Poison Spring
Page 22
The residents of Scottsdale, Arizona, learned this the hard way. People exposed to drifting pesticides suffer effects that are “diverse, intense, disabling, and distressing,” wrote Stanley H. Schuman, a professor of epidemiology at the Medical University of South Carolina, who studied this dilemma on behalf of the EPA in 1979.
“There is considerable mental stress and distress associated with belonging to some as yet undefined percentage of the population in a neighborhood or a community [hit by chemical drift],” Schumann wrote. “In addition to experiencing bouts of illness associated with repeated pesticide exposure, [the people of that neighborhood] suffer various forms of antipathy and intolerance. Whereas others may be annoyed or irritated by odors, eye irritation, and respiratory discomfort, these people are functionally disabled. Such a person finds one’s self placed on the defensive with little medical or social support.”
Very little has changed with pesticide drift in the last thirty-five years; if anything, the situation has gotten worse. In the Central Valley of California, a woman named Teresa Avina complained in 2008 that she got sick from the drifting pesticides every day and that drifting pesticides were responsible for the miscarriages and cancer afflicting her neighbors in the town of Huron, located at the center of San Joaquin Valley.10
In 2012, in rural Minnesota, spray poisons put people at risk throughout the growing season. Pesticides drift invisibly from the agricultural fields to residential areas, contaminating their air, water, and food. Rural Minnesotans say they endure “heavy dousings of agricultural pesticides.”11
Drifting pesticides also damage wildlife. Pesticides from California’s Central Valley, for instance, travel fifty to a hundred miles to the Sierra Nevada mountains, where they poison frogs, threatening these sensitive animals with extinction.12
If anything, the pesticide industry had simply—once again—rebranded itself, appropriating the vocabulary of ecology but remaining as ruthless as ever in its defense of toxins. Pesticide companies formed a group with the Orwellian name CropLife America, but the group continues to insist that endangered species are not endangered, that spray drift is not a problem, and that EPA is nothing but a hindrance to business.13
All of this jibed perfectly with the philosophy of the administration of President George W. Bush, which came to power in 2001. President Bush made it clear early on that federal regulators would continue to turn a blind eye to industrial pollution. It could not have been otherwise. In the grand tradition of Washington politics, many in Bush administration “regulatory” agencies had made a great deal of their money in the very polluting industries they were now charged with overseeing.
Bush’s opening gambit was handing the EPA to Christine Todd Whitman, the personable former governor of New Jersey. Whitman was a reliable Republican; while in New Jersey (one of the most polluted states in the country), she had cut the staff and budget of the state’s Department of Environmental Protection (DEP). Evaluating her environmental stewardship, a coalition of environmental groups gave her a C minus.
PEER, the Washington-based Professional Employees for Environmental Responsibility, judged Whitman just as harshly. In a 1997 survey of the employees of New Jersey’s DEP, the group’s director said that Whitman fully supported “corporate violators” of the law and applied “pressure to block enforcement of anti-pollution laws, [and] back-door efforts to gut regulations.”14
With Whitman at the head of the EPA, pro-industry Republicans in charge of Congress through 2006, and the courts packed with environmental regulation skeptics, the state of American environmental protection under Bush fell to levels I had not seen since the days of Reagan. The Bush administration gave away millions of acres of public lands to oil and timber industries for drilling and logging; the Endangered Species Act almost became extinct; Yellowstone and Grand Teton National Parks were opened to sixty thousand snowmobiles; and some two thousand miles of streams in the Appalachian mountains became choked with mining waste.
The Bush administration also stopped enforcing environmental laws, and Republicans—and not a few Democrats—shamelessly defended those breaking these laws. In early 2002, after twelve years of service, Eric Schaeffer resigned as director of the EPA’s Office of Regulatory Enforcement because of the dirty politics being played between the White House, the Energy Department, and energy companies. “Congressmen have become de facto lobbyists for home state polluters,” Schaeffer said.
The White House had paralyzed the EPA and worked hard to weaken the federal Clean Air Act, Schaeffer told Whitman in his resignation letter. Nine power companies, for example, had expanded their plants without upgrading their pollution controls, which clean air laws required. When the EPA filed suit against these companies, the White House undermined EPA’s determination to bring those corporate criminals to justice. In addition to emitting 2 million tons of the powerfully damaging greenhouse gas nitrogen oxide, the companies “emitted an incredible 5 million tons of sulfur dioxide every year (a quarter of the emissions in the entire country),” Schaeffer wrote.
These coal plants’ 7 million tons of sulfur dioxide and nitrogen oxide caused more than 10,800 premature deaths, at least 5,400 incidents of chronic bronchitis, more than 5,100 hospital emergency visits, and over 1.5 million lost workdays, Schaeffer wrote. To this toll could be added “severe damage to our natural resources, as acid rain attacks soils and plants and deposits nitrogen in the Chesapeake Bay and other critical bodies of water.”15
Needless to say, the energy barons running the Bush administration—especially Vice President Dick Cheney, the former head of energy services giant Halliburton—were undeterred. Their tactics, borrowed from the Reagan playbook, involved public deception, intimidating the EPA staff, and weakening or scrapping the law for the benefit of their friends in industry. The EPA could hardly be said to be “working in the public interest,” Schaeffer wrote in The Washington Monthly soon after leaving the agency.16
In the spring of 2006, the presidents of unions representing about nine thousand EPA scientists and other professionals appealed to the EPA administrator to curtail the immense volume of organophosphate pesticides getting into the nation’s food supply—especially since infants and children are so vulnerable to those poisons. The union presidents did not demand that the nerve toxins be banned entirely; they merely appealed for stricter regulation. Industrial muscle, they said, had blinded the EPA to its moral responsibility to protect the public’s health.
In early August, the Bush administration rejected this argument and extended the government’s approval for most of those chemicals, choosing once again to side with industry over the country’s health.
As it had under Reagan, the EPA started to crumble. A new “disinvestment” mandate required that EPA reduce or eliminate its own research libraries and laboratories and shrink the number of scientists serving the agency. That way corporations would be even freer to pollute. Without research libraries, EPA would be blind, incapable of knowing who did what when. These libraries were stocked with tens of thousands of scientific studies and government documents—all relating to issues of public health and environmental protection. The EPA ordered the contractors running its libraries to trash entire document collections, delink documents from websites, and auction off library furniture and bookcases. In short, the Bush managers of EPA pillaged the nation’s information resources on public health and the environment.
The Bush administration also targeted EPA’s laboratories, knowing full well that without its labs, the EPA would become impotent.17
The long-term consequences of this sort of environmental “management” were predictable, and dire.
In 2004, the Center for Biological Diversity, a nonprofit scientific organization based in San Francisco, concluded that the Bush EPA’s ties to the agrochemical industry had led to the widespread pesticide contamination of the country’s waterways.
“Pesticides are contaminating our air and water while the EPA fails to adequately regula
te their use to protect our environment,” the Center reported. “Amphibians are a barometer of environmental health—adverse impacts to amphibians are a sign that our ecosystems are under stress. The EPA’s attempt to ignore the documented and disturbing impacts of pesticides to amphibians by dismissing the science will not alleviate this systemic problem.”
These problems were not limited to wildlife, the report confirmed. Neurological and sexual developmental dysfunction also affected humans, especially children. Infertile women were “27 times more likely to have mixed or applied herbicides in the two years prior to attempting conception than women who were fertile. Farmers, manufacturers and applicators of pesticides have an increased risk of certain types of malignancies, especially lip, prostate, or testicular cancer, lymphoma, leukemia, brain tumors, pancreatic cancer, sarcoma and multiple myeloma.”
Bush’s EPA consistently appeared to work more vigorously for agrochemical industries than for human or environmental health, the report concluded; indeed, much of the data supporting pesticide permits was “compiled by the registrants themselves. The EPA often dismisses environmental concerns in the face of hard science, and steadfastly refuses to adopt any mandatory measures to limit pesticide use.”18
For example, rodenticides, used by farmers and nonfarmers alike to poison mice and rats, were decimating California’s raptors. Predatory birds including eagles, hawks, falcons, owls, and vultures were eating many of these poisoned mice and rats, causing a “secondary poisoning.”
Beginning in 2003, public reaction to the death of predatory birds finally forced Bush’s EPA to begin restricting these poisons, a policy that formally took effect in 2011. Yet despite eight years of public outrage and (reluctant) federal restrictions, three chemical companies, Reckitt Benckiser, Spectrum, and Liphatech, simply refused to comply. EPA regulators claimed to be “shocked” that the companies were “thumbing their noses at them.”19
Chapter 13
The Obama Administration: Yes, We Can?
On the eve of the 2012 elections, the EPA administrator, Lisa Jackson, started an offensive to try to prove that her boss, Barack Obama, cared about public health. On October 21, 2011, she denounced Republicans for delaying the implementation of smog rules. She also said it was necessary to clean up pollution from power plants.
Two months later, I received an email bulletin from Stephanie Cutter, a former EPA employee who in 2011–2012 served as a deputy campaign manager for President Obama’s reelection campaign. “Today, President Obama announced a once-in-a-generation step forward for the environment and public health—the first-ever national standards for mercury, arsenic, and other toxic air pollution from power plants,” Cutter wrote. “This new rule has been 20 years in the making, but couldn’t have come a moment sooner.”
For far too long, Cutter wrote, out-of-date power plants “have polluted our air with toxins like mercury and arsenic: nasty stuff that causes everything from cancer, heart attacks, and neurological damage.” She placed the blame for this squarely on the shoulders of Republicans, who, she said, have been “fighting us tooth and nail to block new environmental protections like this one, while their industry allies have poured millions into rolling back time-tested safeguards already in place.”
Cutter was right: the time had come to do something about the “nasty stuff ” of mercury and arsenic poisoning millions of Americans, giving them cancer and neurological diseases. But when it comes to environmental protection, Obama was still asleep at the wheel. Why did his administration wait three years to point out the clear and documented dangers of unregulated power plants?
It was true that Republicans in Congress and the Republican candidates for president (and eventually their nominee, Mitt Romney) were unified against regulating industrial pollution. But from the vantage point of my twenty-five years of experience within the EPA, I can state unequivocally that both Democrats and Republicans fight tooth and nail to block anything like real environmental protection. That is the reason it has taken twenty years to broadcast the word that arsenic, mercury, chromium, nickel, and acid gases are bad for our children. In fact, the EPA had known for more than twenty years that half the country’s twelve hundred coal- and oil-fired electricity plants did not use modern pollution controls. EPA had also known that breathing the air the factories emit causes cancer and other deadly diseases.1
After the doom and gloom accumulated over eight years of the George W. Bush administration, things appeared to change with Obama’s election in November 2008. Obama pledged to discard Bush’s environmental policies, and environmentalists breathed a sigh of relief.
“Because of the widespread and unnecessary use of over 5 billion total pounds of pesticides a year, hazardous chemicals invade our lives through the contamination and poisoning of our bodies, air, land, water, food and the built environment,” read a letter to Obama signed by 102 environmental organizations early in the new president’s tenure. “We humans share with other inhabitants of this ecosystem immensely elevated toxic body burdens, and excessive rates of environmentally-induced illnesses, such as cancer, infertility and reproductive problems; immune, hormonal and nervous system disease; respiratory illness and asthma; and learning disabilities and autism.”
Administrative practices and leadership are urgently needed, the letter continued, to reverse decisions that have compromised America’s public health and environment and to “change a regulatory culture that accepts unnecessary harm [and] the politicization of science, all of which have resulted in wholly inadequate protection of public health and the environment. Priority must be given to reversing and correcting the blatant disregard for law that has been incorporated into regulatory decisions. And most importantly, leadership is needed to direct federal agencies to prioritize the development of safer, clean, healthy and viable systems that sustain our health, air, land, water, food and the built environment.”2
Unfortunately, President Obama had other priorities that did not include environmental integrity or the protection of public health. Bush had caused so much economic damage that the country teetered on the verge of economic collapse; when Obama stepped into the breach, he rushed for advice to Wall Street. His first chief of staff, Rahm Emanuel, had made $18.5 million in less than three years at a Wall Street bank. Emanuel’s successor, William M. Daley, was the son and brother of powerful Chicago mayors and had worked for JPMorgan Chase. Daley was succeeded in early 2012 by Jack Lew, the former director of the Office of Management and Budget; Lew once worked for Citigroup. With such powerful Wall Street voices whispering in his ear day after day, it’s no surprise that Obama left environmental protection and public health entirely out in the cold.3
At least as influential as the bankers were the voices from industrial agriculture. Among the people Obama appointed to important regulatory positions were Carol Browner, Bill Clinton’s EPA administrator and now Obama’s senior adviser on energy and the environment; Tom Vilsack, agriculture secretary; Roger Beachy, director of the National Institute of Food and Agriculture; Michael Taylor, the FDA’s senior adviser on food safety; and Islam Siddiqui, the agricultural negotiator in the office of the U.S. Trade Representative.4
What bound these officials together was their bias toward agribusiness and their commitment to the genetic engineering of food—in other words, they shared Monsanto’s view of the world. Sure enough, in the spring of 2013, Obama signed what critics called the Monsanto Protection Act, which protects companies from being sued if their genetically modified seeds lead to health problems. Food safety groups like Food Democracy Now collected more than a quarter million signatures on a petition calling for the president to veto the bill; they argued that not enough is known about the possible health risks of genetically modified seeds. Eliminating the public’s ability to halt the selling or planting of these seeds, the groups said, was removing the one sure way of checking this hugely profitable but potentially dangerous forced march toward the genetic engineering of our food.5
; We knew this was Bush’s view, of course: State Department cables reveal that the Bush administration threatened the European Union with sanctions unless EU governments allowed the planting of Monsanto’s genetically modified seeds in Europe.6 But the phalanx of Monsanto men and women working for Obama simply confirms that it does not really matter who presides over the White House or Congress. Corporations rule the kingdom. While still serving as Obama’s solicitor general, Elena Kagan wrote a brief requesting the Supreme Court to lift a ruling by an appeals court forbidding the planting in California of Monsanto’s genetically engineered Roundup Ready alfalfa. In August 2010, Kagan was confirmed as a Supreme Court justice. She sits beside Justice Clarence Thomas, who once worked as a lawyer for Monsanto.7
Indeed, when it comes to genetic engineering, “the Obama administration has not been better than the Bush administration, possibly worse,” wrote Jeffrey Smith, an expert on the health effects of bioengineered food. The triumph of Monsanto within the government is bad for our health and bad for the environment. Let me explain further by introducing Don Huber.
Don Huber knows a lot about biological weapons, and he knows a lot about plants. A retired colonel from the Army’s biological warfare corps, Huber taught plant diseases and soil microbiology at Purdue University for thirty-five years. He has also been the coordinator of the U.S. Agricultural Research Service National Plant Disease Recovery System, a program of the USDA. Of all the things he knows about biological weapons and crops, he is most concerned about the destructive effects of pesticides on the biological systems of plants.
Huber worries, for example, about the effects of glyphosate—popularly known as Roundup, one of the country’s most popular weed killers for both farmers and home gardeners. Glyphosate is also a powerful driver of genetic engineering; its creator, the global conglomerate Monsanto, has bioengineered “Roundup Ready” soybeans, corn, and other crops to resist Roundup’s killing power. For years, farmers have cleared their fields of weeds by spraying them with glyphosate and then planting Monsanto brand crop seeds that are resistant to the poison.