endocrine disruption
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MEPs block Commission from widening endocrine disruptor definition.
MEPs today blocked a Commission proposal that would have exempted some chemicals from being identified as endocrine disruptors due to wider criteria.
MEPs block Commission from widening endocrine disruptor definition
By Niamh Michail
04-Oct-2017 - Last updated on 04-Oct-2017 at 14:31 GMT
1 COMMENT
MEPs today blocked a Commission proposal that would have exempted some chemicals from being identified as endocrine disruptors due to wider criteria.
The Commission must now come up with a new proposal, taking MEP's requests into account.
The Parliament, which voted on the issue this afternoon (4 October) needed an absolute majority of 376 votes to veto the proposal, which it narrowly won with 389 votes in favour, 235 against and 70 abstentions.
The objection, co-signed by MEP Bas Eickhout, a member of the Greens and European Free Alliance (EFA) party, and backed by the Committee on the Environment, Public Health and Food Safety (ENVI), said the Commission had exceeded its mandate by proposing to exempt some substances from the scope of criteria for identifying the chemicals
The Commission’s proposal can be read here.
Environmental Scientist at Pesticide Action Network (PAN), Angeliki Lyssimachou, said the vote was an example of "true democracy in action".
The result of the vote was also welcomed by pan-EU consumer group BEUC which said the Commission's "unfit definition" would have seen too many chemicals escape the regulatory net.
The ENVI committee objection reads: "The specification of scientific criteria for the determination of endocrine-disrupting properties may only be performed objectively, in the light of scientific data relating to that system, independently of all other considerations, in particular economic ones."
Exposure to these endocrine disrupting chemicals, which are used in food packaging and on pesticides and biocides in food production, has been linked to decreased fertility, a rise in endocrine-related cancers, low sperm quality, obesity and cognition deficit and neurodegenerative diseases, according to one 2015 study published in the Journal of Clinical Endocrinology and Metabolism.
Ahead of the vote, Eickhout said: "It is unacceptable that the Commission tries to lift a ban of certain endocrine disrupters via the backdoor of comitology to further the interests of the pesticides industry. The Commission has a mandate to come up with scientific criteria for endocrine disrupters, but not to undo a ban decided by the legislator.”
According to Eickhout, the vote was “an opportunity to halt the Commission from exceeding its powers, insist on the rule of law and maintain existing restrictions".
RULE OF LAW wins! European Parliament just stopped Commission from exceeding its power, on #endocrinedisrupters, by 389/235/70 @GreensEP
— FoodPolicyRevolution (@FoodRevEU) October 4, 2017
Chemicals known or suspected to be endocrine disruptors are used not just in pesticides but in food packaging, cosmetics and toys.
The Danish Consumer Council tested tins of peeled tomatoes and found five out of eight contained bisphenol A.
Meanwhile the French group UFC Que-Choisir commissioned laboratory tests and found known or suspected endocrine disruptors, such as ethylhexyl methoxycinnamate, in seven out of 17 suncreams.
Chemical cocktails
Yesterday, PAN published a report which showed the extent of endocrine disrupting pesticide residues found in EU food on the market.
Using 2015 monitoring data for 45,889 fresh fruit and vegetable samples that it acquired through a public access request, it found that just over one third (34%) of fruit consumed in Europe contained endocrine disrupting pesticides. Citrus fruit mandarins, oranges and grapefruit were the worst offenders – between 46 and 57% of samples contained residues with EDPs.
Celery and rocket were the worst offenders for vegetables, with 35 to 40% of samples containing residues.
Several fruit and vegetables contained up to eight EDPs per sample, for which the “collective toxic potential effects are not assessed”, PAN said.
The report reads: “Governments should put consumers’ health and the protection of the environment before the profit of the pesticide industry, which will always push to use more pesticides in agriculture, even though the Sustainable Use of Pesticides Directive 2009/128/EC34 calls all member states to use synthetic pesticides only as a last resource, after (and provided that) all non-chemical methods have failed.”
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Undermining the rule of law at the EPA.
What good are laws without enforcement? Scott Pruitt wants to stop paying the Justice Department for hazardous waste litigation.
In the more than seven months since he became administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency, Scott Pruitt has been on a reckless mission to dismantle public health safeguards and environmental protections. Mr. Pruitt’s E.P.A. wants to postpone or roll back dozens of rules that save lives and provide clean air and water, including efforts by the Obama administration to combat climate change and to protect rivers and streams from pollution.
Last week brought more bad news: Mr. Pruitt is proposing to end a decades-long agreement with the Justice Department that funds the E.P.A.’s lawsuits against polluters responsible for creating hazardous waste sites. Neither Congress nor the courts will have the final say. The decision rests with the Trump administration.
Since the Reagan administration, the E.P.A. has reimbursed the Justice Department for the cost of suing companies as part of the Superfund hazardous waste site cleanup program. In communities like the Love Canal neighborhood in Niagara Falls, N.Y., and Times Beach, Mo., the Justice Department sued polluters to force them to pay the cost of relocating residents. More recently, the E.P.A. covered the upfront costs of suing the W. R. Grace chemical conglomerate in the small town of Libby, Mont., where hundreds have died from asbestos poisoning, and compelling General Electric to clean up decades of PCB pollution that ravaged the Hudson River.
But in its budget proposal, the E.P.A. said it no longer intended to reimburse the Justice Department for Superfund litigation costs.
These lawsuits are expensive, with Justice Department lawyers doing battle, often for years, with the largest law firms in America. But the return on the agency’s investment is substantial. The Justice Department recovers hundreds of millions of dollars every year in cleanup costs to replenish the Superfund program’s coffers, which enables the E.P.A. to conduct more hazardous waste cleanups, including emergency responses to chemical releases like those that occurred after Hurricane Harvey.
For the Environment and Natural Resources Division at the Justice Department, which represents the E.P.A. and other federal agencies in court, funding from the E.P.A. is essential. In its budget proposal for 2018, the Justice Department indicated that it expected to receive approximately $25 million from the E.P.A., enough to pay for 69 lawyers as well as support staff, nearly 20 percent of the division.
If the E.P.A. stopped paying for Superfund work, significant layoffs would be likely at the Justice Department. But that would be just the beginning. More than half of the Environment Division’s work is defensive, meaning it represents the E.P.A. and other agencies in lawsuits brought by regulated industries, environmental groups and state attorneys general. That work is considered nondiscretionary — the Justice Department must represent the government when federal agencies like the E.P.A. are defendants — so the spending cuts and layoffs would have to come from elsewhere in the Environment Division.
As a result, there could be cuts exceeding 40 percent from the Environment Division offices that prosecute environmental crimes like the Volkswagen emissions cheating scandal, seek civil penalties and natural resource damages in cases like the Deepwater Horizon oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, and sue polluters that are responsible for Superfund hazardous waste sites.
Mr. Pruitt’s proposal is a breathtakingly bad idea, giving polluters license to do their dirty work with less fear of punishment and a greater ability to outlast an understaffed Justice Department in court. The victims would be ordinary Americans, many of them poor and minorities, who often live closest to where environmental violations occur and where the worst Superfund sites are located.
Yet blocking Mr. Pruitt will depend on opposition from Attorney General Jeff Sessions and intervention by the White House, which so far has shown no inclination to curtail the E.P.A. administrator’s anti-environmental zeal.
For decades, Republican and Democratic administrations alike have prosecuted environmental crimes and sued polluters to recover the cost of cleaning up their messes. Vigorous enforcement of the environmental laws has been nonpartisan, because it protects our communities from harmful pollution and ensures that polluters don’t get a free ride at the expense of taxpayers.
Prosecuting polluters also makes sense for American businesses, most of which are committed to meeting their legal obligations and conducting their affairs in a responsible, ethical manner. Why should good companies that invest in environmental compliance be at a competitive disadvantage against the lawbreakers that would be harder to bring to justice under Mr. Pruitt’s cynical ploy?
Mr. Pruitt, a former Oklahoma attorney general, claims state governments can fill the void created by a diminished E.P.A. His argument ignores the fact that most states lack the resources to take on big polluters.
Before the E.P.A. was created in 1970, the United States saw what happens when the federal government does not protect our communities from pollution: the Cuyahoga River on fire in Cleveland, a devastating oil spill sullying the beaches in Santa Barbara, Calif., and thousands of drums of hazardous waste, many leaking toxic chemicals, at the Valley of the Drums in Kentucky.
The system of environmental laws in the United States resulted from bipartisan consensus about the need to protect public health and the environment from harmful pollution. Previous E.P.A. administrators, in Republican and Democratic administrations, have supported strong enforcement of those laws, recognizing that laws are only as good as their enforcement.
By weakening E.P.A.’s commitment to bringing polluters to justice, Mr. Pruitt abandons communities scarred by pollution and undermines the rule of law.
David M. Uhlmann is a law professor at the University of Michigan and was chief of the environmental crimes section at the Justice Department from 2000 to 2007.
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Chad Horwedel
Illinois' vanishing bugs and why it matters to Earth.
Endangered insects, a little-known part of the Endangered Species Act, prepare for life under Trump.
Christopher Borrelli
Chicago Tribune
A beast with black wings buzzed close and darted past us into the trees: What was that? Was that it? That had to be it. Mallory Sbelgio, citizen scientist, entomologist in training, defender of rare insects, did not quite roll her eyes, though it was remarkable her eyes remained in her head: No, she said, no, that wasn’t the bug we were looking for. She continued walking. Our insect was rarer — in decline throughout the country, but especially Illinois. We were hunting the Hine’s emerald dragonfly, one of relatively few insects to receive a special status: It’s protected by the Endangered Species Act.
A long sliver of a thing alighted on a curling blade of grass, its body sky blue, its wings slim windowpanes. It clung to its green, then zipped off.
There!
“Nope,” Sbelgio said. “Damselfly.”
It was a bright Saturday morning, and we were walking along the Des Plaines River in Will County, stepping around the spongy marshes and flooded banks left by a downpour a few hours before. Dragonflies darted inches above the waterline. But not our dragonfly. Sbelgio was too polite to state the obvious: This was a waste of time, we would never stumble onto a Hine’s by wandering around a forest preserve. Success was statistically unrealistic: According to Andres Ortega, an ecologist who specializes in insects for DuPage County, where the Hine’s is slightly more prevalent, its population in Illinois is “close to extinction — like maybe just 200 to 300 a year. So, incredibly low for an insect.”
Think finding an endangered elephant is hard?
Try finding an endangered insect.
Sbelgio crouched and peered into the forest. She wasn’t always a bug person. As a child, she was scared of everything, until one day her father brought home a tarantula, as a happy-birthday joke. To her shock, she has been hooked on insects ever since. The 27-year-old Lombard native has studied entomology at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and zoology at Miami University in Ohio; lately, she has been trying to start a nonprofit to raise awareness of endangered insects in Illinois.
“All the energy goes into endangered fish and mammals,” she said. “So there are not a lot of us out here, but someone has to advocate for bugs. Most of the time I mention I stand up for endangered insects, I’m met with dead silence. People think ‘endangered’ and ‘insects’ don’t go together. But lose insects, and we are dismantling our ecosystem.”
The good news? As summer ends, there are fewer insects, fewer swats.
The bad news? That insect you just swatted might be the last of its kind.
Scientist after scientist, and research study after research study, has agreed our ecosystem is indeed being dismantled, partly because extinction rates for thousands of wildlife species have accelerated in the past decade. The really bad news: Insects constitute a majority of those species. Tarantulas, for instance. Some biologists believe most tarantulas could be extinct within our lifetime. The suspects are not hard to guess: climate change, development, the human-made decline of natural habitats.
One hope, entomologists say, is the Endangered Species Act.
Invertebrates have been on it since 1976, when the Fish and Wildlife Service granted protections to seven species of butterflies. Yet, the trouble with insects is, well, most are not a “charismatic species,” scientists’ term for superstars of the endangered animal kingdom. We coo for pandas and whales. Ants, not so much. “Honestly, endangered insects have been a (public relations) nightmare,” said May Berenbaum, the head of UIUC’s department of entomology. She received the National Medal of Science from President Barack Obama; “The X-Files” named a character after her. But ask about protecting insects and even she acknowledges “insects are a hard case (for protection). Try arguing for a pygmy hog-sucking louse. Not a great name for something we might want to save.”
You can make eye contact with a rare river otter.
Try that with a beetle that buries roadkill for lunch.
And now, insects face a more existential hurdle — the Trump administration, which has signaled it intends to gut the Endangered Species Act. Never mind melting glaciers — explain to a politician why the extinction of the rattlesnake-master borer moth is a crisis. As the Entomological Society of America noted in a recent statement of support for the Endangered Species Act: Insects are 75 percent of species, and insects are necessary for a healthy environment, but only 84 species of invertebrates have government protection, compared to 439 vertebrates.
So the battle for bugs is lonely.
Sbelgio stared into the forest and shook her head: “People don’t get it. They don’t think insects impact their world at all — something moved!” She trudged off into the thicket, ever careful of where she stepped.
Specimens in the Insects, Arachnids and Myriapods collection of the Field Museum.
Fifty years ago, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service issued its first list of endangered and threatened species to be federally protected, an outcome of 1966’s Endangered Species Preservation Act. Some of the initial 76 protected animals included manatees, bald eagles, Columbian white-tailed deer and the American alligator. You know, relatable.
By 1970, protections were extended to invertebrates, and in 1973, at the urging of the Nixon administration, the Endangered Species Act, a significantly beefed-up version of the 1966 law, was passed to include protections for the habitats of endangered species. It wasn’t the federal government’s first rodeo with animal conservation: The Lacey Act of 1900, a response to the decline of passenger pigeons (which eventually went extinct), addressed the illegal trade of animals. Later legislation tried to slow whale hunting and the shooting of migratory birds. Today, the federal Endangered Species List isn’t even the only list: Many states keep their own lists, and the International Union for Conservation of Nature, which has published a broader “Red List” since 1964, classifies 195 insect species (worldwide) as “critically endangered.”
Still, the Endangered Species Act remains a regulatory outlier compared with conservation laws in many countries, said Andy Suarez, an entomologist at UIUC. “Never mind it gives value to a species, which many people find abstract. The language is pretty blanket — it preserves entire habitats. That’s why a lot of people are terrified of losing it under Trump — conservationists will never get anything like it again.”
Despite strong laws, however, insect protection is awkward.
Insects are small and everywhere. Their lives are short. More butterflies receive protection than, say, flies because they’re outgoing, they pollinate — if you can see a bug, you have a better chance of compiling data on it. Said Michael Jeffords, an entomologist with the Illinois Natural History Survey: “Illinois is an insect Venn diagram. We’re on the edge of a lot of (insect) ranges, so accuracy gets rough. On the other hand, we’ve been collecting data since the 1850s. If you don’t see an insect that once lived here, you know they’re done — or their habitat is.”
Bugs die quietly every day.
Since millions of insects remain unidentified, entire species have vanished before we knew they existed. As California condors were captured in the 1980s and brought into breeding programs to prevent their extinction, scientists washed them. However, doing this killed a louse that lived only on California condors. Now that louse is extinct.
The federal Endangered Species Act lists 85 endangered or threatened insects. Illinois’ list is 15 species long and includes Karner blue butterflies, springtails, stoneflies and a scorpion. Crystal Maier, collections manager for invertebrates at the Field Museum, has most of them. She has 4 million bugs stuck on boards, 12 million more floating in alcohol. She walks the cold hallways of the museum’s insect storage room, locates the scientific name of a species, then slides out a series of wooden trays with dead specimens stuck with pins. It’s a combination library/morgue. “And there you ... go,” she says cheerfully.
Behold, the striped bark scorpion.
Found rarely in Illinois on the eastern banks of the Mississippi River, outside St. Louis; grows no more than 3 inches; black stripe on its back; resembles a crustacean; stings. Maier puts it back and reaches for rare springtails, so tiny the specimens float in vials placed inside jars.
Ask an entomologist why it matters to protect bugs like this, and they rattle off reasons, economic, environmental, moral: Bugs provide billions of dollars of pollinated crops, according to agricultural studies. In the Chicago area, said John Legge, Chicago conservation director of the Nature Conservancy, a lack of biodiversity in natural spaces “can be an illustration of the threat of climate change.” (A few years ago, after an uncommonly cool spring in the Indiana Dunes caused the Karner blue to emerge too soon, the population crashed and never recovered.) Maier, whose own specialty is aquatic beetles, said the biodiversity of the insects along a river or stream is often a warning light of water quality.
There are times, though, where she is hesitant to identify a rare species: “Because you’re not just naming a species anymore, you’re pointing out habitat for protection — which gets politicized.” Indeed, the Reagan administration sought to remove all insects from protection. Instead, “pests” — mosquitoes, ticks, certain beetles, anything regarded as having a negative impact on health or economic concerns like crops — were prohibited. “Yet people assume all bugs are pests,” Berenbaum said. “During the W. Bush years, a recommendation was made to set aside 9,200 acres in Hawaii for flies found nowhere else that had bacterial qualities useful, some said, in developing drugs. The White House said ‘OK,’ and then it set aside 18 acres — a giant middle finger to bugs.”
Consider the journey of the rusty patched bumblebee.
Once common throughout the Midwest and Northeast, it’s found in only 13 states now (including Illinois). It pollinates cranberries, tomatoes. Even dead and stuck with a pin, it’s adorable: fuzzy, colored like an autumn forest. Last fall, the Obama administration announced it would be added to the Endangered Species List. Hours before Rusty was officially listed, the Trump administration delayed inclusion, explaining more study was needed. A coalition of farm and real estate interests had petitioned against Rusty. After the Natural Resources Defense Council filed a lawsuit, the White House backed down and included Rusty.
This bee’s story isn’t over.
In the spring, work on the Longmeadow Parkway Corridor Project in Kane County, which cut through the bee’s habitat, was halted, then restarted; that battle is ongoing. Yet Rusty’s inclusion has been pivotal, said Scott Hoffman Black, executive director of the Portland, Ore.-based Xerces Society, which led the decadelong petition process for protection. He sees the bee as a “charismatic” gateway to bringing attention to endangered insects in general. “But the endgame is never the listing. Insects get less money than endangered animals, and almost nothing if they’re not listed, so now the struggle for conservation action begins.”
Xerces, founded in 1971, a pioneer in insect conservation, is not alone. The Nature Conservancy in Chicago buys land that protects local insect habitats; museums launch butterfly counter iPhone apps; the St. Louis Zoo established a Center for American Burying Beetle Conservation.
Just off the lobby of the Peggy Notebaert Nature Museum — some distance from the live-butterfly exhibit, to prevent contagion — Allen Lawrence, associate curator of entomology, and Doug Taron, chief curator of the Chicago Academy of Sciences, breed Baltimore checkerspot butterflies, a vulnerable species. The lab is humid, small. A graduate student is hunched over a table, using a thin paintbrush to delicately sift caterpillar poop from paper cups. That’s nearly the entire arrangement: cups, student, a humidifier, a few leaf greens of food.
“With insects, it doesn’t cost a lot to make a difference,” Lawrence said.
Next summer, after three years, the project will release its Baltimores in Elgin. “Habitat conditions have to be ideal,” Taron said. “The problem is that nature, no matter what you do, throws so much at you.” As with many things in life, it’s the spineless that take the roughest hits.
Grass poked through the fast-moving current on the Des Plaines River. Geese honk-honked overhead. Mallory Sbelgio watched a harvestman (aka daddy longlegs) step carefully around her hand.
It was no Hine’s emerald dragonfly.
Dead specimens alone are hard to find. Andres Ortega, in DuPage, is eager to change this. His Hine’s breeding project in Warrenville is a year old. On waterways, he’s carving the kind of shallow channels that Hine’s look for. And though he wasn’t involved, when the Illinois Tollway built Interstate 355 across the Des Plaines, the state made the road higher than planned, so motorists didn’t accidentally speed up the Hine’s extinction.
“Why spend so much money on a dragonfly?” he asked. “Extinction is normal and happens, but when that removal is unnatural, as we are seeing all over the world, we have a cascading crisis in our backyards.”
The prognosis is grim.
Sbelgio pictures herself on the front lines by staying small. The state rejected her proposal for a nonprofit organization centered on endangered insects. But she’s not going away. Endangered insects make the Endangered Species Act accessible in a way that an endangered polar bear does not, she said — it’s a niche waiting for a leader.
A small quick oblong alien crawled past.
Oh! There!
“That’s an ant,” Sbelgio said. “Don’t worry. There’s a lot of ants.”
cborrelli@chicagotribune.com
Twitter @borrelli
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