Turf battles are breaking out in suburbia.
Concerned that pesticides used in schools and on parks and playgrounds pose health threats to their children and themselves, irate homemakers across the suburbs are uniting to persuade their municipal councils and school boards to enact restrictions on when and what chemicals can be sprayed.
”We`re like the warning lights on the dashboard of a car,” said Marilyn Hamilton, one of three Hinsdale women who have taken the unusual step of filing a state discrimination complaint against the affluent Du Page suburb for its pesticide policy. ”I wouldn`t have gotten involved if I didn`t think this was a greater issue involving more people than myself.”
In addition to Hinsdale, local pesticide-control campaigns are under way in Clarendon Hills, St. Charles and Mokena. In recent years, Oak Park, Aurora, Franklin Park and Schaumburg have restricted lawn-care pesticides, and Naperville, Hinsdale, Elgin, and Crystal Lake have ceased mosquito-spraying. Such local restrictions usually have been the result of lobbying by citizens, most of them women.
”There`s a small handful of men, but it`s 95 percent women,” said Mary Ross, who heads the Chicago-area Sierra Club`s pesticide-education committee. ”Most of them are mothers. Some have kids that got sick from being exposed to toxic chemicals and the others are concerned that their children will get sick. A lot of these women start out by just wanting to help their children and end up taking on City Hall.”
Invariably, in one corner are irate housewives and mothers. In the other is the well-funded lobby of pesticide users and producers. At first glance, the chemical lobby would appear capable of swatting away its unfunded, less politically sophisticated opposition. But they are like buzzing bees. One might pose a slight annoyance; an angry swarm is another matter.
One such ”swarm” of anti-pesticide advocates has been meeting since October 1990 in western Du Page County. Attendees come from a wide suburban swath around Chicago.
”We started meeting about once a month to share information and as a support group,” said Ross, who noted that little anti-pesticide agitating or organizing has occurred in Chicago.
”Chicago government has an intimidating image and history,” she said.
”It`s harder to get involved. In the suburbs, all you have to do is get up at a (village board) meeting and speak.”
That mirrors national experience, according to Jay Feldman of the Washington-based National Coalition Against the Misuse of Pesticides. Local agitation against pesticides has so far been a suburban and small-town issue. What sparked the efforts of Hamilton, Diana Fleming and Ruta Jensen in Hinsdale was the decision last fall by the village to pay a lawn-care service $23,000 to spray public land.
When exposed to strong chemicals such as pesticides, Jensen and Hamilton said they suffer severe headaches, nausea and other flulike symptoms that have been associated with a controversial diagnosis called multiple chemical sensitivity. After the spraying, Jensen wore a face mask when she went out on errands to reduce the amount of airborne chemicals she inhaled. Fleming teamed up with the other women because her 14-year-old son, Doug, has asthma attacks and develops hives following chemical exposure.
After trying for the last couple of years to control weeds without spraying, village officials had no choice but to revert to using pesticides, village attorney Clifford Weaver said.
”The weeds got to the point where they were totally taking over the turf,” Weaver said. ”We wanted to prevent hazards on the playing fields because weeds do not provide the same cushioning and it was dangerous to the kids playing on it.”
The three women have responded by filing a discrimination complaint with the Illinois Department of Human Rights. The complaint charges that chemical treatment of village park land denies them and their families access to the parks because of their chemical sensitivity.
”We believe this is the first time unlawful discrimination charges have been filed in relation to chemical treatment of public lands in the United States,” Feldman said.
A Human Rights Department spokesman said the charges are being investigated. The diagnosis of multiple chemical sensitivity is highly controversial in the medical community, leading some experts to worry that restrictions are being enacted before a clear threat has been proven.
”It`s been exceedingly difficult to document scientifically,” said Dr. David Eaton, an environmental-health professor at the University of Washington in Seattle. ”The reactions tend to be diffuse.”
Nonetheless, he isn`t ready to dismiss chemical sensitivity as a dreamed- up diagnosis.
Apart from some scientists` questions about the need for local pesticide regulations, such efforts have often failed in the past when challenged in court.
For instance, the Illinois Supreme Court struck down one of the first efforts at local regulations in 1985. Because of extensive lobbying by Wauconda resident June Larson, whose daughter became ill after a pesticide spraying, that far northwest suburb passed an ordinance requiring warning signs on lawns sprayed by professional lawn care services. A national pesticide industry lobby challenged the ordinance, and the court found that because Wauconda was a non-home-rule community, it had no authority to regulate pesticides.
But attempts at local pesticide regulations received a major boost last year when the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that the tiny town of Casey, Wis., could set stricter standards than those established by federal law.
”Since that ruling, we have a hundred Casey, Wisconsins, out there, and now more are pushing for local ordinances all around,” said Tom Delaney of the Atlanta-based Professional Lawn Care Association of America.
It`s not that the pesticide lobby is against restrictions, Delaney said, but such regulations should be standardized statewide or nationally. Otherwise, companies will have a host of local regulations to try to comply with. There are 83,000 local jurisdictions nationwide that could impose different rules, he said.
”As it stands now, you could have a farmer with a thousand acres in three different counties with three different sets of regulations,” said Rep. Thomas Ewing (R-Ill.), a co-sponsor of a House bill introduced to counteract the Supreme Court`s ruling.
It and a similar Senate measure would limit authority for setting pesticide standards to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency alone;
enforcement would be the states` responsibility. Hearings on the bills will be held this spring.
On the other side of the issue, Ross has drafted proposed state legislation that would require Illinois schools to adopt a policy called
”integrated pest management,” aimed at reducing, but not banning, use of pesticides.
”It`s a set of procedures,” Ross said. ”First, you check to see if you have a pest problem. Then, you do the least-toxic control measures, such as caulking and improving general housekeeping. Then if you have to, you could spray. Monthly spraying would not count as integrated pest management.”
The bill is being sponsored by state Rep. Barbara Flynn Currie (D-Chicago).
Ewing maintains that local efforts are misguided because small towns do not have the expertise to determine how to regulate pesticides.
But local advocates say that they do not need experts to tell them what makes them and their children ill, and that leaving control in the hands of state and federal bureaucrats will result in little, if any, regulations or enforcement.
”They already have all sorts of (federal) regulations on the books that they`re not enforcing,” Fleming said. ”That`s why there`s a push for all these local laws.”
