Pesticide Reduction Bill Becomes Law

Governor Malloy has signed a bill, supported by Connecticut Audubon Society, that severely restricts the use of two mosquito pesticides in the area bordering Long Island Sound.

We supported the bill because we believe that biological controls such as BT are preferable to toxic pesticides like methoprene and resmethrin, the two substances that were the subject of the bill.

We are in favor of a general reduction in the use of pesticides because of their link to the drastic decline of birds – such as swallows, swifts and martins – that each only bugs they catch on the wing. The population drop was the subject of our Connecticut State of the Birds 2013 report, “The Seventh Habitat and the Decline of Our Aerial Insectivores.”

The state representatives who pushed the bill (now Public Act 13-197) did so because of a supposed connection between resmethrin and methoprene to the die-off of lobsters in Long Island Sound. Last year, tests by the state Department of Energy and Environmental Protection found trace amounts of those chemicals in four of 10 lobsters caught in the Sound.

For more details about that, you can read this story in Ctmirror.org; and I blogged about it here last July. – Tom Andersen, director of communications and community outreach