Poison Spring (27 page)

Nine of every ten households used pesticides, and more than three times as many Americans used pesticides inside their homes than in their gardens, one study showed. Other startling findings: Americans used more than five hundred different pesticide products. People living in the southeastern United States were exposed to more termite poisons and sprays of commercial insecticides than those living in other regions of the country. More than 35 percent of urban Americans used toxic mothballs; 90 percent sprayed disinfectants; 16.4 percent employed no-pest strips; and 28 percent used pet insecticide collars.

Throughout the 1970s, evidence had been mounting about the saturation of the soil with dangerous chemicals: 68 percent of soil specimens from Fitchburg, Massachusetts, contained detectable concentrations of nerve toxin (parathion-like) chemicals, DDT-like sprays, and PCBs. Some 98 percent of soil samples from Washington, D.C., had similar contamination. Samples from Springfield, Illinois; Camden, New Jersey; Richmond, Virginia; and Hartford, Connecticut, had similarly dangerous levels of parathion-like pesticides, DDT-like sprays, and PCBs.
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Hiding inside the country’s seventeen thousand greenhouses—many of them managed by land grant universities—were large amounts of dangerous pesticides, including nerve toxins such as malathion, which is also a carcinogen.
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In other words, the time was overripe for a president to show leadership on industrial contaminants, to stand up for public health, to reinvigorate oversight of corporate malfeasance.

As the world quickly learned, Ronald Reagan was exactly the wrong man for this job. Rarely has our government allowed and encouraged the actions of the chemical industry so openly as it did during Reagan’s tenure in office. He opened the door wide to corporate influence throughout the government, and especially at the EPA, which began a precipitous functional decline. Reagan gave corporations the reins of power at the agency, and they immediately began tearing the EPA apart. Outside the agency, the hired political guns in Reagan’s Office of Management and Budget also set about demolishing environmental protection, justifying such vandalism by the self-serving mythology of the “cost/benefit analysis,” which masked a naked ideological shift toward pesticide merchants and agribusiness.

Early in the Reagan administration, Vice President George H. W. Bush launched his task force on “regulatory relief,” and the federal government was opened up for giveaways to corporate polluters. Reagan’s political men and women were encouraged to run roughshod over regulators they found in their way.

The EPA was an ideal target not because the agency was in the vanguard of environmental protection or industrial reform; it had hardly ever fulfilled its mission of making industry less toxic to human health or the natural world. The EPA was a target because its very mission, “environmental protection,” was anathema to America’s polluting industries.

“[T]here were plainly people in the administration, within EPA, who believed that the EPA itself should be dissolved, that the statutes that it implemented were senseless, and that the federal government had no business in environmental management,” said Sheldon Novick, a top lawyer of the EPA from Region III. “Those people, who found enforcement of federal law particularly distasteful, expressed that the EPA should be dismantled, beginning with its enforcement functions.”
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With this goal in mind, Reagan appointed a lawyer from Colorado, Anne M. Gorsuch (later Burford), to run his EPA; Reagan also appointed a lobbyist from California, Rita Lavelle, to run the EPA’s toxic waste programs. Both understood that their mission was not to empower the EPA but to dismantle it. And they set about their work with zeal. Virtually all of Gorsuch’s subordinates at the EPA came from the ranks of the industries they were charged with overseeing. My colleague William Sanjour said Reagan’s EPA was being run by “hooligans.”
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Gorsuch was tough: even as the country’s leading environmental regulator, she wore fur coats, smoked two packs of Marlboros a day, and drove a government-issue car that got just fifteen miles to the gallon. Denver’s
Rocky Mountain News
once said that Gorsuch “could kick a bear to death with her bare feet.”

Gorsuch cut budgets for research and enforcement, slashed the number of cases filed against polluters, and sped up the pace of approvals for pesticides. She once boasted that she had reduced the thickness of the book of clean water regulations from six inches to a half inch. A colleague of mine, Richard Laska, once told me that Gorsuch “burned” a report he had prepared about acid rain. I can only assume he used the word “burned” metaphorically. Yet her agency once famously tried to set aside a 30-by-40-mile rectangle of ocean due east of the Delaware-Maryland coast where incinerator ships would torch toxic wastes, apparently out of view of nosy onlookers.
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Gorsuch drastically weakened the EPA’s enforcement organization and did away with all employees working with the public. Meanwhile, in a series of sumptuous lunches and cocktail parties with the barons of America’s hazardous waste kingdom, Rita Lavelle made deals that prevented the EPA from continuing its already inadequate efforts to ensure that effluent from millions of tons of toxic garbage did not go directly into the country’s drinking water.
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Senior EPA officials had become “immoral,” a senior EPA scientist, Lionel Richardson, a senior administrator and scientist who had been turned into a paper pusher, explained to me. Richardson
had witnessed the arbitrary termination of a very useful though expensive project on alternatives to chemicals, and he was angry. “Nothing, or almost nothing, prevents them from getting in the end what they want from those working for them,” he told me. “They promise their underlings favors and then slowly test them for loyalty. Would they lie, for instance? Or cover up? Or get rid of documents? You must understand this: We don’t deal with very much science, and the little science we occasionally manufacture to support our decisions, we often screw up. The key to what’s happening here is people, and how a couple of guys at the top have literally succeeded in destroying EPA’s legal opportunity to regulate pesticides. I don’t know what connections these people have with the chemical companies. But I do know they use scientists pretty quick.”
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The Republican White House, however, ordered the EPA to cover up the mess by resorting to the imperial claim of “executive privilege.” Reagan wanted to keep government documents out of the glare of congressional oversight. This meant that industry corporate lobbyists could see EPA documents, but Democratic congressional committee staff could not.
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This of course made House Democrats mad as hell. Since Democrats held the majority in the House of Representatives, a number of powerful subcommittee chairmen launched a series of investigations that revealed the gross negligence of Reagan’s audacious men and women at the EPA.

John Dingell of Michigan was particularly effective. As chairman of the Subcommittee on Oversight and Investigations of the Committee on Energy and Commerce, he understood correctly that the White House’s withholding of EPA documents from Congress was simply a way to cover up serious malfeasance. Dingell’s subcommittee staff confirmed his suspicions. Top EPA officials “violated their public trust by disregarding health and the environment, manipulating the Superfund program [for the management of hazardous wastes] for political purposes, engaging in unethical conduct, and participating in other abuses.”
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During the Reagan years, dangerous chemicals became so ubiquitous that they were even contaminating people inside buildings and during their leisure time. According to an EPA-funded study done at Colorado State University, female greenhouse workers in Colorado were giving birth to low-birth-weight babies at a significantly higher rate than average, the study concluded. They also had more than twice the average number of miscarriages or stillbirths.

What could have been causing this distress? Colorado and other western states use many of the most popular toxins in the farmers’ arsenal. Of an estimated 104,000 pounds of active parathion ingredients distributed to American nurseries in 1982, some 102,000 pounds went to horticultural establishments in the West. These included benomyl, captan, carbaryl, chlordane, Cygon (dimethoate), DDVP (dichlorvos), diazinon, Dibrom (naled), Di-Syston, Dursban (chlorpyrifos), Kelthane, malathion, Metasystox, Morestan, nicotine, Orthene, Paraquat, parathion, Phosdrin, Pirimor, piperonyl butoxide, Princep, Roundup, sulfur, Temic (aldicarb), Thimet, thiram, Treflan, Vendex, warfarin, and zineb.
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Like the names of drugs, the names of pesticides are designed to seem technical and indecipherable, mere hints of the petrochemicals of which they are constituted. Many of the toxins used in the Colorado greenhouses are known to cause “unreasonable adverse effects on man and the environment,” violating the EPA’s core mission.
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During the Reagan years, we were not safe from pesticides even when at play. In 1984, an EPA-funded study revealed that golf courses are sprayed with some 126 different pesticides, at least nine of which (chlorothalonil, MSMA, thiram, benomyl, pentachlorophenol, ethylene dibromide, maneb, oftanol, and dithane M-45) have been known to cause “unreasonable adverse effects on man and the environment.”

How many people played golf on the country’s thirteen thousand courses? About 16 million.
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The problem with pesticides on the golf courses is not merely the incredible variety and toxicity of the poisons being sprayed; it’s also that “large amounts of pesticide chemicals are used on the courses and that these chemicals are applied quite frequently throughout the year.”
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By the mid-1980s, in other words, the bad news had become too widespread to ignore. Pesticides were among the greatest threats to the health of the American people and their environment, a danger that—despite the public outcry over Superfund sites—was more serious than that of hazardous waste. EPA’s own “Operating Guidance” document for fiscal year 1987 listed pesticides as the number one priority for policies designed to reduce “risks from exposure to
existing pesticides and toxic chemicals
.”

Disaster exploded in Arkansas in 1986, when FDA inspectors discovered shocking levels of heptachlor, an extremely toxic poison, in the milk fat of dairy cows fed a mash poisoned by the pesticide. How bad was the contamination? The mash contained heptachlor levels a thousand times greater than the permissible level. The milk itself had poison levels 75 times greater than legally acceptable.

The FDA ordered the seizure and destruction of the heptachlor-laced milk and cream in Arkansas. This travesty, which cost dairy farmers and cattle raisers of Arkansas about $16 million, forced another agricultural crisis to the surface. If American agribusiness were actually interested in producing healthy food, EPA would not be running a poison empire. Instead, we have a brutal business composed of mechanized factories that are, in effect, mining the land.

Owners of factory farms think nothing of “dressing” seed, that primordial molecule of life, with all sorts of toxins, especially fungicides. In the United States in the 1980s, no less than 8.2 billion pounds of seed were treated with fungicides and insecticides. This includes virtually all seed for corn, cotton, sorghum, vegetables, and peanuts. Also, more than 80 percent of potato and rice seed and approximately 30 to 35 percent of all wheat, rye, oats, barley, and soybean seed are treated with pesticides. Considering that a bushel of treated seed sells for $70, and that quite a bit of that seed is genetically designed to be useless for germination at the end of each planting season, the temptation to feed cattle with all that poisonous waste seed is powerful indeed. The FDA has been catching farmers giving cows seed loaded with poisons for years.

Today, of course, the chemical treatment of seeds remains the same, though more sophisticated and far wider. In 2004, for example, 1.3 billion pounds of seed a year were treated with 631,000 pounds of a single chemical, thiram.
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Of all the seeds “dressed” with poisons against disease and insects, seed corn is king. In 2012, the United States used 25 million bushels of corn seed for planting. This translates to 1.4 billion pounds of corn. About 90 percent of all seed, including corn seed, is “dressed.” Thus, altogether, in the second decade of the twenty-first century, several billion pounds of seed are annually treated with pesticides.
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Every year farmers and seed companies ended up with something like 2 million bushels of “obsolete” chemically treated corn seed. What to do with so much valuable but dangerous seed? Farmers didn’t intend to plant it but, at least before 1981, neither could they legally give it to cows; the seed was coated and pumped with several fungicides and insecticides in amounts that would make the cows’ milk, cream, and meat toxic to people. So corn farmers and seed companies resolved the dilemma with a straightforward political solution: they buttonholed the Reagan administration through the American Seed Trade Association—and the rest was easy. Companies claimed that they had effective “detreating” methods that neutralized the toxicity of poisoned seeds, and so these companies were allowed to feed the toxic stuff to cows. On November 6, 1981, the EPA once again gave in to the administration’s “regulatory relief ” agenda and allowed corn farmers to feed their livestock the corn seed treated with the fungicide captan, a carcinogen that is far more powerful than thalidomide in causing fetal deformities. About five years later, in 1986—at a time when desperate Arkansas officials and FDA bureaucrats were contemplating dumping millions of gallons of heptachlor-laced milk—EPA managers realized they simply could not trust industry habits of “washing” or “roasting” the captan-soaked corn seeds.