Poison Spring (4 page)

By the 1960s (before the EPA was founded), it was clear that the federal organizations set up to protect human health and the environment—including the USDA, the Department of the Interior, and the Department of Health, Education and Welfare (now Health and Human Services)—had already failed miserably in their mission. These departments did little more than defend industry, often more blatantly than they do today. The situation was so bad that President Richard Nixon—hardly an environmentalist when he came into office—was forced to address the issue in his 1970 State of the Union speech.

“The great question of the seventies is, shall we surrender to our surroundings, or shall we make our peace with nature and begin to make reparations for the damage we have done to our air, to our land, and to our water?” Nixon said. “Clean air, clean water, open spaces—these should once again be the birthright of every American. I see an America in which we have made great strides in stopping the pollution of our air, cleaning up our water, opening up our parks, continuing to explore in space.”
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Less than a year later, Nixon founded the EPA, charging the agency with protecting our natural environment—and the public health—from the insults of industrial pollution. Fundamentally, the EPA was formed as a keeper of the public trust, to safeguard American citizens from threats they themselves might not even understand.

Change takes time, and change for the better takes both time and virtuous leadership. In 1970, the year of the birth of the EPA, the United States was already full of chemicals, and full of industries accustomed to cutting corners for competition and profit.

In other words, from the moment of its inception in December 1970, the EPA was caught in a trap. It could not honestly protect “human health and the environment” (the slogan on EPA’s logo) from the perpetual onslaught of toxins and outright pollution of the industrial behemoth of the United States. Industries had already begun mastering the art of “externalizing” their pollution—they found ways to dump it or spew it and get someone else to pay for the damages. And for many decades, we have.

“Part of the trouble with talking about something like DDT is that the use of it is not just a practical device, it’s almost an establishment religion,” Gary Snyder, the environmental philosopher and Pulitzer Prize–winning poet wrote in
Turtle Island
, a 1974 book of poems. Indeed, by the 1970s, the most the EPA could do was to try to “regulate” pollution—that is, it set levels at which factories were “allowed to pollute” and prohibit, at least on paper, the most life-threatening practices of companies making poisons and other dangerous products.

At first, there was some basic consensus: Americans ought not to drop dead from breathing air or drinking water or eating food poisoned by chemicals. Rivers (like Cleveland’s Cuyahoga) ought not to catch on fire. Richard Nixon and the EPA’s first administrator, William Ruckelshaus, banned DDT in 1972, not a small achievement. The passage of the Clean Air Act of 1970 and the Safe Drinking Water Act of 1972 were designed with similar purposes in mind: the EPA imposed some limits on the sources of our most obvious pollution. After a time, American rivers were no longer catching fire, and the air became somewhat less burdened by visible pollution—though people in cities still suffer from smog and soot from the pipes of cars, trucks, airplanes, incinerators, large farms, and factories. These microscopic particles still cause inflammation and injury to the lungs and the blood, killing some twenty thousand people in the United States every year and hurting many more.
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But even as he formed the EPA in 1970, Nixon was too preoccupied with fighting the terrible war in Vietnam to concern himself with domestic environmental protection. At the heart of his presidency was a dark paradox: Nixon formed the EPA to do something about pollution, but he also allowed chemical warfare in the jungles of Vietnam. The legacy of this paradox—most vividly displayed in the effects of the hideous Agent Orange—would come back to haunt both American soldiers and the country as a whole.

“I have concluded that in a very real sense we are all Vietnamese to the chemical companies, who feel their annual profits are more important than the health of human beings,” wrote Fred A. Wilcox, the author of
Waiting for an Army to Die: The Tragedy of Agent Orange
. “America, like Vietnam during the war years, is a testing ground for the chemical companies and their vested interests. We have allowed ourselves to be used as guinea pigs, permitted our land and water to be poisoned, and accepted the notion that the average citizen is powerless to stop the ecological devastation of our nation and our world.”
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At the EPA, Nixon’s first move, in 1970, was a good one: he appointed Ruckelshaus to head the agency. Ruckelshaus had grown up in Indiana, studied law at Princeton and Harvard, and been elected in the Indiana House of Representatives, from which President Richard Nixon picked him to become the EPA’s first administrator.

Ruckelshaus started right off rallying the troops to set the foundations of institutional environmental protection. From the beginning, EPA was an extremely well-educated bureaucracy: men and women skilled in science, law, engineering, agriculture, water, physics, and economics, among many other technical subjects.

Ruckelshaus made the agency’s goal of environmental protection noble and real. With words, appointments, rewards, and above all good policies, he gave a mission to the EPA: clean up the country’s environmental mess and protect our natural treasures and people’s health from the visible and invisible pollution of the industry. Banning DDT in 1972, for example, showed how a well-motivated EPA could start righting the wrongs of past decades while sending an unmistakable message to industry to mend its toxic ways.

“[F]or most crops, including cotton, which in the past accounted for 80 percent of DDT use, production has been maintained,” the EPA wrote in a press release. Nationally, the cost of switching to alternative chemicals “has cost cotton farmers slightly more than $1.00 per acre per year. In the southeastern U.S., however, this figure increases to an additional $6.00 per acre per year. For the consumer, the cost of buying cotton goods produced with other pesticides increased 2.2 cents per person per year.”
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Industry got the message, and they did not like it at all. It put up vociferous opposition to the abolition of DDT. It denounced the EPA in the same ways it had excoriated Rachel Carson when her book
Silent Spring
appeared in 1962. It sent its agents to the White House and Congress to undermine the EPA and henceforth take charge of dictating America’s “environmental protection.” The effects of this campaign filtered down to the bureaucracy and in time dramatically recast—and contaminated—the mission of the EPA.

Ruckelshaus served the EPA with distinction, at least at first. But after leaving the agency, he became a pioneer of the “revolving door” policy between government and industry that would plague the EPA for decades. Ruckelshaus was hired as senior vice president of Weyerhaeuser, the giant timber and paper company that has been causing environmental destruction and pollution for decades. He returned to the EPA as a Reagan appointee ten years later, then left the agency again for lucrative jobs at Monsanto, Cummings Engine Company, the American Paper Institute, and a group of companies, the Coalition on Superfund, that lobbied for the weakening of the country’s toxic waste laws. Ruckelshaus also became the CEO of Browning-Ferris, a huge waste management company in Houston, Texas. When Ruckelshaus resigned from the EPA in 1985, he was earning $72,000 a year. Browning-Ferris Industries hired him at a minimum salary of $1 million.
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The “revolving door” between government and industry could not help but compromise Ruckelshaus or the numerous other outstanding (and less than outstanding) men and women who moved in and out of public service. Few could resist the temptation of earning huge sums for selling their government experience to the very corporations they had once regulated.

The Carter administration’s EPA administrator, Douglas Costle, became chairman of Metcalf and Eddy, a company offering consulting services on hazardous wastes. Steven Jellinek, assistant EPA administrator under President Carter, joined a pesticide lobbying firm and for years used his strong connections with EPA scientists and managers to get expedited approval of toxic sprays, especially those made in Japan. Lee Thomas, the EPA administrator in the second Reagan administration, became president of Law Environmental, another hazardous waste consultant. Rita Lavelle, who compromised EPA’s hazardous waste program in the early 1980s, also became a consultant to the industry dealing with hazardous wastes. The revolving door worked the other way as well: Clarence Thomas worked as a lawyer for Monsanto before joining the Supreme Court, and he has been widely criticized for ruling in favor of Monsanto in landmark cases involving the company’s genetically modified seeds.
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Intimately connected to the revolving door is the corrupting tradition of industry-sponsored junkets. Deep-pocketed companies spend a great deal of time and money wining and dining the very government employees who are supposed to be regulating them. These “retreats” and “conferences” are hosted at luxurious hotels, resorts, and other pleasure domes all over the world. Between October 1997 and March 2006, for example, EPA officials took more than ten thousand trips to countries including Australia, Korea, France, Germany, Italy, China, Thailand, Taiwan, and Cuba, and to American vacation destinations in the United States such as Atlantic City, Las Vegas, and Reno. All of these trips were paid for by industry: toxic waste companies, contractors, petroleum companies, and other business organizations lobbying the federal government for favors. These firms almost invariably secure lucrative contracts and other benefits.

Such mutual back-scratching made some at the EPA more than a little queasy. John Quarles, a Nixon man who became a deputy administrator of the EPA in the early 1970s, found industry influence, disinformation, and propaganda against the EPA so insulting he wore his title of “bureaucrat” with pride. “I am part of the faceless, gray government machine, one of those government officials whom cartoonists make fun of and editorialists stick pins in, who are blasted with criticism by public leaders from Barry Goldwater to Ralph Nader,” Quarles wrote. “I am also an environmentalist, a chief official of the United States Environmental Protection Agency since its creation in December 1970, and in that capacity, too, I have been the object of heated criticism. The agency has been the target of the power industry, the steel industry, the auto industry, labor unions, farmers, editorialists, and private citizens. Its actions have been attacked as arbitrary, unreasonable, narrow-minded, impractical, and un-American. Much of this condemnation has been based on misunderstanding.”
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In its day-to-day work, the EPA most resembles a kind of giant emergency room. The staff constantly triages crises and moves a great deal of paper around, but it never gets the chance to address the systemic problems that create the crises the agency deals with every day.

Like most large government departments and agencies, the EPA is a labyrinth—organizationally and physically. It is a version of “Dilbert’s World”––each employee stuck in his or her own cubicle and narrowly defined function. My colleagues worked in an environment that was antithetical to science: in the absence of debate, research data, or field investigations, they did monotonous analyses, mundane work that bore little resemblance to their scientific training. Field scientists morphed into office technicians. Since they rarely got out into the field, EPA scientists didn’t really know much about how industrial agriculture worked. They assumed, for example, that farmers followed the warnings on pesticide labels. That was a fundamental mistake.

A 1981 government survey of agricultural practices in Florida showed, for example, that in about 40 percent of the cases, farmers used the wrong spray on a given crop, or simply used too much.
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Such basic, misinformed behavior destroys any chance of producing safe food and essentially renders EPA’s regulations meaningless.

The situation has been made worse by the weakening—or outright elimination—of the EPA’s monitoring capabilities. In 1982, the EPA shut down the only national laboratory responsible for checking the efficacy of disinfectants. This was done at a time when those chemicals were failing at a rate between 50 and 66 percent.
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In addition, the EPA’s risk assessment was fundamentally flawed. So enamored was the agency of synthetic chemicals that EPA biologists and economists rarely even bothered comparing the risks of chemical sprays to a less toxic system of pest control such as crop rotations, disease-resistant crops, beneficial insects, or organic farming methods. The emerging practice of “integrated pest management”—let alone organic farming—received little more than token attention.

Yet integrated pest management had started with the EPA. A small number of early IPA specialists collected data in search of alternatives to pesticides, sponsored several studies showing the benefits of biological control of pests, and cheered when the EPA banned DDT. The EPA’s IPA staff formed a lively link with the rest of the government and the nonprofit environmental community on all issues of farming and pest control. And when interest in organic farming began to sprout in the 1970s, the agency’s IPM experts were prepared to offer their knowledge and support.