Poison Spring (16 page)

Bushong wanted to protect bees, but he also shared McGregor’s larger concerns: he understood that farmers, the land, and pollinating insects were inseparable. He knew that the time had come to declare a moratorium on encapsulated parathion sprays and to ban farming practices responsible for causing damage to bees and other pollinating insects.

Senior EPA managers in the Carter administration ignored him. Instead, they permitted Pennwalt to sell its time-release gas for use on an even wider array of produce, from artichokes, cabbages, and potatoes to wheat, soybeans, apples, and pears. The move dramatically raised the chemical exposure of both bees and the American people.

The evidence could not have been clearer. In 1979 an EPA scientist named Richard M. Lee discovered how to stain parathion microcapsules so they could be identified in honey and pollen. Sure enough, on testing on a bee colony on the field, he “found microcapsules in the queen bee’s gut and honey.”
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Sadly, and predictably, Lee’s discovery and talent went nowhere. He neither published his research nor continued with his honeybee investigations. Instead, he was forced to become a paper pusher at EPA headquarters while the agency’s top pesticide managers made sure that Lee’s laboratory would no longer be used for research threatening to industry. As with so many EPA moves, this was done to keep bad news about nerve gas pesticides secret.

This was not the first time Lee had rocked the boat at the agency. Just a few months earlier, he had warned managers that bees were also becoming threatened by another parathion-like toxin called EPN. In addition to being powerful in its own right, EPN made other agrochemicals even more virulent. Even nonlethal dosages of EPN decimated worker bees, Lee told EPA’s pesticide boss, Edwin Johnson.

Three years earlier—the year the EPA had nearly approved the marketing of an extremely powerful nerve poison, leptophos—both an EPA chemist, Gunter Zweig, and a Duke University expert on poisons, Mohamed Abou-Donia, had warned him that EPN was far more potent a neurotoxin than leptophos, which the EPA had already restricted.

The evidence against these poisons mounted. The University of Illinois’s Robert Metcalf said he had absolutely no doubt that EPN was a highly hazardous insecticide that could produce irreversible and life-threatening neurological damage in animals and human beings. Metcalf advised Johnson to severely restrict the exposure of people to nerve poisons like EPN, which are known to cause delayed crippling disabilities and subtle neurological disorders.
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Richard Lee and Robert Metcalf were wasting their time. They soon saw all too clearly that the EPA’s business was to protect pesticide makers—neurotoxins or no neurotoxins. For nearly four decades, millions of pounds of EPN were sold every year, especially in areas that grow cotton. Only in 1987, after years of reported mass bee kills, did EPN begin to disappear from the farmers’ armory.

Forty years after EPA first began approving neurotoxins enclosed in microscopic spheres, the same lethal tradition remains in place. And bees continue pay the price. Clothianidin, for example, is a bee killer belonging to a chemical group known as neonicotinoids—neurotoxins that disrupt the immune system of animals. Farmers have been buying clothianidin and other neonicotinoids since 2003 to “treat” corn and other major crop seeds. Plants (such as corn) grown from these soaked seeds become toxic at fantastically small amounts to any insect touching or eating them.

Neonicotinoids differ from conventional spray products in that they can be used as either seed dressings or soil treatments. When used as seed dressings, the insecticide will migrate from the stem to the leaf tips and eventually into flowers and pollen, writes Henk Tennekes, a Dutch toxicologist, who has warned that these systemic poisons have caused a drastic decline of insect-eating birds in Holland, the UK, Germany, Ireland, France, and Switzerland.

Neonicotinoid insecticides act by blocking receptors in an insect’s central nervous system. “Any insect that feeds on the crop dies, but bees and butterflies that collect pollen or nectar from the crop are also poisoned,” Tennekes writes. “The damage is cumulative, and with every exposure more receptors are blocked. In fact, there may not be a safe level of exposure.” Worker bees neglect to provide food for eggs and larvae. A bee’s navigational abilities break down. Exposed to very small quantities of the insecticides, entire colonies can collapse.

Neonicotinoids are also lethal to birds, as well as to the aquatic systems on which they depend. “A single corn kernel coated with a neonicotinoid can kill a songbird,” according to a March 2013 report by the American Bird Conservancy. “Even a tiny grain of wheat or canola treated with the oldest neonicotinoid, imidacloprid, can poison a bird. As little as 1/10th of a corn seed per day during egg-laying season is all that is needed to affect reproduction with any of the neonicotinoids registered to date.”

The bird conservancy accuses the EPA of ignoring the poisoning of the surface and groundwater by neonicotinoids. “Neonicotinoid contamination levels in surface and groundwater in the US and around the world are strikingly high, already beyond the threshold found to kill many aquatic invertebrates. EPA risk assessments have greatly underestimated this risk, using scientifically unsound, outdated methodology that has more to do with a game of chance than with a rigorous scientific process.”

“It is astonishing,” the report continues, “that EPA would allow a pesticide to be used in hundreds of products without ever requiring the registrant [chemical company] to develop the tools needed to diagnose poisoned wildlife.” The report concludes that the EPA remains in a state of “enforced ignorance” and “in the dark.”
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Some scientists have associated the rise of infectious disease in honeybees, birds, fish, bats, and amphibians to the widespread use of neonicotinoids. These chemicals cause immune suppression in honeybees and fish, resulting in the death of the affected organisms from disease. In January 2012, Steve Ellis, a beekeeper for thirty-five years and the secretary of the U.S. National Honeybee Advisory Board, worried openly about the possible end of his ancient profession.

Equally worrisome, the fact that ground and surface water contaminated by these poisons “cause irreversible and cumulative damage to aquatic and terrestrial (non-target) insects must lead to an environmental catastrophe,” Tennekes writes. “The data presented show that it is actually taking place before our eyes, and that it must be stopped.”
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Tellingly, though neonicotinoids are made by Bayer, the German giant chemical and pharmaceutical company, Germany (along with Italy, France, and Slovenia) have banned this insidious compound. Other European regulators “seem to have turned a blind eye to data on the danger that one of the world’s biggest selling pesticides [the neonicotinoid imidacloprid] could pose to bees and other pollinators,” said Joan Walley, Member of Parliament in the UK.
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In a leaked EPA memo dated November 2, 2010, EPA scientists admitted that a 2003 Bayer study supporting the use of clothianidin was flawed. EPA scientists revealed that this insecticide “poses an acute and chronic risk to freshwater and estuarine/marine free-swimming invertebrates” and was “highly toxic” to honeybees.
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So, given all this evidence and all this concern, why has so little been done to protect bees? As always, the answer comes down to politics and money. For several decades, honey producers in the United States have worried that protesting the death of their bees would bring down the wrath of industrial farmers, who will either wipe them out with sprays or ruin them by suggesting that honey and pollen may be full of tiny capsules of nerve gas and numerous other poisons. This explains a depressing catch-22: even as their bees continue to die, honey producers have been largely silent; they are willing to lose some of their hives as a price for the social contract they have with the farmers whose insecticides kill their bees.

The Beekeepers Association of Texas, for instance, opposed state regulations creating a buffer zone between sprayed fields and other property. Beekeepers keep their mouths shut in order to survive, and farmers want to believe their crops are not harming people. No consumer would buy honey with pesticides in it.

Eduardo Gutierrez, the farmworker coordinator of the Texas Department of Agriculture, told me on December 27, 1984, that a beekeeper in Corpus Christi, Texas, who supported buffer regulations was nearly “wiped out”—by farmers who sprayed his hives directly. The farmers wanted to teach him a lesson about whistle-blowing.
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By the late 1980s, cities and various local and state governments had already spent decades using “vast quantities of insecticides with no concern for the havoc they bring on beekeepers by the destruction of their colonies and loss of their crops,” wrote Dee A. Lusby, president, Arizona Beekeepers’ Association. The number of bee colonies in Arizona had declined from over 150,000 to less than 63,000, Lusby wrote. “Some say the Environmental Protection Agency is required by law to ‘Protect the Environment.’ If this is so, why are not bees given the same consideration bestowed to other farm-domesticated livestock? Why are beekeepers treated like second-hand citizens in this state and several others without right of due process by law? Our beekeeping industry is being and has been systematically destroyed in this state due to a lackadaisical administration within our state’s own Commission of Agriculture and Horticulture and the Environmental Protection Agency.”
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Dee Lusby’s concerns apparently touched no one. Her letters were long, replete with historical references and full of useful technical details about the lives of bees: why we need them, why we must protect them, especially from killer pesticides. For several years, especially in the 1980s and early 1990s, Lusby sent her letters to several state and federal agricultural and environmental administrators and key members of Congress. They all ignored her.

I talked to Lusby in July 1989. She told me that beekeepers who complain about pesticide poisoning paid a price. Farmers would “spray bomb” their hives, sometimes killing all the bees. Such was the cost of this war that few beekeepers dared go public with their grief and loss. This remains true today.

Lusby did not back down. EPA regulators are “like monkeys acting with rubber stamps and there are never any no’s,” she wrote on August 31, 1990, in a letter to dozens of state and federal officials—including chairmen of major congressional committees.

“The chemicals that kill and damage honeybees have been known for years,” Lusby wrote. “So why doesn’t the EPA, Congress, USDA, APHIS [Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service], States, and farm users listen? Well, it’s because they never have had to, and because a veil of conspiracy-of-silent approval by looking the other way and seeing nothing exists. It’s like seeing a clean house neat and proper looking on the outside, but on the inside and the closets there is filth that hasn’t been cleaned up in many, many years. This is shameful!”

Lusby knew all about encapsulated insecticides. She was well read, and sophisticated about the technical and political aspects of beekeeping and farming. She warned that “beekeepers are told to accept the loss [of their honeybees to pesticide poisonings] and shut up or be blown out of business.”
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Dee Lusby was unusual in her intimate knowledge of beekeeping and in her courage to speak out. In reading her long letters I felt the same outrage I experienced at the EPA. The problem is not that we don’t know, but that government and industry refuse to do what is best for all of us, and for the natural world. The environment, science, and public health be damned.

Certainly now, in 2014, honeybees are facing an existential crisis, especially in America. In the late 1970s, when my EPA colleague Norman Cook was documenting honeybee death in the asphyxiating embrace of microencapsulated nerve gas pesticides, the situation was bad. But now nerve poison syndrome has become a holocaust for honeybees. Neonicotinoids take over the crop or plant; no matter where the honeybees are, nearly all crops are toxic to them, from their roots to their leaves and sweet nectars. The crops themselves become living pesticides. So now honeybees (and, by extension, honeybee keepers) are once again on the verge of extinction.

Since silence is clearly no longer an option, beekeepers are at last beginning to speak up.

When the EPA approved yet another neonicotinoid insecticide (sulfoxaflor, manufactured by Dow Chemical), beekeeping groups sued the agency in 2013.
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Earthjustice, a public interest law firm, represented the honeybee organizations. “Our country is facing widespread bee colony collapse, and scientists are pointing to pesticides like sulfoxaflar as the cause,” an Earthjustice lawyer, Janette Brimmer, said. “The effects will be devastating to our nation’s food supply and also to the beekeeping industry, which is struggling because of toxic pesticides. This lawsuit against the EPA is an attempt by the beekeepers to save their suffering industry. The EPA has failed them. And the EPA’s failure to adequately consider impacts to pollinators from these new pesticides is wreaking havoc on an important agricultural industry and gives short shrift to the requirements of the law.”

Jeff Anderson, a beekeeper, said that the EPA’s approval of sulfoxaflor “will speed our industry’s demise” and that the EPA’s claim that the product’s label includes robust terms for protecting pollinators “is a bald-faced lie! There is absolutely no mandatory language on the label that protects pollinators. Further, the label’s advisory language leads spray applicators to believe that notifying a beekeeper of a planned application absolves them of their legal responsibility in FIFRA to not kill pollinators.”