ROBERT LEDERMANS RESPONSE TO LETTER FROM SUSAN CUPO 7/2/2012 I am in receipt of a letter dated 6/29/2012 from Susan Cupo,

director of property management, Crest Management. My comments below are addressed to Ms. Cupo, to Crest Management, to the Hastings Village Board of Directors and to Mr. Stephen Stys, President of Leon Reinhardt Inc. the landscaping company that routinely covers Hastings Village with chemicals. Most recently, on 6/25/2012 we were massively exposed to a herbicide, to control the infestation of clover [quoting Ms. Cupos letter] a naturally occurring beneficial plant species native to NJ that has been here for millions of years. Facts do not cease to exist because they are ignored. - Aldous Huxley Despite more than 70 years of scientific data, most Americans are still relatively ignorant of the facts on the toxic effects of pesticides, fungicides and herbicides on human health. In large part this ignorance is because the hugely profitable chemical companies that manufacture these products have a well-funded lobbying machine that obstructs efforts to outlaw the use of these poisons or to educate the public about them. The same chemical companies spend hundreds of millions annually on TV and print ads extolling the virtues of poisoning your lawn. Any elected official who dares to stand up to the poison lobby can expect his political opponents to receive millions in campaign donations from chemical companies and from lobbying groups that defend the actions of landscapers. Leon Reinhardt Inc. proudly lists many of these lobbying groups right on their webpage. The public is constantly being misinformed that these chemical poisons are safe which the average person mistakenly believes means that they are harmless. In reality, no poison can possibly be considered harmless. Even the smallest exposure to chemicals that damage ones DNA, disrupts your nervous system or prevents the normal function of your organs is best avoided. As the home of many chemical companies (which originated in the 1920s with Standard Oil of NJ - half owner of the infamous German chemical company IG Farben) the state of New Jersey has laws about pesticide and herbicide use which seem barbaric when compared to other US States and to other nations. Some of the chemicals NJ residents are being routinely exposed to by landscapers are illegal to use in Europe. Many cities in the US have banned their use except in emergency situations, such as an epidemic. To expose human beings to the health threats of these chemicals for such trivial reasons as killing clover is morally criminal and will, even in the corrupt State of NJ, someday be criminally actionable. We can assume that Ms. Cupo and the Hastings Board actually believe what theyve been told concerning the guaranteed safety of these products. Thats what many landscapers themselves believe and what they routinely tell their employees and customers.

In the hope that if they would simply educate themselves about the facts that this will cease to be an issue of controversy in Hastings Village, and so that a lawsuit can be avoided, I offer the following comments and links to articles and scientific documents. I hope you will read them and become both better informed and more sensitive to the views of people, like myself, who do not want any needless exposure to the poisons used by landscaping companies. 1. What are pesticides and herbicides? Dictionary definition of Pesticide A chemical used to kill animals or plants. Some of these chemicals are harmful to humans, either from direct contact or as residue on food, or are harmful to the environment because of their high toxicity. Pesticides include fungicides, herbicides, insecticides, and rodenticides. The operative word in this definition is kill. The suffix cide meaning to kill is found in the commonly used words, homicide, suicide, infanticide and genocide to name a few. No substance advertised for the express purpose of causing death can possibly be considered harmless. Most pesticides are derived from the nerve gasses developed in WWI and WWII for the express purpose of killing entire armies. The infamous chemical Zyklon-B, manufactured by IG Farben and used in the Nazi death camps was the direct forerunner of many of todays popular pesticides. Most of these toxic chemicals and the accompanying so-called inert ingredients originate as petroleum and chemical industry by-products. A secondary use for the chemicals was discovered when scientists inadvertently observed that they also killed animals, insects and plants. The biggest difference between those WWII nerve gasses and todays pesticides is dosage and concentration. By watering them down with the so-called inert ingredients the chances of a human fatality from exposure are greatly reduced. Chronic exposure, just like taking a little arsenic or other poison in your food each day, gradually breaks down your bodily functions and makes you sick. Humans and Plants are Directly Related Genetically Few people consider plants, insects or animals our equals yet biologically, DNA is common to every living thing. Within the cells of any life form - bacteria, plants, moulds, insects or humans - DNA controls every activity. While the DNA of all organisms is distinct, the overall structure of the DNA found in every living organism is the same. Animals, humans, insects, bacteria and plants all breath, all have circulation, all metabolize food, all have some form of nervous system and all depend on the life processes controlled by DNA that are directly affected by exposure to these poisons. Poisons work by interfering with or altogether suppressing metabolic and other essential life functions. No

amount of exposure to poison is good for you. The minimal so-called testing of pesticides that is done on animals, clearly proves that these chemicals affect us both in very similar ways. Here are some common life forms and their genetic similarity to humans: Chimpanzee DNA: 98% similar to humans Cat DNA: 90% similar to humans Cow DNA: 80% similar to humans Mouse DNA: 75% similar to humans Fruit Fly DNA: 60% similar to humans Banana DNA: 50% similar to humans If a banana shares 50% of our genes, we can assume that clover is also related to humans. What kills clover is not going to function as a health supplement for us. There are thousands of books on the subject of our shared DNA and millions of pages on the internet about it. Heres one short quote from an article published by the venerable Museum of Natural History in NYC: At a glance, neither a mosquito nor a chicken appears to be closely related to humans. But a chicken's anatomyits lungs and backbone, for instanceis much more similar to a human's than is a mosquito's. DNA comparisons confirm that chickens and humans are closer relatives: 79% of chicken genes are similar to ones found in humans, while "only" 43% of mosquito genes have human parallels. In fact, all forms of lifeincluding plants, bacteria and humanspossess many genes that are very similar in DNA sequence, testament to the fact that all life is descended from a common ancestor. One does not need a scientific degree to understand that if a poison kills insects or plants, interrupts their nervous system, prevents them from breathing or permanently damages their DNA that it will have some degree of toxicity to humans. Pesticides, herbicides and fungicides are known to mutate and damage human, plant and animal DNA. Exactly as in taking a prescription drug your body weight, state of immune health, genetic predisposition, age and other factors determine how much a particular exposure to a chemical will affect you. The effect also depends on what other drugs you are taking. So for example, a person on numerous medications or someone getting chemotherapy would be far more likely to get sick from exposure than someone with a perfectly healthy body. Being exposed to multiple poisons, as the residents of Hastings Village have been for 37 years according to Grace Murray, president of the board, means there are countless chemical interactions going on that no one is documenting, monitoring or caring about. An adult can take a handful of aspirin and feel better while the same dose might kill a small child. A person who has been exposed many times to a chemical might experience a far more serious cumulative effect to spraying than someone never exposed previously. No

one is considering these factors while promoting the routine spraying of Hastings Village. 2. Exposure to Pesticides and herbicides is toxic in any amount. Every pesticide, herbicide and fungicide has a product label that contains detailed warnings. These warnings were written by the chemical companies themselves, not by the government or by some independent public interest organization. If these chemicals were in any sense harmless you can be certain there would be no warning labels at all. The scientists who conduct the toxicity studies on these chemicals are, for the most part, paid employees of these same chemical companies. Most of the chemicals ingredients being used have never actually been tested at all. Try looking up the scientific literature on each separate ingredient instead of just reading the label, and you will see what I mean. In other words, while the product label lists numerous precautionary statements, we can assume that the risks have been greatly downplayed so as to protect corporate profits. If the real risks were listed in detail, few people would willingly expose themselves to these substances. Howe much harm to the residents is too much? Why would any harmful effect on the residents health, however slight, not be considered first and foremost when spraying for such nonsensical reasons as getting rid of clover? The corporate coverup of the danger of pesticides has many historical precedents. In past decades corporations spent billions of dollars to keep the public from knowing the facts on the relationship between cigarette smoke and cancer or drinking alcohol and birth defects. Tobacco may not be the main problem with smoking. Cigarettes are known to contain numerous pesticides and herbicides. Most of the ingredients in the poisons being used in Hastings Village have never been tested on animals, and none have ever been tested on humans because that would be illegal. We are being forced to participate, at our own expense, in a vast experiment run by landscapers and their hired crews. For example, the herbicide Speed Zone that was recently massively sprayed all over Hasting Village contains 63% inert ingredients, not one of which is listed by name, thanks to the efforts of chemical lobbyists. Only the manufacturer knows what these 63% unlisted ingredients are. Many are likely to be hundreds of times more toxic than the listed ingredients, which are themselves unquestionably toxic. When chemicals are cooked in the hot sun, they change structure and often become far more hazardous than their original form. Likewise, as our bodies metabolize chemicals they also change structure becoming metabolites, which are often far more toxic than the

original form of the chemical. Levitts Pine Brook, a fertilizer was recently spread all over our concrete and brick sidewalks. (Did our sidewalks need fertilizing?) Within a hour it had migrated from shoes and dogs paws into every house in Hastings Village. Pine Brook has 65% inert unlisted ingredients. As the crystals of this chemical mixture are pulverized by us walking on them, they become a fine powder, readily inhaled by man and dog alike. The notion that this substance just lies there on the ground and has no interactions with or any effect on us is nonsense. The chemical companies put these so-called inert ingredients in these pesticides as a means of waste disposal. Our bodies and property are the waste receptacles for toxic by-products from the oil and chemical companies chemical waste products which theyd be fined for dumping in a landfill and which we are foolishly paying a lot of money for. Despite the toxicity being greatly downplayed, the product labels of every chemical used on Hastings Village property lists health and safety risks. When you buy an apple or a can of beans, there are no safety warnings. Pesticides are inherently dangerous and toxic. Unless one eats only organic food one is exposed to trace amounts of pesticides on many common food items. Just one exposure to poison spraying, as happened in Hastings Village recently, might be the equivalent of 20 years of eating non-organic food. Landscapers routinely violate the handling and application instructions on these products so as to increase profits, save time and avoid alarming their customers by wearing masks and other protective clothing while applying the poisons. Virtually every application to Hastings Village has violated some part of the label directions. For example, exactly how are residents to be kept out of sprayed areas until dry when every path, walkway, sidewalk and lawn has been saturated with poison and when residents were directly sprayed as they walked to their cars and inhaled spray through their windows while sleeping? Could the toxic exposure be made even worse? It can. They appear to go out of their way to make it much worse. As the liquid mixture of pesticide dries, the chemicals revert to a fine powder. The landscaper then has his crew use leaf blowers on the exact same areas that were sprayed. The fine powder is blown into the air, into every window and air conditioner and all over and inside of every car. It eventually coats every interior and exterior surface in Hastings Village (including our skins) and continues to be blown about for months to come. We are still inhaling the residue of poisons that were sprayed here years ago. Like the toxic pollution of the Passaic River with PCBs from the manufacture of Agent Orange in the

1960s, its a gift from NJ chemical companies that keeps on giving. An absolute minimum number of warning signs are posted (long after the spraying takes place) in such a way that they are both unnoticeable and unreadable. No advance warning is given, nor is anyone advised to close their windows or turn off air conditioners. Advising them to do so would clearly alarm everyone in Hastings Village, with good reason. The spraying is usually done while residents are at work so no one will see. Other than my efforts to inform them (as acknowledged in Ms. Cupos letter), the residents have been kept in the dark about the routine application of poisons to their property. The board on the other hand, some of whom allegedly do not actually live here, actively requests more poison to be applied. When a resident does complain to the Hastings office they are told that the products are completely safe, which is a gross misstatement of what the product labels say and of what even the slightest effort to independently research the poisons would show. Like most drugs and chemicals, exposure has both immediate recognizable short term and much harder to identify long term effects. There is a great difference between the short and long term effects of exposure to any poison. For example, exposure to herbicides in a setting such as landscape use is unlikely to result in immediate death or illness, unless one drank it or was directly sprayed and had a previously existing health condition such as asthma or a weakened immune system. That is all that safe means. On the other hand, even a slight exposure, let alone a weekly or monthly saturating of ones home, car and body, can have devastating long term effects, such as cancer. Many of these chemicals are scientifically documented to alter ones DNA. Those DNA changes are passed on to ones offspring. While you may never consciously recognize the bad effects on your own health, your children and grandchildren might not be so lucky. How many of us would trust a doctor to randomly alter our DNA? Would any of us let a landscaper do it if we understood what was being done and the utterly absurd reason why? Childhood cancers and autism are now at epidemic levels. NJ ranks second from the top in US cases of autism with an astounding 1 in 54 children afflicted. These conditions were relatively rare just a few decades ago. NJ is also among the US States with the highest ratio of childhood cancers and it leads the US in residential use of poison by landscapers. Cancer and autism are both thought to be directly related to pesticide exposure. Go to the local High School and see for yourself how many special education children there are. It is a large percentage of the school body. I once videotaped a landscaper spraying Memorial field while the football team was practicing in a cloud of pesticide. In NJ, this kind of landscaper caused atrocity is a daily occurrence.

How many prostate, liver and breast cancers; how many cases of autism; how many dogs with tumors all over their paws are justified in the effort to make the lawns look like they were in a Home and Gardens magazine or so that board members can more easily sell their apartments? In Ms. Cupos letter she alleges that there is no routine spraying of pesticides, and that their current plan is to use them just a few times a year. Isnt doing something a few times a year, routine? Exactly how many times per year would the board find it acceptable to be poisoned by a restaurant or food store? Would a minor case of food poisoning keep you coming back for more? I doubt it. If a restaurant advertised that their food altered your DNA, would eating there just twice a year seem safe? 3. Cost-Benefit Analysis Car manufacturers routinely conduct detailed studies to decide whether it is cheaper for them to fix a defective seat belt or gas tank or to leave it in their cars and risk thousands of lawsuits. In this coldly rational way, they determine whether a few thousand lives are more valuable than spending a few hundred million dollars on a recall. Unlike car parts, once poisons are sprayed on our property, they cant ever be recalled. In examining the issue of poisons used on Hasting Village, we can see a similar kind of financial rationalization. The landscaper wants to exert the least amount of effort, time and money to accomplish what the board of directors and the management have demanded. The board wants the job done as cheaply as possible. Maximizing profit is everyones bottom line. That much of what the landscaper is being asked to do is not even possible (Kill all the clover! Eliminate all insects! Make the lawns lush and green without ever watering them!) does not matter to the landscaper. If the customer is too ignorant of nature to understand that spraying poison just causes insects and plants to evolve poison-resistance in future generations, thats not his problem. If anything, it leads to greater profits due to more demand for poison. While every resident is kept in the dark that we are being poisoned, theres no risk to the board or to the landscaper at all, but now, thats changed. Everyone in Hastings Village is becoming aware. Is there a truly safe alternative? Absolutely. Heres the absolute safest way, as done by farmers and gardeners for all of human history. The landscaper could simply get his large crew to pull weeds out of the sidewalk cracks by hand, with no poison used. That might reduce his profits despite accomplishing a far more

lasting result and causing no harm to any resident. Clover could also be ripped out by hand, by why bother when you can spray the entire complex with poison in less than an hour, charge us to be poisoned and maximize your profits? In 70 years of massively saturating America with poisons we have not eliminated a single pest species of animal, insect or plant. All weve accomplished is making millions of people sick, damaging our children, harming our pets and permanently poisoning the soil. Weve also come close to eliminating numerous beneficial species necessary to our own existence such as bees and bats, which pollinate most crops grown in the US. We have some fine looking lawns in NJ, but at what price? There is a lot of collateral damage being done by this poison. In the week following the recent massive spraying I found numerous dead baby sparrows and robins on the sidewalks. Residents who dont care about birds or who ignorantly hate insects should consider that each sparrow or robin eats as many as 1,000 insects in one day. Each dead bird means another 1,000 mosquitoes and other insects per day multiplied by the lifespan of that bird, that will be free to live and breed. Each dead bird therefore means many millions of additional insects. Numbers tell the story. Birds are millions of times more effective than poison in controlling insects. So what does Hastings Village and our landscaper do in their ecological ignorance? Poison the clover, which poisons the insects, which poisons the birds that eat the insects. The birds then feed poisoned insects to their offspring who die as infants. Then we pay the landscaper to saturate our property with even more poison in a futile effort to artificially do what nature was already naturally accomplishing. I urge the board of directors, Crest Management and the landscaper to educate yourselves. Changing to slightly less toxic chemicals each time a resident complains is not the solution. Would you spray any poison on your own children for such trivial reasons as attacking clover? On your family pets? Would you saturate your own home or office with this toxic filth? If you understood that the effects of your landscaping with poison was to increase the number of insects and weeds rather than decrease them, would you change anything you are doing? Why do you believe you have a right to poison us and make us pay you to do it? Robert Lederman, founding member Stop Poisoning Hastings Village Founding member No-Spray Coalition Can Exposure to Toxins Change Your DNA? http://www.motherjones.com/blue-marble/2012/06/can-exposure-toxins-change-your-dna

HOW HERBICIDES AFFECT PEOPLE http://www.livestrong.com/article/199337-how-herbicides-affect-people/ SIGNS & SYMPTOMS OF ALLERGIES TO HERBICIDES http://www.livestrong.com/article/219980-signs-symptoms-of-allergies-to-herbicides/ Pesticides and children http://earthjustice.org/our_work/campaigns/pesticides-in-the-air-kids-at-risk CDC: U.S. kids with autism up 78% in past decade http://www.cnn.com/2012/03/29/health/autism/index.html N.J. still ranks high in autism rate, report says http://www.nj.com/news/index.ssf/2012/03/nj_is_second_nationally_in_aut.html Farmworkers plagued by pesticides, red tape http://www.iwatchnews.org/2012/06/25/9159/farmworkers-plagued-pesticides-red-tape This herbicide was used on Hasting Village lawns, paths and sidewalks for many years before I started complaining The "Safe" Garden Product that Can Destroy Your DNA http://articles.mercola.com/sites/articles/archive/2012/03/13/active-ingredient-glyphosatein-roundup-herbicides-found-in-peoples-urine.aspx Roundup (herbicide) the same toxic chemical mix used extensively on Hasting Village property for more than a decade by the same landscaper and Crest Management http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roundup_(herbicide) U.S.-funded herbicides damage human DNA http://www.finalcall.com/artman/publish/article_3686.shtml US National Institute of Health study Developmental Effects of Endocrine-Disrupting Chemicals in Wildlife and Humans http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1519860/pdf/envhper00375-0020.pdf THE EFFECTS OF HERBICIDES & PESTICIDES ON HUMANS http://www.livestrong.com/article/246750-the-effects-of-herbicides-pesticides-on-humans/ N.J. chemical company must help pay for Passaic River cleanup, judge rules http://www.nj.com/news/index.ssf/2011/07/nj_chemical_company_must_help.html Pesticides in cigarettes (Im including these links to make a specific point. When the landscaper sprays we get the drift directly in our lungs and on our skins. When the liquid pesticide dries, it reverts to a powder, which the leaf blowers and wind then mix with all of our air causing us to be continuously exposed to the chemicals exactly as if we were smoking them in a cigarette.)

http://www.organicconsumers.org/articles/article_456.cfm http://www.cultivatorshandbook.com/cultivators/cigpest.html http://quitsmoking.about.com/od/chemicalsinsmoke/a/chemicalshub.htm http://www.livescience.com/4083-pesticides-cigarette-smoke.html http://healthliteracy.worlded.org/docs/tobacco/Unit4/1whats_in.html Tell the truth, or someone will tell it for you. Stephanie Klein, Straight Up and Dirty: A Memoir