John,
Would you use a heavy duty chemical in or around your home without knowing what toxic side effects it might have? Although common sense firmly says “no”, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency allows the use of a potent herbicide near vital native bee habitat without having fully assessed its damaging effects.
Tell the Environmental Protection Agency to suspend the use of dicamba until they research the impacts on crucial habitat for pollinating bees and other wildlife and prove it can be used without causing serious environmental harm.
Redbud trees, known for their striking purplish-pink flowers in early spring, provide shelter and crucial sustenance for native bees. But dicamba, a damaging herbicide, drifts from agricultural lands and limits blooming, slowly killing native trees like redbuds that wildlife depend on. Although only in use with soybean seeds genetically modified to tolerate it for a few years, dicamba has drifted and damaged nearby forests of oak and maple trees and other natural and backyard habitat miles away—spelling disaster for native bees.
Repeated exposure to damaging herbicides results in trees and other flowering plants slowly dying, which then eliminates important sources of nectar, shelter and nesting places for insects and migrating birds when they need them the most.
Please help protect native bees and birds, and the trees and other plants they depend on by speaking out about the harmful herbicide dicamba today.
In addition to habitat destruction, initial research on dicamba has found that damage caused by its drift away from where it is sprayed can limit food sources for some types of caterpillars by reducing the nutritional value of the host plants they feed upon. And that drift can change the timing of flowering, as well as the number of flowers produced by native nectar sources. Research has shown that dicamba contamination cuts in half the amount of pollinators visiting an exposed plant.
Even worse, the continued use of dicamba could upset delicate ecosystems and lead to overuse of additional harmful pesticides. Unabated use of dicamba could lead to unwanted or unexpected shifts in insect and weed populations, potentially resulting in an uptick in pests and resistant weeds, pushing farmers into a destructive cycle of using more and more chemicals on their crops—further destroying native bee habitat in nearby forests and backyards.
But this future can be avoided if the Environmental Protection Agency hears from wildlife advocates like you. Tell the Environmental Protection Agency to halt the use of dicamba until proper research on its effects can be conducted.
Thank you for all you do to protect vulnerable wildlife and their crucial native habitats.
