harolds1@ihlpa.ATT.COM (Schessler) (08/10/87)
Silent Spring Still Flows ....
Springtime is spraying time. The peak season for
dispensing an annual 2.5 billion pounds of pesticides means
that the United States, the earth's most chemicalized
landscape, is again to have its farms, homes, lawns, ground
water and food supply awash in poisons.
This year is different because it marks the 25th
anniversary of "Silent Spring," the Rachel Carson book that
told of the chemical plague under way in 1962 and warned
that it was likely to worsen.
It has. If a successor to Rachel Carson, who died in
1964, were to write "Silent Spring II," the sequel could
have as its subtitle: "We Aimed at the Bugs but Sprayed
Ourselves."
One problem with chemicals is that once they are
applied to the land, air or water, it is scientifically
difficult to prove a causal relationship between the poisons
and diseases suffered by humans. The chemical industry
takes refuge in this handy uncertainty. It argues that
pesticides are potentially dangerous but, if used properly,
heighten the quality of life.
Rachel Carson rejected that bromide 25 years ago, and
it's not worth an empty can of roach spray now. How can
pesticides be properly used if the effects of what's being
used are a mystery? Jay Feldman, the director of the
National Coalition Against the Misuse of Pesticides, reports
that as recently as five years ago, "79 to 84 percent lacked
adequate carcinogenicity testing, and 60 to 70 percent
lacked adequate mutagenicity testing, 90 to 93 percent
lacked adequate testing for their tendency to cause birth
defects." More recently, in 1984, the National Academy of
Sciences found that "complete health-hazard assessments for
pesticides and inert ingredients of pesticides formulations
are possible for only 10 percent of the pesticides in use."
Those facts should have been calls to action by
governmental enforcers of the Federal Insecticide, Fungicide
and Rodenticide Act. Instead, the legislation -- passed in
1972 and known as the weakest of the major environmental
laws enacted in the last 15 years -- was applied with all
the force of trying to stop a swarm of locusts with a spray
of milk. Two reports last year from the General Accounting
Office documented that the Environmental Protection Agency
was a regulatory wasteland regarding pesticides: The agency
knows little about "the nature, frequency, amount or extent
of" exposure to the 1.5 billion pounds of nonagricultural
poisons used annually.
A more recent GAO report found that the Food and Drug
Administration's pesticide-monitoring program "provides
limited protection against public exposure to illegal
residues in food." Fewer than 1 percent of 1 million
imported food shipments are sampled. This means that
Americans eating fruit, vegetables or meat from, say,
Central or South America, may well be dining on pesticide-
laden food. In "Altered Harvest," Jack Doyle writes about
the ethics of American corporations: Eighteen of them now
"produce or sell in Third World countries pesticides that
are either banned, heavily restricted, or under review in
the United States."
A poisonous equation is created. We make a buck off
the poor and they get the last laugh -- a deadly one -- on
us. It's the new Montezuma's revenge.
Rachel Carson could not have possibly imagined that
pesticide production would increase 400 percent by 1987.
Nor could she have predicted the government's indifference
to the dangers. She wrote in "Silent Spring" about the
health and safety hazards of chlordane, an insecticide made
by Velsicol Chemical Corp., a Chicago firm that sought in
1962 to block publication of Carson's book. In it she
quoted the FDA'a chief pharmacologist as saying that he
considered "the hazard of living in a house sprayed with
chlordane to be `very great.'"
Last month, citing scientific evidence against the same
pesticide -- still sold for use in millions of American
homes -- the National Coalition Against the Misuse of
Pesticides petitioned EPA to ban the product. It is already
outlawed in New York, Massachusetts and Japan. Velsicol
denied the charges that its product is a danger, and its
judgment seems suitable to EPA, which is permitting its
continued use.
In the 25 years since "Silent Spring" first warned
about chlordane, and a warehouseful of other poisons, not
much has changed politically. The industry is still
winning, the public still losing, and the government not
caring much either way.
Colman Mccarthy
Washington Post
April 19, 1987