Consider relocating the Weed Warriors Program

Boulder County Parks and Open Space recently posted the Weed Warriors Program on its website for volunteers to pull weeds along the Walker Ranch Loop trail. However, to ensure the program’s success and the health of the community, the Weed Warriors program needs to be relocated.

This project began as a discussion between (Boulder County) Commissioner Marta Loachamin and myself to recruit volunteers to restore a natural land area as an alternative to herbicide use. When BCPOS staff got involved, they shifted the project into work on an area that had been treated repeatedly with herbicides, including recently in October 2022 with Indaziflam. Idaziflam is an herbicide that is promoted for its persistence in soil. BCPOS plans to spray Walker Ranch with Indaziflam via drones in 2024.

I communicated to the staff two significant problems with their approach.

First, it is not an experiment with alternatives to the use of herbicides. It is now well-established that repeated herbicide applications are especially damaging to soil health and microbe-plant associations. This project is set up to fail and will just waste the time of the volunteers.

Second, sending volunteers to work on a site that has been heavily sprayed over the past years does not align with their values and health concerns. Many residents have already expressed their opposition to the use of herbicides on BCPOS natural lands based on such concerns.

BCPOS staff rejected my attempts to shift the project back to its original purpose of actually focusing on alternatives to herbicide use at another location. Therefore, I am no longer involved with this project.

Idaziflam is a neurotoxin and a hormonal disruptor to mammals, and it is toxic to fish, aquatic invertebrates, and plants. It has been shown to accumulate in the tissues of certain organisms.

Boulder County residents have submitted many comments against the use of pesticides on BCPOS natural lands — you can add your comments as well. More than 3,000 residents petitioned against the use of both Indaziflam and Glyphosate on natural lands via the petition “Urgent: Signatures Needed to Stop the Spraying of Toxic Chemicals on Boulder County Open Space!” The Community Survey results previously organized by BCPOS show that over 80% of over 1000 respondents demand no use of herbicides.

The current weed management team has been trained to kill weeds but not to implement ecologically sound ecosystem restoration. The BCPOS staff needs some guidance from local ecosystem restoration experts to ensure the success of projects experimenting with pesticide alternatives.

We do not want a repeat of failures such as BCPOS’S Carbon Sequestration Project team’s experiment with using compost on agricultural fields. That experiment failed for an obvious reason that any of our regenerative farmers could have easily identified if consulted: the Carbon Sequestration Project team was spraying Roundup on the compost! For details, see the team’s presentation at the January 2020 POSAC meeting at pub-bouldercounty. escribemeetings.com/players/isistandaloneplayer.aspx?id=96281f5d-644a-39a5-2a27a4a07d7c1c78.

We need a moratorium on all pesticide use until BCPOS establishes a more science-based, inclusive public process that fully incorporates perspectives from ecologists and other scientists, local nonprofits, community leaders, and staff.

You can visit the website pesticidesbouldercounty.org to stay informed and to find additional guidance to take actions.