Poison Spring

by E. G. Vallianatos

  Do we really want this toxic cocktail pouring into our drinking water? Congress doesn’t seem to mind; it ignored Colborn’s warnings. And in the years since, politicians from both parties have pushed the gas companies’ fracking mission with an evangelical fervor, using their full voice to convince the world that America is the Saudi Arabia of natural gas. Most congressional members of panels reviewing studies are associated with the industry. Oklahoma, a major gas drilling state, illustrates this sordid policy. The state’s Republican senators, James Inhofe and Tom Coburn, have spent their political careers defending gas drilling, always pressuring EPA to stay clear of their pet industries. In return, the drilling industries have rewarded them handsomely. As a result, in Oklahoma and other states, the “mystery liquids” of toxic gas and oil drilling wastes continue to contaminate the nation’s waters.9

  Nationwide, the mania for gas well drilling has simply overwhelmed state officials. New Mexico, for instance, has 99,000 gas wells but only eighteen inspectors. How can they possibly safeguard the state’s drinking water?10

  While some elected officials pay lip service to protecting the public health, it’s hard to be convinced by such expressions of good faith. “We have a supply of gas that can last America one hundred years, and my administration will take every possible action to safely develop this energy,” President Obama said in his 2012 State of the Union speech. “I’m requiring all companies that drill for gas on public lands to disclose the chemicals they use. America will develop this resource without putting the health and safety of our citizens at risk. We don’t have to choose between our environment and our economy.”

  Given the Washington establishment’s history—and his own—Obama’s promises for health and safety did not sound sincere. He made no effort to get rid of the Halliburton loophole, so fracking fluids are still (unbelievably) exempt from the Safe Drinking Water Act. And as his EPA prepares another study of fracking and drinking water, gas industry lobbyists and their congressional clients are adding more pressure to simply confirm the results of the morally bankrupt 2004 study.

  In this gold-rush climate, it’s hard to imagine drinking water advocates getting anything like a fair hearing. Senator Inhofe, long a fiery booster of the petrochemical industry, has cautioned the EPA not to use outside experts “who have been longtime critics of hydraulic fracturing.” When the EPA announced in December 2011 that they had linked fracking to water contamination near Pavilion, Wyoming, Inhofe described the findings as “offensive.”11

  So here we are: once again giant corporations are acting with impunity, muscling local officials and members of Congress to nullify environmental regulations. Just as banks considered “too big to fail” wrecked the lives of millions of Americans, the hucksters in the gas industry are moving fast into the country’s farm fields. They dig for gas and petroleum and poison the drinking water and air. People living near gas wells—many of them poor, many of them bought off by companies waving fistfuls of cash for drilling rights—now find themselves living in sacrifice zones. They are the first victims of gas drilling: if they detect bad smells or their drinking water catches fire, they complain to state and EPA officials, but these officials have already made their allegiance clear, and their allegiance is not to the victims of poisoned water wells.

  The upshot of all this is that today there are more than a thousand cases of fracking-related water contamination in thirty-four states, and documented cases of both human harm and severe health effects on wildlife and farm animals. In Colorado alone, where drilling increased by 50 percent between 2003 and 2008, there were more than fifteen hundred fracking spills.12

  In Pennsylvania, as elsewhere, fracking wastes contain dozens of compounds of unknown toxicity, including arsenic, barium, and strontium. Yet gas drillers in Pennsylvania still dump these radioactive wastes into rivers that provide drinking water for more than 16 million people.13

  These crimes take place in part because gas drillers are literally beyond the reach of both state and federal governments.

  In Wyoming, a small farmer named John Fenton has twenty-four gas wells on his farm, and his drinking water is full of poisons, including drilling fluids, drilling muds, and high levels of the cancer-causing benzene. Since the contamination, Fenton’s property has lost half of its value; he has to buy drinking water, though he still bathes in the contaminated water. Around his community, he has seen people with “a lot of neurological problems, neuropathy, seizures, people losing their sense of smell, sense of taste. People with their arms and legs going numb.”

  Local officials, meanwhile, continue to tell Fenton his water is potable. When Fenton persuaded the EPA to test his water and investigate the fracking of gas wells under his land, the agency agreed with him: fracking had poisoned his water.

  The political response to this evidence was predictable. House Republicans held a public meeting on the Fenton water testing case, but when the “public” actually showed up—in the form of Josh Fox, the producer of Gasland, a documentary on the devastation caused by natural gas drilling—the elected officials had Fox arrested.14

  In May 2012, the Obama administration proposed regulations requiring drillers to reveal the composition of their fracking chemicals thirty days before they blasted the underground deposits of oil and gas with those chemicals. Once again, industry pressure diluted the effort, and lobbyists for ExxonMobil and other drillers convinced the White House to reverse the regulation. The drillers would name their fracking chemicals only after they completed their work.15

  Once again, we find ourselves asking fundamental questions: What does such a policy say about our country’s priorities? Who are such laws meant to protect? As with pesticides, so with fracking: America needs to reinvent itself, to reverse the pervasive and insidious influence of the petrochemical-agribusiness complex.

  So here, in the end, is a central question: How can we make the EPA a truly independent, Federal Reserve–like organization, charged with (and actually capable of ) defending nature and public health? How can we create a health and safety mechanism that neither the president nor members of Congress nor—critically—industry lobbyists would be able to compromise?

  Here are a couple of suggestions that have emerged from my long career spent watching the current system fail:

  A great scientist or a distinguished citizen with a long record of defending public health and the environment ought to be selected for a ten-year post administering a politically neutral EPA. A vigorous and sustaining EPA would be a measure of a vigorous and sustaining democracy. Like the Fed chairman, this person—not the president—ought to appoint agency deputies and ought to appropriate enough money to allow our scientists to rebuild the EPA’s laboratories, research capabilities, and libraries. Contact between EPA and industry lobbyists should be off-limits, as should the influence of the White House. And senior EPA officials should not be allowed to work for the industry for five years after their government work has been concluded.

  If these ideas seem utopian, it can only be because we have become so numbed (or defeated) by the stranglehold that industry has had on our economic, agricultural, and energy systems. Yet if we simply consider industry’s legacy—its deceit, its political manipulation, its contribution to broad and long-lasting harm to our health and the environment—it is imperative that we have this conversation. The American public simply cannot afford to serve any longer as the subject of unbridled chemical and technological experimentation.

  We’ve long known that radiation from the testing of nuclear weapons created genetic defects that are passed down through the generations, creating debilitating diseases, physical anomalies, intellectual retardation and other medical genetic problems.

  But with the testing of the various toxic compounds released into the human economy and environment, we now also know that pesticides “injure man’s genetic material in precisely the same way that radiation does,” my EPA colleague John Hou-Shi Chen, a distinguished geneticist, told me mor
e than thirty years ago. “And what is so awful about such a genetic injury is that it is permanent—it can’t be recalled, corrected or somehow restricted to the victim, unless you also castrate that individual. So now with a greater number of pesticide poisons loose in the environment, we as a society are creating a generation of people who will be weak in facing the future. We are then changing, irreversibly, the future itself. The price for that change is—or should be—unacceptable to any people with dignity and respect for themselves and love for their children.”

  I agree with this wisdom wholeheartedly. For decades, the EPA was my personal university, where I learned the hard way why America and the rest of the industrialized world have become hooked on dangerous farm sprays. No science or policy has been allowed to interrupt this corruption. In fact, science and policy themselves have been made a prop to the pesticides industry and agribusiness.

  This is a tragic turn of events, especially given the evidence. Tomes of scientific studies have shown farm sprays for what they really are: biocides, which cause and promote insect infestations of crops; give cancer to animals and humans; and leave a trail of death among fish and wildlife.

  Just as petroleum companies pay for fake “science” that muddies the debate about climate change, most studies funded by the chemical industry muddy the debate about pesticides. Meanwhile, the U.S. Department of Agriculture and the EPA continue to take up the cause of agribusiness, with catastrophic consequences for family farmers, who have been almost completely swallowed up (or driven into bankruptcy) by industrial-scale farms. In the twentieth century, 98 percent of black farmers and more than 60 percent of white family farmers were forced off the land. The few large farmers and agribusinesses left in charge of rural America are hooked on pesticides precisely because these enable them to control their vast estates.

  A widely held myth in industrial agriculture holds that the larger the farm, the better for agriculture and society. In the late 1970s, Arnold Aspelin, the EPA’s chief economist, wanted to know if the size of a farm had anything to do with the amount of pesticide that could be found in its onions. He asked Sharon Hart of Michigan State University to look into it.

  Hart interviewed growers and observed what they did to produce onions. Her analysis challenged two premises that have long been central to American agriculture: that chemicals provide the only science-based road to food production, and that America’s food is the safest in the world.

  In her February 1980 report “An Approach to Solving Onion Production Problems in an Energy and Chemical Limited Future,” Hart painted a very unsettling picture of American agriculture. Farmers had become so addicted to chemicals that they rarely asked what their consequences might be. If one chemical didn’t work, farmers would simply try another. “Everyone assumes another chemical will prevent the onion industry from disaster,” she wrote.16

  In the end, farmers know that chemicals lose their effectiveness, since insects build up resistance to them, and some farmers worried about using too much. Farmers could not believe “the public wants to eat those onions with all that spray on it,” Hart wrote. “ ‘With all the chemicals we use, people eat it anyway,’ one farmer said. ‘Working with poisons seems so hopeless,’ said another. ‘Who knows the outcome of working with chemicals?’ ”

  Food is usually the main route pesticides find to poison people. Such poisoning often has no immediate or obvious effects; tiny amounts of pesticides can be neutralized by the liver, stored in the body’s fatty tissues, or excreted in urine. What’s less clear is how the body handles these toxic residues as they accumulate over time. But the long-term effects, including cancer and other illnesses, are unmistakable.

  EPA has long known about the poisoning of our food, but it has done far too little to prevent it. Both EPA and the agribusinesses it regulates deny that the pesticides in food are harmful, but this stance is based on faulty and even prejudicial science designed mainly to protect the pesticide makers from lawsuits.

  Indeed, the tide of farm chemicals kept flowing. “We keep adding pesticides till costs exceed return—same as we did with fertilizers,” one farmer told Hart. “We just spray for insurance,” another said. “It would be better if we knew when to spray.” An oft-repeated refrain: “We don’t want to use sprays, but we can’t afford not to.”

  Purely in terms of economics, what Hart found was startling: the larger the farm, the more sprays per acre, and the heavier the costs; the smaller the farm, the less pesticide sprayed per acre, and the less cost to the farmer. Farms under 24 acres paid about a third (per acre) of what farms over 50 acres paid for pesticides, yet the largest farms sprayed nearly five times as much as the smallest grower and nearly twice as much as a medium-size grower.

  Large and medium-size growers used twice as much fungicide as the small farmer. Hart stressed that the “intensity and level” of sprays of the “large capital-intensive grower” was “significant.” In the end, if an informed consumer had a choice between eating onions from a large farm (sprayed with 52 different chemicals) and onions from a small farm (sprayed with 11 different chemicals), the owner of the larger farm “would probably not be able to sell his onions.”

  Time was, farmers knew enough to graze cows next to onion fields. They knew that cow dung provided food parasites that controlled the onion maggot. Once industrial farms insisted on devoting all their fields to a single crop (such as onions), the onion maggot flourished and created an ideal market for toxic sprays.

  Given these results, Hart wondered why her academic colleagues seemed so enthralled by chemical companies rather than working to help make farming less hazardous. University researchers, she concluded, were hooked on “agri-chemical research” and spent more energy protecting the profitability of the chemical companies than the needs of farmers.

  These are excellent insights. Universities regard large companies as cash cows that fund their research and pay their salaries. As far back as 1980, Don Paarlberg, a senior official of the U.S. Department of Agriculture, admitted that the land grant universities failed their mission, boosting the industrialization of agriculture instead of serving family farmers. “The [Department of Agriculture’s] Extension Service,” he said, “with its advice that a farmer should have a business ‘big enough to be efficient,’ undoubtedly speeded up the process of farm consolidation and reduced the number of farms. In the classroom, emphasis on modern management helped put the traditional family farm into a state of total eclipse.”17

  Conventional American farmers have become mindlessly attached to a certain view of nature and the world: they have essentially become an extension of the chemical and agribusiness industries. The Department of Agriculture Extension Service has county agents in every significant farming community who are “very effective communicators of the USDA line,” wrote David Menotti, the second most senior lawyer at EPA dealing with pesticide issues. “That line has always been the familiar DuPont slogan ‘Better things for better living through chemistry.’ ”

  Many agricultural pesticides have been used for years, Menotti wrote, and farmers have, in essence, become addicted to them.

  “We are understandably watched anxiously by farmers, much in the same manner that mechanics would feel threatened by the OSHA [Occupational Safety and Health Administration of the Department of Labor] initiative to take away their socket wrenches.”18

  From July 2003 until December 2004, the EPA sent me to the University of Maryland to teach a graduate seminar on global environmental issues, most of them related to food and agriculture.

  At Maryland, which in theory is a land grant school, most of my forty former colleagues in the Department of Natural Resource Sciences had nothing to do with family farming. Only two tenured professors offered courses from time to time that were relevant to organic farming; the rest refused to use the words “sustainable farming,” “organic agriculture,” or “family farming” in describing what they do.

  These agricultural professors keep teaching and
researching “nutrient” management as if they are trying to hide the ceaseless suffocation of the Chesapeake Bay, Maryland’s water treasure and one of the country’s ecological, fishing, and recreational jewels, by the wastes of the chicken factory farms in Delaware, Maryland, and Virginia. Poisons come to Chesapeake Bay from as far away as New York and Pennsylvania, but the real danger lurks next door in the animal farms, which are all but invisible to academics at the University of Maryland.

  In 2005, Maryland had 5.5 million people and about 12,000 growers. How many were organic farmers? Eighty-nine. More than 35 percent of farm receipts in Maryland come from industrial chicken farms, which produced 292.9 million “broilers” in 2002. Yet Maryland’s industrial chicken factories left a vast footprint of ecological devastation in the Chesapeake Bay watershed and social upheaval in what used to be rural Maryland. And any consumer given the opportunity to visit a “chicken factory” would be sufficiently appalled to swear off eating the chicken “products” extruded from its machinery.

  It’s as if the beauty, history, and extraordinary value of family farming and unimpaired nature as sources of life, democracy, and culture—what the Greeks would call Mother Earth—ceased to matter whenever someone threw money or power at scientists. The same thing happens when the state adopts nature-killing policies such as subsidizing and enabling corporations and industrial-scale farmers to take over rural America. Nearly all debate becomes muted.

  When universities put most of their research money into studying “no-till” farming (which Sharon Hart correctly called “a chemical-intensive system”), farmers are convinced to prepare their fields with a flood of weed killers rather than with traditional cultivation. “The no-till system relies totally on chemicals,” Hart wrote. “The EPA has demanded research on the chemical effects of no-till on soil micro-organisms on corn, which, according to the researcher involved, ‘is a bunch of nonsense, anyway. We’ll show them that these chemicals don’t affect nothing!’ Researchers generally evaluate options in terms of private (as opposed to social) economic return only.”