Support for bill
Let’s talk about Senate Bill 3095 again.
This year, the state Legislature passed a monumental bill to ban chlorpyrifos, one of the most egregious poisons that attacks children’s brains, retards their development and saddles them with a host of other grave health problems. The bill also requires disclosure from the corporations about when and where they spray restricted-use pesticides and calls for modest buffer zones of 100 feet around schools during instructional hours.
This was great news! This is great news!
It means I can send my daughter to school and not fear that she might vomit because pesticides are being sprayed literally in her face, depending on which way the winds are blowing. It means the state can regulate the use of the pesticides and actually know what is being sprayed. It means we can all be more informed. Information is power.
Advocates have fought for more than six years to address this issue and bring transparency. Mothers, fathers, aunties, uncles, grandparents and community leaders have fought for this issue long before I even knew it existed. I am grateful to everyone for not giving up and for fighting for my family like it was their family.
Rules are the starting point for accountability. They are not meant to be punitive. Don’t we all want people to be kept accountable? I know I do.
It feels the same to me as parenting. It would be utterly unfair to my 11-year-old daughter and myself for me to enforce rules she didn’t know existed. As her mother, I must set the rules and let her know exactly what is expected of her. Only then can I keep her accountable, and vice versa.
That is exactly what we are doing with these agro-chemical companies. We are setting the rules so we can keep them accountable. We can do this together, but it will take all of us.
We need your help. I need your help. The boulder was pushed up the mountain. No other state did what we in Hawaii did together. Legislators at the federal level have failed to ban neurotoxins such as chlorpyrifos. The Environmental Protection Agency has failed to act. But we did. And we are not finished yet.
What can you do? Well, there is only one thing left to do: Ask Gov. David Ige to sign this bill!
Please tell Gov. Ige to sign SB 3095 and enact it into law. For the sake of our children. For all of Hawaii. Go to https://governor.hawaii.gov/contact-us/comments-on-legislation/.
Zahava Zaidoff
Captain Cook