Gregory D.

Lee

Read Greg's bio and previous columns here

May 12, 2008

Stand By For Higher Food Prices, Courtesy of California’s Environmental Crazies

In an article appearing in the Los Angeles Times, actor Martin Sheen was quoted in a letter he wrote to the Malibu Times about the use of fluoride by the Metropolitan Water District. "We are not lab rats and reject any attempt to be treated as such," he penned.

Huh?

Where do these people come from? Isn’t the prevention of tooth decay high on the to-do list of environmental worshipers? At what point will these people just leave the rest of us alone? In the interest of full disclosure, I twice briefly met Mr. Sheen years ago and found him to be a real gentleman, but he seems to frequently go off the deep end, as do many of his like-minded Hollywierd friends.  

Living on the Monterey Peninsula of California’s beautiful central coast, the area attracts the overflow of nuts from the San Francisco Bay area.  

The Monterey Bay area is faced with an infestation of the Australian light brown apple moth that could jeopardize the area’s massive agribusiness. If you eat salads, the lettuce probably came from the fertile Salinas Valley. The cost to eradicate the pest was estimated to be $1 million. But the environmentally sensitive, question-authority crowd obtained a court order to temporarily stop the spraying. They claim there is not enough known about the safety of the chemical being sprayed. This caused the state to waste valuable time going to court litigating the safety of “Checkmate,” the name of the pheromone (not pesticide) being used to stop the destructive moth.

The California Department of Food and Agriculture (CDFA) projected that costs would rise tenfold to $10 million if they did not resume spraying soon. According to the CDFA, if left unchecked (no pun intended), the monetary loss to the agriculture industry in Monterey County could reach $650 million. Since then, Mexico and Canada announced they will not accept strawberries grown in the infested areas. For $10 million, the CDFA could transport every paranoid hypochondriac living within the spraying area in limousines to bed and breakfast places in Malibu. Maybe they’d even run into Martin Sheen.

The never heard of, self-proclaimed environmental group, Helping Our Peninsula’s Environment (HOPE), suddenly materialized and filed a court motion to require the manufacturer of Checkmate reveal its industrial trade secret ingredients. This is despite the EPA’s assurance that the substance is safe. That’s like suing the Coca-Cola Company for its famous syrup formula because drinking it too fast may bring on a burp.

HOPE’s attorney actually requested the court extend the temporary restraining order prohibiting spraying until the CDFA “prove(s) to a very apprehensive citizenry that the government is not poisoning them.” Poisoning citizens? He’s asking the CDFA to prove a negative. That’s like asking a husband if he has stopped beating his wife. Hey, CDFA, have you stopped poisoning citizens yet?   

I was going to hire a crop duster to spray Pellegrino over the moth infested area. Then I’d issue a phony news release saying that the CDFA had conducted an unannounced, emergency spraying the night before, just to see the reaction from the local environmentalists. But before I could put my plan into action, weather conditions forced the CDFA to abruptly cancel a scheduled spraying of adjacent Santa Cruz County. Faster than a Katrina “victim” could file a fraudulent FEMA claim, a score of people reported they had respiratory problems, skin and eye irritation and that the paint was peeling off their Priuses. Most of the complainers refused to give their names to the officials manning the CDFA hotline that was established to receive such complaints.

If there was one scintilla of evidence that the first round of spraying had caused any harm to anybody – especially animals – Katie Couric, Brian Williams and Charles Gibson would be doing their nightly network newscasts from Monterey’s fisherman’s wharf interviewing the victims of the evil CDFA who ignored citizen pleas not to poison them in favor of big agribusiness.

It would be refreshing to just once hear someone say they appreciated the job the CDFA was doing to eliminate a potential economic disaster. These hard-working, unappreciated civil servants have enough on their plate without having to fend off baseless lawsuits that jeopardize not only the Monterey County economy, but lower food prices for the entire country.  

Gregory D. Lee writes for the North Star Writers Group. He can be reached through his website: www.gregorydlee.com.

© 2008 North Star Writers Group. May not be republished without permission.

This is Column # GL019. Request permission to publish here.