Read Online Poison Spring by E. G. Vallianatos - Free Book Online

BFC’s lawyers asked the EPA’s top pesticides official, Edwin Johnson, to limit regulation to “monitoring” toxaphene. Translation: do nothing. Or, they said, the EPA could limit regulation to changing the label on the pesticide can. This was almost literally the least they could do.
    These requests so infuriated David Severn and Joseph Reinert, two EPA scientists following toxaphene in the environment, that after talking to BFC, they sent a note to Johnson in which they put their cards on the table: BFC’s proposals about toxaphene “would make no useful contribution to our state of knowledge,” Severn wrote.
    “Our concern about the environmental transport of toxaphene is dramatically illustrated by the recently recognized buildup of toxaphene residues in fish in the Great Lakes, even though little or no toxaphene is used in that region,” Severn continued. “In fact, recent data from an isolated landlocked lake on Isle Royale, an island in Lake Superior near the Canadian border whose only known input of water is from the atmosphere, show 3.2 ppm [parts per million] toxaphene in adult lake trout. The toxaphene residues in the Great Lakes almost certainly result from atmospheric transport from the southern states. Toxaphene has been consistently found in rainwater collected along the eastern seaboard, and at levels 10–100 times greater than DDT or PCBs.”
    Severn warned Johnson that merely tinkering with toxaphene regulation—which BFC wanted—would do nothing to reduce the risk to people and nature. “Given the nature of our concern about its atmospheric dispersal throughout the environment, normal risk reduction methods would not be effective,” Severn wrote. “Label restrictions such as requiring application lay-off distances or any type of limiting monitoring effort could not reduce the levels of environmental exposure for this pesticide. Environmental exposure can only be reduced effectively by reducing the amount of toxaphene used.” 11
     
    Severn and Reinert were brave, and they were right. But they were also conventional scientists working within a dysfunctional system. They knew what the political fallout would be when that information became public. They knew that if their suggestions were taken seriously, BFC would lose money, and the implications of that loss would reverberate like a tsunami at the EPA. Congressmen and senators would demand their pound of flesh.
    I talked about toxaphene with Stanley Weissman, the legal adviser to Edwin Johnson. He understood that toxaphene was an American tragedy. But we also saw clearly that Johnson would not dare initiate proceedings against toxaphene, and that it would be futile and dangerous for us to urge him to move in that direction. We knew toxaphene was a political problem that could probably be resolved only in a political context.
    We passed the information about toxaphene to Illinois congressman Sid Yates, who to his credit acted quickly. Yates was the chairman of the appropriations subcommittee for the Department of the Interior and was well informed about environmental issues. As a congressman from Chicago, Yates was concerned about the shore of Lake Michigan, and once he learned about cancer-causing toxaphene and its contamination of the fish in Lake Michigan, he decided he would work to ban the chemical.
    As so often happens in these cases, part of his interest was personal. Yates’s wife had cancer, and in his mind, toxaphene was too close for comfort.
     
    In August 1982, Sid Yates took his righteous anger with him to the floor of the House of Representatives, arguing for a ban on toxaphene.
    “I am very emotional about this amendment,” Yates said. “The reason I feel emotional is that I have just taken my wife home from the National Cancer Institute, where she has been found to have a malignancy. She and I played golf together up to about three weeks ago. We played on a Sunday afternoon, and the next day she did not feel well. We went