The secret history of pollution and the EPA

The author is an ex-EPA employee who reveals how the agency serves its masters in the chemical industry and Congress to imperil America's health and environment. Informative but very technical discussion of toxic chemicals that do not meet safety standards. ( )

Worse planet through chemistry

Poison Spring: The Secret History of Pollution and the Epa by E. G. Vallianatos with McKay Jenkins (Bloomsbury Press, $28).

If E.G. Vallianatos and McKay Jenkins is to be believed, the Environmental Protection Agency hasn’t done anything right since they worked to get DDT banned.

Well, that’s not quite it. But Vallianatos, a former EPA analyst, and Jenkins, a journalist, really take the agency to task for its failure to maintain the line against industry and political pressure. It’s easy to see the outrage.

And that’s not necessarily misplaced—and in the case of the EPA, along with several other agencies like the FDA, the USDA and the public health system—the sort of “regulatory capture” that Vallianatos describes is rampant. Remember, please, that money is speech, according to our U.S. Supreme Court. Industry—especially the chemical industry, which creates both consumer products and pesticides that are regulated by the FDA, has a lot of it. There’s a revolving door at all these agencies between upper management and the very industries they’re supposed to regulate (hey, check out the Federal Communications Commission for some excellent examples of this).

Vallianatos knows how the process works from the inside and there’s no reason to disbelieve him. Nonetheless, their proposed solution—regulation by experts, rather than political appointees—isn’t likely to happen with out deeper systemic changes (overturning Citizens United, campaign finance reform, etc.).

Yes, it’s a polemic. It’s an accurate polemic. The only real criticism is that Poison Spring doesn’t recognize that the ineffectiveness of the EPA is caused by precisely the same dysfunction that afflicts government and politics in general: the excesses of late industrial capitalism.

In the meantime, buy local organic food at the farmer’s market and learn to live with a few bugs.

Reviewed on Lit/Rant: www.litrant.tumblr.com ( )

It’s Big Tobacco all over again, but this time in pesticides and herbicides. Science doesn’t matter. Deaths don’t matter. Laws don’t matter. Nothing is allowed to stand in the way of Big Chem. We now use more than five billion pounds of pesticides a year in the USA. So the plan is working. Yet losses from insects, which would stand at 41% of the crop if we used no chemicals at all, instead stand at 37%. But of course with that comes pollution, disease, and shrinking biodiversity. So it’s not even beneficial, is one of Vallianatos’ many points in Poison Spring. Only between .0000001% and .003% of pesticides actually reach their target insects. The rest goes into the air, soil and water to kill everything else.

Like the pill culture in medicine, Big Chem has us using insecticides when simple crop rotation would do. (In 1954, before the chemical supermarket, we became smart enough to hold losses from insects to 10%.) When one doesn’t work well, we try another, and the bigger the farm, the more insecticide per acre, year in year out. This is blind reductionsim – “There is a tragic lack of holistic thinking in the agriculture establishment.”

Having spent 25 years at the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), Vallianatos is telling all. How the agency is there specifically and only to accommodate Big Chem, with which it always sides against consumers, farmers, and its own scientists. How EPA scientists who try to do real science are transferred out, hounded out, or fired. How the government continually cuts EPA back, to the point of requiring it to shut down labs and actually destroy all the documentation in them. How industry provides EPA’s data, edits its documents, and cripples its regulations, when they don’t ignore them outright. It appears most staffers’ goal is to get recruited by industry, so they co-operate enthusiastically.

The public lies are there in black and white, right on the labels. The “entirely misleading term inert” is a collection of petroleum distillate ingredients that are poisons at least as toxic as the so-called active ingredients. “They are carcinogens, all of them.” And so 220,000 die each year and 750,000 are sickened – and those figures are from the 1990s. Today, we see skyrocketing cases of Parkinson’s, ADHD and autism – all classic symptoms of these chemicals.

Insecticides kill everything. They disable pollen from germinating. They prevent uptake of vital nutrients from the soil. And they promote super weeds that even our most vile chemicals can’t kill. Farmers have much higher (40-100%) incidences of certain cancers and neurological conditions, because they live in this stuff. Freshwater fish two thousand miles from the spraying are polluted with extremely high concentrations of the toxins. There is no water that is unaffected any more.

Vallianatos is not the least surprised by the disappearance of monarch butterflies or by bee “Colony Collapse Disorder”. Inside EPA they have known for decades that the products they approve kill those beneficial beings. In addition, bee pollen sold in healthfood stores contains pollen sized time release capsules of Penncap M – Parathion – one of the worst toxic chemicals ever unleashed. Bees simply bring them home along with rest of the pollen, and ensure death well beyond the hive. 67 million birds that come into contact with farm sprays are killed every year. The list is endless.

Possibly most frightening of all is that this entire book is only about the damage wrought by pesticides and herbicides, because that’s the author’s bailiwick. There are 88,000 new (since 1945) chemical compounds out there, used in food, in furniture, in construction materials, in everything. We don’t know how they affect everything they come in contact with (especially ourselves), and we know nothing about how they interact with each other, because we’ve never looked. EPA is not there to protect you from them. No one is. Poison Spring is the tip of a filthy iceberg. ( )