Sulfoxaflor Needs Banning, Too

Fellow Americans, over the weekend you need to meander over to https://www.regulations.gov/document?D=EPA-HQ-OPP-2010-0889-0659 and tell them you want them to do their job and protect endangered bees, butterflies, and undoubtedly also humans from yet another "new" chemical poison spray. 

Sulfoxaflor is already banned in Europe, which some people seem to think might constitute a reason to ban it here. I don't agree with that. I do agree that we need to stop spraying anything but water outdoors, and force companies like Dow to work on mechanical, not chemical, solutions to farmers' pest problems. 

Why does this web site have a "Butterfly of the Week" feature? Because never before in human history have humans had so much information about butterflies...or recklessly endangered some of them to the verge of extinction. I wanted to write the butterfly book my brother and I wanted to read, as children, now that most of the information that book needs is available. I'm afraid it may become a requiem when it ought to be a big fat supplement to a field guide

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My comment is long because it's an edited version of one some e-friends have circulated. You may recognize some of their words. You're free to copy and paste the comment below onto the page, but you can do better if you take a few minutes to think about it.

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The EPA should cancel the registration for sulfoxaflor, a pesticide that poses too great a risk to bees, other pollinators, and endangered species.

American farmers need to be moving beyond "pesticides" of all sorts. As a start all pesticide sprays should be banned by now, with a focus on limiting the use of paints and dusts to prevent "vicious pesticide cycles" from boosting pest populations.

We don't need to follow Europe's recommendations, but in this case we have abundant scientific evidence that sulfoxaflor will aggravate losses to species that are already threatened or endangered. The American bumblebee population has plummeted by nearly 90% and has disappeared from 8 states. The rusty patched bumblebee has also experienced severe declines and was listed as endangered in 2017. The population of the already endangered eastern monarch butterfly dropped by 22% from 2022 to 2023, with the population east of the Rocky Mountains now down by around 90% since the mid-1990s.

Experts agree that insect declines are in large part due to exposure to pesticides, specifically insecticides and fungicides.

EPA’s own Endangered Species Biological Evaluation “finds that sulfoxaflor is likely to adversely affect certain listed species and designated critical habitats.”

We also have known for a long time that using poisons to fight nuisance plants or animals is a losing game. Nuisance species usually have shorter generations than their predators, so at best the next generation of the nuisance species will be even more numerous than the one humans tried to control. This is how species like corn earworms and codling moths became major pests despite being prey species that would not normally become serious nuisances. EPA's default decision should be to push industry toward mechanical rather than chemical control of all pest species, ban all new poisons, and move rapidly to phase out the old ones (what happened to that promise to get glyphosate off the market by 2022?). 

The science is clear. Sulfoxaflor must be banned, not given a pass for expanded use.

Too many of EPA’s decisions have been driven by corporate collusion. The agency needs to do its job to protect the environment, not chemical industry profits.

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