Poison Spring

by E. G. Vallianatos

  Even with this meaningless injunction, which EPA approved on July 2, 1982, Union Carbide left off its list four counties in which Fish and Wildlife had recommended prohibiting aldicarb. In other words, the compromise EPA worked out with Union Carbide was probably illegal. But who was going to complain?

  The EPA was thus entirely responsible for a policy dangerous to an endangered species in order to satisfy Union Carbide and Texas farmers. This story also served as an emblem of the “regulatory relief ” policy sought by Vice President (and Texan) George H. W. Bush.

  Like the potato farmers of Long Island, some 90 percent of rural people in the United States rely solely on groundwater for drinking. Given the broad contamination of our country’s waterways, this means many of these people are in danger of being poisoned.

  In 1983, for example, EPA discovered weed killers in Ohio’s drinking water, including the herbicides atrazine, alachlor, metolachlor, linuron, cyanazine, and simazine. Poisoned water moved from the Sandusky and Maumee Rivers to the finished tap water of the municipal water treatment plants of Tiffin, Fremont, and Bowling Green. These same weed killers are contaminating drinking water almost everywhere in the United States. In 1991, EPA estimated that about 50 million Americans were drinking water potentially contaminated with pesticides.

  By the late 1980s, the EPA had found sixty pesticides in the groundwater of thirty states. This is not surprising, given that in 1988, America used 2.7 billion pounds of pesticides, 75 percent of which went to farms. However, this 2.7 billion pounds (of “active” ingredients alone) is but a small fraction of the total amount of toxic material that makes up pesticides; most toxic material, as noted in chapter 2, EPA classifies as “inerts.”7

  In 1984, the EPA chemist who monitored Ohio waters for pesticides, Padma Datta, spoke to me several times about one popular weed killer, alachlor. Every year between March and July, alachlor gets into the rivers of all corn-growing states, including Ohio, Iowa, Illinois, and Nebraska; between 100 and 200 million pounds of alachlor are used in the United States every year. Yet not only is the compound toxic to fish in the low parts per billion, but it degrades into some twenty metabolites, five of which are carcinogenic. It causes cancer in both rats and mice; at about 126 parts per million, it causes cancer in sites throughout the animal, especially in the brain, liver, and kidney. At just five parts per million, it is responsible for a rare form of cancer of the lining of the nose, Datta said.

  Yet the EPA branch that funded the Iowa and Ohio research failed to inform the Office of Pesticide Programs that it had discovered the poison in drinking water. Why? Datta asked. Did it have anything to do with the fact that alachlor is a $1 billion molecule owned by Monsanto? “Our Hazard Evaluation Division knew about the carcinogenicity of alachlor, so these scientists-managers are embarrassed,” Datta said. “They don’t regulate alachlor because, as they argue, alachlor does not ‘trip any trigger.’ ” (“Trigger” is the term EPA scientists use to express the potential adverse effects of toxins. When a chemical is shown to cause cancer in experimental animals, it is said to “trip the cancer trigger.”)

  Each time Datta’s supervisors met with the corporate owners of these weed killers—Ciba-Geigy or Monsanto—senior EPA officials would send Datta out of town so he never had a chance to ask the corporate polluters any question. He especially resented having to fly to Dallas, Texas, for computer courses while Monsanto representatives lobbied his colleagues in Crystal City.

  Reagan’s EPA administrators kept what they knew close to their chest. They never contemplated banning alachlor, which (since the government typically buys up stocks of banned substances) would have forced them to spend roughly a billion dollars to buy and destroy remaining alachlor stocks. And EPA managers knew, of course, that alachlor was hardly the only herbicide poisoning America’s waters. The corn herbicides atrazine, simazine, and cyanazine are also carcinogens: all three cause mammary tumors in female rats. These toxins kill plants by disrupting photosynthesis, a critical biological process without which there would be no life. So anything disrupting photosynthesis is, by definition, a deadly biological weapon. Yet every year throughout the 1980s, farmers sprayed up to 110 million pounds of these weed killers on their crops.8

  Throughout the 1980s, EPA managers did precious little to warn Americans about their contaminated drinking water. Nor did they take action to prevent the poisoning by banning these biological weapons. In 2009, alachlor was still being found in the drinking water of Ohio and several other states, and in 2011, atrazine was still the king of weed killers all over the country.

  Tyrone Hayes, a professor of biology at the University of California, Berkeley, discovered that doing good science was not enough to convince the EPA to ban the use of highly profitable sprays. Hayes, who had been passionate about protecting wildlife since childhood, became angry when the Swiss company Syngenta, owner of the weed killer atrazine, challenged his discoveries on the deadly effects of atrazine on frogs. Though Syngenta had funded Hayes’s research, they disputed his findings. Hayes stood his ground. Atrazine, like alachlor, was a menace to both wildlife and human health, he wrote. But Hayes ultimately finally understood that simply publishing data was not enough. He began to speak out, putting his articles on the Internet and openly advocating the banning of atrazine.

  American corn producers have been addicted to atrazine since 1958. Europe—including Switzerland, where atrazine is manufactured—has banned it. But American farmers, including three-quarters of corn farmers, still spray more than 80 million pounds per year. Such prolific use has contaminated most water in the United States, including the drinking water of millions of people. Atrazine compromises the immune system of animals, increasing their susceptibility to disease, Hayes writes; as a potent endocrine disruptor, it also sterilizes wildlife. As little as 0.1 parts per billion of atrazine can turn tadpoles into hermaphrodites. “Atrazine induces breast and prostate cancer, retards mammary development, and induces abortion in laboratory rodents,” Hayes writes. “Studies in human populations and cell and tissue studies suggest that atrazine poses similar threats to humans.”

  Atrazine also feminizes males to the degree, Hayes says, that male fish and amphibians produce eggs and egg yolk. “In fish, amphibians, and laboratory rodents, the decrease in testosterone results in decreased sperm counts, impaired fertility, and a reduction in masculine features,” Hayes writes. “Similarly, atrazine exposure is associated with decreased sperm and reduced fertility in humans.”9

  Studies done in the United States since 2009 are confirming Hayes’s discoveries and the warnings of my colleague Padma Datta. Atrazine in drinking water has been shown to cause hormonal changes and menstrual and other reproductive irregularities in women, especially in Illinois and other states in the Midwest. Hormonal changes are sure signs of added risk of illnesses including osteoporosis, diabetes, heart disease, and cancer, and a 2009 study linked atrazine in drinking water to low birth weight in children born in Indiana.10

  In 2011, another global study of twenty-two scientists from North and South America, Europe, and Japan confirmed the deleterious and “gender-bending” effects of atrazine. “It doesn’t matter if you are a fish or frog, a cat or dog, if you are exposed to atrazine, there is a problem,” Hayes, the lead scientist of this study, wrote.11

  As if fertilizers and agricultural sprays were not enough, traces of pharmaceutical drugs are also ubiquitous in America’s drinking water. In 2008, an Associated Press study documented the contamination of the drinking water of 41 million Americans with prescription drugs. Studies have shown that small amounts of drugs disrupt the development of wildlife, feminizing male fish and, in many other inimical ways, damaging the natural world.12

  One of the results of all this poisoning is its effect on the very beginnings of human life. Paul Winchester, a physician and professor of clinical pediatrics at the School of Medicine of the University of Indiana, reported on May 7, 2007, that premature births and birth defects in the U
nited States peak at the very time (from April through July) when farmers spray and fertilize their crops and the residues of those poisons are at their greatest concentrations in the country’s surface water. Another pediatrician at the University of Indiana School of Medicine, James Lemons, warned in 2007 that what we put into the environment can have “pandemic effects,” harming pregnancy and even the development of the infant and child.13

  Pesticides are especially injurious to women because women are uniquely susceptible to persistent, bioaccumulative, hazardous pollutants such as DDT, polychlorinated biphenyls, dioxins, furans, mercury, cadmium, and lead. Very low exposure of a pregnant woman to the 2,3,7,8-dioxin can cause irreversible effects on the sexual differentiation of the fetus. Other reproductive and developmental poisons such as ethylene oxide, carbon monoxide, 1,3-butadiene, and radiation exacerbate the effects of indoor poisons (including radon, tobacco smoke, asbestos, household cleaners, and pesticides) on women.

  Nitrates, a component of agricultural fertilizers, are particularly dangerous to pregnant women and newborns. Yet in 1984, the U.S. Geological Survey discovered hazardous amounts of nitrates in 24 percent of 124,000 water wells. In late 1980s, about half of Iowa’s eight hundred public water supplies were contaminated by pesticides and fertilizers.

  DDT-like pesticides increase the likelihood for birth defects by as much as 450 percent, and they have been linked to cardiovascular disease. Some six thousand cancer cases per year may result from the pesticide residues of two hundred potential carcinogens in food. Something to ponder, given that the United States is suffering from an epidemic of cancer, and that 98 percent of the food is legally sprayed with these two hundred pesticides, many of which are carcinogens.14

  This crisis was inevitable. The United States—and industrial farm states like Iowa, in particular—have been bingeing on farm “nutrients” for a long time; Iowa, for example, is 90 percent plowed under with industrial corn and soybeans.

  Part of the issue is that no one looks at the problems from a broad perspective, such as the overall effect of all these chemicals on crops, the environment, and society at large. Instead, farmers identify a single-level problem—a pest, a fungus—and say, this poison solves this problem. Then, when the pest becomes immune or a new one comes along, there’s always another poison to deploy. There is a tragic lack of holistic thinking in the agricultural establishment.

  The consequences of the industrial scale of agriculture go beyond chemicals, of course. If farmers deplete rivers, they find ways to tap (and then deplete) water from the depths of the earth, as is now happening with the Ogallala Aquifer in the Great Plains. In such a single-minded, convoluted system, one pays attention only to the myriad technical problems of keeping crops and animals alive and multiplying. This eliminates asking complex biological and social questions, much less philosophical ones.

  What happens when our insecticides kill most insects? What are birds supposed to eat? Herbicides kill the microorganisms responsible for the movement of nutrients to the growing crop. What does this do to the nutritional value of the food we eat? The practitioner of one-crop farming does not ask questions like these. The farmer who has become heavily dependent on herbicides does not see the ecological tragedy taking place in his soil. He is oblivious to the dead fish that float to the surface after rains flush his pesticides into the river. He refuses to acknowledge the danger in the poisoned crops he feeds to animals and people (including, inevitably, his own children).

  In 1960, the United States used 7.5 million tons of fertilizers. Twenty-one years later, in 1981, the country’s farmers applied 23.7 million tons of nitrogen, phosphate, and potash. In the years 1960 to 1976, Iowa farmers went from applying a hundred thousand tons of nitrogen fertilizer to more than a million tons. The more fertilizer Iowa farmers put on the land, the more runs off their farms and into the waters they and other Iowans drink.

  The fertilizer loss in the Big Spring basin in northeastern Iowa is about 50 to 75 pounds per acre.15 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.16

  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.17

  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.”1

  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.”2

  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 questio
n:

  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.3

  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.4