CHAPTER 9

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—icons of advertising’s hall of fame, lounging in front-row seats behind home plate. Look, 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 detected in the Big Mac. The plump Pillsbury Doughboy giggles as the Jolly Green Giant looks down on the game from the parking lot, ho-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.

They seem so innocent, so endearing, don’t they? So American. Many of us grew up with these guys, and we love their entrepreneurial optimism, their goofiness, their cool. Our demand for products like theirs has kept the US economy in the growth mode, overall, for more than half a century, and it really can’t be denied that America’s dazzling products make life seem bright, shiny, and convenient. But at what cost to our health, and the planet?

A GENERATION OVERFLOWING WITH SURPRISES

“Americans have a tradition of trusting manufacturers,” says Suzanne Wuerthele, a toxicologist in the Environmental Protection Agency’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.”¹

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.”

We typically assume that somebody else is minding the shop, making sure all these chemicals are nontoxic. Yet the truth is that out of 84,000 chemicals in common commercial use, only about 1,500 to 2,000 have been tested for carcinogenicity. In fact, of the 3,000 chemicals produced at the highest volume, roughly two-fifths have no testing data on basic toxicity.² Writes Sandra Steingraber in 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.”³ 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.’”

That battle continues, though we’re not always in agreement about who the enemy is. If we had microscopic vision, the horrors we’d see in our own houses would send us running for the door: microscopic bits of plastics, carpet fibers, and pesticides disappear into the nostrils of family members and never come out! Of chemicals commonly found in homes, 150 have been linked to allergies, birth defects, cancer, and psychological abnormalities, according to the Consumer Product Safety Commission.⁴

TOXIC DREAM HOUSE

David and Mary Pinkerton were trusting souls. They were buying their 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. 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, “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.”⁵

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 forty million Americans may be allergic to their own homes, according to the American Lung Association, and twenty-five million Americans—about one in twelve—have already been diagnosed with asthma. This chronic disease—typically caused by allergic reactions that create inflammation—accounts for millions of sick days from work and school every year (more than $50 billion annually) 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. Here’s a macabre formaldehyde footnote: only half as much formaldehyde is needed to embalm a deceased American today than was needed twenty years ago, because our bodies are already partially “embalmed” with high levels of formaldehyde in our blood, organs, and tissue.⁶

A new chemical substance is discovered every nine seconds of the working day, as the “invisible hand of the market” demands new miracles such as squeezable plastic containers or more enjoyable “mouth feel” in our snack foods. There is no place on earth that does not contain runaway molecules. “Tree bark sampled from more than 90 sites … found that DDT, chlordane, and dieldrin were present no matter how remote the area,” writes the environmental writer Anne Platt McGinn.⁷ 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.⁸

Spill baby, spill

DEAD ZONES

Among the most exotic of the chemicals being found in waterways are orphan molecules 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. “In the past we looked for the really toxic actors that have immediate effects like death or cancer,” says Edward Furlong, a chemist with the US Geological Survey. “Now we’re starting to look more closely at compounds whose effects are subtle.” 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-six 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 affluence-seeking, no-effort-required civilization.⁹

Per capita consumption of bottled water increased by more than 1,000 percent between 1997 and 2013, becoming a $27 billion a year industry with annual sales of more than nine billion gallons—twenty-four gallons per capita—according to the American Beverage Association.¹⁰ 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 also 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.¹¹

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” (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. Scuba diving, anyone?

No more appealing are the huge islands of waste caught in continent-size oceanic whirlpools in the North Pacific and elsewhere. Mostly composed of tiny bits of eroded plastic, these “gyres” threaten aquatic life that ingests mouthfuls of this toxic minestrone soup. We’re literally littering them to death.

DEADLY MIMICRY

The surprises just keep coming, don’t they, 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. In Our Stolen Future, the scientist and author Theo Colburn, along with her colleagues, 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 can’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.”

The key finding was that these persistent chemicals fake their way into the endocrine system, masquerading as hormones like estrogen and androgen in a deadly case of miscommunication. When hormones, our chemical messengers, are released or suppressed at the wrong time in the wrong amounts, life gets bent out of shape. One experiment studied the health of children whose mothers had eaten fish contaminated with polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs) during pregnancy. Compared with a control population, the two hundred exposed children, on average, were born sooner, weighed less, and had lower IQs.¹²

GENETIC ROULETTE

About thirty years ago, scientists perfected technology that can insert genes with certain traits into organisms. If you want a strawberry that tolerates cold temperatures, why not insert trout genes into the berry’s genetic structure? If you want to protect corn from agricultural pests, why not put a pesticide gene right into the corn seed, so pests die when they eat the corn? Or what if you’re a scientist at Monsanto who wants corn or soybeans to be Roundup Ready—resistant to the company’s flagship herbicide, Roundup—so that farmers can spray as much Roundup as they want and sales of the herbicide skyrocket? Why not use existing laws that enable genetically engineered organisms (GMOs) to be patented? Why not force farmers to sign a contract that forbids them from saving seeds from the crop, and sue farmers whose cornfields accidentally contain GMOs because pollen from the engineered seeds drifted onto their farms? If these actions reduce pesticide use, increase yields, result in healthier corn and higher profits, aren’t they justified?

The problem is, pesticide use is increasing on crops planted with GM (genetically modified) seeds as pests and weeds become resistant.¹³ Roundup Ready crops now account for 94 percent of the soybean crops and upward of 70 percent for soy and cotton, USDA figures show. Between 1996 (when the first herbicide-resistant crops became available) and 2011, GMOs have led to a net increase in pesticide use of 404 million pounds, a 7 percent gain overall. Yields are essentially just holding steady when compared with non-GMO seeds (and in some cases are decreasing); and the health effects of foods containing GMOs are increasingly coming into question, as presented in Jeffrey M. Smith’s eye-opening documentary Genetic Roulette and exhaustively researched book with the same title. Both present hard evidence that when livestock and wildlife have a choice between GM food and non-GM, they invariably choose the seeds developed with natural selection. In one of many examples, Smith writes, “The cows came to the first trough containing GM corn, sniffed it and withdrew. They then walked over to the next trough and finished off the non-GM corn. This same scenario was repeated over and over again using both cows and pigs on six or seven farms.”¹⁴

What are their instincts telling these animals? Even without access to countless lab studies, their immune systems apparently sense potential problems. Already documented in lab tests are disruptions in endocrine systems; the transfer of genes into beneficial bacteria in stomachs; antibiotic-resistant diseases; kidney damage; allergies; and significantly increased mortality.

More evidence comes from India, where cotton growers who signed contracts with Monsanto seed vendors find themselves on a treadmill: the Indian government has issued warnings that cotton crop yields can decline after the first five years of production with GM seeds because of “growing parasite and pest infestations and the need for greater pesticide use, higher costs tied to both the GM seeds and the greater pesticide use, [and] Bt cotton’s heavy water demands which are twice those of traditional cotton crops.” According to one news account, this has led to a staggering number of suicides among Indian farmers; according to the Indian Ministry of Agriculture, a thousand or more small Indian farmers commit suicide every month, largely because of GM-generated crop failures and debts.¹⁵

The company that brought us Agent Orange, dioxin, PCBs, and the bovine growth hormone is coming under increasing scrutiny by agricultural experts and the general public. National polls show that more than 90 percent of Americans are in favor of mandatory product labeling for GMOs, and companies like Whole Foods have announced that labeling will be required on the products they sell.

So far, about a dozen state legislatures have taken up the issue, and federal legislators have introduced a bill to require labeling, but largely due to massive industry spending to prevent labeling requirements, these bills haven’t passed. Unfortunately, H.R. 933 did pass, including a provision that “prohibits federal courts from banning the sale and planting of genetically modified organisms, even if they are proven to be dangerous to human health.” The law has been dubbed the “Monsanto Protection Act” by food and health activists.

If there’s nothing wrong with what some call Frankenfood, what are the manufacturers and vendors afraid of? Just label what’s in the foods, and let us make the decision whether or not to buy them. One way to avoid GMOs is to buy USDA-certified organic food, which is not allowed to contain GMOs. A new “ethical shopping” app called Buycott can be used at the supermarket to find out where your groceries come from and how to participate in consumer campaigns.

A SMELL FROM HELL

The products that cause industrial diarrhea often seem remote and out of our control: plastic packaging, processed food, toys, cars, and computer circuit boards. But when we track hazardous chemicals from their sources to their points of use, we see they are not really remote at all: even the familiar bacon on our plates literally results in industrial diarrhea, as the writer Donovan Webster describes:

Raising hogs used to be a family business, until one enterprising North Carolina farmer made it big business. But this booming national industry is churning out at least one unwelcome by-product—millions of gallons of pig waste that soil the water and foul the air.

The smell is what hits you first. Like a hammer, it clamps against the nerve endings of your nose, then works its way inside your head and rattles your brain. Imagine a filthy dog run on a humid day; a long-unwashed diaper in a sealed plastic bag; a puffed roadkill beneath the hottest summer sun. This is that smell: equal parts outhouse and musk, with a jaw-tightening jolt of ammonia tossed in.

In recent years, this potent mix of acrid ammonia, rotting-meat ketones, and spoiled-egg hydrogen sulfide has invaded tens of thousands of houses—and millions of acres—across rural America. The vapor billows invisibly, occasionally lifting off and disappearing for hours or weeks, only to return while the neighbors are raking leaves, scraping the ice off their windshield, or setting the table for a family cookout.¹⁶

Isn’t it time to say good-bye to the obsolete Industrial Revolution—plagued from the start with industrial diarrhea—and bring in a new era of civic oversight and ecological design?