A new documentary film tells the story of a small town that banned pesticides -- and changed the world

A few weeks ago I learned of a very interesting documentary that was to be shown at the Fort Lauderdale International Film Festival. The movie addressed an issue that is near and dear to my heart and health -- cultivating a lawn without the use of pesticides or fungicides. The title was A Chemical Reaction, and I made plans to see it. I also invited the producer and director to visit to Jungle Island and experience nonchemical horticulture Miami-style.

A Chemical Reaction tells the true story of how a doctor in a small Canadian community noticed a link between chemicals that were being used on lawns and symptoms of disease that were showing up in local homeowners and their children. The doctor’s very dedicated and persistent efforts instigated a ground-breaking and effective community initiative that resulted in the banning of pesticides for lawns in the town of Hudson, Quebec, and eventually throughout the province of Quebec. This pesticide law was fought by lawn-spraying companies, ChemLawn in particular, for ten years, all the way to the Supreme Court of Canada, where it was upheld in 2001. Since then scores of other Canadian cities and towns have banned chemical pesticides. Last year Home Depot stores throughout Canada removed the banned products from their shelves.

I was thrilled when I was able to host the director and producer of the movie at the park. They saw firsthand a large-scale landscape that had been installed and grown without pesticides and fungicides. They heard about our Integrated Pest Management and Plant Health Care programs that utilize the “proper plant-proper site” concept. I described some of our cultivation methods, irrigation control, and biorational control of mosquito larvae.

When they viewed our two lawn areas, I explained to them that one of my goals had been to limit monocultures. If a single plant species was under pressure from an insect or disease, it would not affect a very large portion of the landscape when or if the plants died or had to be removed. It would also be replaced by the other plant species surrounding it.

I then explained how our lawns could be considered as “banker plant systems,” with many different types of tiny flowering plants growing in the lawn. A habitat had been created that provided a food source for beneficial insects. These beneficial insects are the tiny wasps and flies that parasitize insects that attack our plants. The only way a “banker plant system” will function full-time is if the beneficial insects can easily find a food source anytime they need it. The best way to accomplish that is to have many species of plants that flower at different times of the day, and plant species that thrive throughout the year.

Another very important component of this system is not having to spray for mosquitoes. I am certain that the daily spraying for mosquitoes we did years ago had a very detrimental effect on the population of beneficial insects. At any given time there are always fewer predators than prey in a given location. The smaller populations of insects (the predators) would be more vulnerable to being wiped out by pesticide spraying.

A banker plant is specifically associated with biological control. This concept was originally used only in greenhouses, where plants were brought into the structure and allowed to develop pest infestations. Biological control agents, predators or parasitoids, were then released onto the banker plants, and as they ate the pests (or paralyzed them for their larvae) and reproduced, their progeny spread throughout the greenhouse and ate the bad guys.

The concept behind development of the park’s landscaping was to grow a functional landscape that served the purposes of providing a tree canopy that would shade the park, provide the setting for a botanical garden and zoo, and create an ecosystem that would provide a full-time habitat for beneficial organisms that could control any insect infestation that would drop by and attempt to wreak havoc.

Our methods behind the landscape design and development encouraged the creation of a healthy, functional ecosystem. Why not expand this concept in the context of smoke-free hotel rooms? I have made the point with hotel managers regarding guests who preferred smoke-free rooms. Wouldn’t you like to offer your guests a pesticide-free environment outside in the garden, where their children can play or where they may host events and parties?

Later on during our tour, I showed my guests how the fig whitefly in the park was being controlled by wasps, parasitic flies, and lady beetles. As always I was asked, “Do you release these beneficial insects on a regular basis or did you introduce them to the park?” I replied that they came on their own. I only provided a habitat in which they could live and thrive.

For information on where A Chemical Reaction is showing and to see the movie’s trailer, visit www.safelawns.org or www.pfzmedia.com. By January it should also be possible to purchase a DVD directly from the sites.

Feedback: This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it