Poison Spring (23 page)

As early as 1985, Jenkins told Congress, she had approached the EPA inspector general with allegations that her superiors had colluded with a prestigious Washington lobbying firm, Arnold and Porter, to reverse a determination that two hundred open railroad cars of dioxin-contaminated dirt (from a pentachlorophenol wood preserver company, Bell Lumber and Pole in New Brighton, Minnesota) were “regulated wastes.” “As a result of that reversal, the State of Illinois was forced to drop felony charges against the wood preserving company,” Jenkins wrote.

Jenkins then brought allegations of corruption and misconduct at the EPA directly to the appropriate congressional oversight subcommittees. In early 1988, she brought formal conflict of interest charges to the attention of the EPA inspector general. To the shock of no one, the charges were dismissed.
11

At the same time, of course, Jenkins was also fighting a war on another front: the Monsanto dioxin scandal. In response to her whistle-blowing—to her raising so many bright red flags about the EPA's ethically compromised collusion with industry—the EPA “relieved” her of her normal duties and transferred her to a clerical job.

But it was not in Cate Jenkins's nature to back down. Instead, she filed a grievance against the EPA, and—after a torturous legal battle—she won. On December 14, 1992, a U.S. Department of Labor administrative law judge, Glenn Robert Lawrence, ordered EPA to reinstate Jenkins and pay her “exemplary” damages.
12

An Honorary White Man

I met Marsha Coleman-Adebayo in 1990 in Washington, D.C. She was working for the World Wildlife Fund, an international environmental organization. Marsha was an analyst focusing on issues affecting Africa. Not long after I met her, Marsha joined the Office of International Activities of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. At that time, I was also working for the EPA. In fact, in 1994, my organization, the Office of Pesticides and Toxic Substances, detailed me to OIA for one year.

Marsha and I collaborated on a number of issues, especially assisting EPA in handling the important and delicate international health problem of women and the environment. Were women more sensitive to toxins and pollution than men? Did conventional environmental protection include women in its policies? These complex questions preoccupied the 1995 international women's conference in Beijing.

Working with Marsha for a year gave me the opportunity to understand that this African-American woman, who held a doctorate in political science from MIT, had the virtues of a great education and commitment to the well-being of humankind. She loved Africa. She married a Nigerian engineering professor, Segun Adebayo. She respected my Greek culture and knowledge of history and science.

Like children, women have long been getting the brunt of global pollution. EPA tested mothers' milk in the late 1970s and found the milk contaminated by DDT-like poisons and other toxins. Women's biology make them more vulnerable to hormone-like poisons now known as endocrine disruptors; their work at home exposes them to substances confined inside the house, sometimes several times more deleterious than the polluted air of the atmosphere outside their homes.

In addition to searching the scientific literature for answers, I also talked to EPA colleagues all over the country. I then wrote a memo on the unsettling results, recommending that the EPA administrator, Carol Browner, and the head of my office, Lynn Goldman, take them seriously and do something about them. But my “ecofeminist” memo caused not enlightenment but anger, especially among senior women managers.

This is what it meant to be an analyst with an environmental–public health vision at EPA—in the 1990s or at any other time. Like me, Marsha wanted to do “good”: to put the EPA on the side of protecting people and nature from the toxic assault of industry.

But Marsha had also a passion for Africa. And when on March 1, 1995, the United States established the Gore-Mbeki commission, chaired by Vice President Al Gore and South African Deputy President Thabo Mbeki, promising South Africa ways and means to facilitate a transition from apartheid to democracy, Marsha thought she would become an instrument for providing South Africa with a modicum of technical assistance for health protection.

Marsha's African contacts alerted her to the dangers of mining vanadium at Brits, South Africa. Vametco, an American subsidiary of Union Carbide, was extracting vanadium, which the CIA classified as a strategic metal for the United States. Vanadium was certainly an asset to American industry and the military, but getting it out of Africa was poisoning and killing African workers.

Jacob Ngakane, a South African black man representing the ailing vanadium workers, told Marsha that South Africa has “vast reserves” of vanadium, which is mined in pits. “Open, gaping wounds are carved into the earth,” he said. “The workers in the [vanadium] mines are being poisoned . . . They bleed from their eyes, their noses, their genitals, their colons. These same young men become impotent from working in the mines. Their tongues turn green.”

Vanadium also wrecked Marsha's career. Marsha quoted Ngakane in her 2011 book,
NO FEAR
, in which she details her career at EPA. She believed that the United States, through the EPA, could and should help the ailing vanadium workers, perhaps make the mining process less toxic. But sadly, Marsha overestimated both what the United States and she herself (through the EPA) could do for South Africa. She learned rather quickly that the EPA, like the rest of the U.S. government, had been co-opted by the likes of Union Carbide, Vametco's parent company (whose pesticide factory in Bhopal, India, exploded in 1984, killing thousands).

In the agency's treatment of her, racial bigotry combined with resentment of those who challenged the status quo. Marsha's supervisors, all of whom were white, mocked her, hinting she had the option of being with them or against them. Her boss even baptized Marsha an “honorary white man.”

EPA reneged on its promise to offer technical assistance to the vanadium mines in South Africa. Within less than two years of the establishment of the Gore-Mbeki Commission, in December 1996, Marsha received an unsatisfactory evaluation by her supervisor, the first blow on the way to being fired in the federal government. Marsha called the unsatisfactory performance review “a white phosphorus flare.”

“The white flare of an unsatisfactory performance rating meant that from then on the agency's dealings with me were on autopilot,” she said. “There would be no reasoning. There would be no reconsideration. There would be formulaic responses, form letters, and scripts. If there was any negotiating, it would be on agency's terms, and would be about just exactly what it would take to get rid of me.”
13

Marsha fought back. She sued the EPA for racism and retaliation—and she won. An embarrassed Congress wanted to maintain the illusion that it did not approve of the silencing of whistle-blowers like Marsha. So it passed the Notification and Federal Employee Antidiscrimination and Retaliation (NO FEAR) Act of 2002. President George W. Bush, hardly an environmental steward, signed this bill into law. Marsha's case helped trigger this law, though great numbers of federal employees had struggled for decades for just such action. Sadly, and predictably, the law remains toothless, with no money appropriated for enforcement. It was a cheap congressional trick for avoiding responsibility; Congress knows full well the roots of corruption but refuses to remedy its archaic system of patronage and corporate welfare.

Nonetheless, Marsha was proud to describe the NO FEAR legislation as the first civil rights law of the twenty-first century.
14

Marsha's story, of course, reveals far larger national environmental and political issues. It shows in microcosm the racism in American society, our callousness and imperialism in foreign policy, and the corporate domination of the government and the world. And it shows that if Reagan's presidency was disastrous for the EPA, the Clinton presidency did little to reverse the capture of government by industry. Clinton and Gore and their appointees at the EPA and in the rest of the government handled South Africa badly, exacerbating the corporate-friendly trends among the leaders of postapartheid South Africa.

Marsha's case gives an insider's rare view of the alien universe of the federal government, in which a few politically motivated bureaucrats, beholden to money and the president, drag administration after administration along in the path of corporate power.

Chapter 9

When Will the Well Run Dry?

In 1979, disaster bubbled to the surface of Long Island’s sandy soil. Union Carbide discovered aldicarb, one of the most acutely toxic insect poisons used in the United States, in most of the drinking water beneath the lush potato fields on the eastern end of Long Island. No one knows for how long the people had been drinking and washing in the poisoned water. Neither the local New York government nor the EPA had done any checking for the potato neurotoxin until the harm had already been done.

Union Carbide, which manufactured aldicarb (also known as temic), broke the bad news to the EPA on the morning of August 23, 1979. The contamination, an EPA official wrote, was “extremely serious with potentially grave consequences to Long Island residents.”
1

A week later, Steven Jellinek, the EPA’s highest official dealing with pesticides during the Carter administration, wrote a letter to David Axelrod, New York’s health commissioner, warning of the contamination’s impact, “particularly [on] infants and children.” Anyone dependent on well water, Jellinek said, should find “alternative sources of water.”

“The amount of aldicarb found in some wells sampled so far may present an unacceptable degree of risk to human health,” Jellinek noted. “Of special concern are the exposures to small children. Aldicarb is one of the most acutely toxic pesticides currently registered for use in this country. For infants, whose diet may be 100 percent milk, dilution of milk or formula with aldicarb contaminated well water would pose a significant hazard. While the extent of the contamination of the well water on Long Island is uncertain at this point, the problem may be far reaching and is one of serious import.”
2

The poisoning of Long Island’s drinking water was just the beginning of a national disaster. Soon Union Carbide “discovered” aldicarb in the drinking water supplies of Wisconsin, Virginia, Maine, Florida, Georgia, and Oregon, raising the number of potential victims to immediate and long-term disease and death to millions.

Stanley Mazaleski, an EPA toxicologist, urged his bosses to test aldicarb for its possible impact on the nervous system. His efforts were in vain; instead of being thanked, he was hounded out of the agency. (Mazaleski also knew too much about the EPA’s malathion studies, which showed that malathion and other neurotoxins affect people at minute amounts.) Yet additional water testing on Long Island revealed not only traces of aldicarb ranging up to 515 parts per billion—roughly 1,700 percent greater than the legal amount EPA allowed in food or drink—but also evidence of carbofuran, another highly toxic insect poison.

In the early 1970s, David Coppage and three other EPA scientists had exposed pinfish to lethal and sublethal seawater concentrations of malathion. They observed that even if the fish did not die from their exposure to malathion, their chances for a normal life were compromised. Even sublethal dosages of the poison “may cause physiological and behavioral modifications that reduce animal survival ability.”
3

People living among the potato farms of the East End of Long Island were facing an “unacceptable degree of risk, and decidedly most unacceptable to children,” wrote Salvatore Biscardi, an EPA toxicologist.
4

Why was aldicarb buried next to the potato seeds when it, like ethylene dibromide or parathion, can be devastating to people in minute amounts of parts per billion? These nerve poisons starve the brain and the nerves in days, or cause irreparable neurological and behavioral wounds. They kill slowly or on the spot. Some, like dibromochloropropane, sterilize both people and animals. Others, like toxaphene, leave behind a storm of molecules hanging in the air, moving with the wind for a few yards in a farm or for hundreds and thousands of miles around the earth. Or, like thalidomide, certain agrochemicals damage fetuses being carried by women and other female animals.

Maurie Semel, a biologist of the Long Island Horticultural Research Laboratory at Riverhead, New York, witnessed Long Island’s aldicarb poisoning and was disheartened by this example of yet another toxic (and fruitless) war against insects. Ever since the potato beetle first appeared in 1874, she discovered, Long Island’s potato farmers had been waging a battle as toxic as it had been futile.

Even with modern synthetic pesticides, she concluded, potato beetles from Long Island to Virginia and Colorado were “beyond the threatening stage of effective control.” A far more effective (and benign) copper-based method of blight control known as the Bordeaux mixture had long since been replaced by synthetic fungicides, which not only failed to kill beetles, but harmed fungi that were themselves inherently hostile to the beetles. The farmers’ new chemical weapons, in other words, were making life easier for their worst insect enemy.

In Long Island in 1972 alone, potato farmers used about thirty thousand gallons of a nerve poison known as azinphos-methyl against the Colorado potato beetle, Maurie Semel wrote. That poison left the beetles pretty much intact. So a year later, farmers sprayed their plants with 70,000 gallons of aldicarb, plus a ton of the ineffective azinphos-methyl, 80 tons of methoxychlor, 13 tons of carbaryl, 68,000 gallons of parathion, and 5 tons of endosulfan.
5