Poison Spring (25 page)

The fertilizer loss in the Big Spring basin in northeastern Iowa is about 50 to 75 pounds per acre.
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The Big Spring basin is about 103 square miles in size. Padma Datta, who reviewed the use of pesticides for growing corn or oats, found that atrazine and another product, known as lasso, were the most popular weed killers with Iowa farmers. Datta found atrazine in amounts up to 2.5 parts per billion in Big Spring groundwater; he estimated that up to 4 percent of all the pesticides sprayed over crops of the Big Spring basin were ending up in the basin’s water table.
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Farmers pay a high price for their chemical addiction, suffering an increased frequency of cancers of the stomach, prostate, bone and connective tissue, blood, lymph tissue, and bone marrow. Compared to nonfarmers, Iowa farmers develop these cancers from 40 to 100 percent more frequently. In general, Iowa farmers, and probably all farmers using pesticides, “are subject to higher than expected mortality rates from certain types of cancer,” studies show. In a study of white male Iowa residents dying from 1971 to 1978, for example, it was concluded that farmers “had statistically significant elevated mortality rates from the following six cancer types: lip cancer, stomach cancer, prostatic cancer, lymphatic cancer, leukemia, [and] multiple myeloma.”

These results were consistent with an Iowa study based on the years 1964–1970 and with studies completed in other states. The more bushels of corn and soybeans the large farmers of Iowa produce, in other words, the more cancer they harvest—and sell to the rest of us.
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Chapter 10

Fallout

The people who run chemical companies, as well as those engaged in industrial-scale agriculture, are calculating people. Their eyes overlook downstream concerns like environmental health or human health and stay focused on the bottom line. For them, the destruction of insects is a source of profit; other consequences of their products are someone else’s concern. They seem uninterested in the fact that insects not only represent 75 percent of the planet’s biomass but also form the very base of the global food chain—including the human food chain. Ignorance of this fact, along with a broad indifference to the environment, has become deeply troubling, said Glenn B. Wiggins, a distinguished Canadian entomologist, in his presidential address to the entomologists of North America in November 1982.

The unprecedented prosperity of North American society “stems directly from the abundance of productive soils, fresh waters, equable climates, forests, and grasslands that are the foundation of our environment,” Wiggins said. “[T]he terrestrial and freshwater parts of it, at any rate, are really an insect world. And it is scarcely an exaggeration to say that man will have to learn a great deal more about those insects and the useful as well as destructive things insects do in order to secure harmoniously his own place in that world.”
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It remains to be seen whether people can be educated enough so that one day they may live “harmoniously” on an insect-dependent earth. George M. Woodwell, a renowned scientist with the Marine Biological Laboratory at Woods Hole, Massachusetts, is not optimistic. He speaks of the earth being “in the throes of a series of biotic changes that are unprecedented in human history” and denounces these changes for impoverishing the earth.

“One might dream that on the only green planet we know, life would have a special value of its own, just as books and works of art do in our culture,” Woodwell writes. “And if the interest in life
per se
were not sufficient to protect it, one might hope that simple, selfish interest in human comfort and sustenance might confer a special status on living systems and force their conservation. Unfortunately, neither occurs. The stacks are open in the world’s great library of life and we advertise to the vandals.”
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Here are some numbers you aren’t likely to hear broadcast by the pesticide industry. In 1954, insects destroyed about 10 percent of America’s food crops. In 1980—more than twenty-five years and untold tons of pesticides later—insects and disease destroyed nearly four times as much food—some 37 percent, worth about $85 billion. Without even raising the harrowing questions of environmental and human health, it seems reasonable to ask a simple question:

Has it been worth it?

If farmers grew food entirely without using pesticides, they would lose about 41 percent of their crops, according to David Pimentel, Cornell’s renowned professor of entomology. This would lead to a rise in the price of food of about 5 to 10 percent. Yet when we consider the significant damage done by fully armed chemical farmers, growers, and ranchers, this seems a modest price to pay. In 2003, Pimentel calculated the “environmental and societal damages” from the legal use of pesticides to be about $12 billion per year.
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Pimentel is one of the few scientists swimming against the agrochemical stream. For several decades, Pimentel has been asking questions about the energy, economic, and social costs of America’s agriculture and the industry’s ways of dealing with insects, weeds, and crop and animal diseases. Pesticides may be necessary sometimes, Pimentel says, but the costs we pay for them are far too great to justify agribusiness’s increasingly unsafe practices.

Pimentel chronicles the hugely inefficient—and dangerous—consequences of chemical trespass. Only minute amounts of sprayed pesticides actually reach their target pest insects and plant pathogens. For example, about 0.003 percent of the 1 kilogram per hectare of insecticide sprayed on a field of collard greens actually hits the cabbage white butterfly caterpillar. In bean fields, no more than 0.03 percent of the sprayed insecticide hits aphids. On cotton farms, the heliothis caterpillars are hit by an absurd 0.0000001 percent of the spray; the rest ends up elsewhere—in other insects, birds, and fish, as the poisons seep into soils, wash down rivers, and blow in the wind. This is true for the vast bulk of agricultural poisons, which (as we have seen) collectively total hundreds of millions of pounds.
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“It is nearly impossible to control insects and mite pests on crops by applying the spray insecticide directly to the target pests,” Pimentel has concluded.
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His writing, full of numbers and results of scientific studies, raises important questions: Is industrialized agriculture as benign—or even as effective—as its industrial patrons seem to think? Or is it just a con game, a successor to the nineteenth-century patent medicine hustle? Another way of asking this question: Have we been duped?

When I came across Pimentel’s early work, I became intrigued. I distributed some of his articles to my EPA colleagues and invited Pimentel to come to the EPA to present his ideas.
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One November morning, Pimentel showed up in my office, a small corner of an immense room in the second floor of Crystal Square #4 in Crystal City, Virginia. This was eight months after the election of Ronald Reagan, and the EPA was already in critical condition.

A senior EPA official and I spent two hours with our distinguished guest. Our meeting began with the official presenting the boilerplate overview of the work he supervised, replete with the usual nonsensical claptrap about priorities, limited resources, deregulation, and so on. But the real embarrassment began when the official tried to explain the purpose of what he called the “policy analysis model,” a phrase designed to trivialize research into the negative consequences of pesticides.

“There’s a continuing need to relate changes in regulatory control by EPA on pesticide matters to changes in user behavior to changes in the health and the environment,” the official said. EPA control options must be evaluated, ultimately, in terms of the “net benefits expected if the options are exercised.”

“To do this, the options must be identified clearly and expressed in operational terms,” the official continued, in typically opaque bureaucratic rhetoric. “The options must be linked to alternative user behaviors and user behaviors linked to a set of definitive changes in the health and the environment. Comprehensive quantitative mea-sures are required to express these changes in terms of both costs and benefits so that net benefits can be derived. The above elements would be integrated into a policy analysis model. Such a model would aid in the examination of alternative policies, strategies, resource allocations, and projected program accomplishments expressed in more distal terms than the present proximal measures of decisions made.”
The same sort of mind-numbing language about “managing” might well have been used by the chemical industry to deflect public (and stockholder) concerns about the effects of its products on human life and our increasingly fragile environment.

While this performance was under way, Professor Pimentel’s eyes would meet mine. He sat there smiling, wondering why he was wasting his time like this and thinking there was no way his research would have any impact on senior EPA people.

I finally got to ask Pimentel what he would have done in our shoes. He said two things could be done that would immediately reduce the threat of pesticides by at least 50 percent. First, pesticides ought to be given only to farmers who had a prescription from their county agent detailing precisely why those chemicals were necessary to treat the farmer’s land. Second, the EPA should ban toxaphene, a DDT-like chemical that for several decades had left a heavy footprint of poisoning and death.

EPA had taken DDT off the market in 1972 and in one way or another had heavily restricted some twelve other major pesticides in the first ten years of the agency’s existence. Now, Pimentel said, the time to ban toxaphene had come. In 1944, something like 250 million pounds of all farm chemicals were sprayed in the United States. Barely forty years later, in the early 1980s, 200 million pounds of toxaphene
alone
was being broadcast on our farms every year.

Like DDT, toxaphene accumulates at high levels in animals and moves readily by winds and rain around the globe. Toxaphene, which looks like amber, is not readily soluble in water, but it mixes nicely with other chemicals; indeed, it is made up of some 177 different chemicals, each of which has its own toxic history. Nearly 70 percent is chlorine, a deadly chemical in its own right. The impact this toxic bomb has on humans is dramatic: it causes leukemia and changes in the structure of human chromosomes, resulting in genetic disease. It damages the nerves and brain of all animals, sterilizes water animals, and has devastating effects on fish and wildlife.

“[T]here is clear and compelling evidence that toxaphene is acutely and chronically toxic to a wide variety of important fish and wildlife species at concentrations to which these species are likely to be exposed when the pesticide is used in several crops at historical or legally permitted levels,” an EPA report said in 1980. “Continued toxaphene use fatally threatens members of endangered species.”
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A great deal of toxaphene migrates to water on the back of soil erosion, polluting streams and rivers and lakes. However, a quarter of what gets into the ground is carried by prevailing winds to the four corners of the earth. For several decades, atmospheric transport moved toxaphene from the cotton fields of the American South to the water and fish of the Great Lakes. Scientists found toxaphene in the atmosphere above the western North Atlantic at a level ten times higher than any other pesticide.

In soil, toxaphene can linger for as long as ten years. In lakes, it has the potential to remain biologically active (that is, deadly) from two years to two centuries. Estimates are that toxaphene will radiate disease and death in Lake Michigan for 104 years and in Lake Superior for 185 years. This is particularly troubling given the web of life it contaminates: fish absorb toxaphene, bigger fish eat smaller fish, and humans and wild animals (such as eagles and bears) eat the bigger fish.
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Indeed, water animals are especially vulnerable to toxaphene poisoning because it bioaccumulates in their tissues at staggering rates. Yearling brook trout, for instance, absorb toxaphene at 4,000 to 16,000 times the water concentration, rainbow trout at 10,000 to 20,000 times, and brook trout fry at 15,000 to 20,000 times. In channel catfish, toxaphene biomagnifies at a factor of 2,000 to 50,000, and fathead minnows collect toxaphene at 3,700 to 69,000 times the water concentration. Oysters absorb into their flesh 146 parts per million of toxaphene from water with only 0.05 parts per million of toxaphene—in just ten days, which is to say, oysters collect toxaphene at nearly 3,000 times the amount of toxaphene found in the water.

Tragically, fish absorption seems to be the only way to “dispose” of toxaphene, which, obviously, is no way at all. In other words, once toxaphene gets into drinking water, there is practically no way to get it out.

Given the Reagan administration’s utter disinterest in industrial regulation, David Pimentel knew he was talking to a blank wall when he told EPA they ought to ban toxaphene. The official said nothing, and our conversation with Pimentel came to an end.

And our toxaphene poisoning continued.

By 1982, close to 7 billion pounds of this poison had been used all over the United States. In 1974 and 1975 alone, more than 200 million pounds of toxaphene reached the land. In 1982, some two hundred merchants sold 200 million pounds of toxaphene through two hundred different products. About 80 percent went to the cotton farmers of the South; some of the remaining poison became a “dip” for millions of cattle. What was left became part of chemical arsenal used on about three hundred crops. This means that toxaphene was contaminating a lot of food, especially fish and meat.
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