Poison Spring (8 page)

As clear and sensible as these sentiments were, the truth from the very beginning was that good science about the dangers of pesticides was being ignored and even scorned. In 1969, the same year this report was released, Robert van den Bosch testified in a California court that the pesticide industry was out of control. Speaking on behalf of farmworkers, who were at grave risk of chemical contamination, Van den Bosch said that pest control in the United States “is essentially not an ecological matter. It is largely a matter of merchandising.” “In essence,” Bosch said, “we are using the wrong kind of materials in the wrong places at the wrong times in excessive amounts.”
20

In 1987, Robert Metcalf issued his own warning about pesticides, taking an open and public position that challenged his own colleagues in the scientific establishment. By this time he had witnessed the abandonment of ethical science, and he was fed up with the corruption pervading the agricultural-industrial complex. He had also lived to see the unraveling of his own contribution to the farmers’ weapons against pests. “The short-sighted and irresponsible use of pesticides and antibiotics is producing strains of monster-bugs that are resistant to our chemical weapons,” Metcalf wrote. “The outlook is dismal—and getting worse.”
21

And so it had. As chemical abuse continued to spread, more and more toxic compounds were required to do the same work. By the early 1980s, some 432 insects and related organisms were immune to one or more bug sprays. Fungicides were also becoming useless to a significant degree. Agricultural pesticides “have often been used unnecessarily, excessively, and otherwise abused such as to shorten their useful life,” two University of California scientists, Boysie E. Day and George P. Georghiou, testified before a congressional committee on July 12, 1981.

A foundational myth of industrialized agriculture is that sprays have something to do with increasing the yields of crops. But we have known since for at least forty years that pesticides actually
stifle
the yield of growing crops, as you would expect from poisons that indiscriminately kill insects, plants, and countless other forms of life. In 1970, J. Sedivy, a European scientist, published a study showing that after dusting the pollen of alfalfa with melipax, a toxaphene-like spray, no more than 10.5 percent of the grains would germinate, compared to 62.1 percent of the pollen left clear of the deadly dust. With only 0.3 percent of fribal emulsion, another poison similar to toxaphene, only 28.2 percent of grains germinated, compared to 81.5 percent of the grains sprouting in the absence of the toxin.
22

In 1971, three other scientists, A. G. Gentile, K. J. Gallagher, and Z. Santner, found that as little as 100 parts per million of a spray called naled would completely destroy the germination of both tomato and petunia pollen. They also discovered that other pesticides—DDT, dicofol, azinphos-methyl, dichlorvos, Gardona, and endosulfan—made it impossible for
all
pollen to germinate. No less important, those poisons blocked the pollen tubes from reaching their full length. So these chlorine-based toxins and nerve-poisonous pesticides made tomato and petunia and other plants not more but less productive.
23

Other studies proved that the less a farm was sprayed with chlorine-based insecticides (primarily aldrin), the higher the corn yields.
24

The scientific results are powerful, and clearly counter to the prevailing mythology of agricultural pesticides. But this brand of science has been hard to come by for one simple reason: most academic scientists, when they examine America’s agricultural system, don’t ask the right questions. Their work is funded largely by agribusiness, so—naturally—scientists tend to believe this system is the best in the world, and that pesticides make that system possible. Such delusions become intransigent beliefs, both within and without the government.

And all along, nature continues to take its course. By 2003, there were 520 insects and mites, 273 weeds, 150 plant diseases, and 10 rodents that were resistant to at least one fungicide or pesticide.
25

In 2005, Cornell’s David Pimentel reported that the use of pesticides had come to cost the public about $10 billion per year: more than $1 billion for damage to public health, $1.5 billion for the increasing resistance of pests due to the overuse of pesticides, $1.4 billion for the loss of crops, $2.2 billion for losses in wild bird populations, and $2.0 billion for groundwater contamination.
26

Some of the chemicals causing all this trouble are known as pyrethroids, part of a new class of extremely toxic insecticides that in fantastically small amounts also kill fish and other water animals.
27
Despite their names, the pyrethroids are not closely related to the naturally occurring compound pyrethrum. Popular variations like permethrin, pydrin, and cypermethrin are actually similar to the chlorine-like chemicals toxaphene and DDT. They make organophosphates (nerve gases) even more acutely toxic. Pyrethroids also resemble DDT-like compounds because they are fat-soluble—meaning that they accumulate in fat tissue—and they resemble parathion-like nerve toxins because they poison the nervous system.
28

Pyrethroids bind themselves so tightly to soil particles that they can be extremely difficult to detect. They may stay in the sediment of rivers and lakes for more than a year, continuously killing or incapacitating small fish.

Pyrethroids are so toxic they are sprayed in just ounces per acre. Yet even in such small quantities, the poison has is “acutely toxic” to zooplankton at all concentration levels, eliminating it almost completely. Zooplankton is linked with phytoplankton (microscopic plants) and the fish that consume them, so the toxin’s destructive powers amplify as it spreads through an ecosystem and moves up the food chain. Cypermethrin, more toxic to life than permethrin, is deadly to some water animals in the low parts per trillion
29
.

Despite the acutely deleterious nature of pyrethroids, EPA nonetheless “registered” them for use. In 1990, a number of states asked EPA for an “emergency exemption” to use a pyrethroid called esfenvalerate (or asana) to battle grasshoppers. The request would allow spraying this extremely powerful poison on an additional 20 million acres of land in North and South Dakota, Minnesota, Kansas, Montana, Oklahoma, Colorado, and Wyoming.

When this request reached the desk of James Ackerman, chief of the EPA’s ecological effects branch, he was stunned. Asana was “extremely toxic to aquatic organisms,” Ackerman formally pointed out on April 11, 1990. The lethal concentration for the freshwater animal
Daphnia magna
was as minute as 0.032 parts per billion; for the estuarine animal
Mysidopsis bahia
, it was 0.008 parts per billion. Given the way poisons bioaccumulate—several contaminated smaller fish being eaten by single larger fish, who are in turn eaten by larger fish, or birds, or mammals—these numbers—especially given the 400 percent increase in the acreage for the spraying of asana—would be dangerous for countless species, including our own.

Worse still, over half of this land would be in the “prairie pothole” region of the Midwest, “which has been well documented as the most important production grounds for our national waterfowl treasure,” Ackerman wrote.
30

Despite its founding mandate as an agency devoted to protecting the environment, the EPA routinely does just about everything based not on health risks but on the basis of dollars and cents. It nearly always weighs the costs of protecting people and the natural world from pollution against the benefits that unregulated pollution brings to businessmen and manufacturers. Allowing nerve poisons and cancer-causing sprays on America’s farms and vineyards may kill or injure farmworkers, but it will benefit industrial grape growers and chemical merchants. Since farm workers, particularly those who migrate throughout the country, have little social support in the United States, EPA finds it easy to side with the owners and users of poisons.
31

EPA does not advertise its bias. It tests and pushes its unethical policies under the cover of science, but it does not reveal just how compromised this science actually is. For example, farmworkers are on the front line of pesticide danger, yet the agency marshals its considerable regulatory authority to “prove” that migrant farmworkers face “no unreasonable adverse risk” in grape fields drenched with nerve pesticides and carcinogens. Meanwhile, its economists and biologists largely ignore the “costs” of pesticides (such as their chances of causing cancer) and instead collect data on their “benefits,” that is, their potential to make money for the companies that produce them.

It goes without saying, of course, that if farmworkers are at risk from these poisons, so, too, are the people who eat what they grow.

Should a case ever be made that the EPA should remove a certain chemical from the market, scientists responsible for the “benefits assessment” of pesticides typically exaggerate the economic “loss” to farmers. Take a toxin off the market, and farmers might have to spray a more expensive chemical, and consumers would pay higher prices for food. Rarely is the cost of illness included in these economic “assessments.”

When the EPA banned DDT in 1972, the chemical industry and large farmers made loud and dire predictions about food shortages and hunger. Yet ever since, organic farmers have continued to produce crops without DDT or any other synthetic chemicals. Still, EPA economists refuse to cite any evidence on the benefits of nonchemical pest control methods. The only thing that interests them is keeping the pesticide system intact; should there be a serious problem with one pesticide, they simply strive to replace one chemical with another.
32

The “benefits analysis” process is simply another device, in other words, for the perpetuation of the pesticide regime demanded by the country’s industrial farmers. In truth, the only “benefits” of this process have been flowing to the manufacturers of these toxins who hold seventeen-year patent monopolies. Over their lives, some of the registered, EPA-approved pesticides can earn $50 to $100 million. Such phenomenal earnings come from the almost astronomical amounts of pesticides farmers and others use. In 1983, the Department of Food and Agriculture of California calculated that 743,186,620 pounds of pesticide active ingredients were sold in that state alone.
33

In 1990, a group of EPA scientists working out of Dallas reported on the ecological and human impacts of pesticide the country’s huge south central region. “Man depends upon a predictable global ecology for air quality, water, food, shelter, and medicines,” the scientists concluded. “Ecological problems such as loss of terrestrial and wetland habitats result in species extinction and overall loss of biological diversity. Humans depend upon a diverse plant and animal gene pool for food production. If genetic diversity is diminished, adaption to changing environments will decrease as will resistance to diseases, pests, and the elements. The end result will be fewer and less productive varieties of food and fiber crops. The net effect of decreasing diversity in ecosystems is an unstable system.”

Ecological problems in the middle of the country would have dire consequences for the huge water supply found in the Ogallala Aquifer; the elimination of wetlands in Louisiana; and the additive discharges of chemicals to surface water from agriculture (nitrogen, phosphates, pesticides, and animal waste), industrial discharges (organic and inorganic), and urban runoff (organics, sewage, pesticides).

“Although humans are one species among thousands, they are the only species that can chemically and biologically alter the planet,” the scientists wrote. “Human activity has changed the course of evolution through agricultural and industrial technology; we must begin to understand that, ecologically, humans have a responsibility to preserve the earth’s life if but to protect human life. We have not demonstrated the knowledge, wisdom, or compassion to accept this role.”
34

The concern of my colleagues for some kind of balance between humans and nature is an ancient philosophical concern. Aristotle acknowledged the mystery and majesty of animals; for Plato, earth was not merely alive, but was itself the oldest of the gods. The value of a healthy—if not divine—natural world continues to be at the core of civilization.

In the modern United States, we have allowed industry to utterly disregard these traditions in the service of their own self-interest. In 1974, an EPA contractor, Rosmarie von Rumker, expressed astonishment and anxiety over the habit of the farmers to keep drenching the same land with poisons. The incessant growing of corn and soybeans means “heavy applications of chemical pesticides and fertilizers are made to the same land year after year.”

“Most of the chemicals remain in the upper 1–3 inches of topsoil, and their routes and rates of degradation under field conditions are often not known,” she said. “It is surprising and somewhat alarming how little information is available on the individual or collective effects of these chemicals on the soil microflora and -fauna [soil microplants and animals] and on the long-term fertility of the topsoil, one of our most important resources.”
35

Distinguished scientists including A. D. Pickett, Rachel Carson, Robert Metcalf, Paul Ehrlich, Robert van den Bosch, and David Pimentel have made similar statements. They have spoken out, protesting the violence we legalize in the “registration” of barely tested petrochemicals. Van den Bosch especially spoke in stark and graphic terms about agribusiness and the destructive practices of the chemical industries, which he dubbed the “pesticide mafia.”