“It’s a vivid portrayal of the land and its people, a snapshot of a not-so-distant time…And it’s a glorious book — an assured novel that’s gorgeously told.” –New York Times
Damnation Spring is a novel based on the true history of herbicide use by the timber industry in America and elsewhere. The story begins in the late-1970s shortly after environmental legislation started to regulate the timber industry. At that time the timber industry had been using Agent Orange for many years to destroy the forest understory and build roads in preparation for clear-cuts as well as after clear-cuts to eliminate competition for tree seedlings.
After a century of clearcutting, this forest, near the source of the Lewis and Clark River in Clatsop County, Oregon, is a patchwork. In each patch, most of the trees are the same age. Photo by Walter Siegmund
The story takes place in a small community of loggers in Northern California. Their employer is fighting with the federal government for permission to clear cut one of the last old growth forests in Northern California. It’s a desperately poor community, partly because logging is a seasonal business that provides erratic employment at its best. The dangerous work orphans many children and disables those who survive their injuries. It is physically challenging work best performed by young men, not the community of aging loggers without any retirement benefits that would enable them to retire. It’s a dead-end job in an all-but-dead community.
The visible threats to this community are real, but the long-term threat is less visible. Agent Orange has contaminated the drinking water of the community. It’s a deadly herbicide that persists in the environment and in our bodies. It causes miscarriages and birth defects that are inherited by subsequent generations. It causes cancer and many other sub-lethal health issues such as frequent nose-bleeds. America’s use of Agent Orange in Vietnam has sickened, killed and disabled several generations of Vietnamese and American Veterans of the Vietnam War.
US Army helicopter spraying Agent Orange over Vietnam. Public Domain
But Damnation Spring is a novel, so where is the drama? The drama is created by the division between the loggers who desperately cling to their dead-end employment and their wives who have experienced repeated miscarriages, still births, and disabled children. Many wives have experienced more loss than they can tolerate and are ready to object to the poisoning of their water by the herbicides used to facilitate logging. Their objection is threatening to prevent the timber company from getting the approval needed to continue their clear cuts.
The result is violent intimidation of the families who are prepared to object to the logging methods that are poisoning them. The homes of these families are burned and they are threatened if they don’t fall into line to support the continued logging of the remaining forest. Damnation Spring weaves this toxic mix of conflict into an engaging story with many sympathetic characters. It is a rewarding book to read.
Although Agent Orange is no longer used by the timber industry, the basic strategy of the timber industry remains. Glyphosate is most commonly used by the industry to aerial spay herbicide after forests are clear cut. The theory is that this reduces competition for the replanted forest. Since glyphosate and other herbicides are known to damage the soil, it’s doubtful that the new forest benefits from this dousing of the ground.
This is a familiar scenario that is not unique to the timber industry. Coal miners are a case in point. It’s a dangerous occupation with no future. Yet, coal miners are as wedded to the jobs that damage their lungs as the loggers in the Pacific Northwest are to theirs. It seems that these poor communities are unable to imagine a better future for themselves. They resist efforts to regulate their industries. The regulations are intended to make their jobs safer and improve their environment by reducing pollution and the global warming it causes. Have we failed to offer them the alternatives that could improve their lives?
The majority of the scientific community has, until recently, considered genetically modified (GM) food safe to eat. The Pew Research Center conducted a survey in which they compared the opinions of scientists regarding GM food to the opinions of the general public. The scientists in the survey were members of the American Association of the Advancement of Science, an elite group of scientists. Eighty-eight percent of the sampled scientists considered GM food safe to eat, compared to only 37% of the general public. This survey was published in January 2015, reflecting recent attitudes toward GM food.
That opinion has changed, at least among some medical professionals, according to an article recently published by the New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM). (1) NEJM is America’s premier medical journal, with the highest standards of journalistic ethics for the studies they choose to publish. The article in NEJM was co-authored by a professor of preventive medicine and a professor of crop and soil science. They conclude that GMOs have enabled huge increases in the use of herbicides by agriculture, posing hazards to public health. The genetic modification itself is not to blame. Rather it is the increased use of herbicides that are a matter of concern.
The authors trace the sequence of events that changed their opinion of GM foods from benign to a public health hazard.
What is “genetic modification?”
Genetic modification of plants and animals occurs naturally and has as long as life has existed on Earth. When two closely related species interbreed, the result is a hybrid, which sometimes persists in nature and often ultimately results in a new species. For example, there are hundreds of species, sub-species, and varieties of Manzanita in California because it is a species that freely hybridizes. Sycamore trees are another plant that hybridizes freely. Historically, such hybridizing events were not considered harmful.
Genetic modification is not fundamentally different from selective breeding in which humans have been engaged since the advent of agriculture and domestication of animals thousands of years ago. Individual plants and animals with characteristics considered valuable were bred by humans to enhance the usefulness of plants or animals to humans. Ancestor plants of corn were barely edible, but corn has become one of our staple foods as a result of breeding.
DNA analysis greatly enhanced the ability of humans to genetically modify plants and animals to make them more useful to humans. Now scientists can import DNA into plants and animals from virtually anywhere in the biosphere. Some of those modifications have been very beneficial, such as increasing crop yields, or enabling plants to survive in warmer climates, etc. In 2000 and 2004, the American Academy of Sciences evaluated GM foods and concluded that they did not pose any unique hazards of human health.
Genetic modification becomes the enabler of herbicides
So what has changed that makes the medical establishment decide that GM foods are a matter of concern?Beginning in the 1990s genetically modified crop seeds were developed that enable the crop to tolerate unlimited amounts of herbicide, particularly glyphosate (AKA Roundup). Ninety percent of corn and soybeans grown in the United States is grown from these seeds. Consequently, glyphosate use in the United States has increased from .4 million kilograms in 1974 to 113 million kilograms in 2014.
Rare ears of organic corn. Courtesy A Really Small Farm
Unfortunately, weeds are smarter than we are. The more herbicide we use, the smarter the weeds get. The evolutionary pressure of the chemical onslaught on the weeds has produced glyphosate-resistant weeds on nearly 100 million acres in 36 states. There is always enough genetic variation in any large population of plants and insects to ensure that a few individuals will survive whatever we spray on them. Those survivors will breed to produce the next generation, which ensures that the next generation will be more likely to survive the next onslaught of chemicals. Over time, the population of weeds and insects capable of surviving our chemicals gets bigger and stronger.
One bad decision begets another
You might think we would abandon this chemical warfare in favor of a less poisonous, more effective long-term strategy. You would be wrong because you’re not thinking like a corporation which manufacturers chemicals and the seeds that ensure their use. Of course, their strategy is to make the chemicals stronger and stronger. That strategy might make sense if we weren’t living on the same planet with all that poison or eating the food that has been sprayed with them.
The medical profession draws the line
In response to herbicide-resistant weeds, the manufacturers of pesticides have developed a new herbicide which combines glyphosate and 2,4D into a product called “Enlist Duo.” You may recognize 2,4D as one of the ingredients in Agent Orange, used during the Vietnam War to defoliate the battle field and incidentally to poison our troops and generations of Vietnamese. Enlist Duo was approved by the Environmental Protection Agency in 2014. In 2015, the World Health Organization (WHO) classified glyphosate as a “probable human carcinogen” and 2,4D as a “possible human carcinogen.”
US Army helicopter spraying Agent Orange over Vietnam. Public Domain
This escalation of chemical warfare on America’s food supply has sent some members of the medical community over the edge:
“These developments suggest that GM foods and the herbicides applied to them may pose hazards to human health that were not examined in previous assessments. We believe that the time has therefore come to thoroughly reconsider all aspects of the safety of plant biotechnology. The National Academy of Sciences has convened a new committee to reassess the social, economic, environmental, and human health effects of GM crops. This development is welcome, but the committee’s report is not expected until at least 2016.” (1)
In view of these concerns, the authors of the article in NEJM advise the EPA to withdraw its approval of Enlist Duo, a decision which “was made in haste…based on poorly designed and outdated studies and on an incomplete assessment of human exposure and environmental effects.” The authors also suggest that we “revisit the United States’ reluctance to label GM foods.” They suggest that it is time to join 64 other countries around the world that require labeling of GM foods.
(1) Philip J. Landrigan, M.D., and Charles Benbrook, Ph.D., “GMOs, Herbicides, and Public Health,” New England Journal of Medicine, August 20, 2015.
In our previous post we told our readers about the strategies used by opponents of government regulation to prevent or delay regulation by undermining the science that informs us of environmental and health risks. In this post, we will focus on the inadequacy of pesticide regulation in the US and the arguments used to justify inadequate regulation.
Paracelsus coined the adage “the dose makes the poison” in the 16th Century
Pesticide regulation in the US—like all regulation of chemicals—is based on an assumption that there is a threshold of exposure below which the chemical is safe. This assumption is often summarized as “the dose makes the poison.” This old adage originates with a Renaissance medic who died in 1541 and it was employed at the dawn of the nuclear era to reassure the public that they were not being harmed by radiation. Since radiation occurs naturally in the environment, some low level of exposure is assumed to be harmless. (1)
But can we assume that the same is true of pesticides? Does every pesticide have some threshold dose below which it is harmless? There are many reasons why we cannot assume that there are safe levels of exposure to pesticides.
Bioaccumulation and Biomagnification
Many chemicals accumulate in our bodies throughout our lives. Researchers at Brown University tested the blood of over 3,000 women between the ages of 16-49 for levels of mercury, lead, and PCBs. These three chemicals are known to harm brain development of fetuses and babies. The sample was designed to represent the national population of 134.4 million women of childbearing age. Here’s what they found:
“Nearly 23 percent of American women of childbearing age met or exceeded the median blood levels for all three chemical pollutants [combined].” (2)
“As women grew older, their risk of exceeding the median blood level in two or more of these pollutants grew exponentially to the point where women aged 30 to 39 had 12 times greater risk and women aged 40-49 [born before these chemicals were banned] had a risk 30 times greater than those women aged 16 to 19.” (2)
The chemicals that accumulate in a woman’s body do not stop there. They are passed from one generation to the next in mother’s milk and across the placenta to her unborn child. If we stopped all new discharges today and cleaned up all the PCBs already in the environment, “it would take six generations…until PCBs would no longer be detectable in the bodies of our offspring.” (3)
“Fish and alcohol consumption also raised the risk of having higher blood levels. Women who ate fish more than once a week during the prior 30 days had 4.5 times the risk of exceeding the median in two or more of these pollutants.” (2)
PCB is an organochlorine (organic–carbon-based–chemicals that contain one or more chlorine atoms), as are all products derived from chlorine, such as polyvinyl chloride (PVC) and some pesticides, such as DDT. Organochlorines accumulate in the fatty tissue of living things (bioaccumulation), magnifying in concentration as they are eaten by their predators (biomagnification). Animals at the top of the food chain—such as humans—therefore receive larger doses of these chemicals than animals at the bottom of the food chain.
Some chemicals are not easily metabolized by our bodies and many persist in the environment for long periods of time, which contributes to the cumulative effect of each individual exposure: “The increased stability of many organochlorines makes them more resistant to the body’s metabolic processes, so they are retained in the body for longer, may accumulate to higher and higher concentrations over time, and will cause more severe toxic effects for a longer period of time than if they were more easily metabolized.” (3)
In other words, a single dose of a chemical may not be harmful, but the accumulation of many doses from a variety of sources over a long period of time is much more likely to be harmful.
Multiple exposure sources
Even if there were some safe dose of a particular chemical, we should assume that we are also exposed to multiple sources of that chemical, of which we may be unaware. Taking organochlorines as an example of chemicals known to be toxic and to accumulate, if we are exposed to an organochlorine pesticide, we might also be exposed to organochlorine by-products of pulp paper manufacturers, and/or dry cleaning processes, and/or hazardous wastes generated by incinerators, and/or the PVC plumbing in our homes, and/or detergents and water disinfectants, etc.
Many of these chemicals are airborne and are found at high concentrations far from where they were applied: “Airborne deposition of atrazine [herbicide] into the Great Lakes has become so significant that there is now about 36,000 kilograms of the pesticide in Lake Superior water…the bulk of organochlorine pesticides and other persistent pollutants that enter the waters of the Great Lakes come from as far away as the southeastern United States and Latin America.” (3) These chemicals are volatized from where they were discharged, they travel on atmospheric currents and are deposited by rain and snow in colder regions where they stay. Polar regions are the ultimate sink for persistent organochlorines, where they are far more persistent than in warmer climates, e.g., atrazine has a half life of 60 days at room temperature, but does not degrade at all below 43° F.
Mixture of glyphosate and aminopyralid sprayed on ivy in Glen Canyon Park, San Francisco
There are over 80,000 chemicals on the market of which only a small fraction have been tested and there are thousands more that are formed as accidental by-products, such as dioxins. These chemicals interact in unknown and unpredictable ways about which little is known: “Less than 0.25 percent of studies have evaluated the effects of mixtures of more than two chemicals.” (3) Even if there were some safe level of exposure to a single chemical, that would tell us nothing about the synergistic (multiplicative or exponential effect by which the whole is greater than the sum of its parts) or additive effects of the multiple chemicals to which we are exposed. A recent study by an international team of 174 scientists at leading research institutions reported that a “cocktail” of common chemicals found at exposure levels in the environment today can trigger the cellular mutations that result in cancer.
Limitations of testing
In the small minority of cases in which a chemical has been tested for toxicity, that test is only as accurate as the test protocol/test parameters/test procedures, etc. There are many methodological limits of toxicological analysis:
Tests are conducted on laboratory animals in which the dose is limited to a single chemical. As we said before, in the real world, humans and other animals are subjected to many chemicals simultaneously in doses that are unknown and unknowable, because little testing is done of contamination in the environment.
Tests are done for relatively short periods of time, compared to the long lives of humans during which chemicals accumulate in our bodies.
The chemical threshold deemed “safe” is not the dose at which no adverse affect occurred. It is only the dose at which no adverse affect wasobserved: “Subclinical affects—reduced fertility, compromised immune systems, and reduced intelligence, for example—are not observed not because they have not occurred but because they are seldom sought.” (3) In other words, the testing regimen does not test for many potential health problems.
The testing regimen also is limited to certain species and certain stages of development. For example, bees are the only species of insect on which pesticide tests are required and they are only tested at the adult stage. Bee keepers will tell you that larvae stages of bee development are far more vulnerable to pesticides than adult bees, yet no tests are required on that stage of development. Bees are probably less vulnerable to pesticides than caterpillars which eat vegetation, but caterpillars are not tested. If caterpillars are killed, there are no moths and butterflies.
The test is only as accurate as the analytical tool. The test may not be sensitive enough to detect injury. The history of lead regulation is an illustration of the evolving science of toxicology testing. Lead poisoning was first detected in the 1920s among workers exposed to lead. The first established threshold for lead exposure was 80 micrograms of lead per deciliter of blood. In the 1960s Australian physicians reported a connection between lead levels in children and lead in household paint. Industries with an economic interest in the issue organized a defense of their products, which prevented further regulation until the late 1970s when the threshold was lowered to 60 micrograms per deciliter. A few years later, the threshold was reduced further to 40 micrograms, then 35 micrograms, then 30 micrograms, then 25 micrograms. “In the 1990s the safe level for children was reduced to 10 micrograms…Today it is understood…that exposure to less than 10 micrograms per deciliter also impairs cognitive development, and there is most likely no threshold at all.” (3)
Manipulation and Obfuscation
The tests of toxicity required by law are conducted on a small minority of the tens of thousands of chemicals on the market. When the tests required by law are conducted, they are inadequate to accurately determine toxicity. So, in those rare cases when tests indicate that a chemical is harmful at the doses being used, you might think its use would be prohibited by law. You would be wrong. Regulation is prevented, even when tests clearly indicate that a chemical is harmful.
Atrazine is only one of many examples of how regulation is prevented by the disinformation campaigns of the manufacturers of chemicals and the industries which use them. Professor Tyrone Hayes was hired by the manufacturer of atrazine to test the toxicity of that chemical on frogs, the animal that Professor Hayes studies. Professor Hayes quickly reported that atrazine caused hermaphroditism and sterility in frogs. Atrazine is a known endocrine (hormone) disrupter. Very small quantities of hormones are capable of producing cascading effects throughout our bodies. Despite this well known physiological fact, the primary means used by the manufacturer of atrazine to discredit Professor Hayes’ research was to argue about the doses that were used in his study: “Atrazine is unlikely to have an adverse impact on frogs at existing levels of exposure” (4) This criticism of Professor Hayes’ research is bogus because the dose he used was taken directly from the environment in which atrazine is used and contaminates surrounding water bodies: “He and his students continued the work, travelling to farming regions throughout the Midwest, collecting frogs in ponds and lakes, and sending three hundred pails of frozen water back to Berkeley. In papers in Nature and in Environmental Health Perspectives, Hayes reported that he had found frogs with sexual abnormalities in atrazine-contaminated sites in Illinois, Iowa, Nebraska, and Wisconsin.” (5)
African clawed frog was used in human pregnancy tests. Creative Commons
In our recent debate with a reader who does not believe that pesticides are harmful to humans, his response to this information about the affects of atrazine on frogs was that he does not care about frogs. So, let’s take a moment to think about why this research should be a matter of concern to us, even if we don’t care about frogs. One of the frogs that Professor Hayes used in his research on atrazine was the African clawed frog. The reason why he used that particular species is that, although it is not a native frog, it is very commonly found in nature because it was used for decades in pregnancy tests on humans. If the urine of a pregnant woman is injected into a female African clawed frog, the frog quickly lays eggs. In other words, the reproductive and endocrine system of frogs is closely related to that of humans. If the reproductive and developmental system of frogs is adversely affected by atrazine, we should assume that humans are probably also affected.
Agent Orange was used in Vietnam from 1965-1969 to defoliate the battlefield to make the guerilla enemy more visible. It was discontinued when scientists reported that it caused birth defects in mice. Subsequently, Vietnam veterans reported severe health problems that were suspected to be a result of exposure to Agent Orange. The manufacturers of Agent Orange quickly circled the wagons. With the active participation of the government, they were able to prevent compensation of Vietnam veterans for their health problems for over 20 years. This was achieved by direct manipulation of the research data. Specifically, exposed workers and soldiers were put into the unexposed control group so that no statistical difference in the groups was apparent. (3)
There are multitudes of ways to cook the books. Atrazine and Agent Orange are two examples in which the manipulation was discovered. We will never know how many more there are that we don’t know about.
Cost-benefit analysis
Current federal law regulating toxic chemicals requires a cost-benefit analysis be taken into consideration before a chemical can be taken off the market. In the case of pesticides, the manufacturers and the primary users of pesticides have successfully defended against regulation by claiming that agricultural productivity would be drastically reduced and the price of food drastically increased without continued use of pesticides. However, there is considerable evidence to the contrary:
“Despite massive pesticide use, some 37 percent of all US crop production is lost to pests—significantly more than was lost before the advent of synthetic pesticides.” (3)
In 1989, the US National Academy of Science’s Board on Agriculture reported, “Reduced use of these [chemical] inputs lowers production costs and lessens agriculture’s potential adverse environmental and health effects without necessarily decreasing—and in some cases increasing—per acre crop yields and the productivity of livestock management systems.” (3)
“In Germany…a long-term study of 44 farms has found that yields of wheat, oats, and rye have steadily increased over a 17-year period following the farmers’ transition to strictly organic agriculture.” (3)
“While yields stay more or less the same, the impact on farmers’ profits can be very positive [because] pesticides account for as much as 20 percent of the variable costs of crop production.” (3)
As strong as the case is against economic benefits of pesticide use by agriculture, the case is much stronger against pesticide use for ecological “restorations.” There is no empirical evidence that there is any benefit to ecological “restorations.” They do not increase biodiversity. They do not benefit wildlife. If there is no benefit, there is no justification for using pesticides for this purpose.
We apologize for the length of this post. After spending several months studying the issues, we felt compelled to take you on our journey to the inevitable conclusion. There is no justification for using pesticides for the sole purpose of eradicating non-native plants because they are not doing any harm and therefore there is no benefit to killing them, particularly with harmful pesticides.
(1) Naomi Oreskes & Erik Conway, Merchants of Doubt, Bloomsbury Press, 2010
(2) Marcella Remer Thompson, Kim Boekelheide, “Multiple environmental chemical exposures to lead, mercury, and polychlorinated biphenyls among child-bearing-aged women: Body burden and risk factors,” Elsevier, November 16, 2012
(3) Joe Thornton, Pandora’s Poison, MIT Press, 2000
(4) Jon Entine, “Scared to Death: How chemophobia threatens public health,” A position paper of American Council on Science and Health, 2011
Conservation Sense and Nonsense 