By Ed Cunningham/ Special To The Tab
March, by mayoral proclamation, is Alternatives to Pesticides Month in Newton. It’s an opportunity for us to think about the consequences of our habit of adding unnecessary toxins to our city environment, to learn about alternatives, and to do something to reduce our use of toxins in our homes, our yards, our places of worship, and our places of business. The city has been trying to do its part. Ten years ago it became the first municipality in the state to adopt an Integrated Pest Management Policy to be followed in the maintenance of city buildings, parks, and grounds.
The term Integrated Pest Management sounds abstract and technical, and, in a sense, it is. The science of IPM is sophisticated, utilizing advances in computing, operations research, systems analysis, and modeling. But in the end it is common sense: it is safer, more effective, and more economical to “outsmart” pests with non-toxic methods than it is to apply pesticides and herbicides reflexively.
IPM is a set of practices and strategies that evolved from extensive agricultural research initiated in the early 1950s in response to pesticide misuse problems, reduced effectiveness of pesticide and herbicide treatments, and unintended consequences. Poisoning pests is not only a dangerous approach with unintended adverse affects, but long term it is less effective than IPM strategies.
The genesis of IPM is long and interesting. For at least 5000 years, a mixture of cultural, biological, and chemical methods have been used in agriculture to control crop-destroying pests. Cultural methods include the rotation of crops and manipulation of the dates when planting is done. Biological methods include using predatory ants to control caterpillars and beetles, as the Chinese did as early as 300 AD. Chemical intervention can be traced back to 2500 BC, when the Sumerians used sulphur compounds to control insects and mites. Late in the nineteenth century the use of inorganic chemicals emerged as the most popular means of pest control. By the 1890s it was found that lead arsenate provided very effective insect control, by 1930 synthetic organic compounds began being used for plant pathogen control, and in 1939 the pesticide properties of DDT were recognized. Based on the insecticidal properties of DDT and benezene hexachloride, the early 1940s were seen as the dawn of a new era of blissful insect control in agriculture, horticulture, and public health.
The first report of resistance to DDT was published in 1946, followed in the 50s and 60s by evidence of widespread pest resistance to DDT and other pesticides. Against this backdrop that systems analysis was first applied to efforts to control crop pests. Economic entomologists and agricultural economists weighed the cost of chemical treatment against the cost of crop loss. Chemicals were increasingly perceived as being expensive and ineffective, and alternative methods of control began to emerge under the moniker “integrated control.” In 1959 a group of entomologists from UC Berkley and UC Riverside published a landmark paper which documented pest resistance to pesticides, the destruction of natural enemies, the resurgence of treated species, the appearance of new pests, as well as health hazards resulting from toxic residues and the misuse of chemicals. By 1967 “integrated control” had broadened to encompass not only biological and chemical control, but also climatic factors, cultural control, plant growth analysis, and modeling. UC Berkley entomologists RF Smith and R van der Bosch introduced the term “Integrated Pest Management” to reflect the broadened scope of the science. Two years later the US National Academy of Sciences formalized the term, and within a few more years BS, MS, and PhD degrees were offered in the subject.
In the 1980s the principles and practices which had been developed for agricultural and forestry applications began to be used in urban sites such as schools, parks, hospitals, and nursing homes. The list of what was categorized as pests had grown to include rats, mice, squirrels, raccoons, cockroaches, wasps, yellow jackets, mosquitoes, lice, bed bugs, bats, moths, fleas, flies, birds, ants, termites, grubs, crabgrass, poison ivy--any living thing which causes a problem when it shows up where we don’t want it to be.
IPM deals with pests by identifying the problem pest and then formulating the best plan for removing the problem. Techniques include regular cleaning, eliminating access, controlling the temperature of the environment, removing water sources, ensuring that food is properly stored, and routine monitoring. EPA and USDA (Department of Agriculture) websites provide copious information on IPM symposiums, grants, and newsletters, as well as a Pest Management Strategic Plans database, an IPM Expertise database, and links to topics such as “Current PM Research” and “Information on pesticide use.” When necessary, careful and judicious chemical treatments are part of the IPM program, but they are only used when natural mortality agents are inadequate and the pesticides used allow natural enemies of the target pest to survive treatment.
Look for an article next month on Newton’s IPM policy, the work that has been done over the past ten years, and the work which remains.
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