Poison Spring (5 page)

Tragically, the EPA put its IPM staff in a box. Outstanding policy documents (edited by the vigorous ecologist Charles Reese) remained unread, conventional scientists ignored the unit’s skepticism about chemicals, and eventually the IPM unit became entirely co-opted by the agency’s chemical culture, which saw IPM as a threat. Big Chemical set about defining IPM in a way guaranteed to keep farmers hooked on their pesticide products.
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In the best of circumstances, IPM encourages farmers to use smaller quantities of toxins on crops. But the IPM at EPA essentially became a do-nothing shop existing entirely for public relations, throwing dust in the eyes of the people about the EPA’s toleration of the expansion of the pesticide and herbicide poison empire.
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In other words, the choice has always been between one chemical and another, never between a chemical and an alternative. And given the growing chronicle of our country’s chemical saturation, the choices we have been making are clearly not serving us well. During my career at EPA, I saw this firsthand.

“EPA’s developing cancer policy is progressively less oriented to public protection,” a congressional report stated in 1976, four years before Ronald Reagan came to office. “In its regulation of pesticides, EPA is failing to perform its mandate to protect the public. EPA’s developing pesticide program is increasingly solicitous of the pesticide industry at the expense of the public health and well-being.”
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Two years later, another congressional report highlighted the failure of the government to protect Americans from eating food “tainted with potentially dangerous pesticide residues.”

“Because of the nature of chemical contaminants, we are forced to rely on the Federal government to protect us against potentially dangerous chemicals we cannot see, smell, or taste,” the report said. “Our examination leads us to believe that we cannot rely on the Federal government to protect us.” Researchers found that the EPA “continues to approve tolerances for potentially carcinogenic, mutagenic, and teratogenic pesticides which result in residues in our food.” The agency had set tolerance levels for pesticides without complete safety data, and it had “exempted some potentially dangerous pesticides from its tolerance requirements which end up in or on food.”

In almost all cases, these chemicals had been certified by both industry and the EPA as having an “acceptable” impact on the environment, or posing only “acceptable” risks to people. Human beings, we were told, had a “tolerance level” for each of them. As long as we use the chemicals “properly,” we would be safe.

The EPA uses the term “tolerance” to describe how much of a certain pesticide will be tolerated in a given amount of food. But there is very little science behind these tolerance levels; their sole purpose is to provide legal cover for the companies who make the chemicals, the farmers who use them, and the manufacturers who process food. As long as the government sets even bogus health standards, companies have legal cover if their products make people sick.

Yet these definitions of “tolerance” require an astonishing level of trust from the consumer. Who does the testing? Who determines what is safe and what is not? Who establishes the tolerance levels? If you think it is the EPA, you would be wrong. In most cases, the EPA bases its decisions to certify chemical products on the research and testing results provided by the very companies that make them.

By using an inadequate and outdated statistical base for setting tolerance levels, the EPA “often does not know what level of pesticide residue usually results from the use of a product, and bases its approval of pesticides merely on industry-supplied safety data.”
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In other words, the EPA’s tolerance setting program “is abysmal and needs a complete overhaul,” one report concluded. “Even when meat was found to be contaminated with dangerously high levels of toxic pesticides, neither USDA nor FDA could stop these products from reaching the dinner table. This is an appalling state of affairs which cannot be allowed to continue.”
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During the Reagan years, I spent several years with the EPA’s “Benefits and Use” division—another ironic name, given that “benefits” meant the benefits (that is to say, “profits”) that pesticides bring to industrial farms and pesticide companies, not the human or environmental health benefits the EPA is supposed to protect.
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To say the least, the staff of this division rarely thought about the adverse effects of pesticides. Cancer, especially cancer caused by pesticides, was not their concern. They listened to the producers of pesticides and their industry-funded academics who sought to “prove” that synthetic cancer-causing molecules in farm sprays were less dangerous than carcinogens that occur in nature. This led to an Orwellian situation in which the EPA was being asked on one hand to regulate processed foods in which these toxic chemicals showed up, and on the other hand being asked to formally allow “acceptable” levels of carcinogenic residuals in farmers’ sprays. No one wanted to acknowledge, for example, that carcinogens sprayed on farms could actually end up in the carrots they grew. At the EPA, this became known as the “Delaney Paradox”: the agency was stuck, essentially left to obscure the quality and potency of the chemicals that end up in the processed food we eat.

In May 1987, the prestigious National Academy of Sciences set out to make the EPA’s job easier. In “Regulating Pesticides in Food: The Delaney Paradox,” the academy concluded that the EPA ought to abandon the Delaney prohibition of carcinogens in food, and instead should regulate all pesticides under a single risk standard assessed during food production.

Whatever its intentions, the decision to abandon Delaney led to a disastrous outcome. Clearly, the more pesticide data companies collected, the more their products would be shown to be carcinogenic; under the Delaney provision, evidence of carcinogenic toxins turning up in processed food would mean that companies were breaking the law. By dropping the law—the only one prohibiting the presence of carcinogens in certain foods—the EPA was offering companies a way to avoid this oversight. Worse, the EPA was now essentially allowing the agricultural industry to regulate itself. Abandoning the Delaney Clause made it easier for chemical companies to hide data and meant that EPA scientists no longer felt obliged to investigate carcinogens in food.

In 1996, the Clinton administration brought this debate to a close when the president signed the so-called Food Quality Protection Act. The law amended a wide swath of chemical regulations, from pesticide and cosmetic oversight to the law establishing “tolerances” in food. Supporters said the new law established “a single health-based standard for all pesticides in all foods.”

Beleaguered EPA scientists said something else: true, there was no more discrimination against processed foods; now all foods could legally be served with a daily dosage of poison.
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In September 1987, while I was writing a speech for Allen Jennings, my division deputy, a colleague suggested that my hard line on pesticide safety might be the result of a misunderstanding of the EPA’s duty. EPA was not designed to keep chemicals that cause cancer, birth defects, or neurological disorders out of food and drinking water, he said. Rather, EPA existed only to ensure that the “risk” from those poisons was not “unreasonable.”

My colleague asked me to study the speeches and congressional testimony of the two chiefs running EPA’s pesticides empire, Jack Moore and Doug Campt. Reading this material would give me proper “guidance” in my assignment to rewrite the speech for Jennings. The message was clear: the EPA’s main role was not to protect human health, but to determine just how much poison human beings can “tolerate.”

The branch of EPA that oversees these “tolerance” decisions—the nerve center of EPA for all things relating to pesticides—is called the Registration Division. Its job is to decide how much poison can legally be present in the food we eat; it is where substantive decisions about pesticides are made. It is also where all data about pesticides receives an initial hearing before scientists examine the toxins in detail.

Over the years, my colleagues repeatedly told me that the Registration Division was in chaos, a madhouse of incompetence and lost or misdirected papers. Officials would mail documents to the wrong people. They would create lengthy documents known as “registration standards” but would rarely follow up to see whether their recommendations were actually being acted upon. When they received documents from chemical companies, they would dump them, misplace them, or simply do nothing. This black hole of paperwork made it far easier for chemical companies to register their products without even rudimentary oversight.
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In March 1987, the EPA hosted a two-day meeting of a group of special interests known by the fancy name Pesticide Users Advisory Committee. I was asked to help with this organization, which had essentially been formed to assure agribusiness that EPA would not get in the way of the pesticide industry.

The members of this committee could not disguise their contempt for the EPA and its attempts to protect wildlife and human health. So they must have been amused as they listened to an EPA ecologist explain the agency’s (halfhearted) plans to protect endangered species from pesticides. I could see the smiles disappear when an EPA scientist described a well water survey seeking to detect traces of pesticides. These corporate representatives clearly felt the EPA had no business looking for poisons—which they used in huge volumes—in America’s drinking water.

EPA scientists had also been troubled for many years that residues of ethylene bisdithiocarbamate (EBDC) fungicides ended up in food, and that these fungicides (which are still in use) degrade to ETU, or ethylene thiouria, which is known to cause thyroid cancer in experimental animals.

These fungicides had emerged as a major problem. The trouble for the agency, as usual, was that these compounds were extremely profitable: the half-dozen EBDC chemicals constituted half of the most popular fungicide sprays and 90 percent of the 120 million pounds of active ingredients used in American farming. EPA knew in September 1987 that some or most of these toxins presented “adverse affects to man or the environment,” and for a time, EPA considered banning them from farming. Because of the resistance from agribusiness, however, nothing happened. Suddenly, in a dramatic turnabout, EPA were toeing the industry line, warning not about the dangers of fungicides but that banning these poisons would cost fruit and vegetable producers $5.6 billion in the first year alone and that food prices would rise by more than 16 percent.
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In October, a colleague asked me to review an EPA/USDA document dealing with the “benefits” of these fungicides. The 250-page document was full of evidence of scientists mouthing the propaganda of the chemical industry. The document was not an assessment or analysis, but a spirited defense of the fungicides from scientists from all over the government (and the country) who claimed that banning these compounds would have an adverse effect on food supplies. Despite the presence of chemicals that cause thyroid cancer in animals and humans, they reported, the fungicides were actually “safe.”

During the Reagan years, working at the EPA meant living with a certain level of irony. The same month I was asked to acknowledge the “benefits” of dangerous fungicides, I went to a Capitol Hill reception honoring the twenty-fifth anniversary of the publication of Rachel Carson’s
Silent Spring
. While there I spoke briefly to Congressman George E. Brown Jr., whom I had known for several years. He understood the difficulties I faced at the EPA and was supportive. The rest of the crowd was made up of environmental activists and congressional staff.

We listened to a moving speech by Carson’s friend and disciple Shirley Briggs. Yet even as I was enjoying some good wine and canapés, I began to fear that Carson’s warning had largely faded into history—and out of the public’s consciousness. It was all too clear to me that—even with the EPA overseeing things—the volume of toxins used in America and their destructive impact had increased enormously since Carson’s death in 1964.

Not long after this, I had breakfast with an EPA scientist colleague who told me that an elaborate and expensive EPA survey of pesticides in ground water was a disaster. This $10 million project’s statistical design was fatally flawed, he said, since a large number of the study’s water samples would come not from contaminated agricultural areas but from relatively clean forests and nonrural regions. This meant the results would be heavily diluted; the survey would inevitably “prove” that the contamination of groundwater with farm sprays was of no concern.

My friend also accused the laboratory, which had been hired by the EPA’s water program, of using analytical methods so outdated that they would not even detect most poisons in the water. Within the Reagan administration, of course, this combination—incompetent lab practices and bad statistical design—meant the study would not be a failure, but a success: it would satisfy the administration’s plan of showing there were no significant amounts of toxic substances in America’s drinking water.
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Chapter 2

Pest Control: A Matter of Merchandising

In July 1980, a young man from Cheektowaga, New York, named Thaddeus Jarzabek complained to the EPA that he had gotten “a good whiff ” of a couple of pesticides, after which his life had never been the same. Jarzabek, just twenty-nine years old, said that he had been waking up “with a lot of tiny particles floating inside my eyeballs, and I developed haloes around lights at night.” With no family history of eye trouble, Jarzabek was convinced the troubles had been caused by the “Insta-Fog” pesticides sprayed at the milk cooperative where he worked in upstate New York. Insta-Fog, it turned out, contained piperonyl butoxide, pyrethrins, and a substance called N-octyl-bicycloheptene dicarboxyme.