Andrea Dudley

New Hampshire's environment and natural resources lie at the heart of the state's quality of life and its economy. That environment includes the intricate web of life that begins with the smallest insects and carries upward to the state’s largest animals. Relying on that web are the people who live here and those who come to visit year after year. The web, however large, is fragile, and cutting strands at indiscrimanate points inevitably compromises it, leaving it unable to support many of the forms of life that rely on its integrity. Among the practices that threaten critical strands of the state’s environmental web is the use of neonicotinoid pesticides, which impact a wide range of insects, many of them beneficial. Apart from the animal world, the state’s agricultural sector has dependencies large and small on the creatures found in our environment. Most prominent among those support systems are the various pollinators that make it possible to raise the crops that feed New Hampshire’s residents and visitors. In addition to the threats posed to agricultural practices, the use of neonicotinoid insecticides in ways that allows them to leach into groundwater and nearby lakes and streams adds one more stressor to an aquatic environment already under threat. As with the proverbial frog in the slowly heating pot of water, allowing New Hampshire to wait until conditions reach an environmental crisis is courting irreversible, and likely fatal, harm to the way of life that brings and keeps people in the state. Approval of this bill is a significant way that the state can turn off the heat before the water in the pot boils.