Poison Spring Read online

  Contents

  Preface

  1 The EPA Nobody Knows

  2 Pest Control: A Matter of Merchandising

  3 The Dioxin Molecule of Death

  4 DDT: A New Principle of Toxicology

  5 Why Are the Honeybees Disappearing?

  6 Agricultural Warfare

  7 The Swamp: The Big Business of Fraudulent Science

  8 Whistle-blowers and What They’re Up Against

  9 When Will the Well Run Dry?

  10 Fallout

  11 The Hubris of the Reagan Administration

  12 From Reagan to Bush

  13 The Obama Administration: Yes, We Can?

  Conclusion

  Acknowledgements

  Notes

  A Note on the Authors

  Preface

  A Country Bathed in Man-Made Chemicals

  I wrote this book to tell the story of what I learned at the Environmental Protection Agency, where I worked from 1979 to 2004. This story—secret, exasperating, and tragic—explains why and how the chemical and other industries have captured the EPA and turned it from an environmental protection agency into a polluters’ protection agency.

  Both Democrats and Republicans, in Congress and the White House, have been responsible for this dangerous subversion. Taken in by the strategies and the financial clout of global industries, they have in turn facilitated the practical and moral breakdown at the agency. This story—how the EPA became a target of polluters, and how industrial polluters and their supporters in the White House and Congress remade EPA in their own image—is of immense importance both to the health of Americans and to the integrity of the natural world.

  I spent most of my career in the EPA’s Office of Pesticides Programs, where the regulation of powerful toxins is debated—and where the chemical pipeline that leads directly onto our food (and into our bodies) is opened or shut. While I touch on other causes of pollution of air and water, the primary focus of this book is on pesticides, herbicides, and other chemicals used on farms and in homes, on lawns and in forests—and which collectively have frightful effects on human and ecological health that are still largely hidden from public view. This fact should be very troubling to all Americans.

  It is simply not possible to understand why the EPA behaves the way it does without appreciating the enormous power of America’s industrial farmers and their allies in the chemical pesticide industries, which currently do about $40 billion per year in business. For decades, industry lobbyists have preached the gospel of unregulated capitalism, and Americans have bought it. Today, it seems, the entire government is at the service of the private interests of America’s corporate class. In January 2007, the EPA even approved a promotional slogan that pesticide companies inserted onto the label of their sprays: “This insecticide is dedicated to a healthier world.”

  Far from simply making a narrow case against pesticides, this book offers a broad overview of the failure of environmental protection in the United States over the last seventy-five years—the same period, ironically, that some consider to have been the heyday of environmental regulation. This is environmental history our government and the industries don’t want us to know. But here it is, constructed with the help of secret government documents.

  Pesticides simply unify the story: the EPA offered me the documentary evidence to show the dangerous disregard for human health and the environment in the United States government, and in the industries it has sworn to oversee. Poison Spring makes public a secret history of pollution in the United States.

  The EPA is an agency with the legal, and I would say sacred, responsibility of safeguarding our health and the health of the natural world. The decisions the EPA makes—or does not make—affect our lives in deep and subtle ways. These decisions are often more important and longer lasting than decisions made by any other part of the government.

  To say the least, the troubles within the EPA mirror the troubles that have bedeviled our government from its very beginning. Then as now, powerful economic interests have worked tirelessly to handcuff government oversight. Two hundred fifty years ago, Alexander Hamilton denounced this state of affairs; in Hamilton’s mind, a government bought and sold is worthless.1

  In recent decades, from the 1940s to the dawn of the twenty-first century, it has seemed as if government has been working for industry rather than overseeing it. Most government and academic scientists working on agricultural practices and pest control have obdurately ignored research into nature’s intricate and subtle workings. Instead, they have smoothed the way for the poisonous (and hugely profitable) concoctions of the chemical industry, and they are now doing the same for the rapidly growing field of genetic crop engineering, another Trojan horse of agribusiness.

  In the mid-twentieth century, the Cold War provided the ideological context for the government’s push for expanding agribusiness at the expense of the family farm. Facing the Communist Soviet Union, which wrecked peasant agriculture for its own version of state agribusiness, the United States adopted its own imperial form of farming, focusing on maximizing production and profit on ever-larger industrial-scale farms. Pesticides became more than just a gargantuan industry of their own; they became the very glue of this imperial system.

  Such a tectonic shift—from small, family-run, and largely nontoxic farms to industrial-scale, intensely toxic industrial farms—had ecologists and health experts worried from the beginning. Margery W. Shaw, a scientist and physician writing in 1970 (the year the EPA came into being), feared that the introduction of hundreds of chemicals into the environment would result in a “genetic catastrophe.”2

  Six years later, at a conference in Washington on “Women and the Workplace,” three American scientists (Eula Bingham, Marvin S. Legator, and Stephen J. Rinkus) warned of the high price we were likely to pay for the use of the “miracles” of the chemical age. Scientists, they wrote, “can only speculate on the detrimental effects on the genetic pool from injurious chemical exposure. In terms of ourselves as a population of living organisms, we are suffering chemical shock.”3

  A few years after this, my EPA colleague George Beusch reflected on his early years in the chemical business, including a New Jersey factory he knew where workers were manufacturing explosives. “Their skin would turn yellow and at that moment they knew it was time to die, which they did without much protest,” Beusch recalled to me. “We called them the ‘yellow canaries.’

  “In other jobs I had with chemical companies, I learned to breathe—almost instinctively—with only the upper part of my lungs. Trying to make a workplace safe isn’t easy, for it takes a lot of dollars. Money, not human health and welfare, is the heart and soul of that corporate business. People are cheap these days. The chemical industry can kill as many workers as they have at any one time, yet there are still more workers waiting outside to take their place. And the government always looks the other way while the worker gasps for breath.”

  Writing in 1994, two scientists of the United Nations University, Robert Ayres and Udo Simonis, described the spread of industrialization in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries as “a cancer.” Industrialization in its present form, they said, “is a process of uncontrolled, unsustainable ‘growth’ that eventually destroys its host—the biosphere.”4

  Like other synthetic petrochemicals, and like radiation, pesticides affect life processes all the way down to the genes. And since Americans have been eating food contaminated by pesticides for more than seventy years, the genetic impact of pesticides must be correspondingly large.

  Indeed, underlying most of the problems discussed in this book is the overwhelming power over ecological and human health held by this country’s agricultural economy, which is controlled by fewer and
fewer companies. For example, IBP, ConAgra Beef, Excel Corporation (Cargill), and Farmland National Beef Packing Company slaughtered 79 percent of cattle in the United States in 1998. Six companies—Smithfield, IBP, ConAgra (Swift), Cargill (Excel), Farmland Industries, and Hormel Foods—slaughtered 75 percent of all pigs in the country in 1999. Four companies—Cargill (Nutrena), Purina Mills (Koch Industries), Central Soya, and Consolidated Nutrition (ADM and AGP)—controlled all feed plants in the United States by 1994. Also, by 1997, four companies (Cargill, ADM Milling, Continental Grain, and Bunge) controlled America’s grain trade: they managed 24 percent of the grains, 39 percent of the facilities for storing grain, and 59 percent of the grain export facilities in the country.5

  The EPA has been standing alongside and (mostly) cheering these industries for nearly fifty years. Like most administrative and policy functions of EPA, funding for research and regulatory work is shrouded in secrecy and ambiguity. A very small number of officials have enormous control over what gets funded. If a political appointee sees a chance to increase his prestige or the influence of a corporation, he will divert money from one activity to another, close a government laboratory, and hire a private laboratory more sympathetic to the desires of his clients in industry. During the last years of the George W. Bush administration, the EPA dismantled its libraries, the very foundation of its institutional memory. Why? Because the libraries were full of EPA-funded studies documenting the adverse effects of chemicals made by companies that had supported Bush’s candidacy.

  As a rule, these industries lobby tirelessly for the dissolution of the country’s environmental bureaucracy and for a return to a nineteenth-century version of unregulated “free enterprise.” Their representatives arrive for EPA meetings well dressed and well prepared to defend their interests. They know how to play the game: they come to meetings with slides, computer programs, fancy jargon, and colorful handouts, pretending to deliver a scholarly exercise in the manner of a college seminar or a defense of a doctoral thesis. Taking their cue, EPA staffers behave like students eager to learn from their chemical masters, allowing them to go on with their spurious presentations and never challenging their outrageous claims.

  This entire book is, in a sense, about a bureaucracy going mad. The EPA bureaucracy is “civilized,” and it may appear far removed from the darker Soviet forms written about by people like Alexander Solzhenitsyn. Indeed, along with so many scientists, economists, lawyers, and experts in many other important disciplines of useful knowledge, the EPA might easily fit in Plato’s Republic: their work—protecting the natural world and the health of people—is, in theory at least, entirely virtuous.6

  The trouble is, as Solzhenitsyn knew too well, both individual people and entire bureaucracies are susceptible to corruption. Appoint a corrupt administrator at EPA, as Ronald Reagan appointed Anne Gorsuch, and the disease spreads fast through the entire bureaucratic system. This does not mean bureaucrats are more prone to corruption than other people; bureaucrats are just trying to make a living, and like everyone else, they want promotions and higher salaries. They follow the leadership of their organizations, which in the case of the EPA always mirrors the desires of the White House and Congress—and thus, inevitably, of the industries that control the country’s politics.7

  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 ninet
eenth 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