All of this foreknowledge made DDT’s catastrophic impact on our national landscape—Biskind called it “the most intensive campaign of mass poisoning in known human history”—that much more insidious. We knew it was dangerous, yet we kept on using it—for three decades. Only when Carson’s book appeared, and our national symbol, the bald eagle, was on the verge of extinction because of DDT contamination, did we finally acknowledge what scientists had been saying for years.
“Virtually the entire apparatus of communication, lay and scientific alike, has been devoted to denying, concealing, suppressing, [and] distorting the overwhelming evidence,” Biskind wrote. “A new principle of toxicology has, it seems, become firmly entrenched in the literature: no matter how lethal a poison may be for all other forms of animal life, if it doesn’t kill human beings instantly, it is safe. When nevertheless it unmistakably does kill a human, this was the victim’s own fault—either he was ‘allergic’ to it (the uncompensable sin!) or he didn’t use it properly.”2
Biskind was both perceptive and courageous. His message went against the stream well before Carson made the dangers of DDT a national scandal. It’s possible that the timing of his essay—it appeared in 1953, at the height of the Cold War—was less than ideal. The explosion of the atomic bomb gave enormous power to physicists, who design and build nuclear weapons. Suddenly, a kind of “physics envy” descended on the sciences, and the rest of society reorganized its thinking to accommodate the existential questions of death the physicists (and their bombs) opened up. Ironically, such broad anxiety seemed to shift attention away from chemists and their own dangerous concoctions, which also fundamentally altered life. The government’s military imperatives, including the aboveground testing of nuclear weapons and the rapid growth of agribusiness, pushed aside any voices that questioned the wisdom of industrial chemicals. So enamored was the Nobel Prize committee with DDT’s effect on malaria that it awarded Paul Miller of Geigy Chemicals the Nobel Prize in Medicine in 1948.
A decade and a half later, Carson would denounce the hegemony of chemicals as “the sinister and little-recognized partners of radiation in changing the very nature of the world—the very nature of its life.” America’s industrial monoculture farming was already clashing with natural systems of pest control.
“We allow the chemical death rain to fall,” Carson wrote. “The crusade to create a chemically sterile world seems to have engendered a fanatic zeal on the part of many specialists and most of the so-called control agencies. On every hand there is evidence that those engaged in spraying operations exercise a ruthless power.”3
Like Biskind, Carson was astonished at the silence of federal regulators at the USDA. She could already see that political and economic forces were at work, adopting and spreading this new (and profitable) skepticism about toxicology that largely reigns supreme today. “These [pesticide] sprays, dusts, and aerosols,” she wrote, “are now applied almost universally to farms, gardens, forests, and homes—nonselective chemicals that have the power to kill every insect, the ‘good’ and the ‘bad,’ to still the song of birds and the leaping of fish in the streams, to coat the leaves with a deadly film, and to linger on in soil—all this though the intended target may be only a few weeds or insects. Can anyone believe it is possible to lay down such a barrage of poisons on the surface of the earth without making it unfit for all life?”4
Few people since Carson died in 1964 have spoken so openly about that tragic inevitability. Carson was thorough in her absorption of the published scientific literature on pesticides. She looked at the industrialized agriculture of her time and rightly blamed America’s “single-crop farming” as the source of trouble. She said monoculture farming had more in common with engineering than with natural systems. And since engineers were redesigning and plumbing the country to water the developing giant farms, she thought of pesticides as crude weapons like “a cave man’s club . . . hurled against the fabric of life.” She connected this violence with the still-fashionable ambition of modern industry to “control nature.”
That idea—that modern people could dream of controlling the natural world—made Carson very angry. She lambasted such thinking as hubris. This kind of thinking and ambition, Carson said, mirrored a “Neanderthal age of biology and philosophy, when it was supposed nature exists for the convenience of man,” she wrote. “It is our alarming misfortune that so primitive a science has armed itself with the most modern and terrible weapons, and that in turning them against the insects it has also turned them against the earth.”5
Here’s how the DDT story unfolded. In its early days, pesticides seemed to represent a triumph of Western science and technology: both a proven weapon to subdue the “undesirable” aspects of nature and an elixir of cleanliness and even health. “The great expectations held for DDT have been realized,” ran an advertisement in Time magazine in 1947. “Exhaustive scientific tests have shown that, when properly used, DDT kills a host of destructive pests, and is a benefactor of all humanity. Today, everyone can enjoy added comfort, health and safety through the insect-killing powers of DDT products. [DDT] helps to make healthier, more comfortable homes [and] protects your family from dangerous pests. Use DDT powders and spray—then watch the bugs ‘bite the dust.’ ”6
The scientific community, such as it was, mostly lauded the chemical—and issued dire warnings of life without it. “To abandon the use of DDT and other valuable insecticides would subject people to an inadequate and unbalanced diet due to crop loss and disease epidemic far more serious than any we now know,” two Illinois scientists, Rolland K. Cross, state health director, and Harlow R. Mills, chief of the Natural History Survey, wrote in 1951. “We should not be concerned so much with whether DDT or other insecticides should be used, but should concentrate upon using the right insecticide at the right time, in the right place and in the right way.”7
DDT did indeed kill insects—at least for a while. But its damaging effects on the environment and on human health would persist for generations. As Biskind pointed out, DDT did not discriminate. It doomed birds by making the shells of their fertilized eggs so brittle that they cracked under their parents’ weight. Because DDT bioaccumulates as it moves up the food chain, the compound became particularly deleterious to predatory birds, bringing peregrine falcons, ospreys, brown pelicans, and bald eagles to the brink of extinction.
DDT also killed countless insects it had not been designed to target and thus also killed fish and small animals that ate DDT-poisoned fish and bugs. The compound’s legacy is doubly pernicious because it lasts for decades in nature and continues to accumulate in the fat of the animals—and people—at the upper reaches of the food chain.8
By the time the EPA finally banned DDT in 1972, the compound had already widely contaminated staple human foods, especially meat and milk. A year after the ban, a federal judge wrote that he did not know what to do with DDT that had contaminated nearly everything Americans ate.9 “Although the cancer aspects of DDT are frightening, the obvious solution to that problem, that is, a total ban on foods containing DDT, is not available,” he wrote. “Virtually every food contains some DDT. DDT has presented, and apparently will continue to present, a massive dilemma both for EPA and for society.”10 In 1979, two Wildlife Society scientists, Steven G. Herman and John B. Bulger, reported that DDT was still “the most widespread and pernicious of global pollutants.”11 A few years later, Richard Balcomb, an EPA ecologist, wrote that DDT remained toxic to many terrestrial and aquatic animals. “It has been shown to cause acute mortality of birds, bats, fish and invertebrates as well as have profound chronic effects in many species at low exposure levels.”12
What was going on? Why, years after DDT was officially taken off the market, was so much DDT showing up in the bodies of birds and animals?
Part of the story had to do with the chemical industry, which had never forgotten how DDT lost public and legal favor. Even in the 1950s, the industry’s rhetoric was already full of half-truths
, lies, and fear, and it would only become more sophisticated and vitriolic over time. And this growing (not to say ignorant) love affair with chemicals could not help but shape both science and public policy.
Immediately after EPA banned DDT in 1972, Dick Beeler, the editor of Agricultural Age, an industry magazine, accused EPA of mishandling the compound’s cancellation. “The entire process smells badly of farce and fraud,” he said. “The [cancellation] fraud, however, is no worse than the original one perpetrated by the environmental mystics and pseudo scientists who hoodwinked the public and its political medicine men on DDT. Perhaps the greatest fraud of all is the one those same cultists and politicians have pulled on themselves, for the big losers in the DDT battle are the very object of their oft professed affection: the consumer, the common man, the underprivileged and the oppressed.”
Beeler criticized EPA administrator William Ruckelshaus (a Republican appointee) for ignoring “the facts and scientific opinion”; EPA policy, he said, seemed as if it had been written by Rachel Carson, Barry Commoner, and Paul Ehrlich, three influential environmental thinkers.13
Plainly, the chemical industry had already become rife with cunning and contempt: cunning in its pretense of respect for science, and contempt in its attitude toward actual scientific evidence, the rule of law, and the tide of democracy, including the influence of the rising environmental movement. Beeler called environmentalists “mystics,” probably wishing to somehow divorce their argument from science. From Beeler’s funhouse-mirror perspective, an establishment Republican like Ruckelshaus is indistinguishable from a reformer like Rachel Carson, and DDT is the friend of the consumer and the oppressed. It was this sort of colorful (and ludicrous) rhetoric that had shaped the chemical industry’s agenda for years—and scared Carson’s colleagues from taking it on.
Carson herself, of course, was practically burned in effigy by the chemical industry. “Rachel Carson’s candor and innocence brought on her the fury reserved for those who neither connive nor conciliate,” wrote Paul Shepard and Daniel McKinley, professors at Williams College and the State University of New York–Albany. “Her brother biologists, almost to a man, did excellent imitations of people frightened by big money and authority and deserted her before the Establishment which controls the funds that keep scientists fat.”14
Yet even in the face of this rhetoric, some scientists continued to do their work, and they continued to turn up worrisome trends. In May 1983, Robert A. Jantzen, director of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, became worried that many of the EPA-approved pesticides were pushing rare insects, birds, fish, and other animals toward extinction. Many of these poisons were being sprayed on corn.
“It is my biological opinion that the use of certain pesticides on corn is likely to jeopardize the continued existence of the following species and result in the destruction or adverse modification of the critical habitat of the Everglade kite, slackwater darter, valley elderberry longhorn beetle, and Delta green ground beetle,” Jantzen wrote.
The problem, Jantzen said, was that DDT was still showing up in insecticides. One compound, Kelthane, contains as much as 9 percent DDT, Jantzen wrote—an exceedingly dangerous problem given that DDT and its principle metabolites “cause reproductive failure in raptors and certain fish-eating birds.”
Already the peregrine falcon, a beautiful bird and a symbol of predatory grace and freedom, had become extinct in the southwestern United States during the first reign of DDT, and now, nearly a decade after DDT had been banned, the lives of new birds imported to this region were in jeopardy. Jantzen urged the EPA to demand that Kelthane “be manufactured to eliminate the DDT component or a substitute for Kelthane should be used.”
Jantzen also insisted that the EPA prohibit the use of the offending chemical. To avoid jeopardizing the Aleutian Canada goose, he said, the EPA should prohibit the use on corn of nongranular chemicals that are toxic to birds, between the end of August and the middle of May, especially in California’s Central Valley and in Oregon’s Coos, Curry, and Tillamook Counties.
“The widespread use of this chemical was responsible for the total elimination of the peregrine falcon from the eastern half of the United States,” Jantzen wrote. “Since the use of DDT was cancelled in 1972, this situation has improved, and reintroduced peregrines are once again breeding in limited numbers in the East. However, there are strong indications that DDT is currently being introduced into the environment in the southwestern United States.”
Falcon nests that had produced nearly two dozen young in the late 1970s had produced none since; most had been abandoned. Eggs from one nest were found to contain 30 to 51 ppm (parts per million) of DDE (the carcinogenic metabolite of DDT). Eggshells removed from the nests were more than 20 percent thinner than shells from the pre-DDT era.
In 1982, researchers examined the birds typically fed upon by peregrines and found high levels of DDE in everything from mourning doves and red-winged blackbirds to grackles and killdeer. Since the killdeer, red-winged blackbird, and great-tailed grackle are year-round residents of Texas, the scientists concluded the pesticide burdens “were obtained locally.” Because Kelthane was applied not just to corn but a variety of crops, it was clearly accumulating in animals throughout the food chain, Jantzen wrote. More frustrating, even though DDT had been banned for ten years in the United States, American companies were still selling it in Mexico, and “both the peregrine falcon and many of its prey species are known to migrate south of the United States.”
“The most severe problem,” Jantzen continued, “appears to be along the Rio Grande and Pecos river systems in southern New Mexico and western Texas; however, DDT contamination is still present in the American peregrine falcon throughout the West. Therefore we must conclude that the use of Kelthane, or any other pesticide containing high levels (in excess of 1 percent) of a DDT compound, is likely to jeopardize the continued existence of the peregrine falcon.”15
To Jantzen, this was unacceptable, and not merely for the peregrine falcons. The blunt-nosed leopard lizard, for instance, may range over some 640 acres of land for insects. It would be a highly vulnerable victim of DDT. Gray bats travel long distances over land and water hunting insects for feeding their young; they can eat three thousand bugs in a single night. When these insects are contaminated with pesticides, they become poisonous themselves, and Jantzen warned that gray bat “maternity colonies” were especially at risk. By the 1980s, American newspapers were reporting an alarming and unexplained collapse of bat populations, one more result of ignored warnings about pesticides.
Plainly, DDT-contaminated chemicals like Kelthane were extending the poisonous reign of DDT, especially during the Reagan years. In 1983, my colleague Padma Datta asked me a penetrating question: Why, given the EPA’s banning of DDT, had the Reagan EPA registered a dozen products with DDT contamination of up to 20 percent, and why were these products still on the market? Had Rohm and Hass, the main manufacturer of Kelthane and other pesticides contaminated by DDT, managed to influence EPA policy? (A Rohm and Hass representative had also asked Padma to lunch, but Padma had declined.)
For their part, EPA officials must have been aware of the Kelthane-DDE products decimating birds like peregrine falcons. Certainly those same officials knew the chemistry of the related organochlorines, DDT and Kelthane: under certain manufacturing and environmental conditions, Kelthane would become DDE, the carcinogenic isomer of DDT. Thus Kelthane was also used as an inert. And under such deceptive classification, one did not have to worry about the effects.16
On Reagan’s watch, more than a hundred new pesticides had been registered to “protect” corn, which grows across immense swaths of the country (and which forms the centerpiece of a global agricultural empire). The fate of the insects and birds and other animals that understand neither human toxicology nor corporate profit models was left unaddressed.
Over at Fish and Wildlife, Robert Jantzen built his case about the peregrine falcons with meticulous care. The
peregrine was living on borrowed time, given the deadly metamorphoses of DDT into other chemicals (Kelthane becoming DDE, the carcinogenic form of DDT), and given that Mexico—right across a national border that was invisible to falcons—continued to use DDT in large quantities.
EPA officials, of course, knew that Kelthane and other pesticides contained DDT. At the very least, Jantzen said, “the EPA should not tolerate farmers spraying toxins all over the home of an endangered species. Ditto for corn insecticides, which harm a wide variety of protected species, from the whooping crane to the Indiana bat.”
In recent decades, we have been told that DDT and DDT-like pesticides have been removed from the arsenal of the American farmer. But since DDT lasts a long time, this infamous poison can still be found in the food birds eat. And new, equally hazardous materials have replaced DDT. They kill life even when present in fantastically small amounts.
Fifty years after its publication, Silent Spring remains a popular book—and a popular target. Pesticide apologists continue to attack the book, and some global health experts praise DDT for being “the cheapest and most effective long-term malaria fighter we have.”17
Sadly, most Americans remain silent and oblivious to the dangers of industrial pesticides. Carson’s book had a great impact in the 1960s, but our collective memory of her warning is fading fast. Dangerous pesticides are still being sprayed on American crops today, while the EPA, as usual, stands silently by.
Chapter 5
Why Are the Honeybees Disappearing?
On January 19, 2011, I received a troubling note from Harriett Crosby, a Maryland farmer. The bees she was raising on Fox Haven Farm were dying.
“All the bees in all hives have died,” Ms. Crosby wrote. “Silently, billions of bees are dying off all over the country and our entire food chain is in danger.”1
What Ms. Crosby had witnessed on her own farm, a calamity repeated all over the country, was tragic. In the United States alone, bees produce more than 200 million pounds of honey a year, but this is only the most visible thing they contribute to human livelihood.
Poison Spring Page 10