On March 9th, the Instructional Media Services Center had the pleasure of recording guest speaker Tyrone Hayes and his presentation on how chemicals are affecting the environment and its animals and people. By conducting research of his own for numerous years with frogs, it is clear that pesticides, specifically Atrazine, can be linked to cancer cell promotion, genetic mutations, and sterility. Frogs are able to detect hormones in water because they change color if estrogen is present, and have been living proof that these chemicals are dangerous enough to change the sex of animals. Atrazine is a synthetic that has been banned in all of Europ
e, but this has yet to take effect in the United States. Even scarier, the chemical is spread all throughout the world to places where it wasn’t even administered through weather and water run off. Its toxicity can be found in water sources, some of which are used for drinking, bathing, and washing clothes, and additionally within areas where we grow most of the country’s produce. Hayes’s passionate and enthusiastic words left the audience in awe and he received a well deserved standing ovation for his eye-opening findings. Hayes and other guest speakers’ speeches and presentations can be found on the Instructional Media Services’ website at www.newpaltz.edu/ims.
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