the usual nonsensical claptrap about priorities, limited resources, deregulation, and so on. But the real embarrassment began when the official tried to explain the purpose of what he called the “policy analysis model,” a phrase designed to trivialize research into the negative consequences of pesticides.
“There’s a continuing need to relate changes in regulatory control by EPA on pesticide matters to changes in user behavior to changes in the health and the environment,” the official said. EPA control options must be evaluated, ultimately, in terms of the “net benefits expected if the options are exercised.”
“To do this, the options must be identified clearly and expressed in operational terms,” the official continued, in typically opaque bureaucratic rhetoric. “The options must be linked to alternative user behaviors and user behaviors linked to a set of definitive changes in the health and the environment. Comprehensive quantitative mea-sures are required to express these changes in terms of both costs and benefits so that net benefits can be derived. The above elements would be integrated into a policy analysis model. Such a model would aid in the examination of alternative policies, strategies, resource allocations, and projected program accomplishments expressed in more distal terms than the present proximal measures of decisions made.” The same sort of mind-numbing language about “managing” might well have been used by the chemical industry to deflect public (and stockholder) concerns about the effects of its products on human life and our increasingly fragile environment.
While this performance was under way, Professor Pimentel’s eyes would meet mine. He sat there smiling, wondering why he was wasting his time like this and thinking there was no way his research would have any impact on senior EPA people.
I finally got to ask Pimentel what he would have done in our shoes. He said two things could be done that would immediately reduce the threat of pesticides by at least 50 percent. First, pesticides ought to be given only to farmers who had a prescription from their county agent detailing precisely why those chemicals were necessary to treat the farmer’s land. Second, the EPA should ban toxaphene, a DDT-like chemical that for several decades had left a heavy footprint of poisoning and death.
EPA had taken DDT off the market in 1972 and in one way or another had heavily restricted some twelve other major pesticides in the first ten years of the agency’s existence. Now, Pimentel said, the time to ban toxaphene had come. In 1944, something like 250 million pounds of all farm chemicals were sprayed in the United States. Barely forty years later, in the early 1980s, 200 million pounds of toxaphene alone was being broadcast on our farms every year.
Like DDT, toxaphene accumulates at high levels in animals and moves readily by winds and rain around the globe. Toxaphene, which looks like amber, is not readily soluble in water, but it mixes nicely with other chemicals; indeed, it is made up of some 177 different chemicals, each of which has its own toxic history. Nearly 70 percent is chlorine, a deadly chemical in its own right. The impact this toxic bomb has on humans is dramatic: it causes leukemia and changes in the structure of human chromosomes, resulting in genetic disease. It damages the nerves and brain of all animals, sterilizes water animals, and has devastating effects on fish and wildlife.
“[T]here is clear and compelling evidence that toxaphene is acutely and chronically toxic to a wide variety of important fish and wildlife species at concentrations to which these species are likely to be exposed when the pesticide is used in several crops at historical or legally permitted levels,” an EPA report said in 1980. “Continued toxaphene use fatally threatens members of endangered species.” 7
A great deal of toxaphene migrates to water on the back of soil erosion, polluting
“There’s a continuing need to relate changes in regulatory control by EPA on pesticide matters to changes in user behavior to changes in the health and the environment,” the official said. EPA control options must be evaluated, ultimately, in terms of the “net benefits expected if the options are exercised.”
“To do this, the options must be identified clearly and expressed in operational terms,” the official continued, in typically opaque bureaucratic rhetoric. “The options must be linked to alternative user behaviors and user behaviors linked to a set of definitive changes in the health and the environment. Comprehensive quantitative mea-sures are required to express these changes in terms of both costs and benefits so that net benefits can be derived. The above elements would be integrated into a policy analysis model. Such a model would aid in the examination of alternative policies, strategies, resource allocations, and projected program accomplishments expressed in more distal terms than the present proximal measures of decisions made.” The same sort of mind-numbing language about “managing” might well have been used by the chemical industry to deflect public (and stockholder) concerns about the effects of its products on human life and our increasingly fragile environment.
While this performance was under way, Professor Pimentel’s eyes would meet mine. He sat there smiling, wondering why he was wasting his time like this and thinking there was no way his research would have any impact on senior EPA people.
I finally got to ask Pimentel what he would have done in our shoes. He said two things could be done that would immediately reduce the threat of pesticides by at least 50 percent. First, pesticides ought to be given only to farmers who had a prescription from their county agent detailing precisely why those chemicals were necessary to treat the farmer’s land. Second, the EPA should ban toxaphene, a DDT-like chemical that for several decades had left a heavy footprint of poisoning and death.
EPA had taken DDT off the market in 1972 and in one way or another had heavily restricted some twelve other major pesticides in the first ten years of the agency’s existence. Now, Pimentel said, the time to ban toxaphene had come. In 1944, something like 250 million pounds of all farm chemicals were sprayed in the United States. Barely forty years later, in the early 1980s, 200 million pounds of toxaphene alone was being broadcast on our farms every year.
Like DDT, toxaphene accumulates at high levels in animals and moves readily by winds and rain around the globe. Toxaphene, which looks like amber, is not readily soluble in water, but it mixes nicely with other chemicals; indeed, it is made up of some 177 different chemicals, each of which has its own toxic history. Nearly 70 percent is chlorine, a deadly chemical in its own right. The impact this toxic bomb has on humans is dramatic: it causes leukemia and changes in the structure of human chromosomes, resulting in genetic disease. It damages the nerves and brain of all animals, sterilizes water animals, and has devastating effects on fish and wildlife.
“[T]here is clear and compelling evidence that toxaphene is acutely and chronically toxic to a wide variety of important fish and wildlife species at concentrations to which these species are likely to be exposed when the pesticide is used in several crops at historical or legally permitted levels,” an EPA report said in 1980. “Continued toxaphene use fatally threatens members of endangered species.” 7
A great deal of toxaphene migrates to water on the back of soil erosion, polluting
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