Stockton Record -- Timber company's herbicide use blasted

ANDREAS - The environmental group Forest Ethics released a report Thursday analyzing the 770,000 pounds of herbicides that timber giant Sierra Pacific Industries used on its lands during an 11-year period and calling on the company to reduce its use of the chemicals.

Sierra Pacific Industries is California's largest private land owner, with about 1.7 million acres statewide. The company also is the largest private land-owner in Calaveras County, with about 75,000 acres here.

The amount of pesticides used in forestry is miniscule when compared with what happens in farming zones such as San Joaquin County, where around 11 million pounds of pesticides are used every year, or about 12 pounds for every acre of land in the county.

But even though the figures for SPI reflect only a fraction of a pound of pesticide use per acre in any given year, several scientists said that herbicides such as atrazine that are used in forestry pose a risk at even very low levels both to wildlife and to the humans whose drinking water originates in the mountain forests.

Tyrone Hayes, a professor in University of California, Berkeley's Department of Integrative Biology, said studies have shown that atrazine at even extremely low concentrations can mimic hormones and alter the sexual biology of creatures from frogs to humans.

"Hormones work in the parts per billion, parts per trillion range," Hayes said.

Don Erman, professor emeritus of aquatic ecology at the University of California, Davis, said he believes there's enough evidence that trace amounts of herbicides are a danger to wildlife and humans that foresters should reconsider their use. Herbicides are typically used after an area is logged to suppress shrubs and other low-growing plants so that newly planted trees have time to grow.

"Those are choices we make as a society. Do we really care about what is in the water we drink, or do we want to have the cheapest food on Earth, or the cheapest timber on Earth," Erman said.

Sierra Pacific Industries spokesman Mark Pawlicki said the company's pesticide use is small compared with food crop farming, and even that use is carefully regulated by state laws.

"Overall, forestry use of herbicides in California is less than 1 percent of total herbicide use," Pawlicki said. "In our case we do extensive monitoring in stream courses where we use herbicides."

"We have yet to find a detectable amount in any watercourse," Pawlicki said.

Hayes said he was skeptical. He and other scientists say concentrations of pesticides such as atrazine may be missed simply because standard lab tests are not sensitive enough.

"We know that it persists, sometimes for years," Hayes said.

Pawlicki said if the state or federal regulations on pesticide use are inadequate, then scientists should take that up with those governments, rather than Sierra Pacific Industries.

"We only do it once, or sometimes twice in an 80-year period," he said of herbicide applications done when particular areas are replanted.