Poison Spring (26 page)

Because toxaphene produces thyroid cancer in rats, is widely distributed in the environment, bioaccumulates as it moves through the food chain, and has “specific adverse effects on fish,” toxaphene should be restricted “more stringently” even than DDT, Endrin, Dieldrin, etc.,” wrote John Doull, a professor of pharmacology and toxicology at the University of Kansas Medical School and a former member of the EPA’s Science Advisory Panel.
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In other words, Doull said in early 1982, the EPA should ban toxaphene, and soon.

Even with Reagan in power, the slow and insidious toxaphene fallout was simply too much even for the timid scientists of the EPA, who in early 1982 decided to disclose what they knew about toxaphene: that the stuff was in the water, food, soil, and air of the entire country, and that the fresh fish and shellfish of entire regions were so contaminated they were unfit for people to eat.

EPA scientists were also sick of the word games being played by BFC Chemicals, the company in charge of persuading the EPA to adopt ludicrous “options” for regulating toxaphene (including canceling toxaphene use on rice and cranberries, two crops on which toxaphene was virtually never used). BFC’s lawyers asked the EPA’s top pesticides official, Edwin Johnson, to limit regulation to “monitoring” toxaphene. Translation: do nothing. Or, they said, the EPA could limit regulation to changing the label on the pesticide can. This was almost literally the least they could do.

These requests so infuriated David Severn and Joseph Reinert, two EPA scientists following toxaphene in the environment, that after talking to BFC, they sent a note to Johnson in which they put their cards on the table: BFC’s proposals about toxaphene “would make no useful contribution to our state of knowledge,” Severn wrote.

“Our concern about the environmental transport of toxaphene is dramatically illustrated by the recently recognized buildup of toxaphene residues in fish in the Great Lakes, even though little or no toxaphene is used in that region,” Severn continued. “In fact, recent data from an isolated landlocked lake on Isle Royale, an island in Lake Superior near the Canadian border whose only known input of water is from the atmosphere, show 3.2 ppm [parts per million] toxaphene in adult lake trout. The toxaphene residues in the Great Lakes almost certainly result from atmospheric transport from the southern states. Toxaphene has been consistently found in rainwater collected along the eastern seaboard, and at levels 10–100 times greater than DDT or PCBs.”

Severn warned Johnson that merely tinkering with toxaphene regulation—which BFC wanted—would do nothing to reduce the risk to people and nature. “Given the nature of our concern about its atmospheric dispersal throughout the environment, normal risk reduction methods would not be effective,” Severn wrote. “Label restrictions such as requiring application lay-off distances or any type of limiting monitoring effort could not reduce the levels of environmental exposure for this pesticide. Environmental exposure can only be reduced effectively by reducing the amount of toxaphene used.”
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Severn and Reinert were brave, and they were right. But they were also conventional scientists working within a dysfunctional system. They knew what the political fallout would be when that information became public. They knew that if their suggestions were taken seriously, BFC would lose money, and the implications of that loss would reverberate like a tsunami at the EPA. Congressmen and senators would demand their pound of flesh.

I talked about toxaphene with Stanley Weissman, the legal adviser to Edwin Johnson. He understood that toxaphene was an American tragedy. But we also saw clearly that Johnson would not dare initiate proceedings against toxaphene, and that it would be futile and dangerous for us to urge him to move in that direction. We knew toxaphene was a political problem that could probably be resolved only in a political context.

We passed the information about toxaphene to Illinois congressman Sid Yates, who to his credit acted quickly. Yates was the chairman of the appropriations subcommittee for the Department of the Interior and was well informed about environmental issues. As a congressman from Chicago, Yates was concerned about the shore of Lake Michigan, and once he learned about cancer-causing toxaphene and its contamination of the fish in Lake Michigan, he decided he would work to ban the chemical.

As so often happens in these cases, part of his interest was personal. Yates’s wife had cancer, and in his mind, toxaphene was too close for comfort.

In August 1982, Sid Yates took his righteous anger with him to the floor of the House of Representatives, arguing for a ban on toxaphene.

“I am very emotional about this amendment,” Yates said. “The reason I feel emotional is that I have just taken my wife home from the National Cancer Institute, where she has been found to have a malignancy. She and I played golf together up to about three weeks ago. We played on a Sunday afternoon, and the next day she did not feel well. We went into a doctor’s office, and we found that she had this condition.

“How does this happen?” Yates asked his colleagues in Congress. “How can it happen? Where does cancer come from? It seems to come out of the blue—but we know better than that. We are being subjected to so many cancer-producing influences in our society today—like toxaphene.”

Toxaphene is used widely in the South as insecticide sprayed on cotton crops, Yates said. “That in itself sounds entirely harmless, but it does not stay in place.” Like DDT, toxaphene has “a very strong life,” Yates said.

The toxaphene that is sprayed on crops in the Southern States is lifted by the winds and carried for distances of over a thousand miles, to the city of Chicago. Then it is dropped by rainfall onto the city of Chicago, it is dropped on all the communities surrounding the Great Lakes, and it is dropped into the Great Lakes themselves.

In Lake Michigan, in Lake Superior, whitefish and lake trout have been found to have toxaphene in quantities, according to the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service under official surveys, of 10 parts per million. The accepted maximum level of FDA for this kind of a carcinogenic material is 5 parts per million. So that in the fish that swim in the Great Lakes, a thousand miles away from where this chemical is used, we find this cancer-producing material in the fish. It is in the food chain that is being used by people all over the country.

This is the reason that I offer this amendment, to stop this chemical warfare. The House took a position against chemical warfare some time ago. This is a chemical that can harm men, women, and children.
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Yates’s efforts resulted in a congressional action banning toxaphene, a rare moment of regulatory sanity. I never thanked Sid Yates for his courage, but I knew that what Yates did was one of those rare political events unlikely to happen again in my lifetime. He was right that cancer is not a curse of the gods, but a variety of different diseases that can be triggered by toxic substances in the environment, notably those employed in the chemical warfare of agribusiness. And he correctly characterized the sprays of the farmers as agents of chemical warfare.

It is not as if congressmen and senators do not have access to reliable information about pesticides. They, more than anyone else, have access to thousands of experts working for them in the Congressional Research Service and the Government Accountability Office. The National Academy of Sciences is also at their disposal. Moreover, members of Congress have command of appropriations and the agendas of committees with the power of investigation and oversight of every branch of activity inside and outside the government. Over the last forty years or so, after lengthy investigations, hearings, and research, the serious ecological risks and health hazards of farm sprays—including the deficient system of regulating these poisons—have caught the attention of elected officials including Senators Abraham Ribicoff, Walter Mondale, Philip Hart, Edward Kennedy, Paul Sarbanes, and Al Gore, and Representatives L. H. Fountain, John Moss, Bob Eckhardt, George E. Brown Jr., Sid Yates, Ted Weiss, Mike Synar, and Henry Waxman. Sadly, and repeatedly, their voices have been drowned out by those of politicians doing the work of corporate America.

Indeed, powerful politicians seldom challenge the chemical corporations that give birth to these toxic sprays. It is as if these companies have a license, granted by EPA, to decide what is going to live and what is going to die.

A case in point: On September 15, 1983, representatives of Ciba-Geigy, a Swiss corporation and one of the world’s largest pharmaceutical and pesticide manufacturers, told EPA scientists they had a new cotton insecticide, dubbed CGA-112913, that was almost ready for registration. Like the ghastly pesticide Dimilin, this new concoction worked by preventing young insects from forming their lifesaving hard cover known as an exoskeleton. This insecticide, Ciba-Geigy figured, would have to be sprayed on cotton fields at least ten times per growing season.

According to Norman Cook, the same EPA ecologist who defended honeybees, the chemical was extremely toxic to aquatic invertebrates in amounts of less than 100 parts per
trillion
. Equally troubling, the toxin was also extremely persistent in the environment with a half-life of 6.2 years in pond sediments; bluegill sunfish absorb this poison at a rate of more than
100,000 times
its concentration in water.

Cook told Ciba-Geigy to “drop further development of this compound since the results to date show potentially devastating hazards to nontargets” such as beneficial insects and other animals. Cook also alerted other EPA scientists to keep their eyes open for CGA-112913 and similarly dangerous insecticides. “The Dimilin-like and DDT-like qualities of this [Ciba-Geigy] chemical cannot be overemphasized,” he wrote.
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Despite this history, the EPA approved and registered CGA under the name chlorfluazuron. To say I was astonished by this act would be an understatement. Despite what I had seen, I wanted to believe there was some wisdom left among decision makers in the EPA. I was wrong.

Make no mistake: the “nontarget” costs of spraying lethal poisons in the environment are often extraordinarily high. In a cotton field, everything but the bugs feeding on cotton is a “nontarget”: that includes not only birds, beneficial insects, other crops, and wildlife but also farmers, farmworkers, and their children. In fact, poisoning of “nontargets” continues to take place in thousands of streams, rivers, forests, and farms when the annual ritual of billions of pounds of toxic sprays hit the shining surface of the water and the green carpet of the land.

Despite “alarming” evidence that farm poisons get into our soil and disrupt or kill the very microorganisms responsible for making the soil fertile, official agriculture remains silent on this tragedy.

“It is important to consider that in intensive agriculture such as the Midwestern corn/soybean production system, heavy applications of chemical pesticides and fertilizers are made to the same land year after year,” Rosmarie von Rumker, an EPA consultant, has pointed out. “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. 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 [microplants and microanimals in the soil] and on the long-term fertility of the topsoil, one of our most important resources.”
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I remember an EPA colleague telling me that midwestern farmers had made their fertile land into a biological desert, the soil turned into nothing but a conduit to the corn and soybean seeds for synthetic fertilizers, insect sprays, and weed killers. Yet my colleague was no friend of organic farming; he mocked efforts to grow food without pesticides. He rose in the EPA ranks from the moment of its inception in December 1970 until his retirement more than thirty years later. His organization justified the use of pesticides in America, always siding with the manufacturers of pesticides, always concluding there was no way America could feed itself and the world without toxic sprays.

Although the EPA agreed to fund Rosmarie von Rumker and Sharon Hart and other university researchers who explored the issues of agricultural production and pesticides, the agency did little to publicize the data on the harmful effects of pesticides that were bulging from its files. In the end, senior EPA officials remained unwilling to help put an end to decades of covering up for agribusiness.

Chapter 11

The Hubris of the Reagan Administration

Less than twenty years after
Silent Spring
warned about the dangers of farm sprays, an EPA study revealed that more than 200 million Americans—at a minimum—were exposed to widely used poisons, including DDT-like chemicals and nerve toxins. Not just from farms, but from household bug sprays, greenhouses, and golf courses. Pesticides were no longer only saturating our food; they had soaked into every corner of our lives.
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“It is quite possible that household use of pesticides may have a more significant role in human exposure to pesticides than previously thought,” the EPA study concluded. By this time the EPA already knew that in three large American cities, up to ten pounds of active pesticide ingredients get sprayed on every acre of the urban environment every year. EPA’s urban soils monitoring program revealed excessive contamination of American cities with organophosphate (parathion-like) pesticides, DDT-like sprays, and PCBs.
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