Poison Spring (32 page)

Genetically modified crops can also be toxic. Charles Benbrook, a former Capitol Hill staff scientist, has shown that, in the period between 1996 and 2011, the GM crops in the United States increased the use of pesticides by about 7 percent, or 404 million pounds a year. When it comes to nutrition and productivity, genetically modified crops are also no better than conventional crops. They create herbicide-tolerant super weeds. They increase the disease susceptibility of crops, harm soils and ecosystems, and reduce biodiversity. They have not been shown to have a positive impact on hunger or global warming. And—in the end, and as always—genetically modified crops “are not adequately regulated to ensure safety.”
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If the arrival of GMOs is the most insidious development we’ve seen in recent years, it is hardly the only area in which the Obama administration has lost its way. In January 2010, the Center for Biological Diversity complained that Obama’s pesticide policy violated the Endangered Species Act.

“Many endangered species most affected by toxic pesticides are already struggling to cope with habitat loss and rapid climate changes,” one of the scientists at the Center, Jeff Miller, pointed out. For too long, EPA oversight “has been abysmal, allowing the pesticide industry to unleash a virtual plague of toxic chemicals into our environment.”
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In 2011, seventy environmental groups sent a letter to the EPA administrator, Lisa Jackson, in which they pointed out that emerging science tells us that pesticides “have transgenerational effects, so low level exposures today may be transmitted via epigenetic modifications that harm subsequent generations.”
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When little changed, the Center for Biological Diversity sued the EPA, charging failure to safeguard species all over the country. The suit was joined by the Pesticide Action Network, another nonprofit conservation organization.

“Endangered species and biological diversity are strong indicators for the health of the natural-resource base on which we all depend,” Heather Pilatic of the pesticide group wrote. “To the extent that we fail to protect that base we erode the possibility of prosperity for future generations. This suit thus presents a real opportunity for American agriculture: By enforcing the law and counting the real costs of pesticide use, we strengthen the case for supporting a transition towards more sustainable pest-control practices like crop rotations and beneficial insect release.”
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The heart of the matter with endangered species is that there is a law, the Endangered Species Act, that forbids activities harming species already considered threatened and endangered. Pesticides, designed to kill all life, are a great threat and danger to the vulnerable birds and wildlife protected by the Endangered Species Act. So the January 2011 lawsuit against the EPA and administrator Lisa Jackson tried to get the EPA to follow the law and thus slow down the ceaseless poisoning of endangered species by pesticides.

The plaintiffs, the Center for Biological Diversity and the Pesticide Action Network North America, urged the court to order the EPA to reestablish its “consultation” with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and the National Marine Fisheries Service. This cooperation is required by law, and for good reason: after all, EPA reports the effects of the pesticides it has registered on endangered and threatened species. This exchange of information, done correctly and honestly, would ensure that “EPA’s oversight of pesticides does not jeopardize the continued existence of any endangered or threatened species or result in the destruction or adverse modification of designated critical habitat of these species.”
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Predictably, the pesticide lobby went on the offensive to interfere in the lawsuit, Jeff Miller said. Miller launched a campaign to persuade leaders of environmental groups to cosign a letter to EPA in order to show a “united front against the pesticide lobby.” In the letter to Lisa Jackson, the EPA administrator, Miller repeated his complaint that EPA-approved pesticides threaten both the natural world and the American people.
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EPA-approved pesticides are linked to cancer, endocrine disruption, and other serious health effects in humans, particularly children, the elderly, farm families, and farmworkers, Miller said. Emerging science further indicates that low-level exposures may be transmitted via epigenetic modifications that harm subsequent generations.

“Species are dying off at over 1,000 times the normal background rate; pollinators and other indicator species such as frogs are suffering dramatic declines. Not since the dinosaurs disappeared has our planet seen this kind of species collapse,” Miller wrote. “This historic loss of biodiversity and degradation of human health must be viewed as intimately intertwined: species and biodiversity loss undermine the productivity and resilience of the natural resource base on which we all rely.”
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This is not a light charge; indeed, it cuts to the core of the EPA’s mission. Environmental organizations representing millions of Americans have been telling the EPA that Americans care about the natural world. They don’t want the EPA approving pesticides harming more than two hundred “imperiled species.” In addition, the environmentalists say, the EPA also knows that pesticides are threatening hundreds of endangered species, some of which are facing extinction. Pesticides also endanger some of America’s treasured animals such as the Florida panther, killer whale, California condor, gray wolf, red-cockaded woodpecker, bull trout, and Atlantic salmon.
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Yet once again the EPA—perpetually under pressure from pro-industry members of Congress—chose not to act. And still the chorus of anger rose. “Two billion pounds of pesticides are sold in the United States every year, killing millions of animals and driving hundreds of endangered species closer to extinction,” Kieran Suckling, director of the Center for Biological Diversity, wrote in a September 2011 letter to other environmental groups. “The government is doing nothing to stop it. Paralyzed by political pressure from chemical giants Monsanto, Syngenta and a host of lobbying firms, the EPA and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service are pointing fingers at each other instead of taking action. Pesticides kill 72 million birds each year, but are especially dangerous to endangered species that have already been reduced to small, struggling populations. In response to our lawsuit, the agency [EPA] began reviewing impacts on endangered species, and even initiated steps towards banning atrazine. Then the massive chemical lobby stepped in. Republicans in Congress threatened both the EPA and the Fish and Wildlife Service. Now both agencies have stopped doing anything at all for fear of angering the chemical industry.”
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Of course, congressional Republicans continued the GOP’s long-standing effort to neuter the EPA or get rid of it altogether. What better way to serve their corporate masters? Former Speaker Newt Gingrich called for “completely abolishing the Environmental Protection Agency,” the League of Conservation Voters complained in March 2011. “Republican leaders in the House took a big step toward making Gingrich’s plan to eliminate the EPA a reality by slashing funding for environmental and public health safeguards. Their call for a 30 percent cut to the EPA budget—the largest cut in 30 years—would jeopardize the water we drink and air we breathe, endangering the health and well-being of all Americans.”

Indeed, in order to meet the legal requirements of the Clean Air Act—and thus prevent the 7,200 annual deaths, 11,000 emergency room visits, and 38,000 acute instances of asthma—EPA sought a new standard for ozone pollution of 65 parts per billion. This was one of Obama’s EPA’s rare high points. New smog rules would mean “the difference between sickness and health—in some cases, life and death—for hundreds of thousands of citizens,” Lisa Jackson, the EPA’s director, wrote in the
Los Angeles Times
. The link between health and air pollutants—especially neurotoxins like mercury and lead and the danger of soot, nitrogen oxides, and volatile organic poisons—is “irrefutable,” Jackson wrote. She urged Americans to stop Republicans from undermining the EPA and denounced the owners of nearly half of America’s power plants that are still operating without pollution controls such as scrubbers.
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This strategy was nothing new. Electric power companies have been lobbying for decades against public health rules designed to reduce pollution, said Ilan Levin, associate director of the Environmental Integrity Project, a nonprofit organization founded in 2002 by former EPA enforcement lawyers in Washington, D.C.
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As the flap over smog reached a climax, Republicans in the House passed a bill to “scrap” EPA rules. The Republican bill was “a blatant giveaway to polluters that will cost thousands of American lives and hundreds of billions of dollars in preventable health care needs,” Congressman Earl Blumenauer (D-Oregon) responded.
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Despite the urging of advocates inside his own political constituency, Obama buckled. William Daley, Obama’s chief of staff, and Cass Sunstein, his regulatory czar, sided with the polluters. They feared that the economic power of the regulators—and even worse, the backlash from industry and wealthy donors—would harm Obama’s reelection campaign. With this misplaced calculation—indeed, with this betrayal of public trust—Obama’s promise of new smog standards all but disappeared from view.
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The New York Times
opined that the capitulation on smog was evidence of both Obama’s “mediocre” record on environmental enforcement and its all-too-frequent capitulation to the demands of industry. (Two years earlier, the Obama administration—citing worries about terrorism—refused even to reveal the locations of forty-four coal ash dumps containing billions of gallons of toxic sludge. In the same year, Obama torpedoed real progress at the Copenhagen climate conference.)
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There is good reason for industry to fear public scrutiny of power plants, which are responsible for 50 percent of mercury air pollution and 77 percent of acid gas emissions. The EPA claims there are more than sixteen hundred facilities that are “high priority violators” of the Clean Air Act. Some three hundred of these facilities have been violating the law for a decade or more. In 2009, factories reported to EPA that they released into the atmosphere about 600 million pounds of poisons including arsenic, benzene, formaldehyde, and lead.
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In 2011, seeking to lower the amount of carcinogens including mercury, arsenic, chromium, and nickel that power plants dump into the air, the EPA issued the Mercury and Air Toxics Standards (MATS or MACT).

The proposal infuriated Oklahoma Republican senator James Inhofe, a prominent climate change denier and major supporter of the coal, oil, and gas industries. Repeating the usual script, Inhofe claimed the effort to clean up power plants was “specifically designed to kill coal as well as all the good paying jobs that come with it.” Inhofe formed a group of twenty-nine senators—whose names remain secret—determined to repeal the EPA rule and to forbid EPA from issuing additional rules to protect air quality. Senator Inhofe also resisted new rules to regulate soot, the invisible killer particles of smoke, chemicals, and metals coming primarily out of the stacks of factories and diesel trucks. The American Coalition for Clean Coal Electricity, a Washington, D.C., lobbying organization for the coal industry, joined Inhofe in describing the EPA standards as part of an “aggressive regulatory agenda” harming the economy.
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The environmental community saw Inhofe’s proposal as potentially disastrous. The EPA standards would save “tens of thousands of lives and avoid hundreds of thousands of asthma attacks,” said John Walke of the Natural Resources Defense Council. The American Lung Association described Inhofe’s strategy as “extreme,” reporting that the EPA standards protect millions of lives from toxic air poisons such as mercury, which “damages children’s neurological development and intelligence.” The ALA also affirmed that soot levels currently considered “safe” still cause heart attacks, strokes, and asthma and that new soot standards would “prevent more than 35,000 premature deaths and save $280 billion in health-care costs.”
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Unimpressed with the benefits of cleaner air, Senator Inhofe accused Obama’s EPA of “persistently going to the extreme.” His sentiments were echoed by the coal industry, which described the EPA standards as part of an “aggressive regulatory agenda” harming the economy. Once again, as it has for forty years, the EPA was held up as nothing more than an impediment to industrial growth. And once again, it will be our health, and our environmental integrity, that will suffer. Once again, industry and the political establishment they command have played their most reliable hand: if you can intimidate an administration—even one that has promised change—change will never come.
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Conclusion

Better Living and a Healthier Natural  World Through Small Family Farms

In a major report on childhood exposure to toxic chemicals that was released in April 2011, the American Academy of Pediatrics lambasted the country’s “non-evidence-based system for chemical management.” The academy was especially critical of the pathetic Toxic Substances Control Act (TSCA), a pro-industry law that hasn’t been updated since 1976. Using the chemical industry’s own estimate of the massive amounts of chemicals used every year in the United States, the academy raised a red flag over the implications of spreading 27 trillion pounds of petrochemicals on the United States every year. This ocean of synthetics does not even include pesticides, pharmaceuticals, fuels, or chemicals used in food production.