Fred Wilcox - Waiting for an Army to Die

During the second section of the EPA’s hearings, Dow Chemical was joined by fifty-four corporations and trade associations, including the National Cattlemen’s Association, the National Forest Products Association, and the American Farm Bureau in opposing the EPA’s possible cancellation of 2,4,5-T. The US Department of Agriculture also intervened with information that supported Dow’s position. Intervening on behalf of affected citizens were the Environmental Defense Fund and the Northwest Coalition for Alternatives to Pesticides (NCAP), an organization with fifty member groups in five northwestern states. Following arguments in favor of and against the continued registration of 2,4,5-T, an administrative law judge was to make a recommendation to the EPA’s administrator, whose decision would be subject to a lengthily appeals process. But in March 1981, before testimony had been completed, the EPA agreed with Dow’s request to suspend the hearings and negotiate a settlement behind closed doors.

“Our reaction to the news was one of anger,” wrote the NCAP staff in their quarterly magazine, NCAP News . “To so compromise a public process as to render it meaningless is an outrage to all citizens. Instead of an orderly public airing of the risks and benefits of 2,4,5-T and a decision by an administrative law judge, we have gotten the backroom deal. The closed-door negotiations have short-circuited the orderly hearing process, stifled the disclosure of essential information, and effectively excluded citizen representation.” 5

“I think they knew that no one really had any information on the benefits of T, either economic or otherwise,” laughs Hill, “but no matter which way things go, Dow pretty much wins because the EPA will be closed down before long anyway. The Reagan administration didn’t even appoint an administrator for the agency until four months after the president took office, and their funding has been cut by 40 percent this year; yet they were always under funded. And it’s ironic that at a time when the EPA seems to be needed more than ever, some of the best people are leaving because they are unable to deal with the frustration of working for an administrator and an administration whose idea of regulating the environment is that you should pretty much let industry do whatever it wishes.”

As I listen to Bonnie Hill it becomes increasingly clear that she has not come to these mountains to be a weekend woodswoman, stapling NO HUNTING OR TRESPASSING signs to the trees on her acreage so the rednecks won’t ravage the wildlife. Nor has she chosen a life style that will enable her to return to her parents’ suburban home and, while the bathtub fills with steaming water, rail against the parasitical and platitudinous quality of urban-suburban life. She does not like what some of the people who work for the BLM, Forest Service, or private timber companies are doing to the land, but she does not hate the men who are doing it. Having lived not just on but in the land for over a decade, she realizes that the ice-clear streams, the trees, centuries old and draped in layers of lichen, the elk and the deer and the trout can get along without human begins; but she cannot imagine her family getting along without the land. What seems to upset and bewilder her the most is why everyone doesn’t love the forests as much as she and her neighbors do—a question that has perplexed Native Americans for more than two hundred years. The answer, as she has heard more than one professor of Ag-Economics say, “is of course complex.”

Although even the most fervent opponents of 2,4,5-T would concede that Dow has managed to reduce the amount of TCDD in this herbicide, no one is quite certain just how much 2,4,5-T is currently being sprayed on rangelands and rice plantations, or even how much of this herbicide is actually manufactured each year. The amount produced is considered a trade secret, but even if one were able to determine the exact number of gallons produced, it would be difficult, if not impossible, to discover with any precision just where and in what quantities 2,4,5-T is being used. Neither the EPA nor the states in which herbicides are used have the financial resources or manpower to spot-check even a small percentage of the helicopters that douse our national forests, rangelands, and rice plantations with defoliants. Moreover, there is little if any environmental testing for residues of TCDD that might find their way into the water, soil, and food chain following the application of herbicides contaminated with dioxin.

Speaking of the difficulties involved in such testing, Dr. Arthur H. Westing, chairman of the Science Department at Hampshire College and a man whom Dow considers one of the “fifty-nine top world experts in dioxin,” explains that “In the whole world there are only about six or eight laboratories that have the capabilities of measuring dioxin at the levels of concern, and I think four of these labs are here in this country. There’s one in Wisconsin, there’s one at Harvard, Nebraska, Beltsville, and possibly Du Pont can do it; so there’s four or five labs. There’s one lab in Switzerland and one in Sweden, and those are the only labs in the whole world where you can do the kind of dioxin analysis that needs to be done in order to examine the levels of concern. But we’re talking about a theoretical capability that, however, doesn’t exist. For example, consider Canada, a developed country, a rich country with a large forestry industry that uses, or did use, a lot of 2,4,5-T, yet they could not test for dioxin. There was no laboratory in the country where they could see whether a problem was building up in the environment. On the other hand, it’s not so difficult, although it is still difficult, to do the testing on the actual 2,4,5-T. Probably thirty or forty labs can do that around the country. You’re talking about parts of tenths of hundreds of parts per million of a chemical, that is dioxin in this case, and so where the problem lies is that if Dow goes perking along and says, ‘We’re making the stuff and it’s safe,’ you have to take their word for it. But I shouldn’t pick out Dow, I mean any company. You just have to take their word for it because you and I couldn’t test for it. I was in Vermont and I discovered that neither the Vermont Department of Health nor the University of Vermont had the capability of checking whether or not the shipments of 2,4,5-T coming in were safe. No one in the entire state has this capability. Now you can tool up for that, but it hasn’t been done.

“But to go back to the question of environmental testing, that now costs $750 to $1,000 a sample if you have it done by contract. For instance, you could ship it to the University of Nebraska and they’ll do it for you, but obviously you can’t do that very often. So the problem is not that you might not be able to reduce the content of dioxin in a herbicide so it might be a conceivably safe level, but that you must take the chemical companies’ word that the shipments will come through safe. And secondly, you can’t continually test to see whether there is a buildup in one place or another, because beyond the safe manufacture of chemicals there has to be some assurance that they will be safely used. In other words, even if the applicators are told that they shouldn’t spray into a stream or reservoir, who’s really going to find out whether they do it or not? Because who’s out there in the woods watching them every day?

“And then, of course, what about accidents? In Missouri, for example, someone in totally good faith got rid of wastes that had dioxin in them, and then the people who were paid to get rid of the waste, rather than doing it in a proper way, simply dumped it along the wayside. Nobody can really test for it readily without a lot of money and expertise, so how do we really know whether or not Vermont Yankee [a nuclear power station], which is just up the road from here, releases an unsafe level of radiation one day? They aren’t going to tell anybody about it. They do or they don’t, but you don’t know if they do or they don’t. And it’s the same with dioxin, and it’s a nasty thing.”