Comment:
Monsanto Canada
and Aventis CropScience GMO contaminating Organic Canola in Canada
It’s been almost five years since my wife and I started
contacting public service officials at the federal, state, county and
municipal levels of government about the insane and suicidal practice of
pumping hundreds of gallons of lethal chemicals into homes in the state of
Arizona
. At last count we had contacted public "service" officials in
fourteen different agencies or department, with zero results.
We contacted the Arizona Structural Pest Control
Commission, only to see them do a complete whitewash of the people responsible
for contaminating our home with more than 758 gallons of these neurotoxic,
immunotoxic, endocrine-disrupting poisons. We asked numerous EPA officials for
help, and got exactly nowhere with every single one of them. The Arizona
Ombudsman’s investigator was incompetent and didn’t even know the laws
relating to pesticide use. We asked the Arizona Attorney General for help and
were ignored. Then we contacted the Governor and were brushed off with a
suggestion to contact--the Attorney General! We pleaded with Senator John
McCain for help, and saw our plea swallowed up in the quicksands of the EPA
bureaucracy. The same thing happened with our request for help to President
Clinton.
Each one of these people knows that our complete case
documentation, up to April 2000, has been on the internet at
www.poisonedinparadise.com for two years. We’ve even gone so far as to alert
them to the huge clean-up costs someone will have to bear as a result of this
mass poisoning. We’ve appealed to their patriotism--on page 88 of http://PoisonedInParadise.com/Poison00.pdf
we say, "If an enemy infiltrated the
U.S.
and secretly contaminated each of tens of millions of homes with hundreds of
gallons of nerve poison--an activity the pesticide industry has been engaged
in for decades--every serviceperson from
Miami
to
Seattle
would be mobilized. We don't know how useful they could be; the usual threats
they're trained to repel are disabled with guns, not bioremediation."
We’ve appealed to their sense of responsibility as successors to those who
founded the
U.S.
out of a sense of outrage against injustice. And we’ve tried so many other
varied approaches. None of them has worked.
Our assumption in making statements such as these was
that someone would say, "Hmm, these people are right. We have a big
problem here. We’d better start solving it." In hindsight, in making
this assumption we completely misunderstood the fundamental values and goals
of those in positions of political power and influence in
Arizona
today.
New homes are going up in the
Phoenix
area at the rate of 30,000 per year. With an average floor area of 2500 square
feet, each one of these homes has 500 gallons of Dursban TC in it by the time
the occupants move in. That means that between now and
December 31, 2005
, when Dursban will (at least in theory) be banned, another 50 million gallons
of pesticides will be added to the 280 million gallons of chlordane,
chlorpyrifos, xylene, trichloroethane, ethyltoluene and trimethylbenzene in
homes today.
Richard Cassidy of
San Antonio
,
Texas
has estimated that 30 million American homes were contaminated by chlordane
before it was outlawed in 1988. By the time Dursban is pulled off the market,
that number may be as high as 50 million homes, containing possibly as much as
10 billion gallons of some of the most toxic substances ever created. How much
is 10 billion gallons? If you took just the amount that will be in all the
Phoenix-area homes by New Years Day 2006, and poured it into a Plexiglas tank
covering the 50 by 100 yard playing field of
Arizona
State
University
’s Sun Devil Stadium, the tank would have to be 997 feet high. It would
tower over the state’s tallest building, the
Bank
One
Center
in downtown
Phoenix
(486 feet).
It would instantly become the nation’s most
high-profile and infamous Superfund site. Yet capped off and isolated from
their surroundings (and possibly under an around-the-clock armed guard), the
poisons in this tank would pose a negligible health risk to
Phoenix
residents, compared with the risk these poisons now pose underneath these
people’s homes.
See http://poisonedinparadise.com/number07.pdf.
The
Phoenix
metro area population increased from 2 million to 3 million from 1990 to 2000.
But that’s just one metropolitan area. During the last decade alone, in
Los Angeles
and a dozen other metro areas stretching across the termite belt from
Nevada
and
Arizona
through
Texas
to
Florida
and
Georgia
, ten million people have moved into more than three million new homes. How
many of these homes contain concentrations of pesticide gases poisonous enough
to cause asthma, Parkinson’s and Alzheimer’s diseases, fibromyalgia,
chronic fatigue syndrome, road rage, attention deficit disorder, breast and
testicular cancer, coronary disease, arthritis, non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma and
domestic violence, to name just a few of the illnesses associated with
exposure to pesticides? Is anyone anywhere carrying out a full-scale air
testing program of a representative random sample of homes, as we suggested on
pages 66-67 of http://PoisonedInParadise.com/Poison00.pdf? When this situation
finally becomes common knowledge, how on earth will the people responsible to
be able to say they didn’t realize what they were doing?
10 billion gallons is 30 football-field-sized tanks, each
a thousand feet high, located in communities from
Miami
to
San Diego
. How on earth do you go about cleaning up such a massive volume of poisons?
Compared with this problem, it’s not too difficult or costly to detox an
aquifer that’s been contaminated with TCE--at least the poison there is
concentrated and (relatively) contained. For example, the North Indian Bend
Wash Superfund facility in
Scottsdale
,
Arizona
cost a little over a million dollars. Is the pesticide industry ready and able
to spend the billions of dollars needed to make 50 million homes habitable?
Plus compensate all the people made sick by the industry’s poisons in the
assumed "safety" of their own homes?
I can’t speak for other states, but in
Arizona
many people in high positions of political power and influence know all about
this problem. In fact they’ve known about it for years. This includes the
Governor, the Attorney General, and the head of the Arizona Structural
Pest
Control Commission. Members of the Arizona House and Senate were made aware of
the problem when they debated HB2144 last year. Their response was to gut this
bill, in particular the section that would have required prospective home
buyers to be told of all applications of pesticides done in the previous three
years (information the ASPCC is required by law to keep on file).
I’m sure that the
Arizona
pesticide industry is already making plans to start spraying homes with
Dragnet and Tribute once Dursban is outlawed. I wouldn’t be surprised if
they hire a spindoctor to convince the average person that these new
pesticides are "safe." And unless there are some major improvements
in the enforcement of pesticide laws, they’ll get away with it. After all, a
spokesperson from Patriot Pest and Termite Control told a Phoenix TV reporter
three years ago, when asked about the 400 to 500 gallons going into every home
in the state, "It’s all safe." To the best of my knowledge no one
has ever charged this spokesperson with an offense under the Code of Federal
Regulations, 40CFR156.10, which forbids the representation of any registered
pesticide poisons as "safe."
The whole mess reminds me of a couple of things Patricia
Limerick said in her book, "The Legacy of Conquest: The Unbroken Past of
the American West." She said that the philosophy of the movers and
shakers of the Old West was, "Get in, get rich, get out." She quoted
William Clark, a
Montana
senator a century ago: "Those who succeed us can well take care of
themselves."
Limerick
quoted
Clark
in the context of the environmental destruction left behind by western mining
companies, but her book’s thesis is that the philosophy of the West’s
leaders hasn’t changed significantly since then. Actually, since people are
now being unknowingly poisoned not only in their workplaces but in the
supposed safety of their own homes, I’d say things are worse today than a
hundred years ago. Are today's pesticide companies going to ride out of town
once they've made their profits, the way the mining speculators did in the
late 1800s, leaving thousands of ghost towns littered with crumbling
buildings, piles of waste, toxic slag heaps and toxic people? It's a grand old
Western tradition. And one constant that runs through Western history is that
some of the people who were hurt the most were those who stayed behind and
tried to get the judicial and legislative systems to force their injurers to
clean up their messes. Many people who tried were savagely punished for trying
by civilized and law-abiding means to obtain redress for wrongs committed
against them.
The last time I spoke with someone in
Arizona
about pesticides in homes (Sandy Bahr of the
Grand Canyon
chapter of the Sierra Club), my impression was that the state’s leaders are
all fully aware of the horrendous public health hazard that their pesticide
policy has created. These are the same people who fought tooth and nail
against IPM in schools some years ago. I suppose they’re counting on keeping
the whole thing under wraps for now. If nobody draws attention to this
problem, they’ll be able to serve the remaining time left on their terms and
then quietly get out, leaving the mess for their successors to take care of.
Somehow.
Best regards,
Joe Crozier