Pesticides in Oregon

Through agriculture and logging, Oregon is awash in pesticides. As they are across the country, pesticides are used in Oregon to kill insects and weeds in agricultural fields, along roads, and in cities. But Oregon also has a special relationship with pesticides: applied as part of the tree harvesting technique of “clear-cutting.” After logging companies cut down nearly every tree that isn’t very close to a salmon-bearing stream—including trees that grow alongside streams in which “only” frogs and salamanders live—they plant small replacement trees. These babies of the tree farms they protect from the growth of other native trees, plants, and shrubs by spraying herbicides.

Oregon also depends on pesticides to kill aquatic weeds that grow in over-polluted natural lakes and in irrigation systems that are comprised of both created channels and natural rivers. Due to environmental group litigation, many uses of pesticides in and around water now require water pollution discharge permits. However, this legal requirement has been rendered largely toothless by the Oregon Department of Environmental Quality’s (DEQ) unprotective general permits, permits that are administered primarily by DEQ doing nothing more than cashing the check that comes with the application to use pesticides.

NWEA proved just how badly Oregon DEQ’s system is when it challenged an authorization to poison Fairview Lake, outside Portland. DEQ does not tell the public when it authorizes discharges nor does it invite the public to comment but NWEA commented anyway. Eventually, presumably persuaded by NWEA’s legal and factual arguments, DEQ withdrew its authorization to poison the lake, only to reissue it secretly later.

Other organizations have sought to protect threatened and endangered species, including salmon, from pesticides through lawsuits, some of which have resulted in formal consultations by the National Marine Fisheries Service (NMFS) and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (FWS), the federal government’s two expert fish and wildlife agencies. But the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), which is charged with regulating the pesticides, evaluates the risks to species based on methodology from the 1980s and rejects the findings of these experts. EPA, at least, is required to pay attention. The states are free to ignore—and do ignore—all of the information about how pesticides are harming species on the brink of extinction.

NWEA decided to approach Oregon directly with this evidence of harm and petitioned the Oregon Environmental Quality Commission—the citizen’s board of the Department of Environmental Quality—to adopt the restrictions that NMFS and FWS said were essential to protect species from almost 70 pesticides. In August 2012, NWEA submitted a petition for rulemaking to the Commission. True to form, in October 2012, the Commission denied the petition saying that voluntary actions were protecting Oregon’s public and species from excess pesticides.