Stop Aerial Spraying of Pesticides - Town Hall Meeting February 24, 2008
Berkeley, California 94709
CASS Berkeley Town Hall Meeting
Sunday 24 Feb 2008, 5 - 7 pm
Berkeley Hillside Club
2286 Cedar Street Berkeley
In the Fall of 2007 the California Department of Food and Agriculture began a program of aerial spraying in Santa Cruz and Monterey Counties. Your friends and neighbors in these counties were subjected to aerial assault by pesticides in a dangerous --and ineffective-- attempt to eradicate the Light Brown Apple Moth (LBAM), a relatively insignificant agricultural pest common in Australia, New Zealand, and Hawaii.
The CDFA eradication program, of spraying repeatedly for months (and possibly years) on end, is coming to the Bay Area in 2008 --and to Berkeley in particular.
Come to a town hall meeting to get informed, get riled up, and get motivated to stop this program predicated not on good science but on the politics of trade wars. It is time to get prepared to publicly confront the CDFA on its nonsensical and poisonous behavior.
The town hall meeting is sponsored by CASS (California Alliance to Stop the Spraying), an alliance of non-profits and individuals that originated in the Monterey Bay Area in December 2007.
For more information on the spraying in general, check out the activist website www.lbamspray.com.
Official Website: http://www.hillsideclub.org/cass.htm
Added by raines on January 28, 2008
Comments
sbfisher
I'm really not sure whether this is any kind of threat to human health or not, but the CASS site has a letter in which they say that many other chemicals have been added to the pheromone which may be small enough to be PM10 particulates and/or carcinogenic. Their letter is at http://www.lbamspray.com/00_Documents/2008/Letter_%20R.%20Khalsa_Jan2_2008.pdf .
If what they say is true, then this is cocktail of pheromones with perhaps dangerous chemicals added and it has never been tested or approved for usage in a populated residential area.
I'm not sure who to believe, but there have been plenty of times in the past that government agencies said something was fine, which turned out not to be. I'm not sure I would believe the word of a government agency saying "trust me, it's safe" if they have inadequate or misleading data to show that it is safe as claimed.
Again, I have no idea who to believe on this, but it seems more reasonable to place the burden of proof on the government if this spray does indeed contain dangerous and carcinogenic chemicals in addition to pheromones. The letter claims that it has never been tested in the type of situation, frequency, and application to populated areas and in the cocktail of chemicals now being used with it (and that the chemicals being sprayed haven't been fully disclosed).
Who knows who is to be believed in this case.
spidra
As far as I've heard, they're spraying a moth pheromone. Why would that hurt humans?