Kauai’s sole pesticide inspector says she hasn’t gotten around to reviewing most reports in several years—in part because so many concerned people have been asking her for spray records. “I’ve had so many requests that I haven’t had a chance to work on any of my cases for so many years,” she said.
As for federal oversight, the nearest EPA office is 2,000 miles away in San Francisco.
All of this means that when Gary Hooser asks companies for records about what they are spraying, he finds himself circling in an endless bureaucratic whirlpool. When he asked the state to provide a spreadsheet listing the sales of restricted-use pesticides used by Dow, DuPont Pioneer, Monsanto, BASF, and Syngenta on the island from 2002 to 2004, his request was denied. The disclosure records “are believed to contain confidential business information (CBI) or trade secrets,” the state’s pesticides program manager wrote Hooser. The decision made it impossible for Hooser or anyone else to determine “what chemicals are being used, by whom, at what geographical locations,” Hooser said.
State law requires that companies seeking federal permits to test GMOs or experimental-use pesticides must file a copy of the request with the state. But when Hooser asked the state health department for copies of these requests, he was sent a grand total of eight.
“I said, ‘There must be a problem—there must be more,’” Hooser told me. A couple of months ago, he asked again. This time, the health department said they had “a roomful of these things.” We haven’t even opened the boxes, the state people told Hooser, “but you’re welcome to come by and look.”
Although the state has an entire storeroom full of boxes, “literally nobody at the state looks at these documents,” Hooser said. “Nobody. And most are highly redacted.”
Companies point to reams of paper to show how regulated they are, but Hooser found that no one was checking up on them. “The state inspects them maybe five times a year, and they spray 220 days out of the year, and an average of eight to sixteen times a day. It’s a tragedy. They look me in the eye and say they are inspected on a regular basis, and 43 percent of the state inspection logs are redacted.”
A Hawaii Department of Agriculture (HDOA) log shows that in 2011 and 2012, the state made 175 inspections on Kauai, but more than a third of these reports had been redacted, the names of companies, employees, and alleged violations crossed out. The log has this note attached: “On two separate occasions, Kaua‘i County Councilmember Hooser has requested in writing from the HDOA ‘the nature of the violations and investigations without the accompanying company identification.’ This information has not been provided.”
When Hooser finally got his hands on a list of restricted-use pesticide sales from the state Department of Agriculture, “the core data shocked the hell out of me,” he said. “Restricted use” means the chemicals (in this case including alachlor, atrazine, chlorpyrifos, methomyl, metolachlor, permethrin, and paraquat) are more dangerous—and thus more tightly regulated by the EPA—than general-use pesticides like glyphosate or 2,4-D.
“Ninety-eight percent of the restricted-use pesticides were being used by just four companies. They were using atrazine by the ton. Paraquat. Eighteen tons a year of twenty-two different kinds of restricted-use pesticides on this island only.” All these chemicals didn’t just disappear, Hooser knew. Some were taken up into plants, but some trickled into the island’s soil, the water, the air itself.
State records show that between 2010 and 2012, the agrochemical companies purchased 13 tons (plus nearly 16,000 gallons) of restricted-use pesticides on the island. Pest control companies used an additional 74,000 pounds, mostly to kill termites and ants.
Other records show that between 2013 and 2015, companies sprayed 18 tons of restricted-use pesticides. During this period, companies also used some seventy-five different general-use pesticides, but because of lax enforcement codes, no information was available for how much was used.
Six of the seven restricted-use pesticides are suspected of being endocrine disruptors, which means they may cause sexual development defects in humans and animals, according to the EPA. Four of the seven are also suspected carcinogens. And between them, the seven have been linked to, among other things, neurological and brain problems and damage to the lungs, heart, kidneys, adrenal glands, central nervous system, muscles, spleen, and liver. And these are only the most toxic of the lot. As we have seen, even general-use pesticides like glyphosate and 2,4-D have recently been declared “probable” and “possible” human carcinogens in their own right.
A study published in March 2014 in the British journal The Lancet found that chlorpyrifos, a neurotoxin that is restricted in California and many countries, is one of a dozen commonly used chemicals that “injure the developing brain” of children.
Recent hair sample testing of children living near the Kauai test fields indicated exposure to thirty-nine different pesticides, including eight restricted-use pesticides. “It’s unconscionable that pesticides are being found in the hair and bodies of our children,” said Malia Chun, the mother of one of the girls tested. “State and federal officials have a responsibility to ban chlorpyrifos and make sure our children are protected in our homes and schools from these hazardous chemicals.”
But it wasn’t just chlorpyrifos. Children were exposed to “a cocktail of pesticides, and the consequences of exposure to such mixtures over a lifetime are not known, nor is the issue of exposure to such mixtures currently evaluated by our regulatory agencies,” said Emily Marquez, an endocrinologist and staff scientist at the Pesticide Action Network.
Also in the cocktail: permethrin, a suspected carcinogen thought to compromise kidney, liver, reproductive, and neurological function. When combined in the body with chlorpyrifos, permethrin has been shown to be “even more acutely toxic,” according to E. G. Vallianatos, a twenty-five-year veteran of the EPA and author of Poison Spring: The Secret History of Pollution and the EPA.
Another ingredient in the cocktail: atrazine, the second most widely used herbicide (behind glyphosate) in the United States. A known carcinogen, atrazine is sprayed on half of all corn crops and 90 percent of sugar sold in the United States—which is why it is commonly used on experimental fields in Kauai. “A little bit of poison to an adult is a lot of poison to a developing baby,” Dr. Tyrone Hayes, an endocrinologist at the University of California, Berkeley, told an audience on Kauai recently. The poisoning of a young child can cause health problems that can last a lifetime, Hayes said; his own research has found that frogs exposed to barely detectable levels of atrazine developed both male and female genitalia.
On Kauai, frustration with chemical company behavior grew most acute in the town of Waimea, on the island’s west side. In 2000, residents of the town filed a formal complaint claiming that pesticide-laden dust was blowing into their homes from experimental fields operated by DuPont Pioneer. They got nowhere.
Six years later, sixty students in a Waimea school went to their health office complaining that a “chemical smell” was making them nauseous and dizzy. Some students fainted. Others were seen covering their noses with their T-shirts. Nearly three dozen were sent home. A local reporter noted that several of the children “had their heads in their hands and tears in their eyes.”
The school is situated just a few dozen yards from experimental fields leased by Syngenta. Firefighters, police, a hazmat team, and officials from the state health and agriculture departments descended on the school to examine students and take samples from the nearby fields.
At first, company and state officials blamed the outbreak on a malodorous plant called Cleome gynandra, also known as wild spider flower or (more accurately) stinkweed. “It does stink and as a company we certainly hope the children are feeling better,” a Syngenta official said.
Though it is eaten (boiled) in some parts of the world, stinkweed has been known to cause headaches and even nausea in some people who are particul
arly sensitive to it. But Gary Hooser, who was a state senator at the time, was not convinced. He started making phone calls. He wanted the company, or the state, to tell parents what chemicals were being applied to the crops near their children’s school. Neither state officials nor Syngenta would tell the senator anything, and repeated attempts by local reporters “to compel authorities to release the information were unsuccessful.”
Company claims about stinkweed contamination struck some scientists and doctors as disingenuous. Given that the company fields were so close to the schools and to local homes, a few things were beyond dispute. There was no questioning the presence of restricted-use pesticides, or that dust from these pesticides routinely migrates into residential properties, or that the chemicals have a well-documented connection to childhood neurological problems, including autism, ADHD, and fetal brain defects, wrote J. Milton Clark, a professor at the University of Illinois School of Public Health and a former senior health and science adviser to the EPA, who examined the evidence for an island task force on pesticides.
There was no evidence to support the stinkweed theory, Clark wrote. “Symptoms of dizziness, headaches, nausea, vomiting, and respiratory discomfort are consistent with exposure to airborne pesticides,” he wrote. The children’s symptoms “were far more likely related to pesticide exposures than from exposure to stinkweed.” If the companies continued spraying, Clark recommended that local health centers near agricultural fields be given kits “to quickly test for organophosphate poisoning.”
It took nearly six years for state health officials to formally weigh in on the incident. When researchers from the University of Hawaii sampled the air around the Waimea Canyon Middle School, they indeed found evidence of stinkweed. But they also found five pesticides, including chlorpyrifos, metolachlor, bifenthrin, benzene hexachlorides (BHCs), and even DDT, which has been banned in the United States for four decades. Although the chemicals were found in amounts below EPA health standards, the presence of agricultural chemicals was clear evidence of “pesticide drift,” according to Hawaii’s Department of Agriculture. How many years these chemicals—and perhaps dozens of others—had been drifting into Waimea homes and schools was not addressed.
To Gary Hooser, Waimea’s pesticide drift was just part of the problem. The larger issue was the way companies seemed to consider themselves beyond the reach of public oversight. “The failure to release the information about what is sprayed out there only increases the public’s mistrust that something harmful is being sprayed,” Hooser said at the time. “They know what was sprayed out there and they should tell the public.”
What the island needed—and what the medical community began demanding—was information about the chemicals being sprayed in their communities. Frustrated by the lack of quantitative data about pesticide use, a group of west-side physicians wrote that they had “many qualitative examples that point to a higher than normal incidence of many ailments and disease processes occurring in our patient populations.” They’d seen birth defects involving malformations of the heart that were occurring at ten times the national rate. Miscarriages, gout, cancer, hormonal imbalances—all were occurring at unusually high levels, the doctors wrote, noting that Hawaii had not had surveillance for birth defects since 2005. They called for epidemiology studies by the CDC and Hawaii’s Department of Health to better understand the causes.
“We all share a deep concern for the health of our patients and the concern of what may be happening to our community by being exposed to this unique cocktail of experimental and restricted-use pesticides on an almost daily basis,” the Kauai doctors wrote. “We need to understand what chemical toxins are being sprayed, how often they are being sprayed, and how close our patients live to the specific areas being tested with these pesticides. It is unconscionable to allow open-air testing of new combinations and untested chemicals in any location that cannot guarantee the separation of the testing and any unwilling or unknown exposure potential to the public.”
The doctors’ worries reflected conclusions in a major study by the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP), which contended that a growing body of evidence points to associations between pesticide spray exposure in young children and a range of diseases, from childhood cancers to autism. On Kauai this was especially worrisome for the children of people who work in the fields, said Dr. Lee Evslin, a pediatrician on the island. The AAP “never had a mandate about pesticides before, but they have now placed it in our laps,” Evslin said. “This body carries a lot of weight, and they are basically saying to the pediatricians of the world, ‘pay attention to this. These are dangerous substances.’”
Margie Maupin, a nurse practitioner on the island’s west side, said the presence of so many pesticides—and so little information—had left her unable to do her job properly. “Thousands of reputable studies have already been done that show pesticides are known hazardous toxins,” she said. “The probability that these pesticides will hurt a lot of people on the west side, I believe, is high. Some health care providers are already seeing signs of serious illness and disability now, and we are at a loss for how best to protect our patients from this onslaught of known, dangerous exposure.”
Taking the Companies to Court
When I visited Waimea, I met a man named Klayton Kubo, who has been raging about clouds of dust for fifteen years. When we first sat down at a picnic table in the town center, Kubo refused to talk to me. Too many people around, he said, looking over his shoulder. The companies know who I am.
Instead, we drove to the top of a nearby ridge, parked, and walked along a dry path overlooking the town. To our left, in the near distance, we could see fields operated by both DuPont Pioneer and Dow. Tractors were working the fields, with red dust rising behind them. Perhaps six miles away, the largest of the plumes rose hundreds of feet into the air.
“If you think this is bad, you should come back during a trade winds day,” Kubo said. “It’s fucking insane!
“Two hundred yards outside my living room window, I can see their facility. The wind comes this way, we get it. The wind goes the other way, we get it. And right in the middle is a school and a town.”
Kubo pointed at the plume in the distance. “What you see right there? That’s what’s in my kitchen,” he said. “I scrape the stuff off my glass-top stove. That’s why I’ve been grumbling the longest.”
As we walked down the hill, an official-looking white pickup truck drove by. “Ha! Syngenta!” Kubo shouted. “Don’t fuck with my truck!”
In 2011, more than a hundred of Klayton Kubo’s neighbors filed a lawsuit against DuPont Pioneer claiming that dust from the company’s fields was damaging their property. Despite more than a decade of complaints and a formal citizen petition seeking relief from pesticide-laden dust, the lawsuit claimed, Pioneer’s GMO operations continually generated “excessive fugitive dust” and used dangerous pesticides “without taking preventative steps to control airborne pollutants as promised by Pioneer and as required by state and county law.”
“The community is covered,” the plaintiffs’ lawyer Gerard Jervis said. Residents are “living in lockdown, unable to open their doors or windows.” The suit pointedly did not make any health claims, though Jervis said local residents complained frequently of asthma and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease.
A company spokesperson defended Pioneer’s practices. “We operate our facilities on the islands with the highest standard of safety and environmental responsibility and we plan to vigorously defend our case.”
At the beginning of the trial, when residents alluded to health problems they attributed to the dust, the judge in the case reminded his attorneys that the case was about property damage only. The case was not about the effects the chemicals might be having on their health.
Jervis reminded the court that the EPA requires that applicators must not allow spray to drift from fields into private property, parks and recreation a
reas, woodlands, or pastures. He also noted that the state’s air quality study did not even try to look for more than thirty pesticides that have been used at the GMO test fields since 2007, including two of the most heavily used and dangerous: methomyl, an insecticide, and paraquat, a weedkiller that (like atrazine) has been linked to Parkinson’s disease and (also like atrazine) is made by Syngenta. Paraquat has been banned both in Switzerland, Syngenta’s home, and across Europe.
As the Waimea lawsuit proceeded through its paces, worries about pesticides on Kauai continued to grow. A local Kauai diver discovered a massive die-off of up to 50,000 sea urchins. A biologist for the state Department of Land and Natural Resources speculated that the chemicals sprayed on GM seeds might have been a cause, because when it rains, the loosened red topsoil on treated land flows into streams and rivers that eventually flow out into the ocean and onto coral reefs.
“Kaua‘i produces more GMO seeds than anyplace,” Don Heacock, the biologist, said. “Now, there are a whole bunch of people in the genetic engineering camp that say GMO crops need less pesticides, but the new wave of crops is more toxic than ever before. The Bt corn is meant to kill. It has an insecticide protein in the corn. In the Midwest, they found that the residue from GMO corn is related to aquatic insect deaths, which are food for baby fish.”
That same winter, the internationally renowned environmentalist Vandana Shiva traveled from New Delhi to Kauai to speak to anti-GMO activists. “I think your island is truth-speaking to the world that GMOs are an extension of pesticides, not a substitute or alternative to it,” she said. “[Hawaii] has become like a nerve center for the expansion of destruction. GMOs are not a safe alternative to poisons, they are pushed by a poison industry to both increase the sale of the poisons and simultaneously monopolize the seed.”
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