Crystal: I’m Crystal DiMiceli and welcome to the Forces for Nature show.

Do you find yourself overwhelmed with all the doom and gloom you hear of these days? Do you feel like you, as just one person, can’t really make a difference? Forces for Nature cuts through that negativity. In each episode, I interview somebody who is doing great things for animals and the environment. We talk about the challenge they’re addressing, the solution they have found, what keeps them going, And we’ll leave you with practical action tips so that you too can become a force for nature.

Today’s guest is Elizabeth Hilborn, author of the book, Restoring Eden, a book written like a suspense novel, but based on real life, on something that’s affecting us all, the heavy and mostly unregulated use of pesticides. If you think that’s an exaggeration, think about this. Remember taking car rides years ago, and the grill and the lights would be covered in dead insects afterwards?

Does that happen anymore? In my experience, hardly at all. Through the retelling of a personal tragedy, Elizabeth opened up my eyes to a problem that I thought I already knew about. I’m willing to bet that you’ll be shocked as well.

Hi Elizabeth, thank you so much for joining me on Forces for Nature. It’s so great to have you.

Elizabeth: Thank you so much for having me, Crystal. I’m excited to be here. We’re

Crystal: here to talk about your book, Restoring Eden. And if I’m being honest, when I was first presented with the book, I thought I would be a bit bored by it, just because I already know that Pesticides are contaminating the lands and that bees are dying out and about the insect apocalypse, but you had me hooked and I had no idea about the things that you exposed.

And I’m so excited to be able to talk to you today to share your story with others and even go a little deeper. So to start, explain to me where you live and what it’s like, or what it was

Elizabeth: like. Sure. Thank you, first of all, for your interest. I’m so glad that you took the chance and read the book because I agree.

I mean, there’s, we have this idea that there’s this big issue, but it’s not colored in and I have to share, I’m an environmental scientist. That’s my day job. And I didn’t know this stuff. So. One of the reasons That’s huge. That says a lot actually. Yeah. Yeah. That’s why it’s a secret. In the, um, title of the book, it says the agribusiness secret and it surely is.

So we live on a family farm. I’d call it a homestead because although we have livestock, although we have extensive fruit and vegetable farms in central North Carolina. We are not commercial farmers. We both work outside the home and earn our money from other means. So the farm is for us, but it was a lifestyle of being in touch with nature out in a very rural area.

We’re surrounded by forest and by other family farms, small farms, So it’s kind of our dream, our lifelong dream to live in a rural area and be able to do for ourselves on a piece of land. And what happened in

Crystal: the spring of 2017?

Elizabeth: Yes, so we live near a major river and It floods once or twice a year, so there’s a large floodplain.

I’ve been working to plant trees along the river side to help stabilize the banks and make it a more wildlife friendly area. So in May of 2017, I hiked down the hill to check on some young trees I’d planted after a flood, ’cause the flood waters can just flatten the trees. I wanted to make sure they were standing upright and not too damaged.

Do it. I could keep them healthy and on the way back home after that day of work. I stopped by a local wetland in our community and I kind of did it as a treat after I finished working because normally the wetland is just full of life. There are tadpoles playing and. Frogs. And if I sit there for a while, they’ll come out and I can kind of watch them.

They’re not scared because I’m not moving. And I love that. I’m a veterinarian and I just love animals in all shapes and forms. There are usually dragonflies and birds by the water. And when I went that day, it was a. dark tea color brown covered by a thin gray scum and there was nothing moving like the scum Looked like a ceiling there was nothing breaking it to come up for a breath of air Normally the tadpoles or frogs will take a breath of air and then submerge again None of that and it was so shocking.

I I didn’t really believe my eyes I was just wondering like After the flood, did the river contaminate the wetland? I had no idea what was happening. And was it just

Crystal: this wetland that was affected or your higher ground garden farm area as well?

Elizabeth: When I first discovered it, my husband came down the next morning and we walked the length of the wetland and it looked like the whole area was affected.

We didn’t see normal life anywhere along the wetland. And at that time, All the uplands seemed normal. I had bees in the garden. There were birds all over the place, raising their nestlings. We had bats flying at night, at dusk, capturing insects. There were big dragonflies patrolling and capturing insects out of the air.

So we had a, a thriving ecosystem in the uplands and. I wondered my, my investigation was focused on the wetland because that’s where I saw the damage. I gathered water samples and put them aside because in order to have them analyzed, I needed to know what was in the water so I could direct the chemist.

to analyze for certain things. I noticed that within weeks of finding the wetland damaged, the moths disappeared from our porch light. That was the first indication that there may be something going on that was bigger than the wetland. Then I was seeing butterflies struggling on the ground, trying to fly.

I found dragonflies convulsing at my feet, but mostly they just disappeared. The flying insects disappeared. I had no more bees in my garden. I could walk through the land and there was nothing moving around me. No gnats in the air. It was so creepy, it felt like some invisible force spreading, and I had no idea what it was.

Like, what could do that? Certainly damaged water, but we’re pretty far away from it. And I noticed bird nests empty of the adult birds. They’d abandoned their babies. I’d never seen that before. Adult birds will go through a lot to raise their young, but then I realized there were no insects, and that’s what birds feed their babies, are insects.

Maybe they had nothing to feed them anymore. Like, that was the only thing that made sense to me, why they’d leave them. I got very concerned because this is the fabric of life at our farm, and I was watching it fall apart.

Crystal: The book goes into your quest into finding out what happened, because even though you knew there was potentially pesticide runoff from the upstream farms, what you thought you knew about these chemicals from what you had been told and what you read about and what you’ve heard, is that they aren’t that dangerous to anything but the pests that they’re targeting in the place that they’re targeting them.

And especially not in the small quantities that you knew were being used. What did you come to learn about what gets sprayed on fields?

Elizabeth: Sure. So after this happened, I knew a farmer had been working in a crop field upstream and Yeah, I’ve lived in this community a long time. I knew the farmer. I reached out to him, but the farmer said.

That, that spring he had prepared the ground by spraying Roundup, and then had planted corn seed, and then had followed up with nitrogen. And I was so puzzled because that’s what people do to grow crops now, crops like corn and soybeans and wheat, they will use an herbicide to clear the field, so they spray that.

On the fields. And I knew that happened. I’d seen him out spraying fields in the community, but my understanding at that time was that the Roundup wouldn’t harm the animals. And I was seeing dead and dying animals. That was the big disconnect for me and the thing I had to investigate to find out what had happened.

And what

Crystal: did you learn about Roundup? Because Roundup is supposed to kill plants, not animals, right? It’s not a pesticide.

Elizabeth: Well, so pesticides are any sort of biocide, is the term I use, meaning plants, animals, insects, bacteria. It’s a broad term, so herbicides or Roundup are a type of pesticide. They’re made to kill plants.

And my understanding at that time was that when you spray Roundup on a plant or on soil, if it’s dry weather, it stays where it’s sprayed and doesn’t spread around and that just affects the plant where it was sprayed. That was my understanding going in. What I learned is as well, it does interrupt the biochemistry of the plant to kill it, but it also uses a pathway that bacteria use.

So it can also kill bacteria. And when I was investigating, I learned that there’s an active ingredient formulated with a soapy sticking agent to break surface tension. And that’s so that when the product is sprayed on the plant, it doesn’t bead up and run off. It spreads out. And stays on the plant that sticking agent that surfactant is extremely toxic to amphibians amphibians like frogs.

Salamanders have skin that can take up water. They can breathe through their skin. Some salamanders don’t even have lungs. They just breathe through their skin and this roundup formulation. is extremely toxic to them. And I always think of amphibians as like canary in the coal mine for water quality. If you have a thriving water body full of singing frogs in the spring, to me that’s a heavenly sound because I know that water can support their lives.

But our frogs had Stop singing. And that was of great concern to me. It was frightening.

Crystal: The active component in Roundup is glyphosate. Is that

Elizabeth: correct? Yes. Yes. Okay.

Crystal: So you said that when Roundup is sprayed on the ground in normal conditions, it stays there, but turns out it’s actually water soluble, right?

And then travels with the water.

Elizabeth: Yes. That’s what I discovered as I was going deep in my investigation. I went. into the scientific literature and really tried to just understand, because I was hitting roadblocks, people were telling me they had no idea what was happening, so I, I ended up feeling like it was really on me to figure it out.

I learned that what I thought was true about Roundup, about it staying where it’s sprayed, is not exactly true. So, If Roundup is sprayed on bare soil in dry conditions, it tends to stay there and break down rapidly and sunlight with the microbial action. But if there’s a rain before it’s broken down. It can dissolve in the rainwater and flow off the field.

So, there is so much Roundup used in the world now. It’s the number one pesticide used in the world. That when people go out to collect water samples to specifically look for Roundup, find it everywhere people are. Because people use it in urban areas, on their lawns, keeping the grass out of the cracks in the sidewalk.

People spray it on crop fields. As I mentioned, it’s used by landscapers to maintain those beautiful mulch beds around government buildings, schools, playgrounds. And we use so much Roundup that it is found now in rainwater as it falls from the sky. So it’s found in, I know, I know, shocking. It’s found in surface waters.

Where people live and it also, because it’s water soluble, it leaches through the soil into groundwater. So it is possible for it to contaminate drinking water wells, depending on how shallow the well, the soil type, how much roundup, you know, it’s.

Crystal: That’s what you discovered about what was sprayed on the fields, but you also discovered something about the seeds that were being planted, and the culprit wasn’t necessarily the Roundup.

There, you, you knew that there might have been something else at play.

Elizabeth: Well, yes, because everything I’d read about Roundup suggested that although it could harm amphibians, it couldn’t kill insects. Like it, I didn’t, not that it couldn’t, just, I wasn’t seeing any reports like that, any evidence that it could.

So I didn’t suspect it. I knew there was something else going on, but I couldn’t figure it out. So. I reached out to Christy Morrissey, who is a scientist in Western Canada in the plains. She studies insect eating birds. And Christy I, I told her my story in an email and she replied, Oh, well, you might want to consider since you have a cornfield, a hill of you, the seeds of the corn are coated with very potent pesticides, a mixture of insecticides and fungicides, the insecticides.

are in the class called neonicotinoids or nicotine like substances. They’re a newer class of insecticides. They’ve really increased in use over the last 20 years and they’ve revolutionized crop production because instead of a farmer having to spray the field, When they’re a pest, they’re coating the crop seed, so the farmer is applying insecticide every time a crop is planted, whether it’s needed or not, even if he has no pests or she has no pests.

that insecticide is put into the field. Well, it turns out this new class of neonicotinoids, or neonics, as I call them for short, are extremely water soluble. So only a small portion is taken up by the plant. Over 90 percent of the insecticide flows out with water. Away from the crop field, into the soil, and into the surface water, it also, like Roundup, can bleach down into the groundwater.

So, this was new to me. Pesticides that dissolve so easily in water, because the old classes of pesticides were more, I’ll just say, call them oil based, so they didn’t move out with water the way the newer class does. That was a big realization. In her email, Christy suggested, Dr. Morrissey, that the neonics on the corn seed may have been associated with what I was seeing with the insect deaths.

Crystal: Neonics also So what I learned in your book was that they are systemic insecticides. So when the plant grows, the insecticide goes into the plant system, right? They are inside the plant.

Elizabeth: They’re taken up by the plant and even nearby plants who take up the contaminated water can become contaminated by the insecticide.

So I’m. I am a veterinarian with a specialty in honeybee medicine and I’m focused a lot on pollinators. I grow fruit in my orchard. I need pollinators. I pay attention to them. And in order to help pollinators, farmers have been planting strips, pollinator strips of flowers near their fields. And I realized that the use of systemic insecticides It weakened the argument for planting these strips because if that water ran into the area where the pollinator strips were planted, those flowers could take up the insecticide.

And they’re so very potent crystal. One corn seed has enough insecticide to kill 80, 000 honeybees. What? Oh my God. I know. That came from Aaron Hodgson of Iowa State, I believe. They are so potent. And a cornfield starts with about 30, 000 seeds. So the neonic can run off through the water if it’s taken up by the nearby flowers.

When the insects feed on the flowers. the pollen and the nectar is contaminated. So it’s like a honey trap, right? We’re attracting insects. And if those plants near the field has taken up the insecticide, We’re, we’re attracting them and, and killing them. They may not be killed the first time they feed, but this insecticide is cumulative.

So what we’ve seen in the pollinator world is, we see animals that are sickened and bring contaminated pollen back to their colonies, or they, they package it for food in the solitary bees for their young to eat. So when the The larvae are emerging and start growing. They eat this contaminated food and it interrupts their life cycle.

We’ve seen severe reproductive harm. And that’s one of the reasons people are so worried about bee decline. Bee decline has been associated with these neonics because they are the most commonly used insecticide in the world. Over 90 percent of corn crops are grown with this neonic coating, over 50 percent of soybeans now, cotton, wheat, canola, a lot of our major crops that we depend on that are grown every year in many countries are contaminated with these water soluble chemicals.

Neonics. So, as a pollinator vet, as a fruit grower, I am so concerned about this use on crop seed. In the United States, where I am, it is not tracked, it is not counted as a pesticide use, and the seeds aren’t regulated as pesticides. So, we don’t even really know how much is out there in the environment.

That

Crystal: was something else I was going to bring up that shocked me was that in the book you said it’s no longer recognized as a pesticide once it gets coated on the seeds, which is just shocking. And also this is a danger to us because once these neonics get into the plant, it could also get into our fruits and veggies and you can’t wash it off.

It’s inside the plant.

Elizabeth: Yes, these systemic insecticides are taken up by the food plant. So why some farmers love these is that they kill all the chewing insects that try to harm the food. Item so the apple or the bell pepper, or whatever the item is, it can be a perfectly flawless piece of fruit for sale at the grocery store.

And that’s what consumers expect. They expect no pest damage on their produce and these insecticides can give that product. So the downside is they are in all parts of the plant, including what we eat, and there’s no way to wash it off. A recent survey by the Centers for Disease Control found that in their survey of urine samples from Americans, About 50 percent of us have neonics in our urine.

So we’re absolutely being exposed at low levels. What are

Crystal: the health consequences of these things?

Elizabeth: We don’t know for mammals, we’re just starting to get some information from studies on deer from other vertebrates like birds, that even though these insecticides were designed to be very potent for insects, but less harmful to mammals and animals with backbones, that they still can be harmful.

There’s some Japanese studies where people have really eaten a lot of foods with residues and they had obvious signs and symptoms of neurologic damage and had residues in their urine. So we’re just starting to understand we don’t No very much, but again, pregnant, young child, it may make sense for the most heavily contaminated fruits and vegetables, maybe a good option to choose organic or find another option than just commercial food, because you don’t know, you can’t look at the food and know, well, this pepper is good, but this one’s contaminated with more insecticide, like we can’t tell.

It’s invisible to us. Oof.

Crystal: Okay. Oh, this is, I have so many questions. Well, I guess this is, this is probably just. A big impossible question to answer, but if these things can cause such harm to the environment and to biodiversity and to even us, how are they not banned or more

Elizabeth: heavily regulated? So, There’s always a, um, process where pesticides are evaluated for safety based on their active ingredient by the manufacturer.

The manufacturer submits that information in the United States to a regulatory agency and they decide, Okay, is all the information we need complete here? Does it tell us that it is? Safe, given these restrictions on its use, safe, meaning no substantial adverse effects to what they call non target organisms or beings other than the pest insects.

So once that’s submitted, aimed to kill, yes, and it can be approved in a narrow way for just a few crops in a few situations, or it can be approved for broader use. So, what’s missing in this process. Is only the active ingredient is evaluated, but what’s applied in the real world is a mixture of other things, and it’s applied in a manner where it mixes with other approved pesticides.

And 1 thing I learned was that the neonics and the fungicide on that corn seed. Potentiate each other, they can be synergistic or much greater than expected in their toxicity when they work together in the environment and they’re applied together. It’s not taken into account when the individual active ingredient is approved.

So you have unexpected things happening in the environment, but we don’t track things. People aren’t doing surveys of biological. Condition after spraying or, or treated seed, or so we have no way of tracking to know what’s happening out there. What we find are all these scientific reports saying, Hey, we found neonics and dead hummingbirds.

We found a bunch of dead bees that flew through a cloud of pesticide that came off the seed as it was being planted. We’re seeing. Steep colony losses were, we did experiments and we find solitary bees are not able to reproduce successfully after exposure to these things. So that’s not part of the process, though.

That’s kind of separate. It’s in the scientific literature. There’s a

Crystal: petition out right now that people can sign about coated seeds. Right.

Elizabeth: Right now in the United States, our Environmental Protection Agency is taking comments on whether, should they be evaluating treated seed in some way, should they be restricting the use of treated seed.

So anyone who lives in the United States who Is impacted, and these might be farmers, people with natural waters that they want to keep biologically active beekeepers, anyone who feels that they want to comment can submit comments. I don’t know what the end period is, and

Crystal: not to mention the strong economic interests from powerful pesticide industries.

Elizabeth: And that’s one of the things I felt when I was writing the book, is here I’m talking about butterflies and frogs and birds. Right now in the United States, I don’t have the feeling that there’s a good balance, valuation. Our society doesn’t value The small creatures, the way our society values a healthy balance sheet.

And I’m here to tell you as a fruit grower and as a bee veterinarian, that we need. to value our small creatures because our garden failed without pollinators. We didn’t have any apples, pears, or blueberries for years because there were no flying insects to pollinate the plants. We still haven’t recovered six years later.

Crystal: So we have this big problem that surrounds us, but I want to talk now about what we can do to protect ourselves and then how we can try to change the system, which is, which is a much

Elizabeth: bigger question. Well, I don’t know about changing. the system. But I do know that even though I kind of stumbled into this and had to figure this out, I’m not the first person to discover this.

There are over 15 years of scientists warning, hey, we’re losing our insects. We’re losing our birds. We’re losing our fish because of these insecticides. What gives me so much hope, Crystal, is that I live in an area where there are a lot of young people who are attracted to farming. And they’re attracted to farming in a manner that doesn’t use so many pesticides.

The goal is to sustain The quality of the soil to sustain the pollinator populations to keep a healthy environment of birds and bats that also help eat pests and to be a partner. With these animals in growing food, so it’s like a consideration. I’ve heard the word reciprocity used where you don’t only think about feeding yourself, you’re also feeding the soil to make healthier plants for the next season.

So these types of agriculture, agroecology, regenerative agriculture. organic agriculture. Young and new farmers are overwhelmingly choosing this approach because many people recognize that our soils are being degraded, that we’re losing our pollinators. I just happened to figure out one specific cause of the biodiversity loss, but it’s much larger, you know, it’s how we use the land.

As a pollinator specialist, one of the things I notice when I’m in my 60s now, but when I was a young woman, it was common to see meadows with wildflowers in them. Now the culture in the United States tends to be mowing frequently to keep things looking neat. But what that does is it takes the flowers out of the field so they only have stems and the leaves of the grass, and it eliminates huge areas of foraging habitat for pollinators.

Pollinators need millions of flower visits to make honey, to feed their young, to gather enough pollen to ensure that next generation of pollinators. So one of the things I always What I’d like to point out that we can do is to plant flowers and especially native flowers have different shapes that allow many different kinds of bees and pollinators to feed, like some bees have very long tongues so they like, like the trumpet shaped flowers.

Whereas some bees need a flat flower to feed, so all different shapes of flowers that are not contaminated with Neonics. Now Neonics are used in nursery culture, and many commercial outlets will display these perfect plants and flowers to plant in your garden. But they were raised with Neonics, so the flowers from those treated plants are potentially toxic to pollinators.

So you either want to grow your plants from seed or buy them from a vendor that you know has not used systemic insecticides. And that is the best way to support the beneficial insects, composting, leaving undisturbed soil. These are all leaving leaves when they fall, allowing them to compost. These are all ways to support our beneficial insects.

Crystal: And, and you have to specifically ask for uncoated seeds or, or plants that were grown from uncoated seeds,

Elizabeth: right? So this is where it gets complicated. Seed coatings. Yeah, seed coatings aren’t always neonics. Yeah. Oh, okay. Okay. Yeah. And it’s sometimes hard to find out what they are. Just as an aside, we have grass seed here that’s commonly sold coded.

I’ve called the grass seed manufacturers. No one can tell me what the coding is. It’s not on their label. It’s not online. And I have not, I’ve just stopped using coded grass seed because I don’t know. So I’ll default to it’s bad, because I don’t know, and I want to protect the animals, so I just plant uncoated grass seed, but frequently corn seeds coated with fungicides, and, you know, bright pink corn seed, so, but it doesn’t have neonics on it, and you can’t always tell when you buy the seed.

But it needs

Crystal: to be labeled as un coded. Okay. Um.

Elizabeth: Well, no, you can, you kind of have to find out the hard way. Oh, okay. It’s not labeled. It’s not labeled. It’s so hard. I know. It’s so hard. We should probably just skip that part. Yeah. So, so I do recommend buying plants that you know are grown without the systemic insecticides like Neonics or planting your own seed.

I have

Crystal: gone to nurseries and seen, like, I’m drawn to the plants that already have a bunch of bugs and bees. Flowers, yeah. Around them. So I’m assuming, I’m hoping that maybe those are the, the safe ones, but you never know, I suppose.

Elizabeth: Well, the bee can’t detect, let, let me just mention that even if you see animals visiting a flower, it doesn’t mean it’s safe.

They can’t detect the chemical, so they don’t, they don’t avoid the chemicals. They don’t know it’s there. So it’s up to us humans to know how the plant was produced to offer them safe food because the insects just see the flower and feed from it. Okay.

Crystal: That’s good to know. I’m glad you clarified that. How, so how can people avoid eating foods with these pesticides?

Elizabeth: If you want to minimize your pesticide residue exposure from food, you can choose an organic diet. Now they tend to be a little more expensive because it’s more labor to produce these fruits to get them to a perfect condition where they’re attractive in a grocery store. But if you’re lucky enough to live in an area with farmers markets or no local farmers where you can talk with your local farmer and just find out what their.

Approaches to farming. As I mentioned, many, especially younger farmers are growing fruits and vegetables with a very low pesticide approach, but they don’t always pay for the certification to become organic, so they can’t label their food organically grown, but they’re still using low pesticide methods.

Also, the Environmental Working Group every year hosts a dirty dozen list of the fruits and vegetables that have the largest amount of pesticide contamination. So if someone is seeking to avoid pesticide exposure, They can look at that list and maybe choose organic options, grow their own food, work with a farmer who they know is using fewer pesticides to try to get that pesticide load in that food down.

And that’s especially important for pregnant women and growing children. All right.

Crystal: I don’t want to take up. Much more of your time. So I just have one last question that I’m curious about. At the end of the book, Mike told you that you did them a favor because they hadn’t known the extent of how dangerous what they were using is.

So does that mean he’s stopped using chemicals on

Elizabeth: his land? Yeah, I’m happy to report that, to the best of my knowledge, no more coated seed has been planted in the fields. I know it really spooked him too, to learn about it. I am not anti pesticide. because I see them as useful tools, but we need to use them as a last resort.

When everything else has failed, we’ve tried all the management options for pests, they’re a last resort. And they’re out there. Instead of using, yeah, and instead of using them every time something is grown, that just kills the animals we need to grow food.

Crystal: Absolutely. This has been, I enjoyed your book so much and it’s blown my mind in so many different ways, but I’m going to let you go.

And I just want to thank you for, for writing this book and bringing this to our attention. And I mentioned it in the beginning. I think this is, this book is this generation’s Silent Spring and I hope it’s treated as such and that some really good results come from it because. It’s incredible what’s happening out there, and we need more people to know about it.

So thank you for everything that you’re doing, Elizabeth. You’re making a difference.

Elizabeth: Oh, thank you so much, Crystal, for having me.

Like Elizabeth,

Crystal: I’m not anti pesticide either, but there really needs to be far stronger monitoring and evaluation of the effects of these chemicals in the real world. There have been attempts to ban some of the chemicals like in 2022 when the U. S. Environmental Protection Agency banned chlorpyrifros, I can’t pronounce them, but they’re a pesticide linked to brain damage in children, even in small doses.

But that was overturned this past November. What happened on Elizabeth’s land is happening in so many places, even far away from farmlands because pesticide use in suburbs and cities is off the charts. But many of us aren’t as in tune with the details of our ecosystems as much as Elizabeth is, so we don’t realize it.

There are steps we can take to protect ourselves. Elizabeth mentioned many, and I’ll list them again in the show notes. I hope this episode helped to open your eyes, like her book.

Elizabeth: Don’t

Crystal: forget to go to ForcesForNature. com and sign up to receive emailed show notes, action tips, and a free checklist to help you start taking practical actions today. Do you know someone else who would enjoy this episode? I would be so grateful if you would share it with them. Hit me up on Instagram and Facebook at Becoming ForcesForNature and let me know what actions you have been taking.

Adopting just one habit can be a game changer, because imagine if a million people also adopted that. What difference for the world are you going to make today?

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