by John de Graaf; David Wann; Thomas H Naylor; David Horsey; Vicki Robin
The Extinction Spike
Before nature’s health began to slide, we rarely thought about how a product got to us, and what came with it; we just consumed it and threw the leftovers away. We didn’t think about the plants, animals, and even human cultures that were displaced or destroyed when the materials were mined. Now, when biologists like Norman Myers and E.O. Wilson tell us we may be in the middle of the most severe extinction since the fall of the dinosaur sixty-five million years ago, many are finally moving beyond denial. We are losing species a thousand times faster than the natural rate of extinction.14
What will civilizations of the far future say about our era? Will they somehow deduce the causes of the calamitous decline in species diversity? Or will they shrug their shoulders (if they have shoulders to shrug) the way our scientists do when they ponder extinctions of the past? “It was global warming,” the future scientists might conclude. “Inefficient use of land,” others will hypothesize. But for the sake of our civilization’s dignity, let’s hope that none of them uncovers humiliating evidence of our obsessive need for cheap coffee, gasoline, and underwear.
CHAPTER 12
Industrial diarrhea
DDT is good for me!
—1950s jingle
The chemical age has created products,
institutions and cultural attitudes that
require synthetic chemicals to sustain them.
—THEO COLBURN ET AL,
Our Stolen Future
Imagine spotting them through binoculars at a baseball game—the all-stars of advertising, sitting together in front-row seats behind home plate. There’s the Marlboro Man and Joe Camel, signing autographs and passing out smokes to the kids. The Energizer Bunny flings handfuls of batteries into the crowd like Tootsie Rolls, while Ronald McDonald argues defensively with an environmentalist about hormones, antibiotics, and pesticide residues now being detected in the Big Mac. The overweight Pillsbury Doughboy giggles as the Jolly Green Giant looks down on the game from the parking lot, ho-hoing every time the home team scores. No one messes with a guy that size, even though chunks of pesticide slough off his green body like gigantic flakes of dry skin. (Look out, here comes another one!)
They all seem so innocent, don’t they? So American. We grew up with these guys, and we love their optimism, their goofiness, and their cool. Our demand for their products keeps the U.S. economy cranking at a feverishly giddy pace, and it can’t be denied that America’s dazzling products make life seem bright, shiny, and convenient. But with a steady diet of this stuff, we risk serious damage to our environment and to our health. Many of the goods we buy contain toxic “bads” such as dangerous chemicals hidden from plain view, but for some reason, we don’t want to believe that.
THE GENERATION OF SURPRISES
We don’t want to believe that cigarettes now kill more than 430,000 Americans annually, wiping out five million years of potential life each year. That radiation from nuclear power—once thought to be “too cheap to meter"—really does destroy DNA and cause cancer and has obliterated a handful of bioregions, effectively forever. That one tiny particle of dioxin transmitted to a fetus at the wrong time could permanently disrupt the unborn child’s reproductive system. That between 1940 and 1995 the production of synthetic chemicals increased six hundred times and that we now produce 1,600 pounds a year per capita. And that two out of every five Americans will contract cancer at some point in their lives, including increasing percentages of children.1
“Americans have a tradition of trusting manufacturers,” said Dr. Suzanne Wuerthele, a toxicologist in the EPA’s Denver office. “Ever since the days of the flour mill, the small leather-tanning company, and the blacksmith, products have been assumed innocent until proven guilty—just the opposite of the way it should be. We’ve worked within an “acceptable risk” strategy. Industry’s stance is, ‘Show me the dead bodies, or else let me make my product the way I want to.’ When a disaster happens, industry begins to respond, and sometimes not even then.”
As Wuerthele points out, the track record for synthetic chemicals is laced with unpleasant surprises. “From nuclear radiation and CFCs to the various chlorinated hydrocarbon pesticides, we’re always playing catch-up, finding out about health and ecological effects after it’s too late. The most recent surprise is that genetically engineered organisms can migrate into the environment, even when they’re engineered into the cells of plants. For example, pollen from genetically engineered corn plants migrates to plants like milkweed, where it has been shown to kill the Bambis of the insect world—Monarch butterflies. That shouldn’t have caught the corporate and government scientists by surprise—with hundreds of thousands of acres of genetically engineered corn already planted—but it did.”2
We typically assume that somebody else is minding the shop, making sure all these chemicals are safe. Yet the truth is that out of 75,000 chemicals now in common commercial use, only about 1,200 to 1,500 have been tested for carcinogenicity. In fact, of the 3,000 chemicals produced at the highest volume, 43 percent have no testing data on basic toxicity.3 Dr. Sandra Steingraber writes in her book Living Downstream, “The vast majority of commercially used chemicals were brought to market before 1979, when federal legislation mandated the review of new chemicals. Thus many carcinogenic environmental contaminants likely remain unidentified, unmonitored, and unregulated.”4
Steingraber, herself a victim of bladder cancer, recalls the advertising blitz for DDT, a product that returned home victorious from World War II after protecting American soldiers from malaria and other diseases overseas. “In one ad,” writes Steingraber, “children splash in a swimming pool while DDT is sprayed above the water. In another, an aproned housewife in stiletto heels and a pith helmet aims a spray gun at two giant cockroaches standing on her kitchen counter. They raise their front legs in surrender. The caption reads, ‘Super Ammunition for the Continued Battle on the Home Front.’”5
DDT was seen as a harmless pal even though biologists had already documented that the chemical killed birds and fish, disrupted the reproductive systems of laboratory animals, created population explosions of pests with newly evolved resistance, and showed strong signs of causing cancer. By 1951, DDT had become a contaminant of human breast milk and was known to pass from mother to child.
Yet DDT continued to be seen as an “elixir” until Rachel Carson’s book Silent Spring put the spotlight on birds with convulsions, twitching to death under the elm tree. Since the time of those DDT ads, cancer has become an epidemic in slow motion. Cancers of the brain, liver, breast, kidney, prostate, esophagus, skin, bone marrow, and lymph have all escalated in the past fifty years, as the incidence of cancer has increased by more than 50 percent.
The use of chemicals like DDT seemed justified at first. After all, the use of other pesticides has played a role in the low prices Americans pay for food. (As a percentage of income, we have the world’s cheapest food.) But what hidden costs do we pay?
ACCIDENTAL CONCOCTIONS
Ever since the days of alchemy, the field of chemistry has suffered from a tragic flaw: its isolation from the field of biology. Humans were deploying technology long before they understood what causes disease, or how living things interrelate. Sir Isaac Newton may have discovered gravity, but he didn’t seem to have a clue that the heavy metals he experimented with could kill him. In a 1692 letter to colleague John Locke, he blamed his insomnia, depression, poor digestion, amnesia, and paranoia on “sleeping too often by my fire.” We found out otherwise three hundred years later, when scientists analyzed a lock of his hair, passed along as a family heirloom. The hair was a repository of lead, arsenic, antimony, and mercury molecules from his alchemy experiments. Carefully recorded in his logs were descriptions of the taste of each chemical. Little did he know the gravity of his actions.
Even when a toxic cause-and-effect connection was made, our ancestors often adopted a policy of “acceptable risk.” Mercury was mined in Spain as far back as 400 B
CE, despite severe health effects like chronically bleeding gums, dementia, and eventual death. In that case, the risks were deemed acceptable because convicts and slaves did the mining.
While the benefits accrue only to those who sell or use the products, the risks are often spread among the whole population. Chemicals, if profitable, are deemed innocent until alarming evidence proves otherwise. For example, workers in a pesticide factory didn’t realize that their exposure to Kepone was sterilizing them until they sat around the lunch table talking about a common inability to start a family.
BETTER LIVING THROUGH CHEMISTRY?
As America’s economy grew at rates never before seen in human history, millions of chemical compounds were brought into the world. Most did not find immediate uses, but a century’s worth of tinkering has created an alphabet soup of persistent molecules that hang around in our world like uninvited guests. Many of these ingredients are incorporated into familiar products like detergents, varnishes, plastics, fingernail polish, bug spray, and pharmaceuticals, as well as behind-the-scenes industrial products like degreasers and plasticizers.
A new chemical substance is discovered every nine seconds of the working day, as the “invisible hand of the market” continues to call forth legions of them, like a throng of marching broomsticks straight out of The Sorcerer’s Apprentice. It’s become impossible to call them off, and as a consequence, we’re living in a sea of our own waste products. We’re exposed to chemicals in consumer products and in the workplace. We’re also bombarded by invisible particles that escape into our water, the air in our houses, and the living tissue in our bodies. There is no place on earth that does not contain runaway molecules. “Tree bark sampled from more than ninety sites around the world found that DDT, chlordane and dieldrin were present no matter how remote the area,” writes Ann Platt McGinn in State of the World 2000.6 In “toxic body burden” research performed in 2003, medical scientists at the Mount Sinai School of Medicine found an average of fifty or more toxic chemicals in the bloodstreams and urine samples of nine volunteers, most of whom led normal or even environmentally conscious lives. These chemicals, common in consumer products and industrial pollution, are linked to cancer, brain and nervous system diseases, and dysfunction in hormone and reproductive systems. Andrea Martin, a survivor of breast cancer, was one of the volunteers. “I was completely blown away,” she says. “There were ninety-five toxins, fifty-nine of which were carcinogens. We’re living in a toxic stew, and the manufacturers and polluters are, quite literally, getting away with murder.”7
If we had microscopic vision, we might get outdoors a bit more —where the air is cleaner—because the horrors we’d see in our own houses would send us running. We’d see microscopic bits of plastics, carpet fibers, and pesticides disappear into the nostrils of family members and never come back out! Because of all the chemicals contained in our everyday products, indoor pollution levels can be two to a hundred times higher than those found outdoors, especially now that homes are more tightly sealed for energy efficiency and air-conditioning.
NOWHERE TO RUN
David and Mary Pinkerton were trusting souls. They were buying a “dream house” in Missouri, and they liked to walk through the construction site after work, to see the house taking shape. On one visit just before moving in, David noticed a health warning printed on the subflooring that had been put in their new house. Irritation of the eyes and upper respiratory system could result from exposure to the chemicals in the plywood. But David trusted the builder. “He makes a living building houses. He wouldn’t put anything in there that would hurt anybody.”
“Within a month,” write the authors of Toxic Deception,8 “the three girls and their parents had grown quite ill. David would sit in an old overstuffed chair until supper was ready; after dinner he would usually go right to bed. . . . One night Mary tried to make dinner and David found her leaning against the wall with the skillet in her hand. . . . All five had bouts of vomiting and diarrhea that would wake them up, almost nightly. Brenda no longer wanted to go to dance classes, even though ballet had been ‘her big thing in life,’ Mary later recalled.”
After the family was forced to evacuate the house within six months of moving in, a state environmental inspector found ten parts per million of formaldehyde in the house, many times higher than the standard.
As many as 40 million Americans may be allergic to their own homes, according to the American Lung Association, and 26.3 million—more than a third of them children—have already been diagnosed with asthma. This chronic disease accounts for millions of sick days from work and school every year, as we continue to bombard ourselves with chemicals in paint fumes, cleaning products, air “fresheners,” particleboard, plastics, glues, wallpaper, cosmetics, and a hundred other standard products of the twenty-first century.9
DEAD ZONES
Scientists do have microscopic vision, and with new-millennium equipment they are finding toxic chemicals wherever they look. The average American hosts up to five hundred chemicals in his or her body. Among the most exotic of the chemicals now being found in waterways are refugees from the American lifestyle: trace amounts of pain relievers, antibiotics, birth control pills, perfumes, codeine, antacids, cholesterol-lowering agents, antidepressants, estrogen-replacement drugs, chemotherapy agents, sunscreen lotions, and hormones from animal feed lots. These compounds survive the assault of sewage treatment’s microbes, aeration, and chlorination and eventually show up unannounced in drinking water.10
With reports of pesticide, lead, and other industrial compounds gracing the front pages of newspapers across the country, it’s no wonder per capita consumption of bottled water increased by more than 1,000 percent between 1997 and 2005, becoming a $35 billion a year industry with annual sales of more than five billion gallons —twenty-four gallons per capita—according to the American Beverage Association. Yet the Natural Resources Defense Council advises that bottled water, at up to a thousand times the cost of tap water, is not only expensive but somewhat suspect. At least a third of the bottled water on the market is just packaged tap water, and another 25 percent contains traces of chemical contaminants.
“In the past we looked for the really toxic actors that have immediate effects like death or cancer,” said Edward Furlong, a chemist with the U.S. Geological Survey.11 “Now we are starting to look more closely at compounds whose effects are more subtle and less easily identified.” To his surprise, Furlong discovered what he calls “the Starbucks effect,” an indicator that caffeine may be giving aquatic life an unsolicited buzz. In addition to being a basic fuel of the American lifestyle (twenty-four gallons a year per capita), caffeine is a persistent and detectable compound. Just as it often persists in our bodies when we try to sleep, it also lingers in our rivers and streams. These findings are only the most recent in a series of aquatic conundrums presented by our affluent, often oblivious civilization. How long can an economy boom without adequate supplies of drinking water?
A decade or so ago, fishermen began reporting a “dead zone” in the Gulf of Mexico, where their nets always come up empty and their lines never record a strike. By the time the Mississippi River reaches the Gulf of Mexico, it contains enough pesticides, wasted nutrients (from eroded farm soil), and petrochemicals to poison a body of water the size of New Jersey. Luxury cruise ships in the Gulf add insult to critical injury by dumping raw sewage and other waste into open waters. Because of regulatory loopholes, cruise ships can legally discharge “graywater” (graywater is used water that doesn’t contain human waste) anywhere, and can dump human waste and ground-up food when they’re more than three miles from shore. On a weeklong voyage a typical Carnival or Royal Caribbean cruise ship with three thousand passengers and crew members generates eight tons of garbage, one million gallons of graywater, twenty-five thousand gallons of oil-contaminated water, and two hundred thousand gallons of sewage.12 Scuba diving, anyone?
DEADLY MIMICRY
The surprises just keep comi
ng, some of them involving other dead zones in the Great Lakes, the Arctic, and, potentially, even the human womb. Like evidence in a gruesome criminal case, the mounting data tell us more than we really want to know. Scientist and author Theo Colburn compiled thousands of data sets spanning three decades. The data report chaos and dysfunction in the natural world: male alligators with stunted sex organs, roosters that don’t crow, eagles that don’t build nests to take care of their young, “gay” female seagulls that nest together because males aren’t interested, whales with both male and female sex organs, and other cases of “sexual confusion.”
Though she knew that chemicals were central evidence, Colburn couldn’t deduce the mechanism until she began to look beyond cancer, the standard disease of toxicology. She and her colleagues traced persistent chemicals like PCBs, DDT, dioxin, and other pollutants into the human body, where they are stored in fatty tissue, passing from prey to predator, and from mother to breastfed baby. The key finding was that these persistent chemicals fake their way into the endocrine system, masquerading as hormones like estrogen and androgen. It’s a deadly case of miscommu-nication. When hormones, our chemical messengers, are released or suppressed at the wrong time in the wrong amounts, life gets bent out of shape.
For example, ecotoxicologist Pierre Béland began finding dead whales washed up on the shores of the St. Lawrence River in the early ’90s, sometimes so toxic they had to be disposed of as hazardous waste. His autopsies typically reveal a devil’s brew of breast tumors, stomach tumors, and cysts—all indicators of industrial production gone haywire.
It would be distressing enough if endocrine disruption were taking a toll on the planet’s wildlife, but not on humans. However, research is revealing what some scientists have suspected for years: humans are by no means immune, since endocrine systems function similarly throughout the animal kingdom. One experiment studied the health of children whose mothers had eaten PCB-contaminated fish during pregnancy. As compared with a control population, the two hundred exposed children, on average, were born sooner, weighed less, and had lower IQs.13
