The Monarch Has Been Proposed for the Endangered Species List. It Still Needs Better Protections From Pesticides.

What to know:

• Around the world, we are seeing steep declines in insect populations. Many countries are facing losses of over 40% of their bee and butterfly species in the coming decades.
• The monarch butterfly is now at risk of extinction. Its decline has been linked to pesticide use in the American Midwest. Pesticides are a threat to other insect pollinators as well.
• The Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA) current testing requirements for pesticide manufacturers are insufficient, allowing pesticides harmful to thousands of insect species to go to market.
• Earthjustice has petitioned the EPA, on behalf of the Xerces Society, to require pesticide manufacturers to submit more data concerning pesticide impacts on diverse insect pollinator species.

In her groundbreaking book Silent Spring, Rachel Carson warned of a world where “the apple trees were coming into bloom but no bees droned among the blossoms, so there was no pollination and there would be no fruit.”

Carson cautioned that our collective dependence on ecologically devastating pesticides was responsible: “No enemy action had silenced the rebirth of new life in this stricken world. The people had done it themselves.”

Carson’s book marked a watershed moment that led to greater regulatory oversight over pesticide usage in the United States — including through the birth of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.

Yet in the six decades since Silent Spring was published, our collective reality has verged ever closer to Carson’s “stricken world.” In the last 50 years, hundreds of insect species have declined in abundance by an average of 45%. Many countries face losses of over 40% of their bee and butterfly species in the coming decades.

Last week, the iconic monarch butterfly was proposed for Endangered Species Act protections because it is now at risk of extinction. Efforts to protect the monarch have spread across North America, capturing the hearts of gardeners young and old who have planted milkweed in an effort to sustain this population.

While this public engagement must continue to bring the monarch back, its decline has also been linked to pesticide use in the American Midwest. We cannot ignore the risk of pesticides to the monarch and other native pollinator species.

The decline of these invertebrate pollinators threatens all of us. To begin, human food systems, made possible by insect pollinators, are in trouble.

Bees pollinate roughly three quarters of all the fruit, nut, and vegetable crops grown in the United States. Although many industrial-scale crops depend upon managed honey bees for pollination, wild bees such as bumble bees and solitary bees also play a critical, and often overlooked, role in pollination. Butterflies, moths, flies, and beetles are important pollinators as well.

Pollinating insects are also essential for sustaining global biodiversity, stabilizing terrestrial food webs, and controlling pest and disease vectors, among other values. Due to their ecological importance, they serve as key indicators of ecosystem health. Yet many insect pollinator species are in sharp decline.

Life on earth depends on the fitness of our insect populations and we are running out of time to pull them back from the brink.

Pesticide overuse is a major driver of the global decline of insect pollinators. “Systemic” insecticides, such as neonicotinoids, dominate today’s agricultural landscape. Neonicotinoids are much more harmful to insects than older pesticides and persist significantly longer in the environment.

Moreover, today a large volume of pesticide use in the United States is preemptive—that is, agricultural landscapes routinely receive pesticide treatments at levels damaging to non-target insect pollinators even before there is a demonstrated pest problem.

The EPA is currently falling short of its visionary mission and legal responsibility to avert the disastrous consequences of pesticide overuse. Our nation’s pesticide law, the Federal Insecticide, Fungicide, and Rodenticide Act (FIFRA), requires the EPA to evaluate whether a given pesticide will have unreasonable adverse effects on the environment and prohibit the use of pesticides if they will. But because the EPA requires pesticide manufacturers to submit only an exceedingly limited set of data concerning pesticide impacts on wildlife before pesticides go to market, thousands of insect species remain vulnerable to harm from these toxic chemicals.

To address this problem, Earthjustice has petitioned the EPA on behalf of the Xerces Society for Invertebrate Conservation to require pesticide manufacturers to submit more data concerning pesticide impacts on diverse insect pollinator species. Pesticide manufacturers would be required to submit these data before their products would be available for commercial use.

Currently, the EPA only requires pesticide manufacturers to submit limited data concerning pesticide impacts on adult honey bees.

As important as they are, honey bees aren’t moths or butterflies, nor are they even representative of thousands of species of native bees that face a different set of pesticide risks than honey bees. And even for honey bees, the EPA has never codified the bulk of pesticide testing procedures it requests of pesticide manufacturers.

This means that there are delays, data gaps, and a lack of transparency in the pollinator risk assessment because the EPA is not required to ask pesticide manufacturers to collect the same essential data in every instance.

Our petition calls on the EPA to swiftly correct the flaws in its pollinator risk assessment framework by mandating pesticide testing for bumble bees, solitary bees, moths, and butterflies like the monarch, along with filling in the gaps in its testing requirements for honey bees.

And it calls on the EPA to resume its leadership role in protecting our environment. On another continent, the European Food Safety Authority (EFSA) is well ahead of the U.S. with respect to the development of a pollinator risk assessment that incorporates data on pesticide impacts to bumble bees, solitary bees, butterflies, and moths. The EFSA’s innovations demonstrate that a better way is possible and offer the opportunity for the EPA to partner with the EFSA on these initiatives.

The time to act is now. In the coming months, the EPA will consider pesticide registration renewals for some of the world’s most harmful pesticides, including neonicotinoids.

In the past, the agency has made these decisions without much data on a pesticide’s ecological impacts. Our petition seeks to correct this deficiency before it is too late and ensure the EPA has a complete picture of potential harms of the pesticides under evaluation.

Last week’s proposed Endangered Species Act listing for the monarch butterfly must be an urgent wake up call for our federal agencies.

Until the EPA has the data it needs, the agency’s pollinator risk assessment framework will significantly underestimate the toll of pesticides on insect pollinators essential to the web of life. And our nation’s environment will continue its slide toward the “stricken world” that Rachel Carson warned us about.