By Rich Kozlovich
As most of you know I left the OPMA because I couldn't resign from NPMA due to joint membership. I can tell you from conversations, that discontent isn't isolated. While others have expressed the same discontent with NPMA as I, they've chosen to remain within OPMA, always hoping for the best, and trying to see the benefits offered, and I can understand that.
Of course the question everyone should be asking is: Would I act differently if I was still active, in the leadership and not retired? No, I wouldn't, and those who know me best don't doubt that! While I intended to do a piece on this later this year, this article has been inspired by a post by Ohio Attorney General Silent After Texas, Others Leave NAAG, appearing in the Ohio Star discussing a letter addressed to Iowa Attorney General Thomas Miller (D), the president of NAAG.
After the top attorneys in Texas, Montana and Missouri announced that they would be leaving the National Association of Attorneys General (NAAG), Ohio appears poised to remain part of the group. “The attorneys general of Texas, Missouri and Montana have decided to withdraw our states’ membership from NAAG,” said a letter penned by Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton (R)..........
The article goes on to show how they've approached the leadership about "the Association’s leftward shift over the past half-decade has been intolerable. Indeed, this liberal bent has fundamentally undermined NAAG’s role as a ‘nonpartisan national forum’ that ‘provides a community … to collaboratively address’ important issues,” the letter said. “We can no longer spend our taxpayers’ money to sustain our membership with NAAG under these circumstances.”
All of which accomplished nothing. What conclusion did they arrive at? It was never going to be fixed and they ended their relationship with their national association.
The article goes on to note Ohio and 18 other states almost immediately ended their relationship with the National School Boards Association because of their position that parents who were exercising their Constitutional rights protesting what their school boards were up to were domestic terrorists, and wanted to sic the FBI on them.
Both associations hold values antithetical to the values of many of their members, and quite frankly, to the nation's values.
So, what's this have to do with NPMA? Below is information I've published in the past. It's nothing new and shocking, but it is the truth, and it needs to be taken seriously.
In my years I have seen our industry go from being ardent defenders of pesticides universally, to a substantial number who are almost as anti-pesticide in their approach as anyone from the Sierra Club or the NRDC, especially with their embrace of "green" pest control, and IPM. I find this especially true with those holding advanced degrees in our industry, any or all of whom I'm still willing to publicly debate, irrespective of position or education.
Over they years the NPMA did some excellent work for our industry, and they should be commended for it, but having done something right doesn't give anyone a pass on the rest of life. Over the years I've yet to see them take a truly heroic stand against leftist green positions. School Environmental Protection Act? They supported it. Our members went to Legislative day and told our representatives Ohio did not. If Ohio could stand up against this, why couldn't NPMA?
The EPA spent untold millions promoting a structural pest control system
that doesn’t exist. IPM! In point of fact there is no
such thing as IPM in structural pest control. (Please see The Pillars
of IPM.) NPMA embraced it.
Perhaps I missed it, but as far as I can tell they've been silent
on repealing the Food Quality Protection Act, and some even claimed it
was a good law. But time is the great leveler of
truth.
This law was originally intended to be a pro-pesticide bill fixing the Delaney Clause, the foolishness 1958 Amendment of the of the 1937
Federal Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act. An
amendment that unscientifically declared if something tested
carcinogenic at any level, it was carcinogenic at every level. But the
EPA turned this into one of the most corrupt anti-pesiticde laws since
the EPA banned DDT. As a result, we lost Ficam and Dursban,
(carmabates and organophosphates) because of EPA's irrational and
radical changes regarding risk and unending testing.
Neither were banned in spite of what you may read. The
manufacturers pulled their registration for structural applications.
There was very little argument, and when Dow decided not to fight it the
other companies manufacturing chlorpyrifos gave up.
Chlorpyrifos: A Hostage of the Secret Science Rule? Then
there was the EPA's unscientific demands regarding endocrine distuptors.
It has seemed to me that over the decades the NPMA has
far too willingly embraced a philosophy of appeasement with the
neo-pagan secular psuedo-religous movements of the left.
Then there was the Butterfield Bill, as I outlined in my article, The Butterfield Bill: Activity as a Substitute for Accomplishment, Part II,
which NPMA wanted us all to support. Why? I read it, and outlined to the leadership
what was wrong with it. I was told I needed to see the positive
aspects of that bill. I asked - what were they? I didn't get an
answer.
Well, it didn't pass, and if it had, it wouldn't have done anything to
relieve the plague of bed bugs in America. If passed it would have been
an expensive waste, and an ineffectual imposition on our industry and
the public. In short, more government, less results. And we were
supporting this why?
Why? That’s the question I kept asking over the years, and I've never gotten a satisfactory answers. I've gotten a lot of logical fallacies and obfuscation, none of which was satisfactory.
Over the years the rates of cancer have consistently
dropped, and yet we still hear the irrational – and unscientific –
mantra that pesticides cause cancer. If you were to take a plastic
overlay of our modern demographic and put it over the demographics of
those living in 1914 and those living in 2014 you would notice two very
distinct differences. Very few people smoked and very few people lived
past 65, the two major areas of cancer related deaths. The decrease I
spoke of would be even more dramatic if we reduced the demographic of
smokers and the aged from our modern demographic chart.
Now that whole narrative has been shown to be blatantly false, so what did they do? Now the big ones are endocrine disruption (and here), Colony Collapse Disorder, and the junk science surrounding the Sixth Mass Extinction. All of which have been proven false by time and real science. None of which, as far as I can tell, the NPMA stands up against, and in point of fact, collaborates on.
When the federal government banned DDT industry rose up as one to defend it, and it was the same for chlordane. Then came the Food Quality Protection Act and
which brought about the irrational elimination of Ficam and Dursban
(chlorpyrifos), [Neither were banned in spite of what you may read. The
manufacturers pulled their registration for structural applications.
There was very little argument, and when Dow decided not to fight it the
other companies manufacturing chlorpyrifos gave up.
Was it a business decision? You bet!
Chlorpyrifos
was out of patent and it represented a very small percentage of their
annual intake, at least from structural pest control, and the lawsuits
kept coming. It is interesting that the last time I looked it’s still
used as an agriculture product under the brand name Lorsban. But since then we've now learned just how deceitful the EPA has been with it's Secret Science on Dursban. Why aren't we demanding Dursban's return?
The
makers of Ficam W (bendiocarb), which I understand is still used in
Australia and New Zealand and I’m told still works on bed bugs, gave up
also. Why? We lost two whole categories of pesticides [organophosphates
and carbamates] from our arsenal with that terrible piece of legislation
called the Food Quality Protection Act, which wasn’t about food or
protection. It was about making it too expensive to keep pesticide
registrations active, thereby banning pesticides without having to go
through all those nasty and potentially messy legal and scientific steps -
where they would have lost.
Now we come to those new restrictions on pyrethroids,
and there was hardly a peep, except from Ohio’s pest controllers. People
at the national level may not like it, but if the Ohio pest controllers –
who are responsible for the very existence of NPMA – can stand up to be
counted, and fight the good fight, why can't the NPMA?
A fight the
entire industry should have been fighting and should still be fighting.
But nothing happened. Quietly as church mice, passive as sheep and as
rational as lemmings, NPMA did nothing useful to maintain our ability to
use pyrethroids as we've been doing for decades. Oh, I can hear the
screams now about how much NPMA did, but the proof is in the pudding.
We have unreasonable restrictions.
What’s worse it appears the manufactures of
pyrethroids, known as the “Pyrethroid Working Group (PWG), an industry
task force whose members are AMVAC, Bayer, Cheminova, DuPont, FMC
Corporation, Syngenta and Valent", were part and parcel of this
pesticide reduction scheme. I would have loved to have been a fly on the
wall when the Pyrethroid Working Group was formed.
I wonder, does this whole thing sound conspiratorial to anyone besides me? I know…I know…. there’s no such thing as a conspiracy. I often wonder why the people who have never read a history book are so ardent in that view. Just a thought!
And why were these restrictions
to structural pest control and not to lawn care or agriculture? We have
substantial restrictions against where and how
we make pyrethroid applications to structures, while the lawns,
fields and shrubs can be covered with pyrethroids by the lawn care and
agricultural industries.
Does that sound irrational to anyone besides me?
All this to protect an almost microscopic shrimplike
creature known as Hyalella azteca, a creature that is capable of living
in extremely adverse conditions, and is one of the most prolific
creatures in North America and South America. Pyrethroids are used
extensively everywhere. How can that be? If these products are so deadly
to Hyalella here in the United States, or more specifically California, why aren't they in the rest of the world?
I have spent some time going over the information
available and there are a number of things I would like to see answered.
Since this “shrimp” is so impacted by small amounts of pyrethroid
materials; with one study claiming the appearance of chlorpyrifos
created a more toxic impact, which I found truly interesting since we
are no longer using chlorpyrifos in structural pest control, so where
did that come from? Agriculture! Until recently there was no real
effort
to eliminate it for agricultural purposes, but Scott Pruitt,
President Trump's first EPA director put a stop to that saying they were
going to follow the science. While that's still being litigated, the
important fact is this: The chemical companies fought to keep it for
agriculture. Why not structural pest control?
Why hasn't NPMA been more
strident on these matters? But the real questions that need answering are these:
- NPMA seems to have a penchant for embracing leftist narratives on pesticides and junk science. Why?
- Now our national association is deciding if it's going to get involved in "diversity" issues. Why?
The structural pest control industry has nothing to be ashamed of. We've accepted people from every walk of life in our industry, regardless of race, religion, sex and even sexual orientation. In Ohio, in the 1960's one of the founders and first President of what's now the Greater Cleveland Pest Control Association was Bob Caldwell, and is a past President of the Ohio Pest Management Association. He's black. In the 1960's Ohio was either the first or among the first to choose a woman for it's state association President, Betty Portwood. One of our recent Presidents was Molly Patton Marsh. John Patton's daughter.
Betty has now passed and was in her 90's, and Bob is still running his company, and both were respected and treated accordingly by our industry forever.
- What are NPMA's priorities?
- Why has the NPMA decided to get involved in social engineering?
- Is that their job?
- Where in the NPMA constitution does it outline that as a duty?
- If that became their job, when was that decided, and by whom?
- Does that mean we can start posting about social issues on the NPMA Open Forum, if it still exists?
In the past anyone doing so would have their posts deleted, and even then, we were subject to unpublished and unknown standards for acceptance, even if the posts or comments met the posted criteria for acceptable posts.
I've been there, done that, so I know it's true. Just like EPA had secret science, it would appear, the NPMA had, secret standards for posting on the Open Forum regarding topic, and who was posting. But either way, we still have to come back to the main questions.
- Why is the NPMA getting publicly involved with Social Justice issues?
- What is their agenda, and why?
- If the NPMA can be so public about social issues that have no bearing on pest control, how can they restrict anyone else from doing so?
- Is that blatant hypocrisy!
- What is their agenda now?
- What are their priorities?
- Who articulated such an agenda and priorities and why?
- Do we need to redefine and rewrite the NPMA constitution and bylaws?
Make no mistake about this, as Thomas Sowell stated: If there is ever a contest for words that substitute for thought, “diversity” should be recognized as the undisputed world champion. You don’t need a speck of evidence, or a single step of logic, when you rhapsodize about the supposed benefits of diversity. The very idea of testing this wonderful, magical word against something as ugly as reality seems almost sordid.
No comments:
Post a Comment