Poison Spring (35 page)

Yet Hart’s modest but original study leaves little doubt that the hegemony of the industrial-scale farmer—with his demands for petroleum-based pesticides and fertilizers, his machines, and his huge chunks of land—is becoming toxic to the survival of farming in America. In fact, she found the myth had it backward: the larger the farmer, the more pesticides sprayed on the crops—and therefore the more poisons in our food and drinking water.

Pesticide sprays’ effects against insects and weeds, as I have shown, do little to improve the nation’s agricultural productivity; their effects on the natural world and human health, however, are deadly serious. The chief role of chemicals has to do with politics and money. Chemicals lubricate the relentless production of vast amounts of processed food (and dollars) from very few species of crops and very few species of animals on large factory farms.

Occasionally, this unethical and dangerous system is revealed for what it is, as when industry corruption burst its seams in the 1970s, or when the Reagan administration did everything it could to abolish the EPA in the 1980s. Since those demoralizing moments, the agency has become a toothless tiger, only pretending to fight on behalf of the environment and public health. EPA officials know global chemical and agribusiness industries are manufacturing science. They know their products are dangerous. Yet industry power either corrupts or silences EPA scientists, who are forced then to bury or ignore the truth. Scientists find themselves working in a roomful of funhouse mirrors, plagiarizing industry studies and cutting and pasting the findings of industry studies as their own.

These are the behaviors of a traumatized organization. And these are the reasons why, fifty-two years after
Silent Spring
, farm sprays remain ubiquitous, their makers remain more powerful than ever, and we remain overwhelmed with diseases in humans and imbalances in nature.

President Barack Obama—indeed, any president—needs to take human health and family farming much more seriously. He needs to discard the toxic policies of agribusiness in favor of small-scale agriculture that raises healthful food without injuring humans and wildlife or contributing to climate change. Traditional (and often organic) farmers—until seventy-five years ago, the only farmers there were—are slowly beginning to make a comeback. They have always known how to raise crops and livestock without industrial poisons. They are the seed for a future harvest of good food, a healthy natural world, and democracy in rural America—and the world.

Acknowledgements

T
he story of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency is not very complicated or very long. The difficulty has been in decoding and documenting the corruption behind the scientific facade of the EPA.

I am grateful to my EPA colleagues who passed their stories on to me. Many thanks also to others outside the walls of the EPA for their ideas, encouragement, and friendship: Brent Blackwelder, Jay Feldman, Jefferson Boyer, the late Nikolaos A. Stavrou and the late Congressman George E. Brown, Jr., Dee Lusby, Michael Fox, Nick Maravell, the late Bill Devall, Theo Solomos, the late Rudolph Becking, Barbara Childers, Carol Van Strum, Paul Merrell, the late Al Krebs, the late Michael Warren, the late Robert Metcalf, Mohamed Abou-Donia, Michael Hansen, Timothy Weiskel, Cecilia Gregorio, Jeff Gritzner, David Pimentel, Miguel Altieri, Gary Grant, Fred Wilcox, Nicolaos G. Alexopoulos, Daniel F. Yuhasz, Tony Perreira, John Cobb, Harriett Crosby, Raisa Scriabine, Richard Olson, Richard Hazlett, Don Huber, Ian Panton, and Rosemary Mason.

Gloria Fulton typed the first draft of this book. I thank her for that act of generosity and kindness. Janette Sherman—a physician and research scientist documenting the carcinogenic effects of the nuclear and chemical industry—read part of this book and gave me useful comments. I thank her for her friendship and wisdom. James Wade also read the book and made it better.

I am grateful to my literary agent Jonah Straus, who brought the book to the attention of Peter Ginna, editorial director and publisher of Bloomsbury Press. Ginna asked probing questions that helped me improve the book. He also brought me in touch with McKay Jenkins, who employed his superb writing talent in editing and polishing the text. I also thank Nikki Baldauf, Emily DeHuff, and Rob Galloway of Bloomsbury Press for their meticulous work.

I am very grateful to my wife, Crista. My tenure at the EPA was extremely trying, and the unexpected fallout engulfed her as well. She put up with my anger and anguish. She kept the family together and helped me in the enjoyment of life.

Finally, I thank my children, Mark Andreas and Corinna Lia, as well as the students I taught at Humboldt State University, the American University, George Washington University, the University of New Orleans, Bard College, the University of Maryland and Pitzer College. It is to them—children and students—that I dedicate this book. In addition, I wrote this book in grateful memory of two men, both government bureaucrats, who made a difference: Adrian Gross, my EPA colleague who revealed the systemic corruption of the chemical industry, and William Carl Heinrich Hueper, who fought the good fight at the Department of Health and Human Services in defense of our health.

Young people have to replace the culture of pollution and undemocratic politics of their parents and create a new EPA as part of an Earth-venerating civilization; otherwise the world, and the United States in particular, will have a bleak future—or no future at all.

Notes

Preface: A Country Bathed in Man-Made Chemicals

 
  
1
   Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, and John Jay,
The Federalist
, edited by Benjamin Fletcher Wright (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1961), 451. Paul C. Light, professor of public service at New York University, took Hamilton’s warning (of a government ill executed being a bad government) seriously and wrote a timely and important book about the decline of government in the United States:
A Government Ill Executed: The Decline of the Federal Service and How to Reverse It
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008).

 
  
2
   
Annual Review of Medicine
21 (1970): 409–32.

 
  
3
   Eula Bingham, Marvin S. Legator, and Stephen J. Rinkus, “Women and the Workplace” (Occupational Safety and Health Administration, Department of Health, Education and Welfare, Washington, D.C., June 17–18, 1976).

 
  
4
   Robert U. Ayres and Udo E. Simonis, eds.,
Industrial Metabolism: Restructuring for Sustainable Development
(Tokyo: UN University Press, 1994), p. xii.

 
  
5
   U.S. Department of Agriculture,
Concentration in Agriculture: A Report of the USDA Advisory Committee on Agricultural Concentration
(Washington, DC, June 1996); William Heffernan, “Consolidation in the Food and Agriculture System” (Report to the National Farmers Union, February 5, 1999).

 
  
6
   In 1988, some 14,000 people worked for EPA’s technical staff. This was an impressive team of physicians, toxicologists, and economists. There were also ecologists, chemists, biologists, and plant pathologists, lawyers, engineers, statisticians, and hydrologists. The team in 1988 had a $2.7 billion budget for programs dealing with hazardous waste, water, and air, radiation, pesticides, and other toxic substances. From 2006 to 2010, EPA had around 18,000 employees and a budget of $7.7 billion (in 2006) and $10.3 billion (in 2010). The overwhelming majority of these technical people were stationed in Washington, D.C.

 
  
7
   In 1982, there were thirty companies in charge of the production and sale of pesticides in the United States. These major producers supplied 3,300 formulators who distributed their products to some two million farmers. There were also 100 other producers connected to 29,000 distributors who sold their pesticides to 75 million households and 40,000 pest control companies. All this production and trade relied on the EPA approval of 1,400 chemicals made into some 35,000 products. The production of 1.5 billion pounds of pesticide “active ingredients” in 1982 employed 15,000 people, earning $5.8 billion for the 30 major pesticide corporations. Agriculture used 62 percent of all pesticides; industry and government 24 percent; and 14 percent went to supply homes and gardens. EPA, Office of Pesticide Programs, “Regulatory Impact Evaluation,” September 17, 1982, Figure 1.

 
  
8
   EPA, “EPA’s Toxics Programs: An Unparalleled Task” (Office of Pesticides and Toxic Substances, December 17, 1979).

 
  
9
   William Hueper, “Adventures of a Physician in Occupational Cancer: A Medical Cassandra’s Tale” (unpublished autobiography, 1976, Hueper Papers, National Library of Medicine), pp. 290–91, 300.

 
10
   EPA, Office of Pesticide Programs, “Point Source Pesticide Use Sites,” October 28, 1987.

 
11
   EPA, Office of Pesticide Programs, “Estimated Usage of Pesticides in Homes,” February 7, 1984.

 
12
   Other key elements in America’s toxic universe:

 
         
Pesticides: About 1,850 toxic chemicals; 400 manufacturers; and 4,200 formulators devising more than 34,000 products.

 
         
Air pollutants: 10,000 to 15,000 man-made chemicals in the air, hundreds of which are toxic to life and 50 to 100 of which are carcinogens. Air pollutants come from millions of mobile and tens of thousands of stationary sources.

 
         
Hazardous waste: About 57 million tons every year. There are 353,000 large generators of hazardous waste and 10,000 companies transporting hazardous waste. In 1979, the country also had about 50,000 landfills.

 
         
Water pollutants: About 336,000 industrial plants emitting toxic water pollutants, 129 of which were of “particular concern.”

 
         
Drinking water: There are some 200,000 “non-community” water systems and 60,000 community water systems in America. The potential for the contamination of drinking water is theoretically “as great as [the] number of chemicals in commerce.” Government agencies have detected 700 organic chemicals in drinking water.

 
         
Ocean dumping: Every year about 8 million tons of sewage sludge (in which there are high residual concentrations of toxic chemicals) and industrial waste end up in the 5 ocean sites of this country.

 
13
   Nena Baker,
The Body Toxic: How the Hazardous Chemistry of Everyday Things Threatens Our Health and Well-Being
(New York: North Point Press, 2008)
,
pp. 39–40. See also Katharine Mieszkowski, “Plastic Bags are Killing Us,”
Salon,
August 10, 2007; Elizabeth Royte, “A Fountain on Every Corner,”
New York Times
, May 23, 2008; Athanasios Valavanidis et al., “Persistent Free Radicals, Heavy Metals and PAHs Generated in Particulate Soot Emissions and Residue Ash from Controlled Combustion of Common Types of Plastic.”
Journal of Hazardous Materials
156 (1–3): 277–84 (August 15, 2008).

 
14
   William Lijinsky, “Environmental Cancer Risks—Real and Unreal,”
Environmental Research
50, 207–9 (1989).

 
15
   Samuel S. Epstein, “Losing the War Against Cancer: Who’s to Blame and What to Do About It” (Chevy Chase, MD: Rachel Carson Council, 1987), p. 1.

 
16
   I joined EPA in May 1979. The reasons I initially applied to the EPA were mostly practical. I had worked on Capitol Hill, but the job left me unfulfilled. An EPA employee living in my neighborhood in Alexandria, VA, put me in touch with an EPA office, which hired me immediately. My first assignment was working with a team of scientists seeking information from the owners of pesticides. From that very moment I began to understand how science—and the government—are used mostly to benefit a few giant companies running the chemical industry.

 
17
   I temporarily sought asylum in the academic community. I took up an offer from Allen Jennings, the director of the EPA’s Biological and Economic Analysis Division, to take a year’s leave of absence. Humboldt State University in Northern California became my home for 1988–89. Neither Jennings nor I expected I would come back to the EPA. I went off to California by myself, leaving behind my wife and my two teenage children. Teaching gave me rare moments of happiness that overshadowed all my unhappy experiences at the EPA. I told myself I had to stay on teaching. Finally I had found my calling. I made good friends at the university but soon discovered that my department, which emphasized the teaching of sociology and social work, did not really want a historian on the roster. And my knowledge of environmental policy and its impact on both public health and society seemed of little interest to my colleagues. At the end of the year I returned to the EPA.

 
18
   Citing every document I have seen would be impossible, of course, since citing the entire database of documents would take up an entire archive. I donated most of my papers (about 20 boxes) to the Friends of the Earth in Washington, D.C. FOE has now given the documents to the American Heritage Center of the University of Wyoming. I also donated a few documents to the University of Maryland.