Flotsam and Jetsam III – Thinking About Agricultural Fumigants (Makes Me Tired)

Still unpacking from my trip last week.

Methyl bromide is to strawberries what fuel is to cars or water is to plants. That being the conventional wisdom, it was not surprising that the alternative to methyl bromide would be methyl iodide.

Well, why not? Once you get accustomed to the idea of protecting crops from soil pests by chemicals which are neurotoxic to humans, carcinogenic in laboratory animals, and migrate through soil to groundwater like. . . water, why not?

I’ve mentioned before in these posts that I started my career with the California Department of Food and Agriculture (CDFA), which at the time was responsible for health and safety regulation of pesticide use. Years after I had left, enough of the California legislature was finally convinced that the same agency responsible for promoting agricultural productivity which inevitably meant (and means today) promoting pesticide use, should not also be regulating safe pesticide use and transferred those functions to the newly-created California Environmental Protection Agency.

At the time though, I had many opportunities to see California agriculture and pest control up close. I observed an entire subculture in places such as El Centro, Lemoore, Patterson, Woodland, Yuba City, Watsonville and Castroville involved with the industrial-strength farming, performing workplace monitoring and sampling of pesticide mixing operations, ground spraying, aerial spraying, soil fumigation, chamber fumigation, even fumigating squirrel holes in an almond orchard using methyl bromide. These observations have led m to the conclusion that most people in urban communities have only the foggiest idea of what has to happen for fruits and vegetables to magically appear in the grocery store, and the price some in rural communities have to pay for all of us to eat well.

After the debacle with DBCP, use of which as a soil fumigant contaminated groundwater throughout California, and the hassle of fumigating with methyl bromide, which is sufficiently hazardous and volatile that acres of polyethylene sheeting need to be pulled across the newly-fumigated fields to keep the stuff in the soil, one would have thought that we as a society and our land-grant agricultural colleges would have been working diligently to transform agricultural pest control and reduce reliance on pesticides by instituting Integrated Pest Management (IPM).

However, we can’t just leave these things in the hands of regulators and scientists. Lots of people will need to care and will need to develop more of an appreciation for the risks and benefits from agricultural pesticides, and start making noises about pesticide hazards, before we start to have more sensible pesticide regulations. It’s a nice idea, but we’re having problems getting more people to pay attention to global climate change even with Al Gore winning the Nobel Prize for promoting awareness about it. As long as the strawberries keep showing up in the stores, I wonder who’s concerned about this beyond the activists.

Flotsam and Jetsam II – Spectator at a Health Care Debate

Many of the passing events during my blogging hiatus I had observed while lurking over at Scienceblogs. For example, there was this little call-and-response between Revere and Orac about whether or not drug quackdom extends to pharmaceutical manufacturers, whether or not physicians serve as “pharma shills” and other associated whatnot concerning drugs. I come down on Revere’s side in this matter; further evidence offered by Revere of how Big Pharma marketing practices are perverting the concept of evidence-based medicine are with this post concerning another side effect associated with the use of Viagra. Just an aside: now, I’m pleased that because of erectile dysfunction, that at least on TV, you get to hear something about middle-aged guy sexuality. But it was painful to watch the “Viva Viagra” ad, with the middle-aged garage band guys singing about their limp wieners. The problem with prescribing PDE inhibitors is that erectile dysfunction can be a symptom for some major underlying lifestyle health problems. This makes me wonder if the physicians prescribing Viagra are also prescribing lifestyle changes for their middle-age male patients. Sex is better when you’re fit, but spinach, olive oil and gym memberships don’t generate revenue for pharmaceutical companies. While Viagra is evidence-based and pharmacologically active, it is still being marketed in a manner designed to strip mine the assets (either through their insurance or personally) of unhealthy people, without accomplishing any other preventive health benefit beyond the ability to get laid once in awhile. I think the “quacks in business suits” argument applies here.

Flotsam and Jetsam I – Travel Blues

Ships' goods which are lost at sea. Also used figuratively in non-nautical contexts to means odds and ends, bits and pieces.

A lot of these are piling up right now as the impending start-up of another blog, the day job and travel pull me away from blogging here. Business travel is especially galling these days, as airline executives are no longer ashamed to just say it to their customers’ faces, “fuck you, we’ll treat you any way we please because you don’t have a choice but to fly with us”. Congress, with war, a storm-ravaged city not rebuilt yet, health-care crisis, housing market crisis and global climate change, having time for hearings about JetBlue holding passengers hostage for hours on the tarmac, is more evidence that things must be pretty bad travel wise. My recent air travel experience included arriving to my destination four hours late, partly unavoidable because of a weather delay, and not being late on the return only because of the foresight to have a long layover. I was overbooked on one flight, a fact that wasn’t revealed until I reach my seat to find someone else with an identical boarding pass in it. Only through the dedicated effort and persistence of a flight attendant in finding me a seat on a theoretically sold-out flight did I avoid missing getting home Friday night. The long layover was key because we departed late while my seating was being sorted out. While I was on the road this week, several people wondered at my plan to drive 300 miles to get to Friday meeting, which entailed greater expense than flying in addition to hours behind the wheel. I had reasoned that, from an inconvenience perspective, driving wasn’t any worse than cooling my heels in an airport. I don’t have the insane productivity skilz to get a lot of work done in airports (and unlike many people, flipping through my e-mails and typing ungrammatical responses with my thumbs on a Blackberry doesn’t really constitute “work”), there’s always a battle for a seat next to an electrical outlet in the terminal, and the need to guard your stuff from thieves, terrorists and TSA means you can’t get up when you please and walk away to grab some coffee, something to eat or to use the can, without shutting down the computer and packing everything along. Besides, this was a meeting I simply couldn’t be late to, and I’ve lost faith that any airline these days can get me anywhere within four hours of my designated arrival time.

So, with things such as airline travel draining the life force from me, several events have passed by during my blogging hiatus. Hopefully, there will be more later.