Poison Spring Read online

  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.

  Chapter 1

  The EPA Nobody Knows

  A sad fact of contemporary life is that most of us have come to accept that we spend our lives swimming in a chemical soup. Our lives are built on synthetic chemicals: in our food, in our cosmetics, in our water bottles, on our lawns. Here are just a few of the soup’s ingredients—the words are hard to pronounce, and harder to trace: methoxychlor, chlorpyrifos, amitrole, glyphosate, dibromochloropropane, polychlorinated biphenyls, polybrominated biphenyls, dichloro-diphenyltrichloroethane (DDT), vinclozolin, 1,3,-butadiene, petroleum distillates, di-(2-ethylhexyl)-phthalate, fonofos, parathion, malathion, coumaphos, permethrin, atrazine, alachlor, metolachlor, trifluralin, simazine, 2,4-D, carbaryl, dieldrin, diazinon, endosulfan, glasswool (fiberglass), ethylene thiouria, asbestos, acrylonitrile, chloroform, aflatoxins, lead, nickel, mercury, cyanide, arsenic, beryllium, benzene, and chlorine.

  The words are not exactly name brands. They are not widely advertised. But they are here, they are in us, and they will remain—in our food and water, in our air, and in our bodies—for a long time to come, because their use has been approved by the EPA. Consumers may not know what these chemicals are, but they implicitly trust that someone—if not the companies, then surely the EPA—is keeping their health and safety in mind.

  That, at least, is the hope. The EPA is charged with setting standards for environmental and health safety, and then with monitoring industries that threaten to violate those standards. The public is aware that a (very) few chemicals, such as DDT, have been banned. But they have no idea that close molecular relatives of even these dangerous chemicals are still produced in great quantities.

  Here’s how it works: A company coming to EPA for the “registration” of a pesticide either conducts (or contracts out) several tests of its product on laboratory animals. Each laboratory test costs lots of money, sometimes more than a hundred thousand dollars. When all or part of the tests show that the product does not cause “unreasonable adverse effects on man and the environment,” the EP
A approves the product, and the company begins selling it. But this process is far from a guarantee that these products, or their chemical ingredients, are safe.1

  EPA labs can (and do) check on the validity of the information that chemical companies give the government. When a new chemical enters the market (and thereby ends up in our water or our food), the chemical company and EPA discuss how much of the toxin should be allowed in human food. Theoretically, such an amount should in no way harm us. These amounts are measured in parts per million (ppm), parts per billion (ppb), and parts per trillion (ppt). A part per million is like dissolving an ounce of salt into 7,500 gallons of water. One part per billion is like putting an ounce of chocolate syrup in 1,000 tank cars of milk. And a part per trillion is the equivalent of a pinch of salt over 10,000 tons of potato chips.

  This “legal” amount of a poison permitted in food is an artifice known as human “tolerance,” which—if we are talking about pesticides—is really just a cover meant to protect farmers from lawsuits filed by people sickened by the food they eat. To detect “tolerable” poison in apples, for example, EPA looks over the experiments conducted by the industry that makes the poison. Animal studies testing the toxicity of sprays, assuming they are done honestly, reveal the real (or potential) danger of the pesticides or drugs fed to experimental animals such as mice, rats, rabbits, and dogs. Once these results are in hand, EPA then disseminates them to state agencies and foreign countries.

  Tests are designed to detect both immediate and long-term danger. You want to know whether, say, 7 parts per million of a certain chemical will poison someone eating corn sprayed with that chemical. But you also want to know about eating this chemical over a long time. This is where the “chronic toxicity” testing comes in: dosing animals for two years to see how the animal reacts. Does the animal become blind or paralyzed? Does it stop eating or develop cancer tumors? These would be clear signs the chemical is not fit for human consumption and therefore inappropriate for EPA approval.

  Congress can cut funding for labs, but such action is unusual. Instead, Congress cuts funding for the EPA itself, and—depending on the politics of the administration—the EPA then cuts funding for the labs or turns testing over to private labs. As we will see in due course, private labs do the testing for chemicals; nevertheless, EPA labs are critical in monitoring the activities of private companies and labs. If EPA management cuts funding for EPA labs—which it has done—it becomes difficult to detect, much less control, industry corruption.

  Since lab tests are so critical to protecting our health and the environment, you would think they would be used widely to help monitor the eighty thousand synthetic chemicals in common use today. Nothing could be further from the truth. My first supervisor, Bill Preston, a good scientist with extensive experience in the federal government, lamented that the number of laboratories serving the Office of Pesticide Programs of the EPA had dropped from a dozen in 1971 to a half dozen in 1979. By the time I retired from the EPA in 2004, there were two.

  For the majority of politicians and executives in corporate America, effective environmental protection and the safeguarding of public health—the legal mission of the EPA—has rarely been a compelling priority. To understand this fact, one has only to look back at the EPA’s history during its first three decades. I was there, increasingly incredulous, watching that mission being betrayed.

  The Office of Pesticide Programs, the largest organization of the EPA, within which I did most of my work, is essentially owned by the global chemical-pesticide industry, and this has been true under both Democratic and Republican administrations. EPA became a place where honest science has been replaced by dishonest “risk assessments” and “cost-benefit analyses,” both of which serve as thin bureaucratic covers for putting the interests of industry ahead of the environment and public health.

  At its foundation, the EPA inherited much of its work from the U.S. Department of Agriculture and, to a lesser extent, from the Department of the Interior and the Department of Health, Education and Welfare (now Health and Human Services). This inheritance led to a disastrous impact on the EPA’s noble mission, which was—and remains—not the coddling of industry, but the protection of the country’s environment and human health.

  Congress has given the EPA the authority to implement more than a dozen environmental laws designed to keep air, water, and food relatively clean and safe; trash properly disposed off; radiation away from people; and the environment relatively unharmed by industrial pollution or manufacturing practices.

  The most important of our environmental laws administered by the EPA include the Federal Insecticide, Fungicide, and Rodenticide Act of 1947, which evolved from the 1910 Insecticide Act that was supposed to do away with fraudulent pesticide products.2

  The EPA also oversees the Toxic Substances Control Act (TSCA) of 1976, which brought commercial chemicals under the purview of the law. The benefits of this law have been nominal at best, since the EPA has failed miserably to regulate the spread of industrial chemicals—which is exactly how the chemical industry wants it. From the outset, industry has neutered the TSCA law, forbidding the EPA from requiring premarket health and environmental testing of the massive amounts of chemicals the agency is charged with “regulating.”

  The Clean Air Act of 1970 gave the EPA the authority to set national air quality standards and air pollution limits. The Clean Water Act of 1972 authorized the EPA to issue pollution discharge permits to those who would otherwise continue to dump unlimited wastes into streams and rivers, and enabled the EPA to fund wastewater treatment plants throughout the country.3

  Although these laws have been of incalculable benefit (at least compared to the way things would look had they not been implemented), the EPA remains a timid imitation of what it could have become. Sometimes the agency doesn’t even bother to enforce its own rules. Other times it takes years for the EPA to publish its regulations. Even when regulations are posted promptly, they are routinely watered down by the White House Office of Management and Budget, or by congressional or industry demands. These forces often order EPA to rewrite its regulations to benefit industry, a cynical process that grinds down even the most thick-skinned scientists.

  Worst of all, the EPA—like all government agencies—is infected with political appointees, a great many of them with strong ties to the very industries they have been hired to regulate. Once these people have been confirmed to senior posts by the Senate, they divide the agency budget and staff among themselves and then mold regulations as they see fit to satisfy their former (and often future) industry employers. Always, of course, industry is there on the other side of the thin line, watching, influencing, and disciplining both legislators and administrators of the country’s laws.4

  What does this industry influence mean in practice? With few exceptions, environmental statutes allow chemicals to be dumped on the market without ever having been tested. In the case of the pesticides law, for instance, the EPA is authorized to demand premarket health and environmental testing of new products. But in practice, the chemical industry plays a major role in writing those regulations and has a powerful hand in restraining the EPA from enforcing its rules. The chemical industry’s allies in Congress and the White House raise no objections.5

  The truth is, most toxic chemicals enter the market without ever being tested for health and environmental effects, and this is just the way the chemical industry likes it. The Occupational Safety and Health Act, the Toxic Substances Control Act, the cosmetic provisions of the Food, Drug and Cosmetics Act, and all other federal laws require no testing for the chemicals or other products entering the market. Only the pesticides act and the food sections of the Food, Drug and Cosmetics Act require testing of chemicals likely to enter the food we eat. This does not prevent industry marketers from saying that their products “meet EPA standards.”

  How does this happen? EPA staffers routinely cut and paste studies conducted by the very industries they are suppos
ed to be regulating—and rubber-stamp industry conclusions with the imprimatur of government. They fund studies no one reads; they pay for travel for political appointees; and—as political administrations change—they grease the revolving door that barely separates the agency and industry.6

  When political men and women leave the government for positions in industry—or when industry people move into government—they carry their influence with them. Pesticide companies hire senior EPA officials because those officials know how to craft strategies that will ensure the flow of toxins into the market and the profits derived from them. Former government officials are able to persuade their former colleagues to be more lenient in their scrutiny of data provided by industry, which ensures that new and more dangerous pesticides continue to be “registered” and to enter the market. The former “government insiders” become the mirror image of what they once were—they are now industry insiders. This revolving door is a fundamental fact in the continuing hegemony of corporations over would-be regulators.

  Long after tobacco was proven to be deadly dangerous, cigarette companies continued to make billions of dollars because the industry manipulated science and hid from the government what industry knew about the hazards of cigarettes. The chemical industry has enthusiastically adopted this model of deception, manipulating the EPA the way Big Tobacco manipulated the Food and Drug Administration. The EPA has always claimed there was “good science” behind its approval of the chemical industry’s products. As became tragically evident in the case of Big Tobacco, the truth about the safety of products hawked by Big Chemical is far less convincing.