Back on April 24, Bluestem noted MN rep says lead is a-okay because it's natural; or, poisoning is life on Planet Josh Heintzeman.
Luckily, we're not the only ones paying attention to the implications of the Nisswa Republican's nincompoopery in the Brainerd Dispatch. In today's Timberjay, which serves Northern St. Louis County, we read in Lead is “all natural”:Legislator reveals the know-nothing nature of GOP assault on environment:
Last week, we wrote about the dangers of the ongoing assault on science in Washington. This week, we have examples much closer to home.
As we’ve previously reported, Minnesota’s Republican-led Legislature, with the tacit support of some rural DFL legislators, is waging its own assault on environmental protections, and those assaults are directly connected to the ongoing rejection by the GOP of both the scientific method and well-established scientific facts.
Take the Legislature’s attempt to block the DNR from prohibiting the use of lead shot on some state wildlife management areas. This does not affect lead bullets, only the use of lead pellets in shotgun shells. Wildlife management agencies have pushed for a ban on lead shot for years in areas where waterfowl hunting is intense and where the amount of lead shot that builds up in the lake and marsh sediments can prove toxic to wildlife up and down the food chain. Ducks ingest the lead shot as they feed and die from it. And raptors like eagles and peregrine falcons ingest the lead from ducks and other waterfowl they prey upon.
We know that this happens because wildlife researchers have demonstrated, through science, the connection between lead shot and the entirely unnecessary deaths of large numbers of birds.
But what happens when your party constantly dismisses science as some sort of liberal conspiracy? You get people like Nisswa Republican legislator Josh Heintzeman telling his colleagues that lead is just fine, since it’s a “natural substance, found in the soil.” Heintzeman must know, since he clearly spends a lot of time with his head in the sand. . . .
Read the rest at the Timberjay for scathing prose we can only wish we'd written ourselves. Sadly, only senator Carrie Ruud, R-Breezy Point, voted to remove the anti-science lead language.
Photo: An eagle dying of lead poisoning. Via American Cherokee.
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