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May 31, 2022 - RFK Jr. The Defender

09:04

Pesticides and Death Of Bees with Dr David Carpenter

100th episode! - Dr. David Carpenter discusses pesticides and the death of bees, winged insects, and bee colony collapse in this episode.

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	Hey everybody, I'm really happy to have one of my old, old friends and an inveterate expert witness in a number of cases that I've been hanging out with for almost 40 years on the Hudson River, working on the PCB cases.
	David Carpenter is well known to both plaintiffs and defense attorneys all across the country as one of the leading And most respected experts when it comes to looking at the impacts of toxic chemicals on human health.
	Let me just ask you something that's really a preoccupation of mine, which is these neonicotinoid pesticides.
	That have essentially replaced DDT and some of the old organophosphate pesticides that were used in this country and discredited, but in many ways seem almost as bad.
	And we're watching the collapse of bee colonies Something like 80% of winged insects have disappeared over the past decade.
	It's a global apocalypse of insects.
	And, you know, we need the insects.
	As much as people might think they're just irritating, we need them.
	We need them for our survival.
	So tell us about this class of pesticides and what they mean to human health and the ecology.
	The neonicotinides are a class of pesticides that everybody thought was just God's gift to mankind.
	These are a class of pesticides where you don't spray them.
	You impregnate the seeds of your food crop with these pesticides.
	They get incorporated into the leaves of the plant.
	And any insect that eats the leaves or the stems of the plant is killed.
	So, well, you know, Bobby, I was in the car all day driving back literally for about eight hours.
	And you and I both remember the days when you would drive for several hours and your windshield would be covered with dead bugs.
	We drove for eight hours and there were a few bugs, but not many.
	And that just indicates how much our use of pesticides have reduced the numbers of insects, the flying insects that used to get on our car.
	And the mechanism of these chemicals is that they interfere, they activate acetylcholine receptors.
	Now that sounds dangerous for us because acetylcholine is a major neurotransmitter in our nervous system.
	It's the transmitter between nerves and muscle.
	So if your acetylcholine receptors don't work, you're paralyzed.
	And things like cobra venom, some of the snake venoms, will block the activation of acetylcholine receptors, and that kills people by suffocation.
	Well, it turns out that the acetylcholine receptors in insects Are a little different from those in humans.
	And so the neonicotinamides were developed to target, to activate the acetylcholine receptors of insects, but they don't do anything to humans.
	At least that was what was proposed.
	Now, the target then is insects that eat plants, alphids, beetles, corn borers, a lot of insects that are real pests to plants, but should not be a problem for humans.
	Now, what about bees?
	Bees don't eat plants.
	What they do is suck nectar and they collect the pollen and take that back to the hive.
	Well, nobody thought that the pollen and the nectar would contain these neonicotinamides, but increasing evidence suggests that it does.
	Now, the problem with collapse of bees is not only neonicotinamides.
	For example, Roundup kills bees.
	Roundup is a herbicide.
	It's supposed to kill plants.
	But there's a lot of evidence that it interferes with bees.
	And it turns out that the neonicotinamides do sort of the same thing that Roundup does.
	They interfere with the bee's sleep.
	They disrupt its nervous system.
	They don't directly kill them, at least unless there's an extraordinarily high concentration.
	They interfere with the bee's navigational system.
	I think most people know that bees fly from their hive, they go to specific places, and they come back to their hive.
	They have this extraordinary sense of how to find home.
	And they make a beeline.
	They make a beeline.
	They used to before neonicotinamides.
	Now they can't find their way back home.
	I want to just tell you, interrupt you for a second, because when I was a kid with my 10 brothers and sisters, we had a field of clover in our yard, so we had lots and lots of honeybees, and we would go try to find the hives to get a honey, to smoke them out and get a honey.
	And the way that we would do it is we'd go out there and we'd catch four or five bees and then take them to different areas and release them and triangulate.
	Because when they left that jar and you had captured them, they'd fly directly toward their hive.
	So it's very, very easy to find a hive by triangulating the bees.
	So they asked to make a bee line where they used to before we got these neonicotinamides.
	And nobody quite understands how they do that.
	It's an extraordinary thing for an insect that has a very, according to us, very primitive brain.
	But they have extraordinary skills and they go great distances and still come directly back to their hive.
	However, if they drink nectar and use pollen to take back to the hives to feed the young, That contains even trace amounts of neonicotinamides.
	Their sense of direction is screwed up.
	They no longer can have normal sleep-waking cycles.
	Most people don't think about insects having sleep-waking cycles, but every kind of animal does.
	And for the bees, just as it is for us, if they don't get a good night's sleep, they're screwed up.
	They can't function normally.
	So there's getting to be increasing study, not of death, because usually the neonicotinamides don't kill the bees.
	But they screw up their life function to the point that they might as well kill them.
	And they're not the only cause of bee collapse, of colony collapse.
	But they're a major one.
	Now, Europe has banned most neonicotinamines.
	In the U.S., We haven't done anything.
	They're about 20% of the total market for what we call pesticides, which is a term we use for pesticides, herbicides, fungicides, the whole range of chemicals that we apply.
	On crops to control both pests and weeds and undesirable things.
	It's a problem.
	We are too dependent on these chemicals and the result is we have screwed up the balance of nature.
	That's why you can drive your car and not get bugs in your windshield.
	But what do the birds eat?
	The birds that used to survive by eating insects.
	No wonder we have a loss of songbirds.
	Most of the songbirds are insect eaters, but there are very few insects to eat any longer.
	And our dependence on bees is extraordinary because they're the pollinators.
	They're the ones that pollinate the fruit trees, the apples and the oranges and the apricots and the pears.
	But they also pollinate a lot of garden vegetables, a lot of grain seeds.
	And if we don't have the pollinators, what are we going to do?
	That's going to grossly adverse our food supply, which is already threatened because of climate change.
	So, you know, the problem is there isn't a simple solution.
	Clearly we need to grow food so we can feed the world.
	We still have people that are hungry because they don't have adequate food.
	And pesticides and herbicides have been very helpful in increasing food production.
	At the same time, they're killing off the pollinators that are absolutely essential for food production.
	And then of course the other issue of How we've disrupted the balance of nature by use of so many herbicides, which turn out not only to have ecological effects, but while usually we thought they would have no human health effects, now we find they do.
	Roundup is a case in point.
	Elevations in human cancer.
	So we really need to think and explore before we bring these chemicals on the market.
	Dr.
	David Carpenter, thank you so much for joining us on such short notice.

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