BRAMPTON -
April marked the 10th anniversary of the start of the biweekly musings which morphed into The Eclectic Gardener, so, when a neighbour brought a page from the paper and said that there had been a response to the previous week’s column, it was like a belated birthday present. It was a sunny morning, and it had rained overnight making the ground soft, so I took a border fork and started popping dandelions out of the small patch of grass by the road in front of the house. The front lawn went years ago, replaced by a sort of woodland garden full of minor spring bulbs and slowly naturalizing semi-shade plants, so I don’t get to engage much in one of my favourite garden ‘chores’: weeding. I like weeding. Weeding is a totally mindless occupation which engages the hands and the eyes and leaves the brain free to roam and explore. The recent letter was obviously something to ponder. In a decade of writing, I remember only two other resulting letters to the editor, neither of them complimentary and both on the same subject — pesticides. As I recall, the first letter was from a science teacher, the second from someone with a BSc., and the latest from a, K. Jean Cottam, PhD. At least, I thought, my critics were getting more and more expensive to educate. Having joined the workforce aged 16, it’s something of a compliment that any of them consider me worth bothering about. The trouble with free-ranging brains is that they tend to go wandering off asking awkward questions. This PhD for instance; for what line of research was it awarded? Elizabethan wig making? The interaction of hydrogen nuclei at near light speeds? Both perfectly worthy fields of enquiry, but not necessarily pertinent to pesticide use. It is not considered sporting to do mischief to the messenger but, if the messenger is using her reputation to bolster the veracity of the message, she is no longer impartial and her sureties should at least be examined with some care. Readers should be just as dubious about some scary pronouncement from the Suzuki Foundation as they would be about safety assurances from Monsanto. As a "retired federal intelligence analyst", it is quite alarming that Cottam would mistake the column’s introductory paragraphs, about Carrie Nation and the results of Prohibition, as being a comparison between the "use and abuse of alcohol and the unnecessary use of lawn pesticides". Prohibition was used in the column as an example of what can happen when legislation is based on popular public opinion driven by, presumably well-meaning, pressure groups. It is in the likely results of a pesticide ban and the results of prohibition that time might show that comparisons were warranted. Regarding prohibition, the column said: "For the rich and the very rich, the champagne and good whisky continued to flow copiously. At the speakeasies and through darkened doors in back-allies, lesser folk could get a furtive bottle or three, and bath-tub gin ran like ditch-water for the poor and the down-and-out". Of the pesticide ban, in years to come one might read: The rich and the very rich continued playing golf on their pristine weed-free greens. On the black market, lesser folk could get a furtive bottle of Roundup— diverted from agricultural use. And law-abiding home-gardeners turned to highly toxic and hazardous kitchen-brews of tobacco and rhubarb leaves, and to kettles of scalding-hot salt water. Although I’ll likely not live long enough to see the currently proposed pesticide laws thrown out as were the Prohibition laws, I would not be at all surprised to learn that the ban on control products registered for home use had made no measurable difference to the rates of asthma, allergies, endocrine disruption, or any of the other popular early 21st century maladies. In the real world of risk, it is much more likely that kids in Ontario will be killed and injured riding bicycles than they will be killed or injured because their grandparents smelled Malathion a few times. Indeed, if someone can find actual statistics that show otherwise, I’ll happily put the numbers into a future column. Personally, as a male, I’d be far more concerned about my daily intake of female hormones— from birth-control pill residue recycled in the water supply—than I would be about a once-a-year spritz of Cygon to keep borers out of the Irises.
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