup with homemade croutons and vegetable slaw.  Patrick calls the kitchen a “zero mile eatery” because generally the meals consist of food grown on site.  They rarely serve meat, but they recently killed some chickens and are planning to butcher a pig in the fall.  A resident cow provides milk.

 

Brandy Gallagher, the executive director of OUR Ecovillage, sits down to visit while we eat lunch.  A social worker by training, she was raised in a commune in the wilderness.  Brandy describes herself as a “long, long term visionary.”  She explains that most communities like this one maintain a very low profile, staying as far away as possible from regulators and code enforcers.  Brandy has taken a different tack and tries to bring code enforcers around to her point of view; to compromise on acceptable ways to water the orchard with gray water and compost the latrine output.  I sense that sometimes the code people balk.  Brandy admits that she and the bank have different views of mortgage payments and community ownership, so the commune part of OUR Ecovillage is struggling a bit.  The education mission, in contrast, is proceeding full throttle.

 

Brandy rushes off and leaves me with a group of women who have just finished a two week permaculture design course.  They have been staying in tents and using a latrine.  The latrine is called the “Credit Union” because it takes deposits.  Withdrawals are also required; users have to take turns dumping the latrine bucket into the humanure composter.  One of the students, Rebecca, an ecology professor at Metropolitan State University in Denver, volunteers to give a tour.  We see the doomed pig enjoying a sunny day in a mud puddle.  Chickens and goats comingle around a coop near a greenhouse filled with produce.  Rebecca shows us a peach tree planted on the south side of a cob wall where it can soak up solar heat as the days get cooler.  She also shows us several of the latrines, which have apparently made quite an impression on her.

 

Most of the buildings, while quite artistic, are not completely finished.  I ask Rebecca how she, as a university scientist, interprets the non-linear thinking prevalent in the ecovillage.  She smiles and reminds me that solving humanity’s current problems will require all kinds of different thinking.

 

Rebecca and the peach tree soaking up solar warmth

My son Jeffrey in front of the "Credit Union"

A pig who doesn't know what's in store for her

A volunteer digging potatoes

 

Mercury

Published in the Williamson County Sun 8-26-12

Mercury from a broken thermometer was so much fun to play with.  I would put it on a saucer and break it into tiny beads with a toothpick, and then watch the beads pop back together into a big, shimmery ball.  Genie Vogler told me she would squish a dime into the mercury to make the dime real shiny.  What our mothers didn’t know when they gave us mercury as a toy was that those bits of quicksilver were vaporizing into toxic gases, inhaled into our curious little brains.  We all survived those multiple small exposures, and even went to college, but sometimes when I watch CSPAN I wonder if there could have been a lingering effect on our generation.

 

Remember Alice in Wonderland and the Mad Hatter?  In 1865, when Lewis Carroll wrote the novel, mercuric nitrate was used to make felt hats.  Hatters were chronically exposed to mercury vapors and suffered tremors, hallucinations, and erratic behavior.  Carroll grew up near the center of England’s hat industry, so he would have been acquainted with the condition.  The center of America’s hat making industry was Danbury, Connecticut, where factories dumped waste mercury into the Still River.  Although the use of mercury for making felt was banned in 1941, the river sediment is contaminated with mercury to this day.

 

Mercury has no essential role in animal physiology, but it has become a ubiquitous pollutant.  Every year, fifty tons of mercury is released into American air as the result of burning coal for electricity.  You guessed it:  Texas is Numero Uno, with more than twice the emissions of the distant number 2, Ohio.  The problem with all that mercury in the air is that it settles into our lakes and oceans where bacteria convert it into methylmercury, a neurotoxin that accumulates in the muscle tissue of fish.  The higher the fish is on the food chain, the more mercury it accumulates, so the big carnivorous fish like tuna and shark have the most mercury.  Eating large doses of methylmercury can cause permanent brain damage, especially in a fetus or young child.  This fact creates a dilemma for me.  In my freezer is a big filet of king mackerel, caught recently by my son-in-law at Port Aransas.  It is super-delicious, which I know because I ate the other half of that fish before realizing that king mackerel is on the Food and Drug Administration’s “Do Not Eat” list for pregnant women and young children.  I’m not pregnant, of course, but knowing about the mercury in that fish sucks the joy right out of eating it.

 

Mercury can also bypass the air and enter directly into our water supply.  Dentists’ offices that place or remove amalgam fillings (the silver ones which are 43% mercury) flush 3.7 tons of mercury a year into municipal wastewater systems, according to an estimate by the EPA.  Ninety percent of that mercury will settle out with the biosolids and can re-enter the environment if the biosolids are incinerated or applied to land as fertilizer.  The other ten percent remains in the treated water and returns to our lakes and streams.  The quantity in the water is too little to hurt you if you drink it, but it can be converted to methylmercury and concentrated in fish.  Mercury never goes away.  It just moves around.

 

Although in most states it is still perfectly legal for dentists to flush waste amalgam down the drain, the American Dental Association recommends that it be carefully captured and recycled.  Dr. David Hennington was kind enough to show me his amalgam separator, a special filter that removes amalgam fragments from his surgical wastewater.  Dr. Hennington prefers to fill cavities with the new tooth-colored composite resins and doesn’t use amalgam for filling teeth anymore, but often he has to remove an old silver filling that has failed.

 

Interestingly, another way that dental amalgams contribute to mercury pollution is by cremations.  When a body with amalgam fillings is cremated, the high temperatures vaporize the mercury.  The EPA estimates that every year several tons of mercury go up in smoke from cremated teeth.

 

There is a lot of controversy about possible health effects of having amalgam fillings in your mouth.  It is well known that there are mercury emissions even from cured amalgam fillings, but the amount is so small that it is difficult to prove any detriment to health.  The argument will rage on, but neither Dr. Hennington nor the American Dental Association recommends removing amalgam fillings that are functioning well.  If a dentist advises you to remove all your old amalgam fillings to avoid mercury toxicity, put your hand over your wallet and get a second opinion.  Dr. Hennington belongs to the Eco-Dentistry Association, and not even they recommend removing intact amalgam fillings.  They do, however, recommend that you save water by turning off the tap while you brush your teeth.

 

Dr. David Hennington and his amalgam separator

"Smart" Meters - published in the Sun August 11, 2011

Aldo Salinas, a supervisor with Texas Meter and Device,

 is in charge of installing smart meters in Georgetown

A controversy about “smart” electric meters is raging through the internet.  Some say the meters are exposing us to dangerous radiation; others believe the meters are prying into our private affairs.  The city of Georgetown is currently in the process of installing new meters that measure the amount of electricity used by a home in 15 minute intervals.  The data is stored, and then several times a day the information is sent wirelessly to the utility company, as if the meter were sending a text message.  This transmission is the crux of the concern.

The truth is that Georgetown residents have already been using meters with wireless technology since 1998.  The old meters transmitted only once a day, but the wholesale market for electricity operates on a 15 minute standard, so the old meters were obsolete, and they were wearing out anyway.

Currently customers pay the same price for electricity no matter what time of day it is consumed, but at some future date the new meters could be used for time-of-use pricing, offering customers the option to pay lower rates for electricity during off-peak hours.  For example, rather than running the dishwasher at 6:30 pm when demand is high, it could be run at 11 pm for discounted rates.  This shift would not only save customers money, but would allow the city to avoid buying expensive electricity during periods of high demand.

The smart meters are clearly useful from an energy standpoint.  What about possible health effects?

Human beings have always lived in a soup of electromagnetic energy from the sun, coming at us in a broad spectrum of wavelengths and frequencies.  We are most familiar with the center of the spectrum, visible light, because that is the frequency our eyes evolved to receive.  Higher frequency energy, like X-ray, carries more energy than visible light.  Because X-rays have a very short wavelength, they can penetrate all the way through your body to make a picture, but you can’t feel anything at all because you have no sensory receptors for X-rays.  X-rays are called “ionizing” radiation because their extremely high energy enables them to knock electrons off molecules in DNA, which can lead to mutations and even cancer.

In contrast, microwaves and radio waves are less energetic than visible light.  These waves are called “non-ionizing” radiation because they are too weak to knock electrons off DNA molecules.  They can however cause vibration of molecules in biologic tissue.  A microwave oven uses a 2450 megahertz signal to vibrate water molecules in food, heating it up.  This is called thermal effect.  Radio waves are even lower frequency than microwaves, but thermal effect has caused serious burns in workers or military personnel who stood directly in front of a powerful radar antenna for a prolonged time.  Sailors used to believe that the thermal effect from radar could make them infertile for 24 hours.  Unfortunately for women on shore, this method of contraception did not prove to be reliable.

Just as sound waves can be loud or soft, radio signals can be generated with differing power densities.  The inside of a microwave oven is going to have a very strong power density, because it is designed to create a thermal effect, which only occurs at power densities greater than 100 milliwatts/centimeter².  The power density of a cell phone is less than 1 milliwatt/centimeter², so the energy dissipates too quickly to heat tissue.  Even so, a cell phone can be pressed to the ear for hours at a time, so the Federal Communications Commission regulates the output of all cell phones and other devices that use wireless transmission.

Power density decreases rapidly with distance.  A smart meter on the outside wall of the house is a thousand times less exposure to a resident inside than talking on a cell phone would be.  Even baby monitors, cordless phone bases, and wireless routers expose you to more radio waves than smart meters.  Some people claim that they experience headaches or nausea when exposed to these devices, but controlled experiments have demonstrated that people experience the same symptoms if they are just told that they are being exposed but really aren’t.  Humans cannot perceive radio waves, just as they cannot perceive X-rays.  We do not have “eyes” for those frequencies.  Put the issue in perspective:  if you are comfortable with a cell phone, don’t worry about the much smaller risk from a smart meter.

The other main objection to smart meters is that they are an invasion of privacy, that the city might check how often you use your margarita machine.  Electricity is electricity; a meter cannot distinguish your toaster from your hair dryer and it can’t figure out what kind of videos you are watching.  A “smart” meter is just not that smart.  Once again, your phone is the guilty party.  Your service provider knows who you call, what you Google, and where you are at any moment of the day.

Art at Texas Disposal Systems
Published in the Sun July 28, 2012

Back in high school nobody suspected that Chris Anderson was an artistic genius.  His experience with art was limited to a ceramics class at Colville High in northeastern Washington State where he enjoyed throwing a few pots on a potter’s wheel.  He also took metal shop.  The steel was less pliable than clay, but Chris gradually learned to mold it into useful items and tools.  When he graduated, he went to work in his dad’s shop building steel blades for snow plows.  But every spring when the snow melted his dad laid him off, so Chris took a job at an air conditioning coil plant where he expanded his repertoire to copper and aluminum.

Chris got a reputation for being clever with metal.  The people at Boise Plywood called him with a problem.  After all the plywood layers are spiralled off the giant logs they were left with skinny eight foot posts that they wanted to sell as fence posts.  Chris built them a giant pencil sharpener.

 

Chris had been making tools and parts out of steel for about 10 years when a rancher who catered to buffalo hunters asked him to make a steel buffalo skull to decorate his fancy gate.  Chris had never done any steel sculpture before but agreed to give it a try.  Not only did he manage a realistic skull, but he threw in some chrome plating to add some pizzazz.  From that moment, it was like the scales fell from his eyes.  Chris began to see creations in rusty pieces of steel where others saw only junk.  The ideas started coming one after another.  He made life size animals, bears, and a moose.  The Forest Service commissioned him to build a memorial to the Civilian Conservation Corps and Chris fashioned a six foot man building a stone wall.

Chris used scrap steel because he could get it for 25 cents a pound.  He didn’t care if it was a little rusty.  “You just clean it up and it’s good as new.”  Gradually he gave up snowplow blades and air conditioning coils and supported himself by displaying his creations at art shows.  His favorite show was the Safari Club International in Reno, Nevada.  It was there in 2011 that his life abruptly changed.

A Texan walked into the booth at the Reno show and eyed the big steel animals.  He casually mentioned that he owned a couple of scrap yards and a recycling business and was looking for a resident artist who could do big animals.  Chris and his wife had just built a new home in Washington, and weren’t that interested in relocating to a Texas scrap yard, so Chris didn’t pay too much attention to the suggestion.  But the Texan left his card.  Just for grins, Chris checked the website.

He discovered that Bob Gregory, CEO of Texas Disposal Systems, has some really big scrap yards and a really big recycling business.  He also really likes exotic wild animals, and in fact has over 2000 of them on the Exotic Game Ranch surrounding the TDS landfill.  Mr. Gregory invited Chris to come to Texas and look around.  When Chris got off the plane in Austin on an 80 degree February day, the former snowplow maker thought to himself, “Holy Mackerel, this ain’t too bad.”  He liked what he saw at the TDS facility, and he liked the Gregory family.  Mr. Gregory had mentioned that he might be interested in an elephant sculpture, so Chris went back home and secretly whipped up a stainless steel baby elephant head.  In March Chris came back with his wife to sell her on Texas and brought the baby elephant head to seal the deal with the Gregorys.  The offering worked, and Chris became the resident artist at TDS in November 2011.

It’s a good thing that Chris has a big shop, because the lion he is building now stands 16 feet high at the top of his mane.  All around the shop are the bent and damaged dumpsters that have completed their lives as trash receptacles and are about to be reborn as lion skin and claws.  Using springs and hinges, Chris plans to have the lion’s tail and mane wave gently with the passing breeze.  Scattered around the shop are other projects in various stages of completion:  a couple of gargantuan sunflowers whose heads rotate with the wind, a saguaro cactus fashioned from old rebar, a rhinocerous.

Already completed and on display in front of the TDS offices are a magnificent eagle nesting high up in a recycled steel tree and a hungry bear family raiding a bee hive in a tree.  Every steel leaf on the bears’ tree is cut from the side of an old dumpster and attached with a fishing swivel, fluttering and chiming with the breeze.  Chris is just getting started.  We can expect some really great things to come out of those old dumpsters.

Some thoughts about pesticides
published in the Sun July 14, 2012

Dr. Maggie Stummer and Schnitzel, who is flea-free

At veterinarian Maggie Stummer’s home there are at least three dogs, two cats, a cow and calf, two rabbits, plus a flock of chickens, ducks, and baby turkeys.  I have come to visit with her about flea collars.  When Dr. Stummer sees a dog or cat wearing a flea collar she pulls it off and throws it in the trash.  A flea collar works by coating the animal’s fur with insecticide.  The insecticide is licked off by the pet and rubbed off by anyone who touches the pet.  Not only can flea collar insecticides be toxic to the animal, but Dr. Stummer wonders why anyone would risk exposing their children, who hug and kiss the pet, and maybe even sleep with it.  She prefers flea medications given by mouth.  “The oral products are safe and your kid doesn’t touch it.”

Most of us don’t like insects very much, so we have invented insecticides to kill them.  I’ll admit that when wood ants threatened to turn my dining room into a pile of dust last week even yours truly grabbed a can of Raid.  The problem is that insects and humans have a lot in common.  We are both carbon-based life forms with DNA, for example.  A chemical that is poisonous to a bug will likely have some bad effects on people as well.

Many flea collars are impregnated with the organophosphate tetrachlorvinphos.  Organophosphates are a class of insecticide that interferes with the neurotransmitter acetylcholine.  Insects and humans both use acetylcholine as a chemical signal from nerve cells to muscles, releasing just enough acetylcholine to cause purposeful movement.  When an insect is exposed to an organophosphate, acetylcholine floods the synapse and the insect twitches uncontrollably until it dies. Luckily people and dogs are much bigger than insects, so a fatal dose of organophosphate for a bug is a tiny dose for us.  If you got a dose proportional to your body weight, you too would lie on your back and twitch.  Sarin nerve gas, an organophophate, was one of the chemical agents used by Saddam Hussein to massacre Kurds in 1988.  Worldwide about 300,000 people die every year from exposure to organophosphate pesticides, and 3 million become ill.  Organophosphate exposure has been linked to attention deficit disorder in children.

The other day a salesman came to my door and asked if I have bugs in my house.  Of course we have those tiny spiders that catch bugs in the corners and make those little spots on the floor so I said yes.  He offered to come in and spray, but I told him we prefer a few spiders to toxic chemicals.  He told me, “It’s not toxic – it’s made from chrysanthemums,” conjuring up the wholesomeness of a homecoming queen.  I still preferred spiders.  The salesman realized he was dealing with a nutjob and left to search for a more meticulous housekeeper.  But let me explain this chrysanthemum thing.

Chrysanthemums contain an organic neurotoxin called pyrethrum.  During the Napoleonic Wars, French soldiers used powdered pyrethrum to control fleas and lice.  Pyrethrum is still available today, but chrysanthemum powder was NOT what the salesman wanted to spray in my house.

He wanted to use a pyrethroid, which is a synthetic insecticide similar in action to pyrethrum.  Pyrethroids are found in many, many household products and can be recognized by a chemical name that ends in “thrin.”  Pyrethroids have largely replaced organophosphates in bug sprays for home use because they are generally considered safer for people.  Safer, but not totally safe.

Pyrethroids are used in large doses on lawns to treat fire ants, mosquitoes, chinch bugs, et cetera.   Insecticides on the lawn are very effective.  They kill all the insects, both good and bad, and leave nothing for the birds and lizards to eat, creating an ecological wasteland.  Even though these lawn treatments are supposed to be safe for pets, every week Dr. Stummer sees dogs that develop vomiting and diarrhea two or three days after their yards are treated.  Cats are especially sensitive and can be killed by a dose that would be safe for a dog.  Pesticides for the yard are formulated to persist for months, so animals and people continually track the residue into the house.  Children crawl on the floor and contaminated little hands go into little mouths.  In lab animals pyrethroids can cause thyroid, liver, and nerve damage.  They can also act as endocrine disruptors, affecting reproductive development and stimulating breast cancer cells.  Pyrethroids are frequently combined with piperonyl butoxide, a chemical which increases effectiveness by inhibiting an insect’s ability to detoxify the pyrethroid.  A study at Columbia in 2011 showed that children exposed to piperonyl butoxide in utero had a drop in IQ equal to that caused by lead poisoning.  Dr. Stummer worries about this chronic low level exposure of our children to multiple pesticides, which may be present not only in the home but also on food sprayed at the farm.  “What are we going to know in 30 years?”

Here are Dr. Stummer’s general suggestions about insecticides:

1.  Avoid flea collars, except on rare occasions such as hunting trips.

2.  Check with your veterinarian for appropriate formulations and dosages before treating your pet.

3.  Avoid spraying your whole house or yard with pesticides.

4.  If you must use a pesticide for an out-of-control situation, learn to do it safely and spot treat the involved area only.

5.  Change your attitude about bugs.  Small crawly things are not our enemies, and can be beneficial.  We are all in this together.