Poison Spring (30 page)

In early August, the Bush administration rejected this argument and extended the government’s approval for most of those chemicals, choosing once again to side with industry over the country’s health.

As it had under Reagan, the EPA started to crumble. A new “disinvestment” mandate required that EPA reduce or eliminate its own research libraries and laboratories and shrink the number of scientists serving the agency. That way corporations would be even freer to pollute. Without research libraries, EPA would be blind, incapable of knowing who did what when. These libraries were stocked with tens of thousands of scientific studies and government documents—all relating to issues of public health and environmental protection. The EPA ordered the contractors running its libraries to trash entire document collections, delink documents from websites, and auction off library furniture and bookcases. In short, the Bush managers of EPA pillaged the nation’s information resources on public health and the environment.

The Bush administration also targeted EPA’s laboratories, knowing full well that without its labs, the EPA would become impotent.
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The long-term consequences of this sort of environmental “management” were predictable, and dire.

In 2004, the Center for Biological Diversity, a nonprofit scientific organization based in San Francisco, concluded that the Bush EPA’s ties to the agrochemical industry had led to the widespread pesticide contamination of the country’s waterways.

“Pesticides are contaminating our air and water while the EPA fails to adequately regulate their use to protect our environment,” the Center reported. “Amphibians are a barometer of environmental health—adverse impacts to amphibians are a sign that our ecosystems are under stress. The EPA’s attempt to ignore the documented and disturbing impacts of pesticides to amphibians by dismissing the science will not alleviate this systemic problem.”

These problems were not limited to wildlife, the report confirmed. Neurological and sexual developmental dysfunction also affected humans, especially children. Infertile women were “27 times more likely to have mixed or applied herbicides in the two years prior to attempting conception than women who were fertile. Farmers, manufacturers and applicators of pesticides have an increased risk of certain types of malignancies, especially lip, prostate, or testicular cancer, lymphoma, leukemia, brain tumors, pancreatic cancer, sarcoma and multiple myeloma.”

Bush’s EPA consistently appeared to work more vigorously for agrochemical industries than for human or environmental health, the report concluded; indeed, much of the data supporting pesticide permits was “compiled by the registrants themselves. The EPA often dismisses environmental concerns in the face of hard science, and steadfastly refuses to adopt any mandatory measures to limit pesticide use.”
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For example, rodenticides, used by farmers and nonfarmers alike to poison mice and rats, were decimating California’s raptors. Predatory birds including eagles, hawks, falcons, owls, and vultures were eating many of these poisoned mice and rats, causing a “secondary poisoning.”

Beginning in 2003, public reaction to the death of predatory birds finally forced Bush’s EPA to begin restricting these poisons, a policy that formally took effect in 2011. Yet despite eight years of public outrage and (reluctant) federal restrictions, three chemical companies, Reckitt Benckiser, Spectrum, and Liphatech, simply refused to comply. EPA regulators claimed to be “shocked” that the companies were “thumbing their noses at them.”
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Chapter 13

The Obama Administration: Yes, We Can?

On the eve of the 2012 elections, the EPA administrator, Lisa Jackson, started an offensive to try to prove that her boss, Barack Obama, cared about public health. On October 21, 2011, she denounced Republicans for delaying the implementation of smog rules. She also said it was necessary to clean up pollution from power plants.

Two months later, I received an email bulletin from Stephanie Cutter, a former EPA employee who in 2011–2012 served as a deputy campaign manager for President Obama’s reelection campaign. “Today, President Obama announced a once-in-a-generation step forward for the environment and public health—the first-ever national standards for mercury, arsenic, and other toxic air pollution from power plants,” Cutter wrote. “This new rule has been 20 years in the making, but couldn’t have come a moment sooner.”

For far too long, Cutter wrote, out-of-date power plants “have polluted our air with toxins like mercury and arsenic: nasty stuff that causes everything from cancer, heart attacks, and neurological damage.” She placed the blame for this squarely on the shoulders of Republicans, who, she said, have been “fighting us tooth and nail to block new environmental protections like this one, while their industry allies have poured millions into rolling back time-tested safeguards already in place.”

Cutter was right: the time had come to do something about the “nasty stuff ” of mercury and arsenic poisoning millions of Americans, giving them cancer and neurological diseases. But when it comes to environmental protection, Obama was still asleep at the wheel. Why did his administration wait three years to point out the clear and documented dangers of unregulated power plants?

It was true that Republicans in Congress and the Republican candidates for president (and eventually their nominee, Mitt Romney) were unified against regulating industrial pollution. But from the vantage point of my twenty-five years of experience within the EPA, I can state unequivocally that both Democrats
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Republicans fight tooth and nail to block anything like real environmental protection. That is the reason it has taken twenty years to broadcast the word that arsenic, mercury, chromium, nickel, and acid gases are bad for our children. In fact, the EPA had known for more than twenty years that half the country’s twelve hundred coal- and oil-fired electricity plants did not use modern pollution controls. EPA had also known that breathing the air the factories emit causes cancer and other deadly diseases.
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After the doom and gloom accumulated over eight years of the George W. Bush administration, things appeared to change with Obama’s election in November 2008. Obama pledged to discard Bush’s environmental policies, and environmentalists breathed a sigh of relief.

“Because of the widespread and unnecessary use of over 5 billion total pounds of pesticides a year, hazardous chemicals invade our lives through the contamination and poisoning of our bodies, air, land, water, food and the built environment,” read a letter to Obama signed by 102 environmental organizations early in the new president’s tenure.
“We humans share with other inhabitants of this ecosystem immensely elevated toxic body burdens, and excessive rates of environmentally-induced illnesses, such as cancer, infertility and reproductive problems; immune, hormonal and nervous system disease; respiratory illness and asthma; and learning disabilities and autism.”

Administrative practices and leadership are urgently needed, the letter continued, to reverse decisions that have compromised America’s public health and environment and to “change a regulatory culture that accepts unnecessary harm [and] the politicization of science, all of which have resulted in wholly inadequate protection of public health and the environment. Priority must be given to reversing and correcting the blatant disregard for law that has been incorporated into regulatory decisions. And most importantly, leadership is needed to direct federal agencies to prioritize the development of safer, clean, healthy and viable systems that sustain our health, air, land, water, food and the built environment.”
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Unfortunately, President Obama had other priorities that did not include environmental integrity or the protection of public health. Bush had caused so much economic damage that the country teetered on the verge of economic collapse; when Obama stepped into the breach, he rushed for advice to Wall Street. His first chief of staff, Rahm Emanuel, had made $18.5 million in less than three years at a Wall Street bank. Emanuel’s successor, William M. Daley, was the son and brother of powerful Chicago mayors and had worked for JPMorgan Chase. Daley was succeeded in early 2012 by Jack Lew, the former director of the Office of Management and Budget; Lew once worked for Citigroup. With such powerful Wall Street voices whispering in his ear day after day, it’s no surprise that Obama left environmental protection and public health entirely out in the cold.
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At least as influential as the bankers were the voices from industrial agriculture. Among the people Obama appointed to important regulatory positions were Carol Browner, Bill Clinton’s EPA administrator and now Obama’s senior adviser on energy and the environment; Tom Vilsack, agriculture secretary; Roger Beachy, director of the National Institute of Food and Agriculture; Michael Taylor, the FDA’s senior adviser on food safety; and Islam Siddiqui, the agricultural negotiator in the office of the U.S. Trade Representative.
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What bound these officials together was their bias toward agribusiness and their commitment to the genetic engineering of food—in other words, they shared Monsanto’s view of the world. Sure enough, in the spring of 2013, Obama signed what critics called the Monsanto Protection Act, which protects companies from being sued if their genetically modified seeds lead to health problems. Food safety groups like Food Democracy Now collected more than a quarter million signatures on a petition calling for the president to veto the bill; they argued that not enough is known about the possible health risks of genetically modified seeds. Eliminating the public’s ability to halt the selling or planting of these seeds, the groups said, was removing the one sure way of checking this hugely profitable but potentially dangerous forced march toward the genetic engineering of our food.
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We knew this was Bush’s view, of course: State Department cables reveal that the Bush administration threatened the European Union with sanctions unless EU governments allowed the planting of Monsanto’s genetically modified seeds in Europe.
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But the phalanx of Monsanto men and women working for Obama simply confirms that it does not really matter who presides over the White House or Congress. Corporations rule the kingdom. While still serving as Obama’s solicitor general, Elena Kagan wrote a brief requesting the Supreme Court to lift a ruling by an appeals court forbidding the planting in California of Monsanto’s genetically engineered Roundup Ready alfalfa. In August 2010, Kagan was confirmed as a Supreme Court justice. She sits beside Justice Clarence Thomas, who once worked as a lawyer for Monsanto.
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Indeed, when it comes to genetic engineering, “the Obama administration has not been better than the Bush administration, possibly worse,” wrote Jeffrey Smith, an expert on the health effects of bioengineered food. The triumph of Monsanto within the government is bad for our health and bad for the environment. Let me explain further by introducing Don Huber.

Don Huber knows a lot about biological weapons, and he knows a lot about plants. A retired colonel from the Army’s biological warfare corps, Huber taught plant diseases and soil microbiology at Purdue University for thirty-five years. He has also been the coordinator of the U.S. Agricultural Research Service National Plant Disease Recovery System, a program of the USDA. Of all the things he knows about biological weapons and crops, he is most concerned about the destructive effects of pesticides on the biological systems of plants.

Huber worries, for example, about the effects of glyphosate—popularly known as Roundup
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one of the country’s most popular weed killers for both farmers and home gardeners. Glyphosate is also a powerful driver of genetic engineering; its creator, the global conglomerate Monsanto, has bioengineered “Roundup Ready” soybeans, corn, and other crops to resist Roundup’s killing power. For years, farmers have cleared their fields of weeds by spraying them with glyphosate and then planting Monsanto brand crop seeds that are resistant to the poison.

Monsanto has been using seeds, crops, pesticides, and genetic engineering to spread its web over the entire planet, promising more food to those who buy its modified seeds and chemicals. But like other agribusiness giants, Monsanto seems blind to the harm its products cause to humans and the natural world. For example, Monsanto has convinced millions of farmers, the American government, and the European Commission that glyphosate is safe. Yet the picture is not so clear.

Studies published in 2010 show glyphosate causes birth defects in frogs and chicken embryos at amounts smaller than farmers and gardeners leave in food. Older studies document other dreadful effects of glyphosate, including cancer, endocrine disruption, damage to DNA, and deleterious malformations of the reproductive, neurological, and developmental systems of animals and humans. Researchers also link glyphosate to miscarriages in humans and livestock. Monsanto and government authorities have known about the toxic effects of glyphosate since the 1980s. And both the industry and regulators have kept the public in the dark.
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Genetic engineering, in other words, represents imperial politics of the worst kind, aiming at no less than the control of the world’s food by agribusiness. In early January 2012, Catholic cardinal Peter Turkson accused the merchants of the genetic engineering of crops of breeding economic dependence and a new form of slavery. However, Monsanto remains implacable.
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