Pesticides and Babies
Okay, this is genuinely a startling and offputting bit of news, even given the administration’s track record on the environment:
http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2004/07/29/tech/main633009.shtml
“(AP) The Environmental Protection Agency will be free to approve pesticides without consulting wildlife agencies to determine if the chemical might harm plants and animals protected by the Endangered Species Act, according to new Bush administration rules.”
News flash: pesticides are harmful to us, not just to endangered species. Here’s the rule of thumb: Anything that can kill an endangered species can kill other species. Anything that can poison, suffocate, or dehydrate an endangered species can ditto other species. Anything that can cause disease in an endangered species can cause disease in the broader range of species that includes human beings.
Among all the panoply of products in the pharmacoepia of “Chemistry making life better for man,” as the old television ads used to put it, pesticides and herbicides are particularly lethal.
About eighteen years ago, when my own child was an infant, I got a quick lesson in marketing and survival from a friend, a horticulturist who had worked for the Agriculture Department for years. We were standing outside, in the back of my back yard, my baby in my arms, where I was consulting with Jake on how to start a garden in an area that some former owners of the house had concealed behind a hedge.
I don’t remember how the topic of apple juice came up. But the gist of his anecdote was as follows:
- The agribusiness orchard owners had been dousing their trees, and apples, with pesticide;
- When the apples were processed to make apple-juice concentrate, the pesticide also became concentrated;
- Including in baby juice;
- Lobbied intensively, Congress failed to pass a law effectively limiting the pesticides;
- But the industry curtailed the practice anyway, because of the threat of major litigation involving babies imbibing pesticides with their fruit juice. No legislation stood in the way of their loading the fruit with pesticides, but litigation did.
No wonder the Bush administration is going after “trial lawyers,” bigtime.
The rest of this AP news item carried by CBS is equally startling:
“Under the Endangered Species Act, EPA has been required to consult with Interior's Fish and Wildlife Service and Commerce's National Marine Fisheries Service each time it licenses a new pesticide. But that hasn't been happening for some time.
’Because of the complexity of consultations to examine the effects of pest-control products, there have been almost no consultations completed in the past decade,’ the officials acknowledged in their statement.
Steve Williams, the Fish and Wildlife director, said it was too complex to have to consider every possible result among the interaction of hundreds of active chemicals and 1,200 threatened and endangered species.”
“The interaction of hundreds of active chemicals”: now, there’s a campaign slogan. I’d like to see it on a hat, perhaps worn by Michael Moore. (On a more personal note, the adorable infant referred to above has grown up to give me a CD of Moore’s television program, “The Awful Truth,” for my recent birthday.)
More broadly, one of the biggest problems in public discourse on environmental matters today is the phrase “the environment” itself, which accidentally suggests something removed from us. The pesticide or herbicide that gets on your skin or into your lungs is not removed from you.
These are not just “environmental” issues; they are health issues. It might be a good idea to bring more physicians into the fold, along with trial lawyers, if we really want to make progress on them. The AMA (American Medical Association), which back in my childhood used to deny that things like highway speeding had a deleterious effect on health, has been constructive in recent years about assaults on the public health and public safety.
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