Authors: E. G. Vallianatos
Poison Spring (28 page)
The danger, of course, was not merely related to high quantities of captan. Like magic beans, corn seed is “dressed” with several coats of deleterious protection. Captan and other pesticides are joined by powerfully toxic “inerts” and “dyes.” Ironically, even more poisons are created during the ludicrous and ineffective “detreating” process. The “magic beans” are then fed to livestock.
The problem of poison-soaked corn seeds became so appalling that even timid EPA bureaucrats began thinking in early 1987 how to undo the harm they had legalized six years before. Could they revoke the “captan tolerance” for corn seed and thus once again make it illegal to feed livestock poisonous corn seeds?
As the EPA debated this, about half the obsolete captan-treated corn seed in the United States (close to a million bushels) was exported to Holland to feed Dutch animals. Here’s how it worked: companies would buy the million bushels of captan-treated seed corn, “detreat” the seed, mix this seed with other feeds, then package the final product and sell the mixture to Holland.
This is important not just because another country showed gross negligence by purchasing poisoned seed. It also illustrates the global trade in poisons—many of which end up not just in our food, but in the food of the world.
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EPA managers knew that this poisoned milk disaster was slowly unfolding and that Americans were paying the price. Even by the mid-1970s, a study showed that DDT-like chemicals (dieldrin, heptachlor, heptachlor epoxide, oxychlordane, lindane, BHC, PCBs, HCB, trans-nonachlor) were showing up in the milk of a majority of fourteen hundred nursing women in a hundred fifty American hospitals. The numbers were shocking: 80 percent of the mothers had, on average, 164 parts per billion of dieldrin in their milk. The mean level for BHC, lindane, HCB, and trans-nonachlor varied from 56 to 193 parts per billion. But the most startling (and frightening) discovery was the presence of DDE, the carcinogenic form of DDT, in the milk of 99 percent of the mothers. The average amount of DDE in the mothers’ milk was 3,521 parts per billion. (There were no legal limits to pesticides in mothers’ milk. DDT and other organochlorines were allowed at about 7 parts per million limits in crops.)
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A couple of years later, the EPA found pentachlorophenol, an acutely toxic insecticide, fungicide, and wood preservative, in the urine of about 120 million Americans.
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Another study painted a grim picture of the health of the country’s Hispanic population. The Reagan administration had funded the study in order to feign loyalty to the Hispanic community, though Reagan’s environmental agenda had little to do with either public health or the environment. The administration assigned the task to John Todhunter, the EPA’s assistant administrator from 1981 to 1983.
Todhunter had arrived at EPA after serving as an assistant professor of biology at Catholic University. He also served on the board of scientific advisers of the American Council on Science and Health, a front organization for the agrochemical industry. His work at EPA continued his life’s work, which was to fight for the interests of the industry.
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On January 19, 1983, Todhunter signed a memorandum and agreement with the National Center for Health Statistics for a study of the toxic contamination of the country’s Hispanic population. The study cost EPA more than $6 million, seven years of lab work, and fifty person-years of labor. The scientific results were predictable, and deeply troubling: more than 90 percent of the Latinos in the sampling areas had pentachlorophenol in their urine, and nearly all those living in some areas of Texas, New Mexico, Colorado, and Los Angeles had DDE, the cancer-causing form of DDT, in their blood. (Two Hispanics from Los Angeles also had 18 and 33 parts per billion of PCBs in their blood.)
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Up to 80 percent of Hispanics living in San Antonio and Houston, Texas, were poisoned by the nerve toxin dursban (also known as chlorpyrifos), a Dow Chemical product used for termite and corn insect control, and much more. Some 27 percent of the rest of the Hispanic population of the country had dursban in their urine. This compound, known to be “acutely toxic to fish at extremely low levels,” has also been linked to brain abnormalities in the children of exposed mothers. Virginia Rauh, a professor of medicine at Columbia University and head researcher of the 2012 study of chlorpyrifos, reported that mothers who breathe or eat chlorpyrifos can deliver the poison through their blood and across the placenta to their infant’s bloodstream. Five or ten years after chlorpyrifos poisons the infant, “structural changes” take place in the brain, affecting those areas responsible for “attention, language, reward systems, emotions and control.” Nearly twenty years later, the EPA banned chlorpyrifos for residential use. Farmers, however, keep chlorpyrifos in their armory.
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The study of Hispanics only confirmed evidence that minorities and poor people were—and are—exposed to more poisons than affluent whites. “So striking is the association of the pesticide residues with social class that one might predict the occurrence of greater residues of DDT and its metabolites in those diseases which are associated with poverty,” John E. Davies, a physician funded by the EPA, had concluded in a earlier report.
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So, did all this evidence cause major regulatory action at the EPA? Of course not. Once the study’s findings began to sink in, when Reagan’s people could see that the results were bad, they contemplated terminating or abandoning it. Although they “restricted” the use of pentachlorophenol in 1984, they said—and did—nothing about the contamination of so many millions of people with that acutely toxic poison.
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Donald Marlow, an EPA laboratory manager, told me in July 1984 just how upset he was that senior EPA managers did not, in his opinion, have the brains—or the courage—to act on evidence that pentachlorophenol was in the bodies of a large segment of the country’s Hispanic population. He was right: the EPA had enough evidence against pentachlorophenol to ban it. But the “dummies,” he said, “did nothing.”
The Reagan EPA did nothing because that’s what the Reagan EPA always did: nothing. Not long after this, John Todhunter, who had overseen the study, was brought before a congressional panel over his decision to delay—for three years—restrictions on the cancer-causing pesticide ethylene dibromide. This pesticide, which was injected into the ground in citrus groves to kill worms (and used as a fumigant on grain milling equipment), was known to have caused cancer, birth defects, and other disorders in animal studies. It had not only been found in Florida water supplies; EPA scientists had discovered it in bread given to children as part of school lunch programs. One congressman accused Todhunter of buckling to the demands of industry and the Reagan White House; another accused him of destroying his calendar, a practice that may have violated federal law. “What you had was a series of secret meetings which resulted in the reversal of a decision reached on the record,” Jonathan Lash, an attorney with the Natural Resources Defense Council, told
The New York Times
. “That is not the way the government is supposed to work.”
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Then Todhunter was accused of ordering EPA studies altered to downplay the dangers of formaldehyde. Todhunter was said to have held a private meeting with representatives of the formaldehyde industry (which, not coincidentally, had contributed to the American Council on Science and Health, on whose board Todhunter had once served). After the meetings, Todhunter decided to take no regulatory action on formaldehyde, which has been used for decades to make plywood and particleboard, among many other products.
Once this news broke, Todhunter—like so many other Reagan appointees at EPA—abruptly resigned. Newspapers noted that Todhunter had been accused of “holding private meetings with industry groups before deciding not to regulate formaldehyde as a suspected cancer-causing agent. Also being investigated was his receipt of a $1,664 payment from a former employer after starting work at the EPA. The firm subsequently received a $40,000 no-bid contract from Todhunter’s office.” Todhunter “denied any involvement,” newspaper reports noted.
Five years later, the EPA finally decided to call formaldehyde what it is: a “probable human carcinogen.”
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“To see what has gone wrong inside the Environmental Protection Agency, there is no need to peer through the acrid vapors that stream from its every window,”
The New York Times
opined during the tenure of Todhunter and Reagan’s other EPA appointees. “Seldom since the Emperor Caligula appointed his horse a consul has there been so wide a gulf between authority and competence.”
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Farmers have always sought any advantage they can find to help them grow more food. Sadly, given the regime of intensified agricultural chemicals, this has meant a relentless tide of hazards for both nature and society. In the late 1930s, for example, there were no more than three thousand to four thousand acres of land devoted to rice production in the Missouri Bootheel, which is 4,125 square miles in size. Not much changed in rice growing in Missouri until the early 1970s.
Suddenly, in a single decade, farmers in the Bootheel increased the acreage given to rice production from 5,000 acres to 75,300 acres, a growth of 1,500 percent. Very little idle land survived. By 2005, Missouri rice farmers—and their corporate overseers—ranked sixth in earnings in the country, taking in about $100 million per year. These farmlands are blessed with plenty of water, and the farmers get plenty of government subsidies. But they have also been using massive amounts of weed killer, much of it applied by aerial spraying in the month of June.
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Just to the north of Missouri, Iowa is also almost entirely under cultivation: of its 36 million acres, nearly 34 million are farmed. In 1978, 13.5 million acres of this land was devoted to corn alone. That year, Iowa farmers treated 96 percent of their corn with weed killers, spraying the weed killer 2,4-D on 1.3 million acres of emerging corn. (Recall that 2,4-D made up half of Agent Orange, the weed killer weapon the United States used to burn out the jungles of Vietnam.)
Since 1978, farmers in Iowa (and elsewhere) essentially abandoned traditional mechanical weed removal, going all in for the “no-till” method of intensive spraying of weed killers like 2,4-D before sowing their seed corn. Despite evidence that these poisons end up in our drinking water, chemical companies in the early 1980s taught farmers to spray weed killers and other chemicals through center-pivot irrigation sprinkler systems, thus worsening an already bad situation.
It wasn’t just the Midwest that was choking on industrial chemicals. In 1983, during the Reagan administration, a long-term EPA study called the Regional Environmental Management Reports documented America’s environmental disaster in frightening detail. Some 65 percent of nearly six hundred industries in Florida, Georgia, South Carolina, North Carolina, Alabama, Mississippi, Tennessee, and Kentucky “were discharging wastes containing substances lethal to aquatic life.”
Wastes, both solid and liquid, were also overwhelming New Jersey, which was running out of clean drinking water; the state had been forced to close 74 public water supply wells since 1971, 90 percent because of contamination by organic and industrial chemicals. Of New Jersey’s 391 legal and illegal landfills, fully 75 were suspected of contaminating groundwater—every year—with seven billion gallons of contaminated “leachate.” On top of this, 356 dumps were annually leaking another 6 billion gallons of contaminants into groundwater supplies. New Jersey’s other problems? More than twenty-five hundred accidental petroleum and chemical spills in 1981 alone; leaking underground storage tanks and pipelines; and decrepit wastewater disposal systems.
Over the next several decades, the EPA reported, of the 750 million gallons a day of groundwater used for drinking water, fully 40 to 50 million gallons a day “will be lost because of pollution.”
New York fared little better in the report. It was hard to find a fish in the state that was not already toxic: fish in Adirondack lakes were contamination with cadmium, lead, and mercury; shad in the Delaware River had elevated arsenic levels; trout in the Finger Lakes were poisoned with DDT and chlordane; fish in Lake Champlain and the Hudson River were blighted with PCBs; blue crabs had high levels of cadmium.
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And on and on it went. The rivers and lakes of the entire country had become a mirror clouded and dark from chemical pollution. Researchers found PCBs and DDT-like chemicals in the Pacific Northwest’s Columbia River sturgeon; the PCBs killed the eggs of the fish and also decimated mink and otter. In all, there were more than fifteen thousand sites in the United States where PCBs were buried or dumped, ceaselessly releasing their poisons into the environment. EPA inspectors may need several hundred years to clean up PCBs from the environment of the Pacific Northwest alone.
Evidence of the country’s widespread contamination by farmers’ chemicals was sobering, but at least the Regional Environmental Management Reports correctly identified a root problem: the nation’s pesticides law was little more than an avenue for legal pollution.
Under the law’s Section 18 “emergency” or “crisis” exemptions, federal agencies and states allow the spraying of untested chemicals. But as I described in chapter 2 with regard to asana, the lethal pyrethroid spray, a great volume of untested poisons (and a great deal of money) can come down to what industry and regulars decide constitutes an “emergency.”
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