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