Banned
Page 1
BANNED
BANNED
A History of Pesticides
and the Science of Toxicology
Frederick Rowe Davis
Published with assistance from the
foundation established in memory of
Philip Hamilton McMillan of the Class
of 1894, Yale College.
Copyright © 2014 by Frederick Rowe Davis.
All rights reserved.
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ISBN: 978-0-300-20517-6 (cloth)
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10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
To my parents
Dan Clifford Davis
and
Judith Rowe Davis
…
When the public protests, confronted with
some obvious evidence of damaging results
of pesticide applications, it is fed little
tranquilizing pills of half truth. We urgently
need an end to these false assurances, to the
sugar coating of unpalatable facts. It is the
public that is being asked to assume the risks
that the insect controllers calculate. The
public must decide whether it wishes to
continue on the present road, and it can do
so only when in full possession of the facts.
—Rachel Carson, Silent Spring
…
CONTENTS
Preface
Acknowledgments
List of Abbreviations
CHAPTER 1.
Toxicology Emerges in Public Health Crises
CHAPTER 2.
DDT and Environmental Toxicology
CHAPTER 3.
The University of Chicago Toxicity Laboratory
CHAPTER 4.
The Toxicity of Organophosphate Chemicals
CHAPTER 5.
What’s the Risk? Legislators and Scientists Evaluate Pesticides
CHAPTER 6.
Rereading Silent Spring
CHAPTER 7.
Pesticides and Toxicology after the DDT Ban
CHAPTER 8.
Roads Taken
Epilogue: Risk, Benefit, and Uncertainty
Notes
Index
PREFACE
Late in 1972, William Ruckelshaus, administrator of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, announced that he was canceling the registration for DDT, in effect banning the use in the United States of one of the most popular insecticides available since its introduction after World War II. Environmentalists hailed the ban on DDT as a crowning achievement of the American environmental movement and the culmination of a decade of activism that had coalesced in the wake of the publication of Silent Spring by Rachel Carson in 1962. Carson’s damning critique of the indiscriminate use of chemical pesticides and the resulting widespread ecological contamination in the United States captured the hearts and minds of Americans as few other books had, and it inspired extensive hearings in the President’s Science Advisory Committee and Congress. The passage of the National Environmental Protection Act in 1970 and the establishment of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) that same year signaled to Americans that their concerns had been heard. The DDT ban terminated applications of one of the most notorious and environmentally destructive chemicals in America. Could there be a more perfect conclusion to a dark chapter in the story of American agriculture and public health?
In May 1982, several bird-watching friends (retirees) invited me to join them near Rochester, New York, to find as many bird species as we could in a single day. The big day started at about 1:00 a.m. as we headed out to find nocturnal owls and nighthawks. By 4:30, we had arrived at Norway Road, a renowned hotspot for migrating birds west of Rochester. In the early morning darkness, we heard an American woodcock, and just before dawn a veery began singing its ethereal song and a wood thrush soon joined in. By daybreak, dozens of other species—neotropical migrants—could be heard: warblers, vireos, thrushes, tanagers, cuckoos, flycatchers, and sparrows. The phrase “dawn chorus” fails to capture the deafening cacophony of thousands of birds in full breeding song. My ears were still ringing when I arrived back home near midnight. Even as a teenaged birder I knew that I had witnessed something special that morning. It did not occur to me that I would never again hear anything like the dawn chorus I heard on the May morning so long ago.
Fast-forward thirty years to March 12, 2013, the New York Times reported on a study revealing that acutely toxic pesticides correlated to declines in grassland birds in the United States more closely than habitat loss through agricultural intensification. Three days later, a federal judge considered a motion to dismiss a 2011 lawsuit in which the Center for Biological Diversity and the Pesticide Action Network alleged that the EPA has allowed pesticide use without required consultations with federal agencies. What is going on here? More than fifty years after the publication of Silent Spring and forty years after the ban on DDT, pesticides still account for widespread deaths in birds and other wildlife. Could it be that Carson’s statement in the epigraph applies to the risks of pesticides today? My purpose in writing Banned is to explain one the great ironies of the American environmental movement.
Writing this book emerged out of a simple objective. I had read Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring, and I wanted to explore her scientific and medical sources in building the case against DDT. As I originally understood the story, Silent Spring was a significant catalyst in the environmental movement of the 1960s and 1970s as well as in the banning of DDT. But I soon discovered that Carson began researching pesticides in earnest during the late 1950s, at a time when American scientists, legislators, and regulators were debating the risks and benefits of the still-new chemicals as they revised existing laws. Moreover, concerns about chemical exposures had much deeper roots that significantly predated this period.
Inspired by the fiftieth anniversary of the publication of Carson’s book, Banned examines the development of synthetic pesticides and the science of toxicology over the course of the twentieth century, as well as the legislation that governs exposures to these chemicals—from the Pure Food and Drug Act of 1906 to the Food Quality Protection Act of 1996 and beyond. By studying the larger context of the evolution of pesticides and toxicology, in this book I reveal how environmental science and policy evolved across the twentieth century. Carson published Silent Spring at a critical moment in the history of environmental science. Studying her sources and rereading her careful interpretations of science deepens our appreciation of the achievement of Silent Spring. But an analysis of pesticides policy and usage patterns in the decades following the ban on DDT exposes a tragic irony in the worldwide proliferation of the organophosphate pesticides, chemicals that Carson and
the toxicologists acknowledged to be far more toxic to wildlife and humans alike.
In Silent Spring, Carson cited numerous cases of acute and chronic pesticide poisonings in wildlife, ecosystems, and humans. Throughout her book, she implored people to evaluate evidence and assess threats to environmental and public health, including their own exposures. Carson exhaustively reviewed the scientific and medical literature on how synthetic insecticides affect humans and the environment. To clarify her indictment of the chemical industry and federal agricultural and public health programs, she dramatized scientific and medical findings and thus gave them a face. As much as Silent Spring was about toxicity and lethal doses, it was also about the victims of poisonings: farm workers, children, American robins, bald eagles, and Atlantic salmon. Moreover, Carson revealed how pesticides like DDT permeated soil and waterways all across America.
In part, Carson blamed overspecialization for the lack of knowledge regarding ecological and health effects: each specialist focused on his or her own problem, oblivious to its larger frame. Carson introduced Americans to an emergent discipline and brought the language of environmental toxicology into the public realm. Phrases and concepts like “acute and chronic toxicity,” “LD50,” “parts per million,” “carcinogenicity,” and “reproductive effects” came to dominate the study and regulation of environmental risks of synthetic insecticides. And in so doing, Silent Spring alerted the American public to the problems of indiscriminate use of pesticides and the science that sought to assess the risks they imposed by using the language of toxicology.
Carson’s indictment of pesticides instigated heated debate. Representatives of the chemical industry challenged her authority and the scientific legitimacy of the book. Some of the attacks became personal and attempted to dismiss Carson on the basis of her gender. Even among scientists without direct ties to the chemical industry, reviews of Silent Spring were mixed. Certain scientists praised Carson for the breadth and depth of her analysis, but others took issue with details and Carson’s broad conclusions. President John F. Kennedy directed the President’s Science Advisory Committee (PSAC) to convene hearings and report on the risks and benefits of pesticides, and congressional hearings soon followed. Nevertheless, the wheels of bureaucracy ground slowly. With the exception of minor adjustments to existing laws, Congress failed to pass significant legislation. Finally, litigation at the state and federal levels prompted the EPA to ban use of DDT in the U.S. late in 1972, though manufacture and exportation of DDT continued.
Just as exploring the sources of Silent Spring revealed its roots in science and policy, analysis of developments in its wake uncovered a tragic irony. The story of the book that launched the environmental movement became much more complicated after the ban on DDT when some of the most toxic chemicals known came to dominate the pesticides market. Although there have been many studies of DDT and the chlorinated hydrocarbons, few scholars have explored the history of organophosphates and the toxicology of this large class of pesticides. For the most part, historians have divided the history of pesticides into three periods: pesticides before DDT, pesticides during the DDT era, and pesticides after DDT (still largely unexamined).
In contrast, in Banned I evaluate chemical insecticides by chemical class, like a chemist, and by toxic insult, like a toxicologist. It may surprise readers to learn that most of the pesticides that predominated in agriculture and public health during the twentieth century can be divided into a few major classes: heavy metal insecticides, such as lead arsenate and Paris green; chlorinated hydrocarbons like DDT; organophosphates (and carbamates), such as parathion and carbaryl; synthetic pyrethroids like permethrin; and even the now-prolific neonicotinoids. Environmental scientist John Wargo argued that the chemical-by-chemical approach delayed both toxicological analysis and effective legislation, not to mention historical analysis. By focusing on classes of chemicals across the twentieth century (which is to say before, during, and after the DDT era), I sought underlying patterns to understand the development of toxicology and legislation.
As I studied the history of pesticides, the publication of Silent Spring emerged as a critical moment in a century of attempts by scientists, legislators, and corporations to manage their risks and benefits. The complexities of the topic show us how rigorous and thoughtful Carson was in her writings about pesticides. By relocating Silent Spring within the broader context of the science and regulation of pesticides, I reveal both the inspiration and the implications of one of the most important studies of our time.
Banned reveals the evolution of the science of toxicology and the development of pesticides in the United States during the twentieth century. Since publication of Silent Spring, toxicology and environmental risk assessment have become the dominant paradigms for how scientists determine environmental damage and threats to the health of humans, wildlife, and ecosystems. Environmental toxicology developed out of the science of pharmacology. Toxicologists, many of whom initially studied pharmacology, accepted the fundamental aphorism of toxicology, attributed to Paracelsus: “The right dose differentiates a poison and a remedy.” The dynamic between risk and benefit inherent in pharmacology permeated the science of toxicology also. But the science of toxicology and its development captures only part of the story of pesticides in modern America. Long before toxicology emerged as an independent discipline, pesticides had become integral to agriculture in America. As agriculture industrialized to a previously unimagined scale, farmers increasingly depended on chemical pesticides to control insects and prevent extensive damage to crops.
Much of the story that follows examines how scientists clarified risks associated with pesticides, but the benefits of chemical insecticides in American agriculture and public health also warrant our attention. Chemical companies were quick to emphasize benefits while minimizing potential risks. The public (both as producers and consumers), however, judged the value of pesticides and other chemicals for themselves. Popular science writers like Rachel Carson interpreted (and interpolated) scientific research and legislative debate for the public. Thus what began as a study of a group of scientists developed into a broader examination of the intersections between scientists, policy makers and enforcers, corporate representatives, science writers, and the public.
Banned interweaves several separate narratives. One narrative strand reveals how toxicology evolved as a scientific study. Another follows individuals and groups of scientists and affiliated institutions responsible for the toxicological evaluation of pesticides and other chemicals. To the extent possible, I reflect on the culture of toxicology as fostered by such leaders as E. M. K. Geiling at the University of Chicago Toxicity Laboratory (Tox Lab) and Arnold Lehman of the Pharmacology Division at the FDA. The toxicological analysis of an ever-expanding number of novel chemicals provides yet another narrative. Still another examines the development of legislation to regulate pesticides and other potentially toxic substances. All of these separate stories intersected with the publication of Silent Spring, which encouraged the public to judge for itself the risks posed by synthetic chemicals in the environment. Ironically, after DDT and other chlorinated hydrocarbons were banned in 1972, farmers turned to the highly toxic organophosphate insecticides as replacements, and the regulatory analysis of this class of chemicals stretched into the new millennium. The spectacular proliferation of the neonicitinoid insecticides in agriculture over the past decade has reignited debate about environmental hazards of pesticides.
Over the course of the twentieth century, scientists, physicians, and public health officials have attempted to characterize the risks posed by insecticides and other chemicals. Yet insects continue to pose a real threat to health and welfare. Farmers, public health officers, and consumers have demanded effective controls for unwanted insects. In the case of pesticides, the tightly bound helix of risk and benefit defies simple solution.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
It is fitting that this book, which had its origins at Yale, has found its way
back to that distinguished university. I am very grateful to a large and diverse group of scholars there including the late Frederic L. Holmes, Dan Kevles, John Wargo, John Mack Faragher, Cynthia Russett, Steven Stoll, Toby Appel, Susan Lederer, and John Warner. In addition, I deeply appreciate the assistance of many librarians at the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscripts Library, Yale School of Medicine, Sterling Memorial Library, and the Yale School of Forestry and Environmental Studies. A fellowship from the Beinecke Library facilitated a summer of research in the Rachel Carson Papers. The following statements serve as grateful acknowledgment of permissions to publish quotations from Silent Spring. Quotations from Silent Spring by Rachel Carson (Copyright © 1962 by Rachel L. Carson) are reprinted by permission of Frances Collin, Trustee, and Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. Quotations from Silent Spring by Rachel Carson (Copyright © 1962 by Rachel L. Carson, renewed 1990 by Roger Christie) are reprinted by permission of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. All rights reserved. I also acknowledge Magnum Photos for permission to reprint Erich Hartmann’s photograph of Rachel Carson. Additional photographs of E. M. K. Geiling, Kenneth DuBois, and John Doull appear courtesy of the Special Collections Research Center, University of Chicago Library. Special thanks go to Christine Coburn for providing access to these photos and to Daniel Meyer for authorizing permission to publish them.
My current university, Florida State University, has been a very conducive place to complete this study. I am particularly grateful to colleagues both current and former, including Neil Jumonville, Edward Gray, Jonathan Grant, Elna Green, Michael Ruse, Michael Creswell, Richard Mizelle, Joe Gabriel, Andrew Frank, Jennifer Koslow, Peter Garretson, Charles Upchurch, Ron Doel, Kristine Harper, Max Friedman, and Will Hanley. The History Department provided funds for travel to research sites and conferences. The Office of Sponsored Research at FSU gave me three generous awards for travel, research, and writing, including the Developing Scholar’s Award. A Grant for Scholarly Works in Biomedicine (#1G13LM009606) from the National Library of Medicine at the National Institutes of Health provided a much-needed release from teaching responsibilities to complete research and writing. With this grant, I was also able to utilize a full-year sabbatical from FSU. A small army of graduate students contributed in numerous ways to the research and editing of this book as readers and research assistants: Michael Bonura, Gary DeSantis, Elizabeth Dobson, Abraham Gibson, Samantha Muka, Darryl Myers, Samiparna Samanta, Harvey Whitney, and Chris Wilhelm.