The New 'Silent Spring'

In the mid-1900s, governments and industries across the globe were using the pesticide dichlorodiphenyltrichloroethane, or DDT.

Then came Silent Spring, a book by Rachel Carson that thoroughly documented the harm caused by DDT to waters, to wildlife and to people. It galvanized a movement that ultimately led to the chemical’s large-scale ban.

Now some are saying a new Silent Spring movement must happen, because a pesticide 5,000 to 7,000 times more potent than DDT is here: neonicotinoids, which are used on millions of acres of soybeans, corn and other crops in the United States alone.

To Dan Raichel of NRDC, this is “public enemy number one” to pollinators. Fortunately, just like DDT, we can make systemic change for the benefit of farmers, food and nature alike. Canadian provinces already have. In our next Common Groundwater podcast episode, Dan breaks down the potency, popularity and persistence of ‘neonics’ and the plan to address them.

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To learn more about NRDC's pollinator work, click here.

Are you part of a Michigan-based group or business interested in protecting pollinators and saving farmers money? Email Dan for more information: draichel@nrdc.org.

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Common Groundwater is hosted by the Michigan Environmental Council and Beau Brockett Jr.

Our music is "The Four Seasons" by Antonio Vivaldi, arranged by Derek Zhang and performed by Jackson resident Taj Wallace.

Transcript

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The New 'Silent Spring'

[00:00:00] 

Beau Brockett: Hey folks, you are tuning into Common Groundwater, a podcast by the Michigan Environmental Council, where we go across the state, or in the case of this episode, the region, to talk about the environment.

We tell stories about the environment, we talk about problems it faces, and then we talk about the solutions to those problems. I'm Beau Brockett, your host, and joining me today from The Loop in Chicago is Dan Raichel of the Natural Resources Defense Council, or NRDC. Dan, welcome.

Dan Raichel: Hi, everyone. Thanks, Beau. 

Beau Brockett: Yeah, thanks for being here. Really appreciate it.

Dan Raichel: Yeah, thanks for having me.

Beau Brockett: Yeah, for sure. So Dan, you are taking part in our pollinator mini series. You are the pollinator and pesticides director of NRDC, so a very well-fitting title for a [00:01:00] well-fitting podcast. And we've kind of gone across the state so far in this series, getting perspectives of pollinators in various places.

So we've gone to neighborhoods, we've gone to ecosystems, nature, wilderness. We talked about the ways pollinators benefit those places and the ways that they are struggling in those places too. And you and I are here today to talk about one of the through lines between all of those episodes, which is pesticides. And the ways that they impact not only pollinators, but all the things that pollinators benefit as well. 

 But you, as part of NRDC, have a much more national or maybe even international perspective of the state of pollinators. Would you mind going over what that state is, how they're faring, what, it's like? 

Dan Raichel: Yeah, so the state of pollinators right now is pretty poor. We just got the numbers for last year's losses of honeybee colonies across the country and it was the worst on record. That [00:02:00] follows the previous year, which was also the worst on record this past year.

Beekeepers across the country lost close to 56% of their hives. So that's more than half. And this is a dramatic departure from what beekeepers were losing, you know, before the mid -2000s. Up until that point, they were losing maybe 10, 15% of their colonies a year. Mostly due to winter cold and you know, sort of overnight in the mid-2000s, those losses kicked up to 30, 40, 50% a year. And happening year round, happening in the summer as well as the winter. So there was something new that happened during that period that made those losses significantly worse. We've seen that persist to this day over the last couple of decades and the last couple of years we've seen it get even worse.

It's important to remember, though, that honeybees are just one species of bee. [00:03:00] In Michigan, there are 400 plus species of native bees alone, not to mention other native pollinators, butterflies and other insects. And what we see with honeybees, which are essentially livestock and we have numbers because we keep bees, right, is that there are canaries in the coal mine for this much broader hollowing out of our pollinators and our ecosystems. We see a number of bees like the rusty patch bumblebee or the American bumblebee lose 90-plus percent of their population over the last couple of decades as well.

And again, these are all indicator species. What folks might have an experience of, if you remember a couple of decades ago driving through Michigan countryside, maybe about this time of year, you'd have to turn on your windshield wipers, whether it was raining or not, just to get all of the bugs off your windshield.

Think about when the last time was that you really [00:04:00] had to do that. And so this hollowing out is happening in front of our eyes. It's happening to all our pollinators. Honeybees are our lead indicators and beekeepers are replacing those hives every year. So we still have honeybees. But what they're telling us is that there's something much more broadly happening in the environment that's really bad, and that's especially important for Michigan, 'cause Michigan is the second most diversified agricultural economy outside California. Michigan grows everything, right? And it needs pollinators to do that.

Beau Brockett: Yeah. No kidding. And just to clarify, too, so you were saying that honeybees are, in a way kind of like livestock that gives us a great sense of their numbers, how they're doing as a whole. They're not doing well, and that's an indication that other pollinators are also probably not doing well. Is that a correct sort of summarization of what you were saying? 

Dan Raichel: Yeah, they really are the. Canaries in the coal mine. And, one thing you see too is even though we've been able to sort of maintain the honeybee colonies, [00:05:00] 'cause we breed and replace them at a furious clip.

Yeah. And the whole system is sort of being held together with duct tape. Even those honeybee colonies are weaker than they've ever been before. And we see that in sort of declining honey numbers, honey production numbers, too. It's also financially very expensive for beekeepers to continue to replace these hives.

We know a number of beekeepers this year. They're saying, you know, they don't know if they can keep going and that production and that all those costs are also passed on to producers in Michigan too, because fruit growers, vegetable growers, they paid to have honeybees placed on their farms to do pollination, and if honeybee keepers are losing colonies, that's expensive to replace. Those costs all get passed on and eventually to the consumer too. 

Beau Brockett: Yeah, You had mentioned that there's been a pretty sharp decline in recent years, and at least based on the past episodes, we know that comes from a number of factors, right?

It comes from climate change, it comes [00:06:00] from development patterns, but you and I are here today particularly to talk about the pesticide dynamic of it all. Just wanted to say, though, if, if. we get too narrow-minded on pesticides and need to and expand to discuss stuff, please feel free to, to push back on me and do that.

But the work that, that you're particularly doing around pesticides, at least in the Michigan space, is around one kind of family, maybe so to speak, of pesticide called neonicotinoids or neonics which, you know, in a previous talk, you kind of mentioned to me were, you know, quote unquote "public enemy number one," at least in terms of the pesticide space.

Dan Raichel: Totally.

Beau Brockett: Could you talk a little bit about what neonics are, like, what they look like, how they're presented, how they're used, things like that. 

Dan Raichel: Yeah, so, neonicotinoids are neurotoxic insecticides, which means they are pesticides designed to kill insects by attacking their nerves. [00:07:00] And they do that by mimicking nicotine. ' Neonicotinoid' means "new nicotine-like substance." So they target nerve sites that respond to nicotine, but when nicotine attack, you know, hits those nerve sites, it stimulates the nerve and then the nicotine releases. What neonics do is they attach to those nerve sites permanently, and they continue to stimulate that nerve over and over again until the nerve eventually fails or dies.

And so if you've seen a bee that has been acutely poisoned with neonic, oftentimes that bee will start to twitch uncontrollably before becoming paralyzed and dying. And look, a lot of pesticides kill insects in gruesome ways. Neonics are not unique in that respect, but they do have some unique properties that make them especially problematic.

And what [00:08:00] we saw with all of these other causes, there's climate change, there's habitat loss. All of these stressors on pollinator populations, they're all part of the problem, but none of them suddenly got worse in the mid-2000s. When we go back to that spike in honeybee colony losses, the only signal that we see that matches really well with that sudden spike is the sudden spike in, uptick in use of these pesticides, particularly as coatings on crop seeds. And I can, delve a little bit more into that. 

Beau Brockett: Yeah, please do. Yeah. You had mentioned, again, earlier that there are three sorts of ways that make neonics particularly dangerous. I'd love to get into that a bit more.

Dan Raichel: Yeah. Yeah. So, there's three we can say, like, the three Ps, right? Why are neonics more problematic than other pesticides? Why do we think that they're even, you know, a greater driver than some of these other stressors? It's because they are [00:09:00] potent, they're persistent, and they're popular. So let's go to potency first.

Neonics may be the most potent insecticides ever created. They are in terms of toxicity to bees, somewhere in the neighborhood of 5,000 to 7,000 times more toxic than DDT. And a lot of people are saying like neonics may be sort of the new drivers of a, new Silent Spring, right? That these may be the most ecologically destructive pesticides since DDT.

And to give listeners a sense of scale here. The neonic coating on one corn seed has enough active ingredient to kill a quarter million bees. One square foot of treated lawn with neonic has enough active ingredient to kill a million bees. So number one problem, they are super potent.

Second problem, they're very good at contaminating whole ecosystems. So they penetrate plants, [00:10:00] that was sort of their new invention, right? They're designed not just to be sprayed on plants, but to get into the plant, to get into the leaves, the pollen, the root, the nectar, the fruit, basically to make the plant itself toxic to insects.

And so that allowed them to be applied in all sorts of new and interesting ways. Of course, they can be sprayed, and they are sprayed, but more commonly they're applied to soil, or most commonly, they're literally painted on crop seeds. And as that crop seed is growing into a plant, it soaks up that pesticide coating through its roots, distributes the pesticide to all of its parts and becomes toxic.

The problem is only 2 to 5% of those neonics get into the target plant. The other 95-plus percent stay in the environment, right? Most of that in the soil, and they're super mobile, right? The same properties that let it get up into the plant means that [00:11:00] anytime it rains, anytime there's irrigation, that rain water is pulling the neonic through the soil.

It's contaminating new soil. If there's plants in that soil, they soak up the pesticides, they become toxic, and if there's a water supply, that water supply becomes polluted and the pesticides are persistent, too, so they stay there year after year.

And then the third problem is popularity. Neonics are the most widely used insecticides in the United States. They cover hundreds of millions of acres every year. Most of that is coatings on corn and soybean seed.

And to give you a sense of scale here, one, neonic-treated corn seed, enough active ingredient to kill a quarter million bees. Multiply that times 30,000 seeds per acre. Multiply that times 90 to a 100 million acres nationwide.

That's just one crop, right? That's just corn. So the vast majority is on these seed treatments, but they're also [00:12:00] approved for 140 different crops. They're in lawns, gardens, golf courses, bedbug products, pet products, you name it, they are everywhere. And what's happening is, particularly with the seeds, where most of the use is, we have because they're persisting in the soil, this buildup of toxicity year, over year, and this is probably the biggest deployment of an insecticide in US history, right? And it's happening every year after year. So what you get is this buildup of toxicity that's constantly expanding, every time it rains into every nook and cranny of the ecosystem. soil, water, plant life, wildlife.

And what we've learned is, well, one that's really bad for bees. Super bad for bees. It's also bad for butterflies. It's also clearing out insect life that has ripple effects to birds. So we see [00:13:00] neonics being linked with mass losses of birds. These are bleeding into aquatic ecosystems and water supplies. We see that in Michigan. That's hollowing out fisheries. And, they're getting into our bodies too, actually at pretty high rates. 

Beau Brockett: Yeah. Yeah. I mean, very heady, terrible, like almost dystopian-like stuff happening here, and there's a lot to respond to. I think first what I realized over the course of this little miniseries and then especially today, is like how much of a misnomer, 'pesticide' the word really is, right?

Like you may think, I certainly thought, you know, a while back that pesticide would only knock out the actual pests that you're kind of gunning for. Right? But no.

Dan Raichel: If only right? 

Beau Brockett: If only. It's not that specialized . Its knocking out insects of all sorts, birds of all sorts. It's getting elsewhere.

And another thing too, [00:14:00] you had kind of set this up well, so I want to ask it now, like, NRDC recently worked with others to release like a report specifically around the impact of neonics in the Great Lakes and in the Great Lakes region. Could you go into a, bit more detail on those findings? 

Dan Raichel: Yeah. So, the report looks at contamination in Michigan water. It looks at state and federal testing and what the report finds is that neonics are all over Michigan water at levels expected to basically be hollowing out aquatic ecosystems right? The proof people say, you know, the proof is in the pudding. The proof of like this widespread contamination in Michigan we see in the water. And what the testing shows is about half of the sites that the state has tested are showing positive detects for neonics. And most of that is above [00:15:00] those levels that EPA has set as sort of a benchmark for harms to aquatic ecosystems.

We're seeing these pesticides show up year round in tributaries to the Great Lakes. So that includes the Saginaw River. That includes, the River Rouge around Detroit and the Grand River, on the western part of the state. So we're seeing them all over and these are big rivers,

too. That's what's so odd is that these are big rivers, lot of dilution, and yet we're finding them either 12 months or 11 months out of the year going into the Great Lakes.

The report also shows that probably the problem is much worse than what we see. You know, we're taking these samples at like a snapshot in time, but, likely that's missing, like these peak concentrations.

And these peak concentrations are likely coming at just the worst time. They're coming in [00:16:00] the spring, right after planting of the corn and soybean. This is the time when mayflies are spawning. When the other aquatic. invertebrates, right? Bugs and ecosystems, sort of the building blocks of those ecosystems, the base, this is when they're reproducing.

And this has implications for Michiganders, too. The report doesn't talk about human health, but it's worth noting that conventional chlorination treatment doesn't remove neonic from water supplies.

Advanced filtration does, but most water systems don't have that. So if you have neonic-contaminated source water, you're gonna have neonics in your tap. And the proof of that is that we see neonics in people's bodies. CDC research shows that about, on any given day, half the American population has neonics in their bodies. More recent testing of pregnant women across the country found that 95% of them [00:17:00] had neonics in their bodies and that the levels are increasing year over year.

And this is a big concern because it's like you said, with pesticides, it doesn't attack just the pest. Our bodies respond to nicotine too, right? Our nerves respond to that as well. And what you see is, even though neonics are relatively new, we don't have as much science on them as we have for older chemicals, but they are neurotoxic, and like with other neurotoxins, there may be no safe level right? So we see neonics in some of the research associated with birth defects of the heart and brain, autism-like symptoms, cognitive impairments in people, in children exposed in the womb, and then in adults, a whole host of neurological and also hormonal and reproductive symptoms, lower testosterone, lower sperm count, strange things going on with the sperm, which is funny because we see [00:18:00] the same thing in, animals too. So everything is sort of indicating that what's a pesticide is not just harmful to just pests.

Beau Brockett: Yeah. Yes. And just the, findings, right, about potency, the near universal use of neonics on certain crops, the myriad health impacts, they all feel very like almost unfathomable sorts of numbers and findings, right? Like I think back to like a, common communications struggle across various fields is like, it's a lot easier to talk about it, you know, like a single instance of tragedy, right? And it's a lot harder to talk about a tragedy of the masses. And it's really tough to wrap your head around just how large and widespread it is.

For folks listening, stay tuned. You're gonna hear a quick break. You'll hear from our production partner NRDC, and then we are going to take a quick break ourselves, so stay tuned.

[00:19:00] 

Beau Brockett: Hey folks. Welcome back to Common Groundwater, a podcast by the Michigan Environmental Council. I'm Beau here with Dan from NRDC, the pollinator and pesticides director for the organization. We're here in Chicago talking about pollinators in the Great Lakes region but particularly in Michigan.

Dan at the break, we kind of left off talking about a report that recently released with NRDC. We talked about what its implications were not only [00:20:00] for pollinators but also for ecosystems at large and for people. One of the three Ps of neonics that you mentioned was popularity.

This is a sort of, group of chemicals that is being used throughout a large number of agricultural business sectors. Could you just talk a little bit about the market realities that this pesticide faces and why it is the way it is right now?

Yeah, so I think the first thing to note is when we saw those massive losses of honeybees that started in the mid-2000s, but neonics were approved in the United States in like the mid- to late -'90s. What changed in the mid-2000s was how neonics started to be used, right? They started putting them as coatings on crop seeds and corn and soybean in particular, just being huge crops in the Midwest and Michigan and nationwide. When that took [00:21:00] off, that's the point at which we saw those massive losses. So in Michigan, what that looks like, and this is part of the report too, an estimated 84% of the neonic use in Michigan agriculture is on just corn and soybean seeds, right? So, massive use and over a massive geographic area too. Millions of acres in Michigan alone.

So, there have been studies, a number of studies from across North America and Canada that in the Midwest, especially in the upper Midwest, these corn and soybean coatings are not providing farmers economic benefits, in the vast majority of cases, right? So very rarely are they providing a yield benefit at all. But even when they do provide a yield benefit, the companies are charging for putting [00:22:00] those coatings on the seeds, right? It's like getting the hot wax at the car wash, right? That's an upcharge. So if you measure that cost versus the additional yield benefit, it's a wash on average, right? There are some very rare cases, but again, the vast majority of farmers that are using these coatings are losing money on that additional input cost, and that's the market reality. For most of this pesticide use, so all of these negative things that we have been talking about, what makes it almost criminal is that almost nobody is benefiting economically from this, except for the pesticide companies themselves. 

And now these sorts of companies have made neonic-coated seeds so ubiquitous for some of our major crops that I would guess it's a bit tough for farmers . Like, like why wouldn't they choose that? Because they're [00:23:00] so widespread across the market.

Is that like a fair sort of thing to say? 

Dan Raichel: Yeah, and it's different for different markets. Okay. What's important for folks to know is that the companies that make the seeds are also the companies that make the pesticides. Same company, right? If you've heard of Monsanto that got bought by Bayers, so Bayer, Monsanto, DowDuPont, which is now Corteva...

But the folks that are making the pesticides are also making the seeds. So in corn markets, there, there's less choice. Basically what happens is the companies are providing corn seed with certain genetics they slap on, you know, two to six pesticides on that seed. They coat it actually in microplastics, right? They call it a polymer, but degrades to microplastics to keep all of those pesticides on the seeds, right? And it's not just neonic, it's fungicides, it's nematicide, it's all sorts of things. they slap on there. And then they sell it to farmers [00:24:00] as sort of the meal deal, right? Buy this package, everything included. Oh, and by the way, we'll sell you the Roundup too, right? So it's all sort of a package or a platform they sometimes call it. And so it's very difficult for farmers to sort of pick and choose and say, 'Hey, I don't want this,' right. 'I don't want this extra input, this extra pesticide that's harmful, and is costing me money and is wasting money,' right?

Other markets are a little bit open. Soybeans a little bit more open, but the tricky thing here is for a lot of the dealers that are selling to farmers, a lot of them are owned by these big seed and chemical companies. So they're providing advice to farmers, and guess what they're telling 'em? It's like, 'Oh yeah, no, definitely you need this,' right? So, but there are real costs and there's real cost to farmers too from using these pesticides sort of prophylactically.

The other parallel here is maybe antibiotics, right? [00:25:00] You don't want to use antibiotics all over the place because that starts to create resistant germs. And we're seeing the same things with neonics because we're using neonics all over the place unnecessarily, right? We're putting 'em on the seed before we even know there's a pest problem, and because there's so rarely a pest problem that matters, right? These are rarely providing benefits. We're creating the perfect environment for resistance.

We haven't figured out a way to completely eliminate pesticides, so we want these pesticides to be effective when we do use them. We're creating the environment to make neonics much less effective.

And by the way, you know, it's not just in terms of the other impacts that these pesticides have. It's not just killing pollinators, right? There are so many other insects that are important to farmers. Pollinator is not super important to corn farmers 'cause corn's not insect pollinated. But, neonic also kill pest predators, [00:26:00] right? The good bugs that eat the pests. They're much more susceptible to these pesticides than pests are. 'cause one thing about pests is that they tend to reproduce a lot, right? But the bugs that eat those bugs. maybe not as much earthworms. There's been a lot of studies linking neonics to harms to earthworms and other soil decomposers, insects that are returning nutrients to the soil. There's even studies that link neonics to harm to soil microbes right at the microbial level that are again, returning those nutrients to the soil that are important for farmers. So in so many levels, the massive sort of automatic use of these pesticides, again, taking an antibiotic now, just in case you might get sick in January, it doesn't make sense unless, of course, you're a chemical company. 

And what we have here is like a massive market failure. 

Beau Brockett: Yeah. 

Dan Raichel: Right. [00:27:00] We have the use of a dangerous pesticide that's not providing benefits, but the market is not fixing it on its own. And if anything, the use rates are getting higher. At the end of the day, it's required government action to really address the bulk of the problem. 

Beau Brockett: Yeah. Yeah. And maybe this leans in well then to talk a little bit about of what NRDC is specifically doing, and you're more than welcome to tackle this from a national standpoint or a state by state, or just a Michigan standpoint. But, you know, NRDC is kind of leading the charge here in Michigan, to just kind of, you know, make change happen around neonics. Could you talk a little bit about those efforts? 

Dan Raichel: Yeah, so I think it's helpful to know like what have folks done worldwide around neonic, right? Yeah. So Europe was the first to act. In 2013, they had a partial ban and then by 2018 they expanded it basically to all outdoor uses of the three major [00:28:00] neonics.

In North America, we've seen a different approach. Canada has sort of led the way on this. Again, their national government has been much more hands-on in terms of getting rid of certain neonic uses. EPA in the US has been sort of asleep at the wheel.

But we've seen the provinces in Canada go even further, Quebec and Ontario and in particular Quebec. And they came up with this really interesting idea. They said, 'Hey, if you want to use a neonic coating on your corn or soybean seed or wheat or oat seed, just get a prescription from your agronomist saying that it's treating a legitimate pest problem.'

Very similar to antibiotics, right? We don't just let everybody have antibiotics. We want to use them carefully. You need a prescription. And that prescription model, really dramatically [00:29:00] reduced the use of neonic on corn and soybean seed in Canada.

So to give you a sense of numbers here. In 2015, Canada looks very similar to the United States. Almost all conventional corn, close to a 100% pretreated with a neonic before planting, about 50% of soybeans. Within a couple of years of this law or this regulation taking effect, right? And again, you can still use it, just get a prescription, keep it on file. Those rates fell to less than 0.5% in corn and 0% in soybean. right?

So still a little bit of use, right? Again, there are these really rare situations where maybe your fields are a little more at risk, and so we do see like not zero use but almost zero use, and that actually that use has continued to go down and we haven't seen any associated cases of crop loss [00:30:00] or switching to more harmful alternatives. That's another concern, right? Because again, at the end of the day, these aren't providing economic benefits, right? The best replacement from an economic standpoint is nothing. 

Beau Brockett: Yeah. 

Dan Raichel: So we see some switching to different alternatives, which are less harmful, but in general, we see the pesticide use go down again because it's unnecessary.

In the United States, we've seen, again, with EPA sort of asleep at the wheel, other states are following this Canadian model. New York passed a law called the Birds and Bees Protection Act, in which that verification of need model is there. It also included a ban on the lawn and garden uses. Again, you don't need to use neonics in your lawn and garden. And Vermont followed suit, right? They passed a similar law.

So we think Michigan actually, even with the existing law, has the power to take similar action. But again, this is [00:31:00] something that we're starting to see catch on just over the border, quebec and Ontario. Ontario also has a verification model.

It's happening in the northeast. And Michigan Makes sense as a place to adopt this sort of model. Again, because it's not a ban, it allows those uses in those rare cases, but Michigan agriculture is pollinators, right? It is so, so dependent on pollinators for such a huge portion of it, it's really kind of just common sense.

Beau Brockett: Yeah, I really love this approach and I gotta be honest too, I, my, my coworkers have said the word prescription before when we've talked about, this sort of like policy work. I never knew, I never took that word as, literally as they were probably taking it. It literally can be a prescription if you think about it in a certain way.

So I really appreciate that, and I like how it still gives, in many ways, agency to all [00:32:00] the players involved. It's not ostensibly taking, you know, automatically taking away someone's agency, which I know can be a point of tension. It, it's kind of a way to like prove to folks that like there are better ways to, and better financial ways, better ways for your crops and better ways for life overall if you don't use neonics because they're not needed. 

Dan Raichel: Well, and that's, actually what we saw in Canada too, right? So, you know what happened when that regulation went into place? Is it opened up the market, right? All of a sudden these companies had to offer different choices, better choices to farmers. And farmers were able to say, 'Hey. Do I really need this coating? Do I really need this? Do I really?' And they're able to tailor what they're selecting better to the conditions of their farm and get rid of unnecessary costs.

Beau Brockett: Yeah, very true. [00:33:00] we've talked a little bit about like the, how Michigan could be a great place to, implement this sort of prescription,

this approach to neonics.

Could you talk a bit about that effort?

Dan Raichel: So, it's not just the environmental community, right? We have organic farmers and regenerative farmers that are interested in this. Other sorts of farmers that, again, are interested in like maybe getting rid of unnecessary input costs. We have had brewers and health experts participate, religious leaders, businesses, municipalities.

I think there was a huge coalition that came together to work on these issues. Beekeepers, right? Huge coalitions of people that came together to make change. I know that was true in Canada. It was certainly true in New York. And, we're looking to reach out to folks in Michigan [00:34:00] as well. 

Beau Brockett: And for folks in the audience know that in the podcast description, we'll have some links, first to like the Michigan report that NRDC put out.

But then also, similar, general ways you can get involved in this effort. We can't probably list 'em all, but we'll have some nice little entry points that you can then explore on your own.

Dan, I think we're getting close to the end of our, podcast episode. 

I appreciate you being on, again, on this podcast episode. Thank you.

Dan Raichel: Oh, thank you for having me. 

Beau Brockett: Not a problem. Thank you, too, to our listeners, again, for tuning in throughout this series. if you are not already, you're more than welcome to subscribe to the Environmental Council's newsletter or to the NRDC's various email communications. You'll find we have a lot of wraparound content, so to speak, going on right now around pollinators. And you'll be able to learn even more and have more opportunities to play a role in making change happen. And then again, just want to thank NRDC, too, for not only the work that they're doing here in Michigan and across [00:35:00] the nation around pollinators and pesticides, but also for, again, being a production partner here on the podcast.

So much appreciated. 

Dan Raichel: Well, and a big thanks to MEC, too. You guys do fantastic work. 

Beau Brockett (2): Thank you, thank you. Appreciate that. Well, with that then, folks, thanks for listening. We'll see you soon. Bye everyone.