Poison Spring (2 page)

By 1979, America already had 7,500 manufacturers producing 47,000 industrial chemicals in amounts totaling more than 500 billion pounds per year. A great many of those substances had the potential for trouble. Among the most well known, asbestos threatened not merely a quarter million workers in its mining and manufacture, but also endangered some 5 million children because their schools had asbestos in their classrooms. Benzene exposed 110 million urban Americans to chronic levels of poisoning, and thirty thousand workers to far more intense hazard. The list of industrial chemicals and their historical effects on people is very long indeed.
8

In the 1970s, William Carl Heinrich Hueper, a renowned scientist at the National Institutes of Health, described the world’s industrial chemicals as a “global disaster.” “It is in the best interest of mankind that industry makes the proper adaptations for eliminating and/or reducing environmental and occupational cancer hazards,” Hueper wrote in 1976. Human beings “lack the ability to make the appropriate biologic adaptations for effectively combating the growing wave of toxic and carcinogenic risks propagated by modern industry, which represent biologic death bombs with a delayed time fuse and which may prove to be, in the long run, as dangerous to the existence of mankind as the arsenal of atom bombs.”
9

Hueper paid a heavy price for his honesty and independence. He was hounded incessantly by the chemical industry and his own agency. And if anything, voices like Hueper’s have only become harder to hear. Today, the chemical industry operates behind front organizations including the American Chemical Society; the Toxicology Forum; the American Crop Protection Association (once known as the National Agricultural Chemicals Association); the Iowa Corn Growers Association; and a group known as Vision 2000. Each of these groups spends a great deal of money cozying up to EPA regulators as they shepherd their products through the regulatory pipeline.

Toxic pesticides, of course, are a tremendous source of pollution, and not merely on farms and lawns. By 1987, the EPA list of businesses that contaminate the environment with poisonous sprays included 6,300 sawmills; more than 500 wood treatment plants; 21,000 sheep dip pits; 95,000 storage sheds on large farms; 500,000 on-farm grain storage sheds; 13,000 greenhouses; 19,000 food processors; 6,900 slaughterhouses; 6,500 hospitals; 9,000 golf courses; 560 paper and pulp mills; 217,000 drinking water plants; 15,000 sewage treatment plants; 636,000 oil wells; 22,400 morgues; 13,000 photo processing labs; 5,200 textile mills; and 53,000 printing and publishing companies.
10

A tremendous quantity of toxic pesticides ends up in homes as well. A 1984 EPA survey of home chemical use is instructive about our society’s mind-boggling addiction to biocides: by this time, Americans were using 32 different chemicals at home, among them 20 million pounds per year of pine oil for bacteria, 30 million pounds of ethanol for bacteria, 45 million pounds of naphthalene for moths, 10 million pounds of pentachlorophenol for fungi and insects, and 200 million pounds of sodium hypochlorite for bacteria and fungi.
11

By 1983, the EPA had evidence that 30 percent of 75,000 gas storage stations leaked gasoline, contaminating groundwater and having other toxic ecological effects. That condition would rise to about 75 percent by the end of the decade.
11

In all, since World War II, we have been living inside an explosion of synthetic chemicals: from 1 billion pounds in the 1940s to more than 400 billion pounds in the late 1980s. Even these numbers barely hint at the ubiquity of chemicals in our synthetic century. By 2004, the U.S. chemical industry was producing more than 138 billion pounds of seven petrochemicals—ethylene, propylene, butylenes, benzene, toluene, xylenes, and methane—from which companies make tens of thousands of consumer products. Today, industries worldwide generate 300 billion pounds of plastics a year.
13

It is only in this context—a country bathed in man-made chemicals—that one can understand why the United States is in the midst of a cancer epidemic. The cancer establishment (made up by the National Cancer Institute, the American Cancer Society, trade associations like the Chemical Manufacturers Association, and the chemical industry) has fundamentally misled the American people into searching for a miraculous “cure.” Rather than vigorously examining the myriad poisons we are forced to encounter every day, these groups warn people to be careful about their “lifestyle.” Blame for cancer falls on consumers, not on the poisons that cause illness. From the perspective of the industries that make these chemicals, it’s a brilliant strategy. For the rest of us, it’s a tragedy.

In 1989, William Lijinsky, a government cancer specialist, wrote that something like a quarter to a sixth of the population of America and other industrialized countries suffer and die from cancer, a condition comparable to the great epidemics of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. “The solution to the epidemics of infectious disease,” he says, is “prevention rather than cure, and so it is with cancer.”
14

Samuel Epstein, professor of occupational and environmental medicine at the University of Illinois, estimated in 1987 that the cancer epidemic in the United States was striking one in three persons, killing one in four.
15
In 2000, Janette Sherman, physician, toxicologist, and author of
Life’s Delicate Balance: Causes and Prevention of Breast Cancer
, spoke about “the carnage of endocrine-disrupting chemicals, nuclear radiation, and chemical carcinogens, alone and in combination, invading nearly every family with cancer.” In 2007, Devra Davis, another first-rate cancer specialist and author of
The Secret History of the War on Cancer
, complained that “cancer has become the price of modern life.” In today’s United States and England, Davis says, one out of two men will get cancer. So will one in three women.

This book has emerged from my personal experience with the EPA and from information I gleaned from thousands of government documents, some of them rescued from destruction.

Before coming to Washington, I was trained in zoology (at the University of Illinois), earned a doctorate in history (from the University of Wisconsin, in 1972), and did postdoctoral studies in the history of science at Harvard. Throughout my training, I was taught to ask questions about how and why things come into being and how they develop. It was this combination of humanistic and science background that has helped me make sense of the EPA.
16

EPA hired me as a “generalist,” a person with broad training in and understanding of science. My official title was “program analyst.” I was expected to employ my skills in researching and analyzing science issues relevant to environmental protection. I quickly understood why the EPA’s mission was fatally compromised: bad scientific practices within the agency, and corrupting influences without.

I spent twenty-five years with EPA, from 1979 to 2004, primarily as an analyst of issues relating to pesticides and agriculture. Over the years, I took part in countless meetings and did many other mundane things one does in a huge bureaucracy—all in the interest of helping shape policy that, I wanted to believe, would protect public health and nature.
17

In the course of my work, I routinely monitored congressional actions and outside scientific reports and articles. I also read thousands of letters, memos, notes, briefs, and reports. Not all of them dealt with pesticides, but the documents that most caught my attention examined policy issues about the regulation, health effects, and environmental impact of pesticides. I did not have access to documents that contained “confidential business information” because only people with clearance were allowed to handle such documents. But from the rumors circulating about such documents, I gathered that there was not much trustworthy information in them: chemical formulas and estimates of how many pounds of active ingredient of a certain chemical were produced per year came from industry, not from independent monitors.

I collected my data from all kinds of sources. I attended meetings at which scientists and managers were making policy or discussing important issues and kept notes from those encounters. I met with colleagues for lunch or in their offices, and discussed their work and experience. A number of these people not only talked to me extensively about the problems they faced in their organizations, but also handed me hundreds of key documents illustrating the reasons for their discontent. In this way I was able to examine countless memoranda, issue papers, briefings, letters, studies, reports, and notes detailing the vast panorama of the EPA’s pesticide swamp. Some of the documents mentioned here were generated by the EPA; others were created by other scientists studying environmental and toxicological issues who were supported by EPA funds. I have provided source citations for hundreds of these documents.
18

From among these documents, I have chosen those that best summarize the science and effects of EPA policy. I studied most carefully those documents that draw connections between science and policy. As official paperwork, these documents are rarely personal, and they rarely examine or describe the ways policy actually gets made. These subtleties I absorbed by talking to many colleagues over the course of several decades. It is from this material that I have compiled a picture of the pesticide empire: its power, its abuses, and its effect on human health and the natural world.

Throughout this book, I cite examples of the dilemmas the EPA has faced as it has confronted the country’s ecological crises, most of them relating to toxic chemical sprays. I often quote my sources (drawing on my notes of conversations with them) to give the reader a taste of the style, vigor, and ideas of those caught up in the country’s environmental upheavals.

Although the book’s structure is largely concerned with well-documented events from the 1970s and 1980s, nearly all chapters foreshadow problems running straight through the Obama administration. In all cases I concentrate on events that I knew about from direct experience or have been able to personally document. Over time, the EPA has become less and less transparent—not merely in what it did, but how it did what it did. Access to information has been another casualty of the dismantling of the EPA.

The agency’s oversight of pesticides is monitored by agricultural committees in Congress, which—in a government dedicated to protecting industries rather than people—means that efforts to regulate agricultural poisons are often cast as “attacks on farmers” rather than as “efforts to protect consumers from toxic chemicals.” More frustrating, the Department of Agriculture’s interminable process of assessing the dangers of “problem pesticides” has left little chance that dangerous toxins can even be
evaluated
before they impact our “grandchildren’s grandchildren,” according to David Menotti, the EPA’s former deputy associate general counsel.
19

What have been the repercussions of this resistance? As far as Aldo Leopold could tell, American civilization was already failing in the 1930s. The country was already being remade through the power and influence of increasingly larger corporations. For decades, rural America had been losing its character, becoming an alien landscape: empty of people, a colossus of one-crop agriculture, huge ranches, and animal factories. “A harmonious relation to land is more intricate, and of more consequence to civilization, than the historians of its progress seem to realize,” said Leopold, one of America’s great scientists and environmental philosophers. “Civilization is not, as they seem to assume, the enslavement of a stable and constant earth. It is a state of mutual and interdependent cooperation between human animals, other animals, plants, and soils, which may be disrupted at any moment by the failure of any of them.”
20

In the 1940s, Leopold described this condition as “clean farming,” which translated as “a food chain aimed solely at economic profit and purged of all non-conforming links, a sort of
Pax Germanica
of the agricultural world.”
21

If only Leopold knew what would befall his beloved American landscape following his death in 1948. Spraying DDT on marshes and tidelands in the 1950s and 1960s killed many billions of fish and aquatic invertebrates and drove fish-eating birds such as the nation’s iconic bald eagle to the very brink of extinction. DDT-like sprays including dieldrin and heptachlor killed about 80 percent of songbirds in affected areas, wiping out game birds and decimating wild mammals. Just the runoff of cotton insecticides “caused staggering losses of fish,” according to senior EPA ecologists David Coppage and Clayton Bushong; they once calculated the harm of farm poisons at more than $1.25 trillion per year in lost recreational, commercial, personal food, and aesthetic values.
22

It boggles the mind to think that we have continued to put up with such destruction for so many years with complete indifference.
23
The social and cultural costs of this practice are simply incalculable. Aside from their damaging effects on health and ecological systems, these chemicals are an integral part of the industrialization of our farms, depopulating rural America as family farms continue to be swallowed by corporate giants. Once out of the laboratory, pesticides destroy the beautiful yet vulnerable links—the affection, the real symbiosis—that bind people to the land. It is my hope that this book will go some distance, however small, toward reversing this dire trend.