Its time to retire Agent White

Learn to look for it, and you'll spot it far more often in this province than you might expect.
And once you see it, it can't help but make you wonder if there isn't a better way.

From just above Portugal Cove South on the Avalon Peninsula until Cape Broyle, it's just about as obvious as can be: on both sides of the road, sometimes right back into the tree line, all of the plants are dead, their leaves curled and orange-brown or black long before the first nip of frost.

The dead and dying plants are grouped in a strange and unnatural pattern: they've died off almost in square boxes, boxes that end abruptly within a few metres of any stream or watercourse, and then start up again on the other side. Sometimes, the edges of the box are raggedy: sometimes, fully-grown birch trees are shot up along one entire side with rusty dead leaves, like the tree has been exposed all along one side to the heat of a brush fire.

But it's not a brush fire: this is a chemical burn.

Many people may be familiar with a herbicide known as Agent Orange. A chemical defoliant, Agent Orange used to be used not only as a military weapon, but as an industrial herbicide to restrict brush along power lines and roadsides.

It was vintage "better living through chemistry": the active chemicals in the mix actually disrupted the internal mechanisms of plants, leading them to essentially starve themselves to death.

But even if you know Agent Orange, you might not be as familiar with its cousin.

What's being used in this province is a chemical called Tordon 101 - a chemical, by the way, that used to be known as Agent White.

Tordon is a mixture of two active chemicals: picloram and 2,4-dichlorophenoxyacetic acid, better known as 2,4-D.

And as you look at the dead and dying vegetation on both sides of the road, you have to wonder if the end justifies these particular chemical means.

The Sierra Club, for example, has said that some 97 per cent of 2,4-D applications eventually end up in ground water. Denmark and Norway have banned its use. Spray opponents have pointed out that picloram is remarkably long-lasting in the environment, and that 2,4-D has been connected to reproductive effects in humans and may be connected to cases of non-Hodgkins lymphoma, as well.

This year's spray program is apparently the leftover pieces from budgeted work last year: in all, across the province, the provincial government has spent $371,756 to spray a whopping 448 hectares of roadside land with Tordon.

That's slightly more that 1,100 acres that has been chemically stripped of vegetation.

The money's being spent to improve highway sightlines - primarily, to give drivers a better opportunity to spot moose.

It's presumably cheaper than cutting back brush.

Interestingly, though, while the province went through an environmental assessment process before aerial spraying Mimic to kill hemlock looper, or Avietiv to control balsam sawfly, there doesn't seem to have been any effort to go through the process before spraying this time.

Even if you're cutting down trees for a hiking trail, you have to go through the environmental assessment process.

The thinking is probably that, since Tordon has been used for so long in so many jurisdictions, there's no real need to examine whether we should be spraying with a chemical whose fundamental action is to disrupt normal cell biology in plants and essentially make them kill themselves.

Then again, for years, fire extinguishers were filled with carbon tetrachloride - before, of course, it was widely known that the chemical caused liver and kidney damage, and increased cancer risks. Now, government agencies advise you to properly dispose of any carbon tetrachloride you might still have in your house somewhere.

Times change, to put it simply - and the impression a good spraying with Tordon leaves with anyone passing through is far from a pleasing one.

Drive by Goobies on the Trans-Canada Highway, where whole swaths of alders, fireweed and other plants are now festooned with black and withered leaves, and ask yourself if we shouldn't be talking about finding a better way than depending on a mutagenic chemical to do our dirty work for us.