March 25, 2014 — Conservation and food-safety groups filed a formal notice of intent to sue the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) today for failing to protect hundreds of endangered fish, butterflies and other species from a new, toxic pesticide called cyantraniliprole.
The EPA violated the Endangered Species Act by approving the widespread agricultural and residential use of the new pesticide in January without input from the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and National Marine Fisheries Service, the two federal agencies in charge of protecting endangered species.
“Once again the EPA has approved a harmful pesticide without adequate conservation measures to protect endangered species,” said Brett Hartl, endangered species policy director at the Center for Biological Diversity. “This reckless approval of cyantraniliprole really undermines recent efforts to reform the EPA’s dangerous policy of ignoring the disastrous effects pesticides are having on wildlife across the country.”
The EPA failed to consider or mitigate impacts to endangered species despite concluding in its assessment that cyantraniliprole is “very highly toxic” to hundreds of endangered aquatic species such as freshwater fish, mussels and clams, as well as endangered terrestrial invertebrate species, including 20 endangered butterflies.