Poison Spring

by E. G. Vallianatos

  “It is nearly impossible to control insects and mite pests on crops by applying the spray insecticide directly to the target pests,” Pimentel has concluded.5 His writing, full of numbers and results of scientific studies, raises important questions: Is industrialized agriculture as benign—or even as effective—as its industrial patrons seem to think? Or is it just a con game, a successor to the nineteenth-century patent medicine hustle? Another way of asking this question: Have we been duped?

  When I came across Pimentel’s early work, I became intrigued. I distributed some of his articles to my EPA colleagues and invited Pimentel to come to the EPA to present his ideas.6 One November morning, Pimentel showed up in my office, a small corner of an immense room in the second floor of Crystal Square #4 in Crystal City, Virginia. This was eight months after the election of Ronald Reagan, and the EPA was already in critical condition.

  A senior EPA official and I spent two hours with our distinguished guest. Our meeting began with the official presenting the boilerplate overview of the work he supervised, replete with the usual nonsensical claptrap about priorities, limited resources, deregulation, and so on. But the real embarrassment began when the official tried to explain the purpose of what he called the “policy analysis model,” a phrase designed to trivialize research into the negative consequences of pesticides.

  “There’s a continuing need to relate changes in regulatory control by EPA on pesticide matters to changes in user behavior to changes in the health and the environment,” the official said. EPA control options must be evaluated, ultimately, in terms of the “net benefits expected if the options are exercised.”

  “To do this, the options must be identified clearly and expressed in operational terms,” the official continued, in typically opaque bureaucratic rhetoric. “The options must be linked to alternative user behaviors and user behaviors linked to a set of definitive changes in the health and the environment. Comprehensive quantitative mea-sures are required to express these changes in terms of both costs and benefits so that net benefits can be derived. The above elements would be integrated into a policy analysis model. Such a model would aid in the examination of alternative policies, strategies, resource allocations, and projected program accomplishments expressed in more distal terms than the present proximal measures of decisions made.” The same sort of mind-numbing language about “managing” might well have been used by the chemical industry to deflect public (and stockholder) concerns about the effects of its products on human life and our increasingly fragile environment.

  While this performance was under way, Professor Pimentel’s eyes would meet mine. He sat there smiling, wondering why he was wasting his time like this and thinking there was no way his research would have any impact on senior EPA people.

  I finally got to ask Pimentel what he would have done in our shoes. He said two things could be done that would immediately reduce the threat of pesticides by at least 50 percent. First, pesticides ought to be given only to farmers who had a prescription from their county agent detailing precisely why those chemicals were necessary to treat the farmer’s land. Second, the EPA should ban toxaphene, a DDT-like chemical that for several decades had left a heavy footprint of poisoning and death.

  EPA had taken DDT off the market in 1972 and in one way or another had heavily restricted some twelve other major pesticides in the first ten years of the agency’s existence. Now, Pimentel said, the time to ban toxaphene had come. In 1944, something like 250 million pounds of all farm chemicals were sprayed in the United States. Barely forty years later, in the early 1980s, 200 million pounds of toxaphene alone was being broadcast on our farms every year.

  Like DDT, toxaphene accumulates at high levels in animals and moves readily by winds and rain around the globe. Toxaphene, which looks like amber, is not readily soluble in water, but it mixes nicely with other chemicals; indeed, it is made up of some 177 different chemicals, each of which has its own toxic history. Nearly 70 percent is chlorine, a deadly chemical in its own right. The impact this toxic bomb has on humans is dramatic: it causes leukemia and changes in the structure of human chromosomes, resulting in genetic disease. It damages the nerves and brain of all animals, sterilizes water animals, and has devastating effects on fish and wildlife.

  “[T]here is clear and compelling evidence that toxaphene is acutely and chronically toxic to a wide variety of important fish and wildlife species at concentrations to which these species are likely to be exposed when the pesticide is used in several crops at historical or legally permitted levels,” an EPA report said in 1980. “Continued toxaphene use fatally threatens members of endangered species.”7

  A great deal of toxaphene migrates to water on the back of soil erosion, polluting streams and rivers and lakes. However, a quarter of what gets into the ground is carried by prevailing winds to the four corners of the earth. For several decades, atmospheric transport moved toxaphene from the cotton fields of the American South to the water and fish of the Great Lakes. Scientists found toxaphene in the atmosphere above the western North Atlantic at a level ten times higher than any other pesticide.

  In soil, toxaphene can linger for as long as ten years. In lakes, it has the potential to remain biologically active (that is, deadly) from two years to two centuries. Estimates are that toxaphene will radiate disease and death in Lake Michigan for 104 years and in Lake Superior for 185 years. This is particularly troubling given the web of life it contaminates: fish absorb toxaphene, bigger fish eat smaller fish, and humans and wild animals (such as eagles and bears) eat the bigger fish.8

  Indeed, water animals are especially vulnerable to toxaphene poisoning because it bioaccumulates in their tissues at staggering rates. Yearling brook trout, for instance, absorb toxaphene at 4,000 to 16,000 times the water concentration, rainbow trout at 10,000 to 20,000 times, and brook trout fry at 15,000 to 20,000 times. In channel catfish, toxaphene biomagnifies at a factor of 2,000 to 50,000, and fathead minnows collect toxaphene at 3,700 to 69,000 times the water concentration. Oysters absorb into their flesh 146 parts per million of toxaphene from water with only 0.05 parts per million of toxaphene—in just ten days, which is to say, oysters collect toxaphene at nearly 3,000 times the amount of toxaphene found in the water.

  Tragically, fish absorption seems to be the only way to “dispose” of toxaphene, which, obviously, is no way at all. In other words, once toxaphene gets into drinking water, there is practically no way to get it out.

  Given the Reagan administration’s utter disinterest in industrial regulation, David Pimentel knew he was talking to a blank wall when he told EPA they ought to ban toxaphene. The official said nothing, and our conversation with Pimentel came to an end.

  And our toxaphene poisoning continued.

  By 1982, close to 7 billion pounds of this poison had been used all over the United States. In 1974 and 1975 alone, more than 200 million pounds of toxaphene reached the land. In 1982, some two hundred merchants sold 200 million pounds of toxaphene through two hundred different products. About 80 percent went to the cotton farmers of the South; some of the remaining poison became a “dip” for millions of cattle. What was left became part of chemical arsenal used on about three hundred crops. This means that toxaphene was contaminating a lot of food, especially fish and meat.9

  Because toxaphene produces thyroid cancer in rats, is widely distributed in the environment, bioaccumulates as it moves through the food chain, and has “specific adverse effects on fish,” toxaphene should be restricted “more stringently” even than DDT, Endrin, Dieldrin, etc.,” wrote John Doull, a professor of pharmacology and toxicology at the University of Kansas Medical School and a former member of the EPA’s Science Advisory Panel.10

  In other words, Doull said in early 1982, the EPA should ban toxaphene, and soon.

  Even with Reagan in power, the slow and insidious toxaphene fallout was simply too much even for the timid scientists of the EPA, who in early 1982 decided to disclose what they knew about toxaphen
e: that the stuff was in the water, food, soil, and air of the entire country, and that the fresh fish and shellfish of entire regions were so contaminated they were unfit for people to eat.

  EPA scientists were also sick of the word games being played by BFC Chemicals, the company in charge of persuading the EPA to adopt ludicrous “options” for regulating toxaphene (including canceling toxaphene use on rice and cranberries, two crops on which toxaphene was virtually never used). BFC’s lawyers asked the EPA’s top pesticides official, Edwin Johnson, to limit regulation to “monitoring” toxaphene. Translation: do nothing. Or, they said, the EPA could limit regulation to changing the label on the pesticide can. This was almost literally the least they could do.

  These requests so infuriated David Severn and Joseph Reinert, two EPA scientists following toxaphene in the environment, that after talking to BFC, they sent a note to Johnson in which they put their cards on the table: BFC’s proposals about toxaphene “would make no useful contribution to our state of knowledge,” Severn wrote.

  “Our concern about the environmental transport of toxaphene is dramatically illustrated by the recently recognized buildup of toxaphene residues in fish in the Great Lakes, even though little or no toxaphene is used in that region,” Severn continued. “In fact, recent data from an isolated landlocked lake on Isle Royale, an island in Lake Superior near the Canadian border whose only known input of water is from the atmosphere, show 3.2 ppm [parts per million] toxaphene in adult lake trout. The toxaphene residues in the Great Lakes almost certainly result from atmospheric transport from the southern states. Toxaphene has been consistently found in rainwater collected along the eastern seaboard, and at levels 10–100 times greater than DDT or PCBs.”

  Severn warned Johnson that merely tinkering with toxaphene regulation—which BFC wanted—would do nothing to reduce the risk to people and nature. “Given the nature of our concern about its atmospheric dispersal throughout the environment, normal risk reduction methods would not be effective,” Severn wrote. “Label restrictions such as requiring application lay-off distances or any type of limiting monitoring effort could not reduce the levels of environmental exposure for this pesticide. Environmental exposure can only be reduced effectively by reducing the amount of toxaphene used.”11

  Severn and Reinert were brave, and they were right. But they were also conventional scientists working within a dysfunctional system. They knew what the political fallout would be when that information became public. They knew that if their suggestions were taken seriously, BFC would lose money, and the implications of that loss would reverberate like a tsunami at the EPA. Congressmen and senators would demand their pound of flesh.

  I talked about toxaphene with Stanley Weissman, the legal adviser to Edwin Johnson. He understood that toxaphene was an American tragedy. But we also saw clearly that Johnson would not dare initiate proceedings against toxaphene, and that it would be futile and dangerous for us to urge him to move in that direction. We knew toxaphene was a political problem that could probably be resolved only in a political context.

  We passed the information about toxaphene to Illinois congressman Sid Yates, who to his credit acted quickly. Yates was the chairman of the appropriations subcommittee for the Department of the Interior and was well informed about environmental issues. As a congressman from Chicago, Yates was concerned about the shore of Lake Michigan, and once he learned about cancer-causing toxaphene and its contamination of the fish in Lake Michigan, he decided he would work to ban the chemical.

  As so often happens in these cases, part of his interest was personal. Yates’s wife had cancer, and in his mind, toxaphene was too close for comfort.

  In August 1982, Sid Yates took his righteous anger with him to the floor of the House of Representatives, arguing for a ban on toxaphene.

  “I am very emotional about this amendment,” Yates said. “The reason I feel emotional is that I have just taken my wife home from the National Cancer Institute, where she has been found to have a malignancy. She and I played golf together up to about three weeks ago. We played on a Sunday afternoon, and the next day she did not feel well. We went into a doctor’s office, and we found that she had this condition.

  “How does this happen?” Yates asked his colleagues in Congress. “How can it happen? Where does cancer come from? It seems to come out of the blue—but we know better than that. We are being subjected to so many cancer-producing influences in our society today—like toxaphene.”

  Toxaphene is used widely in the South as insecticide sprayed on cotton crops, Yates said. “That in itself sounds entirely harmless, but it does not stay in place.” Like DDT, toxaphene has “a very strong life,” Yates said.

  The toxaphene that is sprayed on crops in the Southern States is lifted by the winds and carried for distances of over a thousand miles, to the city of Chicago. Then it is dropped by rainfall onto the city of Chicago, it is dropped on all the communities surrounding the Great Lakes, and it is dropped into the Great Lakes themselves.

  In Lake Michigan, in Lake Superior, whitefish and lake trout have been found to have toxaphene in quantities, according to the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service under official surveys, of 10 parts per million. The accepted maximum level of FDA for this kind of a carcinogenic material is 5 parts per million. So that in the fish that swim in the Great Lakes, a thousand miles away from where this chemical is used, we find this cancer-producing material in the fish. It is in the food chain that is being used by people all over the country.

  This is the reason that I offer this amendment, to stop this chemical warfare. The House took a position against chemical warfare some time ago. This is a chemical that can harm men, women, and children.12

  Yates’s efforts resulted in a congressional action banning toxaphene, a rare moment of regulatory sanity. I never thanked Sid Yates for his courage, but I knew that what Yates did was one of those rare political events unlikely to happen again in my lifetime. He was right that cancer is not a curse of the gods, but a variety of different diseases that can be triggered by toxic substances in the environment, notably those employed in the chemical warfare of agribusiness. And he correctly characterized the sprays of the farmers as agents of chemical warfare.

  It is not as if congressmen and senators do not have access to reliable information about pesticides. They, more than anyone else, have access to thousands of experts working for them in the Congressional Research Service and the Government Accountability Office. The National Academy of Sciences is also at their disposal. Moreover, members of Congress have command of appropriations and the agendas of committees with the power of investigation and oversight of every branch of activity inside and outside the government. Over the last forty years or so, after lengthy investigations, hearings, and research, the serious ecological risks and health hazards of farm sprays—including the deficient system of regulating these poisons—have caught the attention of elected officials including Senators Abraham Ribicoff, Walter Mondale, Philip Hart, Edward Kennedy, Paul Sarbanes, and Al Gore, and Representatives L. H. Fountain, John Moss, Bob Eckhardt, George E. Brown Jr., Sid Yates, Ted Weiss, Mike Synar, and Henry Waxman. Sadly, and repeatedly, their voices have been drowned out by those of politicians doing the work of corporate America.

  Indeed, powerful politicians seldom challenge the chemical corporations that give birth to these toxic sprays. It is as if these companies have a license, granted by EPA, to decide what is going to live and what is going to die.

  A case in point: On September 15, 1983, representatives of Ciba-Geigy, a Swiss corporation and one of the world’s largest pharmaceutical and pesticide manufacturers, told EPA scientists they had a new cotton insecticide, dubbed CGA-112913, that was almost ready for registration. Like the ghastly pesticide Dimilin, this new concoction worked by preventing young insects from forming their lifesaving hard cover known as an exoskeleton. This insecticide, Ciba-Geigy figured, would have to be sprayed on cotton fields at least ten times per growing season.
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  According to Norman Cook, the same EPA ecologist who defended honeybees, the chemical was extremely toxic to aquatic invertebrates in amounts of less than 100 parts per trillion. Equally troubling, the toxin was also extremely persistent in the environment with a half-life of 6.2 years in pond sediments; bluegill sunfish absorb this poison at a rate of more than 100,000 times its concentration in water.

  Cook told Ciba-Geigy to “drop further development of this compound since the results to date show potentially devastating hazards to nontargets” such as beneficial insects and other animals. Cook also alerted other EPA scientists to keep their eyes open for CGA-112913 and similarly dangerous insecticides. “The Dimilin-like and DDT-like qualities of this [Ciba-Geigy] chemical cannot be overemphasized,” he wrote.13

  Despite this history, the EPA approved and registered CGA under the name chlorfluazuron. To say I was astonished by this act would be an understatement. Despite what I had seen, I wanted to believe there was some wisdom left among decision makers in the EPA. I was wrong.

  Make no mistake: the “nontarget” costs of spraying lethal poisons in the environment are often extraordinarily high. In a cotton field, everything but the bugs feeding on cotton is a “nontarget”: that includes not only birds, beneficial insects, other crops, and wildlife but also farmers, farmworkers, and their children. In fact, poisoning of “nontargets” continues to take place in thousands of streams, rivers, forests, and farms when the annual ritual of billions of pounds of toxic sprays hit the shining surface of the water and the green carpet of the land.

  Despite “alarming” evidence that farm poisons get into our soil and disrupt or kill the very microorganisms responsible for making the soil fertile, official agriculture remains silent on this tragedy.