A couple of years later, the EPA found pentachlorophenol, an acutely toxic insecticide, fungicide, and wood preservative, in the urine of about 120 million Americans.20
Another study painted a grim picture of the health of the country’s Hispanic population. The Reagan administration had funded the study in order to feign loyalty to the Hispanic community, though Reagan’s environmental agenda had little to do with either public health or the environment. The administration assigned the task to John Todhunter, the EPA’s assistant administrator from 1981 to 1983.
Todhunter had arrived at EPA after serving as an assistant professor of biology at Catholic University. He also served on the board of scientific advisers of the American Council on Science and Health, a front organization for the agrochemical industry. His work at EPA continued his life’s work, which was to fight for the interests of the industry.21
On January 19, 1983, Todhunter signed a memorandum and agreement with the National Center for Health Statistics for a study of the toxic contamination of the country’s Hispanic population. The study cost EPA more than $6 million, seven years of lab work, and fifty person-years of labor. The scientific results were predictable, and deeply troubling: more than 90 percent of the Latinos in the sampling areas had pentachlorophenol in their urine, and nearly all those living in some areas of Texas, New Mexico, Colorado, and Los Angeles had DDE, the cancer-causing form of DDT, in their blood. (Two Hispanics from Los Angeles also had 18 and 33 parts per billion of PCBs in their blood.)22
Up to 80 percent of Hispanics living in San Antonio and Houston, Texas, were poisoned by the nerve toxin dursban (also known as chlorpyrifos), a Dow Chemical product used for termite and corn insect control, and much more. Some 27 percent of the rest of the Hispanic population of the country had dursban in their urine. This compound, known to be “acutely toxic to fish at extremely low levels,” has also been linked to brain abnormalities in the children of exposed mothers. Virginia Rauh, a professor of medicine at Columbia University and head researcher of the 2012 study of chlorpyrifos, reported that mothers who breathe or eat chlorpyrifos can deliver the poison through their blood and across the placenta to their infant’s bloodstream. Five or ten years after chlorpyrifos poisons the infant, “structural changes” take place in the brain, affecting those areas responsible for “attention, language, reward systems, emotions and control.” Nearly twenty years later, the EPA banned chlorpyrifos for residential use. Farmers, however, keep chlorpyrifos in their armory.23
The study of Hispanics only confirmed evidence that minorities and poor people were—and are—exposed to more poisons than affluent whites. “So striking is the association of the pesticide residues with social class that one might predict the occurrence of greater residues of DDT and its metabolites in those diseases which are associated with poverty,” John E. Davies, a physician funded by the EPA, had concluded in a earlier report.24
So, did all this evidence cause major regulatory action at the EPA? Of course not. Once the study’s findings began to sink in, when Reagan’s people could see that the results were bad, they contemplated terminating or abandoning it. Although they “restricted” the use of pentachlorophenol in 1984, they said—and did—nothing about the contamination of so many millions of people with that acutely toxic poison.25
Donald Marlow, an EPA laboratory manager, told me in July 1984 just how upset he was that senior EPA managers did not, in his opinion, have the brains—or the courage—to act on evidence that pentachlorophenol was in the bodies of a large segment of the country’s Hispanic population. He was right: the EPA had enough evidence against pentachlorophenol to ban it. But the “dummies,” he said, “did nothing.”
The Reagan EPA did nothing because that’s what the Reagan EPA always did: nothing. Not long after this, John Todhunter, who had overseen the study, was brought before a congressional panel over his decision to delay—for three years—restrictions on the cancer-causing pesticide ethylene dibromide. This pesticide, which was injected into the ground in citrus groves to kill worms (and used as a fumigant on grain milling equipment), was known to have caused cancer, birth defects, and other disorders in animal studies. It had not only been found in Florida water supplies; EPA scientists had discovered it in bread given to children as part of school lunch programs. One congressman accused Todhunter of buckling to the demands of industry and the Reagan White House; another accused him of destroying his calendar, a practice that may have violated federal law. “What you had was a series of secret meetings which resulted in the reversal of a decision reached on the record,” Jonathan Lash, an attorney with the Natural Resources Defense Council, told The New York Times. “That is not the way the government is supposed to work.”26
Then Todhunter was accused of ordering EPA studies altered to downplay the dangers of formaldehyde. Todhunter was said to have held a private meeting with representatives of the formaldehyde industry (which, not coincidentally, had contributed to the American Council on Science and Health, on whose board Todhunter had once served). After the meetings, Todhunter decided to take no regulatory action on formaldehyde, which has been used for decades to make plywood and particleboard, among many other products.
Once this news broke, Todhunter—like so many other Reagan appointees at EPA—abruptly resigned. Newspapers noted that Todhunter had been accused of “holding private meetings with industry groups before deciding not to regulate formaldehyde as a suspected cancer-causing agent. Also being investigated was his receipt of a $1,664 payment from a former employer after starting work at the EPA. The firm subsequently received a $40,000 no-bid contract from Todhunter’s office.” Todhunter “denied any involvement,” newspaper reports noted.
Five years later, the EPA finally decided to call formaldehyde what it is: a “probable human carcinogen.”27
“To see what has gone wrong inside the Environmental Protection Agency, there is no need to peer through the acrid vapors that stream from its every window,” The New York Times opined during the tenure of Todhunter and Reagan’s other EPA appointees. “Seldom since the Emperor Caligula appointed his horse a consul has there been so wide a gulf between authority and competence.”28
Chapter 12
From Reagan to Bush
Farmers have always sought any advantage they can find to help them grow more food. Sadly, given the regime of intensified agricultural chemicals, this has meant a relentless tide of hazards for both nature and society. In the late 1930s, for example, there were no more than three thousand to four thousand acres of land devoted to rice production in the Missouri Bootheel, which is 4,125 square miles in size. Not much changed in rice growing in Missouri until the early 1970s.
Suddenly, in a single decade, farmers in the Bootheel increased the acreage given to rice production from 5,000 acres to 75,300 acres, a growth of 1,500 percent. Very little idle land survived. By 2005, Missouri rice farmers—and their corporate overseers—ranked sixth in earnings in the country, taking in about $100 million per year. These farmlands are blessed with plenty of water, and the farmers get plenty of government subsidies. But they have also been using massive amounts of weed killer, much of it applied by aerial spraying in the month of June.1
Just to the north of Missouri, Iowa is also almost entirely under cultivation: of its 36 million acres, nearly 34 million are farmed. In 1978, 13.5 million acres of this land was devoted to corn alone. That year, Iowa farmers treated 96 percent of their corn with weed killers, spraying the weed killer 2,4-D on 1.3 million acres of emerging corn. (Recall that 2,4-D made up half of Agent Orange, the weed killer weapon the United States used to burn out the jungles of Vietnam.)
Since 1978, farmers in Iowa (and elsewhere) essentially abandoned traditional mechanical weed removal, going all in for the “no-till” method of intensive spraying of weed killers like 2,4-D before sowing their seed corn. Despite evidence that these poisons end up in our drinking water, chemical companies in the early 1980s taught farmers to spray weed killers and
other chemicals through center-pivot irrigation sprinkler systems, thus worsening an already bad situation.
It wasn’t just the Midwest that was choking on industrial chemicals. In 1983, during the Reagan administration, a long-term EPA study called the Regional Environmental Management Reports documented America’s environmental disaster in frightening detail. Some 65 percent of nearly six hundred industries in Florida, Georgia, South Carolina, North Carolina, Alabama, Mississippi, Tennessee, and Kentucky “were discharging wastes containing substances lethal to aquatic life.”
Wastes, both solid and liquid, were also overwhelming New Jersey, which was running out of clean drinking water; the state had been forced to close 74 public water supply wells since 1971, 90 percent because of contamination by organic and industrial chemicals. Of New Jersey’s 391 legal and illegal landfills, fully 75 were suspected of contaminating groundwater—every year—with seven billion gallons of contaminated “leachate.” On top of this, 356 dumps were annually leaking another 6 billion gallons of contaminants into groundwater supplies. New Jersey’s other problems? More than twenty-five hundred accidental petroleum and chemical spills in 1981 alone; leaking underground storage tanks and pipelines; and decrepit wastewater disposal systems.
Over the next several decades, the EPA reported, of the 750 million gallons a day of groundwater used for drinking water, fully 40 to 50 million gallons a day “will be lost because of pollution.”
New York fared little better in the report. It was hard to find a fish in the state that was not already toxic: fish in Adirondack lakes were contamination with cadmium, lead, and mercury; shad in the Delaware River had elevated arsenic levels; trout in the Finger Lakes were poisoned with DDT and chlordane; fish in Lake Champlain and the Hudson River were blighted with PCBs; blue crabs had high levels of cadmium.2
And on and on it went. The rivers and lakes of the entire country had become a mirror clouded and dark from chemical pollution. Researchers found PCBs and DDT-like chemicals in the Pacific Northwest’s Columbia River sturgeon; the PCBs killed the eggs of the fish and also decimated mink and otter. In all, there were more than fifteen thousand sites in the United States where PCBs were buried or dumped, ceaselessly releasing their poisons into the environment. EPA inspectors may need several hundred years to clean up PCBs from the environment of the Pacific Northwest alone.
Evidence of the country’s widespread contamination by farmers’ chemicals was sobering, but at least the Regional Environmental Management Reports correctly identified a root problem: the nation’s pesticides law was little more than an avenue for legal pollution.
Under the law’s Section 18 “emergency” or “crisis” exemptions, federal agencies and states allow the spraying of untested chemicals. But as I described in chapter 2 with regard to asana, the lethal pyrethroid spray, a great volume of untested poisons (and a great deal of money) can come down to what industry and regulars decide constitutes an “emergency.”3
All too often, what “emergency” means to a company is “whenever we want to test a chemical so we can recover the money we spent on research and development.”
The pitch goes like this. Companies (and their lackeys in state government) come to the EPA with a simple request: “Since existing pesticides seem to be ineffective, this new chemical is the only one left to save the farmers from disaster.” Individual states then ask EPA for a Section 18 exemption, and regulators bow down and do the state’s (and thus the companies’) bidding. The demand for the use of untested poisons typically came primarily from Kentucky, Tennessee, Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia, Florida, South Carolina, and North Carolina. The states of Washington, Oregon, Alaska, and Idaho were also exploiting Section 18 “emergency” exemptions with a vengeance.4
Predictably, the definition of an “emergency” or a “crisis” is left to the industrial farmers and chemical companies themselves. This policy is merely another way the agricultural and chemical industries have found to line their own pockets without interference from the government agencies supposedly overseeing them. Among the biggest beneficiaries of this dangerous practice are domestic and foreign companies such as Shell Chemical Company, Ciba-Geigy, DuPont, Mobay, and Chevron.
With so much money at stake, these companies can be relentless in their lobbying. During the Reagan administration, emergency exemption requests went through the roof, increasing 376 percent from 1978 to 1983. In 1984 alone, EPA approved 770 such requests.5
ICI Americas and FMC Corporation, for example, successfully persuaded farmers and governors of different states to secure EPA’s “emergency” permission for the introduction of their deadly product Ambush (permethrin) 259 times between 1978 and 1982.6
In 1981, my esteemed colleague Adrian Gross urged his EPA bosses to ban permethrin because it caused cancer in experimental animals. Gross showed that a child weighing about 40 pounds who ate a California orange contaminated with a tiny amount of ethylene dibromide (used to fumigate the Mediterranean fruit fly in the summer of 1981) would receive a dosage 50 to 70 times the legal limit.
Gross distributed his findings to several congressional subcommittees on Capitol Hill, and of course he got what was coming to him. Usually reporters showed up after the release of his lengthy memoranda, but nothing more; this time, Gross was stripped of his position as chief of the EPA’s toxicology branch. Since it would have been politically embarrassing for the EPA to fire him, he was simply given an empty room and an empty job, left to rot in comfortable silence.
No doubt companies like ICI Americas and FMC Corporation made a bundle of money when they persuaded EPA to “register” permethrin. Beyond the “registered” sprays, the tons of “emergency” pesticides that rain down on American food constitute a grand experiment on the nature and the people of the United States. At least registered pesticides have come through some kind of scientific scrutiny, however flawed. But when the chemicals are unregistered, we know nothing at all about them.
Given all the evidence against it—including EPA’s own legal team vigorously opposing the emergency ruling—the permethrin debacle became a public scandal. Calling permethrin safe seemed to “fly in the face of the most elementary principles of [the] scientific method,” an infuriated Connecticut Senator Christopher J. Dodd wrote to an EPA administrator. Dodd found the EPA’s decision “alarming.” How was the public supposed to trust its own government “when the very data this conclusion was drawn from appears to have been patched together at best?”7
Dodd’s question goes to the EPA’s core failure: using bad science to mask pro-industry policies. Sadly, Dodd did not follow up, and Congress never seriously contemplated challenging corporate influence over America’s environmental policies. EPA researchers who wrote reports (in 1983 and 1987) on popular, untested pesticides said the agency simply did not have the ability to monitor the use of those chemicals.
The result of all this has been the ever-broadening and intensifying spraying of powerful weed killers, with the usual toxic side effects: chemical runoff into streams, rivers, and groundwater; spray drift hurting humans living near the farms; contaminated gardens, organic farms, and animals; and the crippling and killing of wildlife.
In Montana, North Dakota, Wyoming, Utah, and Colorado, major bird kills were still being caused by DDT and DDT-like chemicals in the 1980s—a decade after DDT had been banned. DDT poisoning of insect-eating birds and waterfowl covered the entire West Coast. Researchers found extremely high levels of DDT in the brain (up to 230 parts per million) as well as in the tissues and eggs of the heron, the whitefaced ibis, and numerous other birds.
In California, the drinking water wells of the San Gabriel Valley were laced with industrial chemicals, trichloroethylene and tetrachloroethylene and carbon tetrachloride, a fumigant used in treating seeds. Nearly a third of the 349 wells bringing drinking water to two dozen community water systems—which served 4.5 million people—had one or more of these potent poisons in them. Also in California, a worm killer called dibrom
ochloropropane (DBCP) was found in more than 750 drinking water wells in the San Joaquin Valley. DBCP made news because it sterilized workers who made it in a factory in Lathrop, California. When I taught for a time at Humboldt State University, one of my students told the class about having to drink DBCP-contaminated water because his family had no other option.8
The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service documented numerous episodes of acute poisoning of birds by farm sprays. In the summer of 1982, hundreds of rare sage grouse died in south central Idaho; so did Canada geese, songbirds, and fish in Yakima, Washington, and geese in Ontario, Oregon. Since the introduction of a nerve poison for the killing of cattle grubs, the population of American magpies declined by about 50 percent.
By 2000, the Fish and Wildlife Service estimated that every year, roughly one in ten birds that come into contact with farm sprays are killed. That’s about 67 million birds.9
The aerial application of mosquito-killing sprays was also sending toxins drifting into lakes and estuaries, especially those of central and southeast Florida and other southern states. Many of the mosquito killers are nerve poisons, toxic to crustaceans, fish, and birds, and DDT-like compounds, crippling or lethal to nearly all wildlife. In addition, both neurotoxic and DDT-like chemicals poison drinking water. Similarly, private and commercial aerial application of pesticides on crops caused “environmental incidents” throughout the country, especially in EPA’s Region V, which includes Illinois, Indiana, Ohio, Wisconsin, Michigan, and Minnesota.
Farmers of these states also “incorporate” granular pesticides into the soil, which means that after rains, huge amounts of poisons end up in streams, rivers, and lakes, contaminating and killing fish and wildlife.
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