1. Upper Agua Fria Watershed Partnership Meeting
Tuesday,April 2, 2019 10 am Arcosanti Red Room
Introductions and announcements
Draft Agenda
1. So many thanks to Maricopa Water District for an incredible March presentation: discussion of what we have learned, ( hope to provide minutes this week)
2. AZ Water/Ways http://azhumanities.org/water-ways/. Update, Next Meeting March 26. Research what Canon School in BCC is doing; explore possibilities for Mayer area grammar and high schools, Spring Ridge Academy, Orme School, any possibilities to involve HS students in Wet/Dry? 3. Friends of the Agua Fria – Agua Fria Days in Cordes to seek more local participation now scheduled for May 18 at Cordes Visitor Center/High Desert Heritage Museum. Wet/Dry 2019 prospects, BLM support? New Monument Manager Tyler Lindsey as Ron Tipton moves to Hassayampa Field Office and Rem Hawes moves to State office.
4. Conservation easerments: Central Arizona Land Trust – Cold Water Farm, Orme updates.
5. Solar Farm on State Land proposal: Update if available. share letter from UAFWP 5. 2019 Meeting Schedule – June usually at Mingus Springs; Black Canyon City Water District (Dave Moore) good for May 7 meeting, Mayer Water District (Frank Soto) later in year
6. Other Business 2019 Goals Livestock for Landscape- Kathy Voth Cordes Junction Projects – Love’s to start in June Points of Pride Outreach for new members Debra Toseline Project Cave Creek
2. AZGives Day. Be a part of something that all of Arizona can benefit from. Just a few weeks away from tax day, you can prepare for tax season 2020 by donating to a non-profit organization. Whatever you give, you can take off taxes next year.
Just go online to AZGives.org and look for the non-profit of your choice to donate. While it is great to donate to national and international charities, it’s even better to have you donation stay in Arizona. So please, think about it, and GIVE.
3. Is The EPA Helping To Poison Bees?
The EPA has been allowing growers to spray pesticides that are toxic to honeybees and other pollinators using a loophole that bypasses standard environmental review and public comment, according to a report by the Center for Biological Diversity (CBD), an environmental legal advocacy group.
The CBD analyzed EPA records and found 78 instances since 2012 when the agency permitted sulfoxaflor, a compound that the EPA’s own research found highly toxic to pollinators, to be used on crops spanning an area of over 17.5 million acres in 18 states. The EPA justified this, says the CBD, by using a loophole in its own regulations that allows for “emergency exemptions” in cases involving “an urgent, nonroutine situation that requires the use of a pesticide(s)”sulfoxaflor was initially developed by Dow Chemical in 2010 and was marketed as a safer alternative to neonicotinoids, a widely used class of pesticide. Neonicotinoids had become a prime suspect in colony collapse disorder, to the point where they had been banned in some countries for their toxicity to honeybees.
Sulfoxaflor was approved by the EPA in 2013, but in 2015, the 9th Circuit Court reversed that approval after a lawsuit brought by the American Beekeeping Association and other bee-related organizations argued that the approval was made using flawed and limited data, and that sulfoxaflor showed signs of being dangerous to bees. Dow was allowed to amend its application for approval, which it did. The new application said, among other things, that sulfoxaflor could be applied while crops weren’t in bloom to avoid pollinators, and only while wind speed was sufficiently low to keep the pesticide from drifting into areas foraged by bees. In 2016, the EPA approved its use under those circumstances.
But growers can still use sulfoxaflor in ways that sidestep those restrictions. The EPA’s Section 18 allows for something called “emergency exemptions” for pesticides. Section 18 is meant to control unexpected outbreaks of pests that are resistant to approved methods, like an unusual boom in invasive bugs or a fungus. But according to the Center for Biological Diversity report, the EPA has granted emergency exemptions for sulfoxaflor for use against pests that have been plaguing crops for years, like aphids and tarnished plant bugs.
Permitting routine exemptions, says the CBD report, allows pesticide manufacturers to bypass the lengthy approval process put in place to safeguard public and environmental health. “Spraying 16 million acres of bee-attractive crops with a bee-killing pesticide in a time of global insect decline is beyond the pale, even for the Trump administration,” says Nathan Donley, a senior scientist at CBD in a statement. “The EPA is routinely misusing the ‘emergency’ process to get sulfoxaflor approved because it’s too toxic to make it through normal pesticide reviews.” Last fall, the EPA’s own research found that while the “emergency exemption process provides flexibility to growers and other pesticide applicators during emergency situations,” it was less good at measuring “how well the emergency exemption process maintains human health and environmental safeguards.”
And the use of sulfoxaflor seems to be on the rise. Last year, Dow entered an application to the EPA to expand sulfoxaflor’s emergency exemption from cotton and sorghum to avocados, rice, tree farms, ornamental plants, and other crops.
Some disagree with the CBD’s assessment that the EPA’s emergency exemption program is too permissive for sulfoxaflor. Professor David Kerns, the Statewide Integrated Pest Management Coordinator for Texas A&M University, has worked extensively with cotton and sorghum and has been involved in Section 18 registrations for sulfoxaflor. When pesticides like organophosphateswere delisted, says Kerns, growers were left with few options for controlling increasingly resistant outbreaks of tarnished plant bugs in cotton and sugar aphids in sorghum. “The emergency came with tarnished plant bugs because resistance was so widespread to other products that we had nothing else,” says Kerns. “But since we’ve gotten the Section 18, and since you’ve seen it used for several years in a row now, the benefits of that product in the system are paying off.” Kerns says that sulfaxoflor’s effectiveness has actually reduced the overall amount of chemicals sprayed—in that regard, he said, it’s ”an environmental win” in cotton.
Bees Continued….
Pollinator warnings on products containing sulfoxaflor tell growers to avoid spraying when pollinators are present, though no regulatory mechanism ensures that sprayers follow such warnings. “The vast majority of cotton and sorghum farmers are using sulfoxaflor responsibly,” says Kerns. “If sulfoxaflor use was shown to be causing bee kills and hive decline, then we would no longer support the Section 18.”
“Once the product is dry, its toxicity to bees is greatly reduced. It is highly toxic to bees as wet droplets,” he added. “The goal is to not treat fields with bees actively foraging.”
According to an Entomological Society of America study, sulfoxaflor shows little negative impacts on other beneficial insects—in this case, predatory insects that eat aphid pests in soybeans. But a 2018 study in Nature found that bumblebee colonies exposed to sulfoxaflor reproduced in far lower numbers than colonies that had not
4. Eight Hour OSHA Refresher.
Do you need your OSHA 8 Hour refresher. Contact Dan (623-930-8197) to register for an early April class. $80 covers the cost of the class, a lite breakfast and a lunch.
5. Pollution Prevention (P2) Reporting is Going Paperless with myDEQ
Starting in April 2019, ADEQ will no longer accept paper submissions for P2 reporting. To help with this transition, we invite interested parties to get free training for P2 reporting in our online portal, myDEQ.
Request Free Training >
If you haven’t already registered in myDEQ, you can sign up today and be ready to submit your Toxic Data Report (TDR) due July 1, 2019.
Learn More >
Why myDEQ?
As a myDEQ user, soon you will be able to:
Submit and amend P2 Plans and Annual Progress Reports at your convenience, 24/7
Receive notifications so you never miss a due date
View P2 Plan revisions from ADEQ
Easily update your information
6. Can Lower Speed Limits Reduce Our Overall Carbon Footprint?
What is the most fuel-efficient speed to drive? About 55 miles per hour is the optimum speed for most cars. Kick it up to 65 mph and you are 8 percent less efficient; at 80 mph you are 28 percent less efficient.
Slowing down can also mean reducing your carbon footprint. In 2008, The New York Times estimated that when the 55-miles-per-hour speed limit was in effect, we were saving about 2.56 billion gallons of gasoline a year. Gas consumption has increased by 16.9 percent since 1995, when the limit was abolished, so if we reinstated the 55 mph rule, we could be saving about 3 billion gallons today, or more than 2 percent of the gasoline burned in motor vehicles. We’ve had an almost 17 percent hike in motor vehicle fuel consumption since 1995, thanks to the fact that we have added more than 70 million more vehicles to the fleet, while improving gas mileage a paltry 3.5 mpg.
7. TURN OFF YOUR LIGHTS FOR EARTH HOUR.
Please join us in turning off our lights for one hour at 8:30 p.m., your local time on Saturday, March 30, 2019, to show your support for a healthy planet.
