Poison Spring (29 page)

All too often, what “emergency” means to a company is “whenever we want to test a chemical so we can recover the money we spent on research and development.”

The pitch goes like this. Companies (and their lackeys in state government) come to the EPA with a simple request: “Since existing pesticides seem to be ineffective, this new chemical is the only one left to save the farmers from disaster.” Individual states then ask EPA for a Section 18 exemption, and regulators bow down and do the state’s (and thus the companies’) bidding. The demand for the use of untested poisons typically came primarily from Kentucky, Tennessee, Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia, Florida, South Carolina, and North Carolina. The states of Washington, Oregon, Alaska, and Idaho were also exploiting Section 18 “emergency” exemptions with a vengeance.
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Predictably, the definition of an “emergency” or a “crisis” is left to the industrial farmers and chemical companies themselves. This policy is merely another way the agricultural and chemical industries have found to line their own pockets without interference from the government agencies supposedly overseeing them. Among the biggest beneficiaries of this dangerous practice are domestic and foreign companies such as Shell Chemical Company, Ciba-Geigy, DuPont, Mobay, and Chevron.

With so much money at stake, these companies can be relentless in their lobbying. During the Reagan administration, emergency exemption requests went through the roof, increasing 376 percent from 1978 to 1983. In 1984 alone, EPA approved 770 such requests.
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ICI Americas and FMC Corporation, for example, successfully persuaded farmers and governors of different states to secure EPA’s “emergency” permission for the introduction of their deadly product Ambush (permethrin) 259 times between 1978 and 1982.
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In 1981, my esteemed colleague Adrian Gross urged his EPA bosses to ban permethrin because it caused cancer in experimental animals. Gross showed that a child weighing about 40 pounds who ate a California orange contaminated with a tiny amount of ethylene dibromide (used to fumigate the Mediterranean fruit fly in the summer of 1981) would receive a dosage 50 to 70 times the legal limit.

Gross distributed his findings to several congressional subcommittees on Capitol Hill, and of course he got what was coming to him. Usually reporters showed up after the release of his lengthy memoranda, but nothing more; this time, Gross was stripped of his position as chief of the EPA’s toxicology branch. Since it would have been politically embarrassing for the EPA to fire him, he was simply given an empty room and an empty job, left to rot in comfortable silence.

No doubt companies like ICI Americas and FMC Corporation made a bundle of money when they persuaded EPA to “register” permethrin. Beyond the “registered” sprays, the tons of “emergency” pesticides that rain down on American food constitute a grand experiment on the nature and the people of the United States.
At least registered pesticides have come through some kind of scientific scrutiny, however flawed. But when the chemicals are unregistered, we know nothing at all about them.

Given all the evidence against it—including EPA’s own legal team vigorously opposing the emergency ruling—the permethrin debacle became a public scandal. Calling permethrin safe seemed to “fly in the face of the most elementary principles of [the] scientific method,” an infuriated Connecticut Senator Christopher J. Dodd wrote to an EPA administrator. Dodd found the EPA’s decision “alarming.” How was the public supposed to trust its own government “when the very data this conclusion was drawn from appears to have been patched together at best?”
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Dodd’s question goes to the EPA’s core failure: using bad science to mask pro-industry policies. Sadly, Dodd did not follow up, and Congress never seriously contemplated challenging corporate influence over America’s environmental policies. EPA researchers who wrote reports (in 1983 and 1987) on popular, untested pesticides said the agency simply did not have the ability to monitor the use of those chemicals.

The result of all this has been the ever-broadening and intensifying spraying of powerful weed killers, with the usual toxic side effects: chemical runoff into streams, rivers, and groundwater; spray drift hurting humans living near the farms; contaminated gardens, organic farms, and animals; and the crippling and killing of wildlife.

In Montana, North Dakota, Wyoming, Utah, and Colorado, major bird kills were still being caused by DDT and DDT-like chemicals in the 1980s—a decade after DDT had been banned. DDT poisoning of insect-eating birds and waterfowl covered the entire West Coast. Researchers found extremely high levels of DDT in the brain (up to 230 parts per million) as well as in the tissues and eggs of the heron, the whitefaced ibis, and numerous other birds.

In California, the drinking water wells of the San Gabriel Valley were laced with industrial chemicals, trichloroethylene and tetrachloroethylene and carbon tetrachloride, a fumigant used in treating seeds. Nearly a third of the 349 wells bringing drinking water to two dozen community water systems—which served 4.5 million people—had one or more of these potent poisons in them. Also in California, a worm killer called dibromochloropropane (DBCP) was found in more than 750 drinking water wells in the San Joaquin Valley. DBCP made news because it sterilized workers who made it in a factory in Lathrop, California. When I taught for a time at Humboldt State University, one of my students told the class about having to drink DBCP-contaminated water because his family had no other option.
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The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service documented numerous episodes of acute poisoning of birds by farm sprays. In the summer of 1982, hundreds of rare sage grouse died in south central Idaho; so did Canada geese, songbirds, and fish in Yakima, Washington, and geese in Ontario, Oregon. Since the introduction of a nerve poison for the killing of cattle grubs, the population of American magpies declined by about 50 percent.

By 2000, the Fish and Wildlife Service estimated that every year, roughly one in ten birds that come into contact with farm sprays are killed. That’s about 67 million birds.
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The aerial application of mosquito-killing sprays was also sending toxins drifting into lakes and estuaries, especially those of central and southeast Florida and other southern states. Many of the mosquito killers are nerve poisons, toxic to crustaceans, fish, and birds, and DDT-like compounds, crippling or lethal to nearly all wildlife. In addition, both neurotoxic and DDT-like chemicals poison drinking water. Similarly, private and commercial aerial application of pesticides on crops caused “environmental incidents” throughout the country, especially in EPA’s Region V, which includes Illinois, Indiana, Ohio, Wisconsin, Michigan, and Minnesota.

Farmers of these states also “incorporate” granular pesticides into the soil, which means that after rains, huge amounts of poisons end up in streams, rivers, and lakes, contaminating and killing fish and wildlife.

The residents of Scottsdale, Arizona, learned this the hard way. People exposed to drifting pesticides suffer effects that are “diverse, intense, disabling, and distressing,” wrote Stanley H. Schuman, a professor of epidemiology at the Medical University of South Carolina, who studied this dilemma on behalf of the EPA in 1979.

“There is considerable
mental stress and distress
associated with belonging to some as yet undefined percentage of the population in a neighborhood or a community [hit by chemical drift],” Schumann wrote. “In addition to experiencing bouts of illness associated with repeated pesticide exposure, [the people of that neighborhood] suffer various forms of antipathy and intolerance. Whereas others may be annoyed or irritated by odors, eye irritation, and respiratory discomfort, these people are functionally disabled. Such a person finds one’s self placed on the defensive with little medical or social support.”

Very little has changed with pesticide drift in the last thirty-five years; if anything, the situation has gotten worse. In the Central Valley of California, a woman named Teresa Avina complained in 2008 that she got sick from the drifting pesticides every day and that drifting pesticides were responsible for the miscarriages and cancer afflicting her neighbors in the town of Huron, located at the center of San Joaquin Valley.
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In 2012, in rural Minnesota, spray poisons put people at risk throughout the growing season. Pesticides drift invisibly from the agricultural fields to residential areas, contaminating their air, water, and food. Rural Minnesotans say they endure “heavy dousings of agricultural pesticides.”
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Drifting pesticides also damage wildlife. Pesticides from California’s Central Valley, for instance, travel fifty to a hundred miles to the Sierra Nevada mountains, where they poison frogs, threatening these sensitive animals with extinction.
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If anything, the pesticide industry had simply—once again—rebranded itself, appropriating the vocabulary of ecology but remaining as ruthless as ever in its defense of toxins. Pesticide companies formed a group with the Orwellian name CropLife America, but the group continues to insist that endangered species are not endangered, that spray drift is not a problem, and that EPA is nothing but a hindrance to business.
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All of this jibed perfectly with the philosophy of the administration of President George W. Bush, which came to power in 2001. President Bush made it clear early on that federal regulators would continue to turn a blind eye to industrial pollution. It could not have been otherwise. In the grand tradition of Washington politics, many in Bush administration “regulatory” agencies had made a great deal of their money in the very polluting industries they were now charged with overseeing.

Bush’s opening gambit was handing the EPA to Christine Todd Whitman, the personable former governor of New Jersey. Whitman was a reliable Republican; while in New Jersey (one of the most polluted states in the country), she had cut the staff and budget of the state’s Department of Environmental Protection (DEP). Evaluating her environmental stewardship, a coalition of environmental groups gave her a C minus.

PEER, the Washington-based Professional Employees for Environmental Responsibility, judged Whitman just as harshly. In a 1997 survey of the employees of New Jersey’s DEP, the group’s director said that Whitman fully supported “corporate violators” of the law and applied “pressure to block enforcement of anti-pollution laws, [and] back-door efforts to gut regulations.”
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With Whitman at the head of the EPA, pro-industry Republicans in charge of Congress through 2006, and the courts packed with environmental regulation skeptics, the state of American environmental protection under Bush fell to levels I had not seen since the days of Reagan. The Bush administration gave away millions of acres of public lands to oil and timber industries for drilling and logging; the Endangered Species Act almost became extinct; Yellowstone and Grand Teton National Parks were opened to sixty thousand snowmobiles; and some two thousand miles of streams in the Appalachian mountains became choked with mining waste.

The Bush administration also stopped enforcing environmental laws, and Republicans—and not a few Democrats—shamelessly defended those breaking these laws. In early 2002, after twelve years of service, Eric Schaeffer resigned as director of the EPA’s Office of Regulatory Enforcement because of the dirty politics being played between the White House, the Energy Department, and energy companies. “Congressmen have become de facto lobbyists for home state polluters,” Schaeffer said.

The White House had paralyzed the EPA and worked hard to weaken the federal Clean Air Act, Schaeffer told Whitman in his resignation letter. Nine power companies, for example, had expanded their plants without upgrading their pollution controls, which clean air laws required. When the EPA filed suit against these companies, the White House undermined EPA’s determination to bring those corporate criminals to justice. In addition to emitting 2 million tons of the powerfully damaging greenhouse gas nitrogen oxide, the companies “emitted an incredible 5 million tons of sulfur dioxide every year (a quarter of the emissions in the entire country),” Schaeffer wrote.

These coal plants’ 7 million tons of sulfur dioxide and nitrogen oxide caused more than 10,800 premature deaths, at least 5,400 incidents of chronic bronchitis, more than 5,100 hospital emergency visits, and over 1.5 million lost workdays, Schaeffer wrote. To this toll could be added “severe damage to our natural resources, as acid rain attacks soils and plants and deposits nitrogen in the Chesapeake Bay and other critical bodies of water.”
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Needless to say, the energy barons running the Bush administration—especially Vice President Dick Cheney, the former head of energy services giant Halliburton—were undeterred. Their tactics, borrowed from the Reagan playbook, involved public deception, intimidating the EPA staff, and weakening or scrapping the law for the benefit of their friends in industry. The EPA could hardly be said to be “working in the public interest,” Schaeffer wrote in
The Washington Monthly
soon after leaving the agency
.
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In the spring of 2006, the presidents of unions representing about nine thousand EPA scientists and other professionals appealed to the EPA administrator to curtail the immense volume of organophosphate pesticides getting into the nation’s food supply—especially since infants and children are so vulnerable to those poisons. The union presidents did not demand that the nerve toxins be banned entirely; they merely appealed for stricter regulation. Industrial muscle, they said, had blinded the EPA to its moral responsibility to protect the public’s health.