Poison Spring (14 page)

Plainly, the chemical industry had already become rife with cunning and contempt: cunning in its pretense of respect for science, and contempt in its attitude toward actual scientific evidence, the rule of law, and the tide of democracy, including the influence of the rising environmental movement. Beeler called environmentalists “mystics,” probably wishing to somehow divorce their argument from science. From Beeler’s funhouse-mirror perspective, an establishment Republican like Ruckelshaus is indistinguishable from a reformer like Rachel Carson, and DDT is the friend of the consumer and the oppressed. It was this sort of colorful (and ludicrous) rhetoric that had shaped the chemical industry’s agenda for years—and scared Carson’s colleagues from taking it on.

Carson herself, of course, was practically burned in effigy by the chemical industry. “Rachel Carson’s candor and innocence brought on her the fury reserved for those who neither connive nor conciliate,” wrote Paul Shepard and Daniel McKinley, professors at Williams College and the State University of New York–Albany. “Her brother biologists, almost to a man, did excellent imitations of people frightened by big money and authority and deserted her before the Establishment which controls the funds that keep scientists fat.”
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Yet even in the face of this rhetoric, some scientists continued to do their work, and they continued to turn up worrisome trends. In May 1983, Robert A. Jantzen, director of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, became worried that many of the EPA-approved pesticides were pushing rare insects, birds, fish, and other animals toward extinction. Many of these poisons were being sprayed on corn.

“It is my biological opinion that the use of certain pesticides on corn is likely to jeopardize the continued existence of the following species and result in the destruction or adverse modification of the critical habitat of the Everglade kite, slackwater darter, valley elderberry longhorn beetle, and Delta green ground beetle,” Jantzen wrote.

The problem, Jantzen said, was that DDT was still showing up in insecticides. One compound, Kelthane, contains as much as 9 percent DDT, Jantzen wrote—an exceedingly dangerous problem given that DDT and its principle metabolites “cause reproductive failure in raptors and certain fish-eating birds.”

Already the peregrine falcon, a beautiful bird and a symbol of predatory grace and freedom, had become extinct in the southwestern United States during the first reign of DDT, and now, nearly a decade after DDT had been banned, the lives of new birds imported to this region were in jeopardy. Jantzen urged the EPA to demand that Kelthane “be manufactured to eliminate the DDT component or a substitute for Kelthane should be used.”

Jantzen also insisted that the EPA prohibit the use of the offending chemical. To avoid jeopardizing the Aleutian Canada goose, he said, the EPA should prohibit the use on corn of nongranular chemicals that are toxic to birds, between the end of August and the middle of May, especially in California’s Central Valley and in Oregon’s Coos, Curry, and Tillamook Counties.

“The widespread use of this chemical was responsible for the total elimination of the peregrine falcon from the eastern half of the United States,” Jantzen wrote. “Since the use of DDT was cancelled in 1972, this situation has improved, and reintroduced peregrines are once again breeding in limited numbers in the East. However, there are strong indications that DDT is currently being introduced into the environment in the southwestern United States.”

Falcon nests that had produced nearly two dozen young in the late 1970s had produced none since; most had been abandoned. Eggs from one nest were found to contain 30 to 51 ppm (parts per million) of DDE (the carcinogenic metabolite of DDT). Eggshells removed from the nests were more than 20 percent thinner than shells from the pre-DDT era.

In 1982, researchers examined the birds typically fed upon by peregrines and found high levels of DDE in everything from mourning doves and red-winged blackbirds to grackles and killdeer. Since the killdeer, red-winged blackbird, and great-tailed grackle are year-round residents of Texas, the scientists concluded the pesticide burdens “were obtained locally.” Because Kelthane was applied not just to corn but a variety of crops, it was clearly accumulating in animals throughout the food chain, Jantzen wrote. More frustrating, even though DDT had been banned for ten years in the United States, American companies were still selling it in Mexico, and “both the peregrine falcon and many of its prey species are known to migrate south of the United States.”

“The most severe problem,” Jantzen continued, “appears to be along the Rio Grande and Pecos river systems in southern New Mexico and western Texas; however, DDT contamination is still present in the American peregrine falcon throughout the West. Therefore we must conclude that the use of Kelthane, or any other pesticide containing high levels (in excess of 1 percent) of a DDT compound, is likely to jeopardize the continued existence of the peregrine falcon.”
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To Jantzen, this was unacceptable, and not merely for the peregrine falcons. The blunt-nosed leopard lizard, for instance, may range over some 640 acres of land for insects. It would be a highly vulnerable victim of DDT. Gray bats travel long distances over land and water hunting insects for feeding their young; they can eat three thousand bugs in a single night. When these insects are contaminated with pesticides, they become poisonous themselves, and Jantzen warned that gray bat “maternity colonies” were especially at risk. By the 1980s, American newspapers were reporting an alarming and unexplained collapse of bat populations, one more result of ignored warnings about pesticides.

Plainly, DDT-contaminated chemicals like Kelthane were extending the poisonous reign of DDT, especially during the Reagan years. In 1983, my colleague Padma Datta asked me a penetrating question: Why, given the EPA’s banning of DDT, had the Reagan EPA registered a dozen products with DDT contamination of up to 20 percent, and why were these products still on the market? Had Rohm and Hass, the main manufacturer of Kelthane and other pesticides contaminated by DDT, managed to influence EPA policy? (A Rohm and Hass representative had also asked Padma to lunch, but Padma had declined.)

For their part, EPA officials must have been aware of the Kelthane-DDE products decimating birds like peregrine falcons. Certainly those same officials knew the chemistry of the related organochlorines, DDT and Kelthane: under certain manufacturing and environmental conditions, Kelthane would become DDE, the carcinogenic isomer of DDT. Thus Kelthane was also used as an inert. And under such deceptive classification, one did not have to worry about the effects.
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On Reagan’s watch, more than a hundred new pesticides had been registered to “protect” corn, which grows across immense swaths of the country (and which forms the centerpiece of a global agricultural empire). The fate of the insects and birds and other animals that understand neither human toxicology nor corporate profit models was left unaddressed.

Over at Fish and Wildlife, Robert Jantzen built his case about the peregrine falcons with meticulous care. The peregrine was living on borrowed time, given the deadly metamorphoses of DDT into other chemicals (Kelthane becoming DDE, the carcinogenic form of DDT), and given that Mexico—right across a national border that was invisible to falcons—continued to use DDT in large quantities.

EPA officials, of course, knew that Kelthane and other pesticides contained DDT. At the very least, Jantzen said, “the EPA should not tolerate farmers spraying toxins all over the home of an endangered species. Ditto for corn insecticides, which harm a wide variety of protected species, from the whooping crane to the Indiana bat.”

In recent decades, we have been told that DDT and DDT-like pesticides have been removed from the arsenal of the American farmer. But since DDT lasts a long time, this infamous poison can still be found in the food birds eat. And new, equally hazardous materials have replaced DDT. They kill life even when present in fantastically small amounts.

Fifty years after its publication,
Silent Spring
remains a popular book—and a popular target. Pesticide apologists continue to attack the book, and some global health experts praise DDT for being “the cheapest and most effective long-term malaria fighter we have.”
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Sadly, most Americans remain silent and oblivious to the dangers of industrial pesticides. Carson’s book had a great impact in the 1960s, but our collective memory of her warning is fading fast. Dangerous pesticides are still being sprayed on American crops today, while the EPA, as usual, stands silently by.

Chapter 5

Why Are the Honeybees Disappearing?

On January 19, 2011, I received a troubling note from Harriett Crosby, a Maryland farmer. The bees she was raising on Fox Haven Farm were dying.

“All the bees in all hives have died,” Ms. Crosby wrote. “Silently, billions of bees are dying off all over the country and our entire food chain is in danger.”
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What Ms. Crosby had witnessed on her own farm, a calamity repeated all over the country, was tragic. In the United States alone, bees produce more than 200 million pounds of honey a year, but this is only the most visible thing they contribute to human livelihood.

Bees live at the very heart of our food system: they pollinate millions of acres of fruits, vegetables, and nuts, including blackberries, blueberries, cashews, pumpkins, and sunflowers; tens of millions of acres of beans, cotton, flax, peanuts, peas, and soybeans; and tens of millions of acres of hay crops such as alfalfa, clover, and lespedeza. In 2005, the benefits of honeybees to agriculture were estimated to be about $40 billion.
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Yet consider this: In 2008, there were 680,000 acres of almond groves in California alone that produced 1.6 billion pounds of almond meat, valued at $2.3 billion. In a three-hundred-mile stretch in California’s Central Valley, millions of almond trees are regularly sprayed with a deadly soup of poisons, including parathion neurotoxins. The result? The premature death rate for pollinating bees in California and the rest of the West Coast is about 30 to 60 percent. A beekeeper I invited to my environmental policy class at northern California’s Humboldt State University once described how he would drive a truckload of beehives south, where he would “rent” his bees to pollinate some corporate farmer’s crops. “I would return home, always with a third of my bees dead,” he said, his voice trembling. “That’s the price I paid for making some extra money. The farmer’s pesticides would kill my bees.”

In October 2006, the U.S. National Research Council reported that America’s bee populations were moving “demonstrably downward.” For the first time since 1922, American farmers were being forced to “rent” bees imported from other states, trucking billions of bees all over the country and even buying bees from Australia.
3

What has happened?

Writing in the eighth century BCE, the Greek epic poet Hesiod, a near contemporary of Homer, considered honeybees a reward that the gods bestowed on honorable farmers.
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Ancient Greece reserved a special place for this useful insect. Bees were protected by Aristaios, the immortal son of the nymph Kyrene and Apollo, the Olympian god of light, prophecy, and healing. Like his father, Aristaios was gifted with prophecy and healing. But above all he was a rural god: he invented and promoted beekeeping, the growing of olives, and the care of flocks and the preparation of wool. Under the protection of Aristaios, honeybees flourished in Greece.

The Greeks’ greatest natural philosopher, Aristotle, studied the life of honeybees, noting their remarkable organization as societies of extremely useful insects, each honeybee devoted to a specialized function, most gathering nectar and pollen from flowering plants and trees for making honey, some caring for the grubs, and others guarding the hive. Aristotle was impressed by the cleanliness and purpose of honeybees coexisting with humans.
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In the late third century of our era, about seven hundred years after Aristotle, Pappos, a Greek mathematician in Alexandria, Egypt, admired honeybees for their “instinctive wisdom” in designing hexagonal cells, the most efficient shape for containing honey. Somehow honeybees figured out that the hexagon was greater than the square and the triangle for holding more honey. Pappos, too, admired the cleanliness of the honeybees and their labor in collecting “the sweets from the most beautiful flowers which grow on the earth” for making their honey, a kind of ambrosia, which the divinely blessed honeybees give us all.
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Nearly three thousand years later, honeybees continue to bring us prosperity, creating honey and pollinating many of the most beautiful and useful plants on earth.

You would think that farmers would be able to recognize the importance—not to say grandeur—of bees. For countless generations, they did. In this country, B. N. Gates warned in 1917 (in the first volume of
Transactions of the Massachusetts Horticultural Society
) that the farmer “may fertilize, and cultivate the soil, prune, thin and spray the trees, in a word, he may do all of those things which modern practice advocates. Yet without honeybees to transfer the pollen from the stamens to the pistil of the blooms, his crop may fail.”
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In our time, factory farming and our national obsession with pesticides have driven pollinating insects—honeybees in particular—to the brink of extinction. And although headlines about “bee colony collapse” have recently begun appearing in our daily newspapers, the origins of this tragedy go back decades and are not hard to trace.