Poison Spring (13 page)

Of course I did no such thing. And it was in that pile of dumped papers that a little gem came to light: a letter documenting the contamination of birds and fish in Texas’s fecund river valleys with DDT and toxaphene.

For the past fourteen years, federal Fish and Wildlife scientists had “consistently” discovered DDT in Rio Grande fish, the letter said, “even after the Environmental Protection Agency cancelled the registration of DDT for general use on June 30, 1972.”

When researchers expanded their monitoring for DDT, they also discovered high levels of toxaphene, a DDT-like spray, and DDE, the carcinogenic metabolite of DDT. Both were dangerous chemicals in their own right.

“Our past monitoring studies clearly indicate that a significant pesticide contamination problem exists in the Lower Rio Grande Valley with respect to fish and wildlife resources,” the letter said. “We feel our data is significant in that our residue values have been triplicated, and pesticide residues have been confirmed by the best analytical procedures in use today. We sincerely hope that some regulatory action will be forthcoming concerning the contamination of the lower valley, before these contaminants pose a threat to human health.”
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Despite this powerful evidence of high amounts of DDT and toxaphene in the fish of Texas, the EPA and the government of Texas did nothing. Strangely, researchers at the medical school of Texas Tech University actually tried to “prove” that there was no toxaphene in the fish in the Rio Grande—an effort that seemed counterproductive at best. And when the federal Interior Department appealed directly to the EPA’s regional administrator, that official apparently decided that avoiding confronting politicians and industry representatives in Texas and Washington was more important than warning Texans to stop eating local fish. The truth was, of course, that had the EPA’s Texas official revealed the DDT contamination of fish, it would have raised a storm with Texas politicians, industry, and EPA political appointees in Washington, and no doubt would have cost that person’s job. In that sense, the official’s behavior—his refusal to take on industry power—was typical of senior administration officials: causing waves has its effects, and those effects are mostly nasty.

And so it has gone with toxic chemicals over and over and across the decades: scientists collect data and issue warnings, and people in charge of making political decisions—many of them intimidated by (or beholden to) large corporations—ignore them.

Nearly a decade before Rachel Carson published
Silent Spring
in 1962, Morton Biskind, a physician from Westport, Connecticut, documented the willful blindness of scientists working with agricultural poisons. Since the end of World War II, he wrote, he had observed “curious changes” in the incidence of certain ailments in both men and domestic animals. Strangely, with the exception of hoof and mouth disease, not one of these conditions was mentioned in the comprehensive U.S. Department of Agriculture handbook titled
Keeping Livestock Healthy
.

Not a word about the manifest dangers of pesticides. How could this be? In Biskind’s mind, this glaring omission alone should have been sufficient to raise a suspicion that a new threat had arrived. By the time DDT was first made available for the general public in 1945, scientific research “had already shown beyond doubt that this compound was dangerous for all animal life from insects to mammals,” Biskind wrote. Cats, dogs, sheep, cattle, horses, monkeys—when they were exposed to DDT, these animals and many more developed degenerative problems with their organs, their muscles, their brains.

The compound was equally dangerous to birds, fish, crustaceans, lizards, frogs, toads, and snakes. Tragically, many beneficial predator insects—dragonflies, ladybugs, and praying mantises—were even more susceptible to DDT than were the crop-eating “nuisance” insects the compound had been designed to kill. By 1945 it was also well known that once mammals or people were exposed to DDT, the compound became stored in their body fat and could be found in their milk. DDT had a way of hanging around, even inside people’s bodies.

All of this foreknowledge made DDT’s catastrophic impact on our national landscape—Biskind called it “the most intensive campaign of mass poisoning in known human history”—that much more insidious. We knew it was dangerous, yet we kept on using it—for three decades. Only when Carson’s book appeared, and our national symbol, the bald eagle, was on the verge of extinction because of DDT contamination, did we finally acknowledge what scientists had been saying for years.

“Virtually the entire apparatus of communication, lay and scientific alike, has been devoted to denying, concealing, suppressing, [and] distorting the overwhelming evidence,” Biskind wrote. “A new principle of toxicology has, it seems, become firmly entrenched in the literature: no matter how lethal a poison may be for all other forms of animal life, if it doesn’t kill human beings instantly, it is safe. When nevertheless it unmistakably does kill a human, this was the victim’s own fault—either he was ‘allergic’ to it (the uncompensable sin!) or he didn’t use it properly.”
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Biskind was both perceptive and courageous. His message went against the stream well before Carson made the dangers of DDT a national scandal. It’s possible that the timing of his essay—it appeared in 1953, at the height of the Cold War—was less than ideal. The explosion of the atomic bomb gave enormous power to physicists, who design and build nuclear weapons. Suddenly, a kind of “physics envy” descended on the sciences, and the rest of society reorganized its thinking to accommodate the existential questions of death the physicists (and their bombs) opened up. Ironically, such broad anxiety seemed to shift attention away from chemists and their own dangerous concoctions, which also fundamentally altered life. The government’s military imperatives, including the aboveground testing of nuclear weapons and the rapid growth of agribusiness, pushed aside any voices that questioned the wisdom of industrial chemicals. So enamored was the Nobel Prize committee with DDT’s effect on malaria that it awarded Paul Miller of Geigy Chemicals the Nobel Prize in Medicine in 1948.

A decade and a half later, Carson would denounce the hegemony of chemicals as “the sinister and little-recognized partners of radiation in changing the very nature of the world—the very nature of its life.” America’s industrial monoculture farming was already clashing with natural systems of pest control.

“We allow the chemical death rain to fall,” Carson wrote. “The crusade to create a chemically sterile world seems to have engendered a fanatic zeal on the part of many specialists and most of the so-called control agencies. On every hand there is evidence that those engaged in spraying operations exercise a ruthless power.”
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Like Biskind, Carson was astonished at the silence of federal regulators at the USDA. She could already see that political and economic forces were at work, adopting and spreading this new (and profitable) skepticism about toxicology that largely reigns supreme today. “These [pesticide] sprays, dusts, and aerosols,” she wrote, “are now applied almost universally to farms, gardens, forests, and homes—nonselective chemicals that have the power to kill every insect, the ‘good’ and the ‘bad,’ to still the song of birds and the leaping of fish in the streams, to coat the leaves with a deadly film, and to linger on in soil—all this though the intended target may be only a few weeds or insects. Can anyone believe it is possible to lay down such a barrage of poisons on the surface of the earth without making it unfit for all life?”
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Few people since Carson died in 1964 have spoken so openly about that tragic inevitability. Carson was thorough in her absorption of the published scientific literature on pesticides. She looked at the industrialized agriculture of her time and rightly blamed America’s “single-crop farming” as the source of trouble. She said monoculture farming had more in common with engineering than with natural systems. And since engineers were redesigning and plumbing the country to water the developing giant farms, she thought of pesticides as crude weapons like “a cave man’s club . . . hurled against the fabric of life.” She connected this violence with the still-fashionable ambition of modern industry to “control nature.”

That idea—that modern people could dream of controlling the natural world—made Carson very angry. She lambasted such thinking as hubris. This kind of thinking and ambition, Carson said, mirrored a “Neanderthal age of biology and philosophy, when it was supposed nature exists for the convenience of man,” she wrote. “It is our alarming misfortune that so primitive a science has armed itself with the most modern and terrible weapons, and that in turning them against the insects it has also turned them against the earth.”
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Here’s how the DDT story unfolded. In its early days, pesticides seemed to represent a triumph of Western science and technology: both a proven weapon to subdue the “undesirable” aspects of nature and an elixir of cleanliness and even health. “The great expectations held for DDT have been realized,” ran an advertisement in
Time
magazine in 1947. “Exhaustive scientific tests have shown that, when properly used, DDT kills a host of destructive pests, and is a benefactor of all humanity. Today, everyone can enjoy added comfort, health and safety through the insect-killing powers of DDT products. [DDT] helps to make healthier, more comfortable homes [and] protects your family from dangerous pests. Use DDT powders and spray—then watch the bugs ‘bite the dust.’ ”
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The scientific community, such as it was, mostly lauded the chemical—and issued dire warnings of life without it. “To abandon the use of DDT and other valuable insecticides would subject people to an inadequate and unbalanced diet due to crop loss and disease epidemic far more serious than any we now know,” two Illinois scientists, Rolland K. Cross, state health director, and Harlow R. Mills, chief of the Natural History Survey, wrote in 1951. “We should not be concerned so much with whether DDT or other insecticides should be used, but should concentrate upon using the right insecticide at the right time, in the right place and in the right way.”
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DDT did indeed kill insects—at least for a while. But its damaging effects on the environment and on human health would persist for generations. As Biskind pointed out, DDT did not discriminate. It doomed birds by making the shells of their fertilized eggs so brittle that they cracked under their parents’ weight. Because DDT bioaccumulates as it moves up the food chain, the compound became particularly deleterious to predatory birds, bringing peregrine falcons, ospreys, brown pelicans, and bald eagles to the brink of extinction.

DDT also killed countless insects it had not been designed to target and thus also killed fish and small animals that ate DDT-poisoned fish and bugs. The compound’s legacy is doubly pernicious because it lasts for decades in nature and continues to accumulate in the fat of the animals—and people—at the upper reaches of the food chain.
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By the time the EPA finally banned DDT in 1972, the compound had already widely contaminated staple human foods, especially meat and milk. A year after the ban, a federal judge wrote that he did not know what to do with DDT that had contaminated nearly everything Americans ate.
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“Although the cancer aspects of DDT are frightening, the obvious solution to that problem, that is, a total ban on foods containing DDT, is not available,” he wrote. “Virtually every food contains some DDT. DDT has presented, and apparently will continue to present, a massive dilemma both for EPA and for society.”
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In 1979, two Wildlife Society scientists, Steven G. Herman and John B. Bulger, reported that DDT was still “the most widespread and pernicious of global pollutants.”
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A few years later, Richard Balcomb, an EPA ecologist, wrote that DDT remained toxic to many terrestrial and aquatic animals. “It has been shown to cause acute mortality of birds, bats, fish and invertebrates as well as have profound chronic effects in many species at low exposure levels.”
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What was going on? Why, years after DDT was officially taken off the market, was so much DDT showing up in the bodies of birds and animals?

Part of the story had to do with the chemical industry, which had never forgotten how DDT lost public and legal favor. Even in the 1950s, the industry’s rhetoric was already full of half-truths, lies, and fear, and it would only become more sophisticated and vitriolic over time. And this growing (not to say ignorant) love affair with chemicals could not help but shape both science and public policy.

Immediately after EPA banned DDT in 1972, Dick Beeler, the editor of
Agricultural Age
, an industry magazine, accused EPA of mishandling the compound’s cancellation. “The entire process smells badly of farce and fraud,” he said. “The [cancellation] fraud, however, is no worse than the original one perpetrated by the environmental mystics and pseudo scientists who hoodwinked the public and its political medicine men on DDT. Perhaps the greatest fraud of all is the one those same cultists and politicians have pulled on themselves, for the big losers in the DDT battle are the very object of their oft professed affection: the consumer, the common man, the underprivileged and the oppressed.”

Beeler criticized EPA administrator William Ruckelshaus (a Republican appointee) for ignoring “the facts and scientific opinion”; EPA policy, he said, seemed as if it had been written by Rachel Carson, Barry Commoner, and Paul Ehrlich, three influential environmental thinkers.
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