Poison Spring (7 page)

Pickett’s prophetic words remain buried in the pages of a technical journal. Other scientists, however, continue to offer their own critiques of our country’s love affair with poisons.

In his book
Pesticides and Politics
, Christopher Bosso described the 1950s as “the golden age of pesticides.” I would never use “golden” to describe the period that gave rise to the pesticide industry. But such language does speak, perversely, to a time when America became infatuated—and then saturated—with the very poisons that made the work of industrial agribusiness possible.

For farm communities hooked on such destructive practices, the economic picture was just as dismal as their spraying habit. Some pesticides failed to work; others worked so well that they killed the crop along with everything else around the crop. Sometimes pesticides eliminate “pests,” but most often they just disfigure natural cycles, giving rise to other pests.

This fact was well known even before the EPA came into existence. In Mexico, the national cotton industry failed after farmers concluded the only way to battle pests was to spray “broad-spectrum insecticides.” What happened? The tobacco budworm became resistant to all available insecticides, and the cotton industry collapsed.
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Pesticide use is also causing agricultural systems to fail in the United States. Decades of pesticide abuse by potato farmers created storms of insects that devoured the potatoes—and far beyond the state that gave the bug its name. “The future for chemical control of the Colorado potato beetle on Long Island is not encouraging based on experiences of the past,” wrote Maurie Semel of the Long Island Horticultural Research Laboratory in Riverhead, New York.
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Farmers, however, ignored these warnings, listening instead to the tireless chemical salesmen. They just sprayed and sprayed, and the companies that made the sprays became richer and more powerful. Inevitably, the power of these chemical industries reached straight into the halls of legislators—and the regulatory agencies they controlled.
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The chief enabling agents in this “golden age” were Congress— especially the agriculture appropriations subcommittee headed by Mississippi congressman Jamie Whitten—and the USDA, the mammoth federal establishment that both embraced and promoted industrial agriculture and the chemical industry on which it came to depend.

At its inception in 1970, the EPA inherited about 80 percent of its scientists from the USDA, which had long since been abandoned any pretense of controlling agricultural pesticides. The EPA scientists arrived at their new agency already fully indoctrinated into a culture comfortable doing the bidding of industry. The tradition of treating pesticides with reverence moved smoothly—lock, stock, and barrel—from USDA to EPA. In the 1970s and 1980s, the EPA approved between 450 and 500 new pesticides, nearly half of the total sprays licensed in the United States in the last century.

Despite discovering—throughout the 1970s—that many pesticides had won approval on the basis of fraud, deception, and bad science, the EPA dismantled ten of its research laboratories. This was a catastrophe. Like libraries, labs are the eyes of the responsible regulator. To say the least, the more power industry grabs, the more important oversight labs become in making sure the products industry is churning out are not harmful to the public. Independent lab tests tell you what chemicals end up in the soil, in harvested food, or in drinking water. Industry knows this, of course. They also know that the fewer the labs, the more they can get away with.

All but a very few EPA labs were closed in the late 1970s and 1980s, a natural outgrowth of a government that had no interest in speaking the truth about poisons.

By the early 1970s, it was becoming clear that corporate greed had fully corrupted pesticide science and the policy that emerged from it. Although pesticides were first formulated in the nineteenth century, in recent years they had evolved into compounds having “spectacular toxicity,” wrote two University of California scientists, R. L. Doutt and Ray F. Smith. These new toxins “proliferated enormously. They spread over the entire globe. They are characteristic of our time and have confronted us with another environmental crisis, outstanding in terms of massiveness, extensiveness and rate of change.”

“There is probably not a single square centimeter of the earth’s surface that has not felt the impact of man,” Doutt and Smith wrote. “The astounding advances of modern science and technology have put these powerful chemical weapons into the bristling arsenal of all pest control practitioners. The pesticide salesman has no natural enemy in the agribusiness jungle.”
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Political support for Big Agriculture and Big Chemical made the explosive growth of pesticides inevitable—so much so that Bosso spoke of a “pesticides subgovernment” operating independently of the federal government as a whole. The political rhetoric used to press chemicals on the American public sounds familiar to contemporary ears: new technologies made a war on pests possible, Bosso wrote; national security made it “imperative.”
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The image of a pesticide industry working in the shadow of the federal government did not go entirely unnoticed. The use of farm sprays in the United States is nothing but “a massive pesticide orgy in which expenditure, waste, and pollution spiral while pest-control efficiency dwindles,” according to Robert van den Bosch, a distinguished biology professor at the University of California, Berkeley, and an astute observer of the pest control business. Van den Bosch had particularly harsh things to say about the collusion between chemical companies and the scientists and administrators of land grant universities, whom he compared to a pro-pesticide “mafia.”

This culture “has its
famiglie
, its
capi
, its
consiglieri
, its
soldati
, its
avvocati
, its lobbyists, its front organizations, its PR apparatus, and its ‘hit men,’ ” Van den Bosch wrote. “It owns politicians, bureaucrats, researchers, county agents, administrators, and elements of the media, and it can break those who don’t conform.”
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Paul Ehrlich, an eminent professor of biological sciences at Stanford University, considers pesticides “an ideal product”—like heroin. “They promise paradise and deliver addiction,” Ehrlich wrote. “And dope and pesticide peddlers both have only one cure for addiction: use more and more of the product at whatever cost in dollars and human suffering (and in the case of pesticides, in environmental degradation).”
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The drug addiction metaphor fits well. Like drug abusers, industrial farmers “go to higher and more frequent dosages, and they are not reluctant to use more persistent and more toxic materials,” wrote S. E. McGregor, an expert on bee pollination at the USDA. “There is great pressure upon the grower by the chemical companies to use insecticides to excess, and even upon State officials not to discourage such usage. Insecticides are like the dope drugs. The more they are used the more powerful the next one must be to give satisfaction—and therein develops the spiraling effect, the pesticide treadmill. The chemical salesman, in pressuring the grower to use his product, practically assumes the role of the ‘dope pusher.’ Once the victim, the grower, is ‘hooked’ he becomes a steady and an ever-increasing user.”
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In the 1970s, one place you could find an “agribusiness jungle” was Hawaii, a state where three large corporations were able to exempt themselves from one of the EPA’s rare regulatory successes. In the 1970s the EPA got rid of heptachlor, a DDT-like pesticide that had caused enormous ecological harm and had possibly caused cancer in humans. But the Velsicol Corporation, which produced the spray, and the Dole and Del Monte companies, which owned the sprawling pineapple farms of Hawaii and used heptachlor liberally, convinced the EPA that banning this poison would hurt their business, and the EPA allowed them to continue selling and spraying heptachlor for years.

The results were predictable. By 1982, heptachlor was turning up in unexpected places, such as milk. Why? Because pineapple growers had chopped up the heptachlor-loaded leaves of the pineapple plant and fed them to the island’s dairy cows. This so angered Senator Daniel K. Inouye that he sent a letter to John Tolan, vice president of the Pineapple Growers Association of Hawaii, excoriating both the industry and the EPA, which was supposedly in charge of monitoring it.

“The pesticide contamination problem in Hawaii is much bigger than most of the public currently imagines,” Inouye wrote. “The EPA has been ineffective in enforcing its regulations governing the use of pesticides in Hawaii, and widespread abuse of pesticides continues—both in use and application.”

Pineapple growers were notorious for ignoring the state law that required they wait a full year before selling fruit sprayed with heptachlor. But it wasn’t just the pineapple industry, Inouye said. The sugar industry was using heptachlor in its cane fields, and workers were regularly seen spraying pesticides from the back of trucks without wearing any of the required protective gear. “State enforcement and testing procedures are notoriously lax, and if people really started looking for pesticides in Hawaii’s environment, they would find them in alarming quantities,” Inouye said.

I don’t know how the pineapple farmers of Hawaii responded to Inouye’s criticism, but the EPA ignored it. The agency’s own researchers in Hawaii had been documenting the terrible ecological and health effects of plantation agriculture for decades, and nothing Inouye said surprised them. If anything, Inouye barely scratched the surface of pesticide abuse in Hawaii—or throughout the rest of the country.

As cogs in this system, farmers are often too close to the pesticide merchants to see them for what they are. They rely on them, and they find it difficult to acknowledge that pesticides might be damaging their crops. In 1974, an EPA study found that when farmers needed information about sprays or pest problems, as many as half rushed to their chemical dealers, who give them expensive and plentiful prescriptions, disregarding other, less harmful alternatives. The result? Chemical sprays reduced the yield of crops.

A decade later, farmers were still putting themselves at the mercy of the chemical salesmen to answer their questions and solve their technical problems. Chemical salesmen rewarded farmers with food, taking them out to dine at least three times a year to keep the taste of wine and prime rib fresh in their mind for the next growing season. In Iowa, farmers came to love these feasts, and more than 75 percent of them relied on their neighborhood chemical merchants for agricultural advice. In Georgia, where, as of 1980, only 33 percent of the farmers were more than fifty-five years old, 75 percent of the farmers rushed to their USDA county agent with their questions about agricultural practice.
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Although they were public employees, county extension agents were even more docile than the EPA in doing the bidding of the chemical industry; county agents resented the little that the EPA occasionally did to guide farmers to protect the environment. About half of the farmers of Georgia were small farmers, though they spent a fortune, in aggregate, for the chemicals they put on and in the land.

Robert Metcalf was another scientist all too aware of the cozy relations between government, academia, pesticide companies, and the industrial-sized plantations of corn or soybeans. A University of Illinois professor, Metcalf was a genius of his times: he had been active in the 1940s and 1950s when the country accelerated its attempt to control nature. And his knowledge of the pesticide industry was personal: he had invented the compounds known as carbamates, which were less toxic than the widely distributed organophosphates. When the University of California, Riverside, refused to patent his invention, American Cyanamid made a fortune on it.

Metcalf also had a hand in the development of pesticide synergists like piperonyl butoxide, which increased the toxicity of pesticides. But after witnessing the abuse of his discoveries—and seeing the general misuse of pesticides—Metcalf became a fierce critic of the agribusiness-pesticide complex. He developed methods for detecting pesticide residues in food, and he began advocating for biological control of insects. Metcalf could see the dangers of monoculture farming that requires farmers, for instance, to spend a billion dollars a year just to spray for corn rootworms. Those farmers probably knew—and should have known—that rootworm damage can be prevented simply by rotating crops, but with the urging of the marketers of chemical sprays, they adopted this dangerous practice.
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In the late 1960s, Metcalf assisted in the government’s greatest assessment of the risks of pesticides, a somber study that claimed that pesticides, like other chemicals, had become so intertwined in American agriculture that “we must learn to live with them.” However, the report also warned about the potential dangers of these sprays and recommended regulating them promptly to safeguard future generations. Even though science is constantly evolving—each generation may prove a previous generation’s conclusions incomplete or even wrong—scientists should always come to the aid of policymakers trying to make the right decisions about pesticides.

“Safety evaluation is an edifice whose construction is never completed; nor does it remain functional without periodic reconstruction,” the study reported. “All that the public has a right to expect is that regulatory decisions should be the products of scientific competence and experience, mature judgment and full possession of all existing data.”
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