The Secret History of the EPA
Wrong Kind of Green Mar 12, 2015 Non-Profit Industrial ComplexA Bureaucracy Going Mad
by Carol Van Strum
Science is the belief in the ignorance of experts,” Richard Feynman famously declared in 1966. Ever quick to challenge accepted wisdom, he distinguished the laudable ignorance of science, forever seeking unattainable certainties, from the dangerous ignorance of experts who professed such certainty.Twenty years later, he would drop a rubber ring into a glass of ice water to show a panel of clueless rocket experts how willful ignorance of basic temperature effects likely caused the Challenger shuttle disaster (1).
Experts with delusions of certainty create imitative forms of science, he warned, producing “the kind of tyranny we have today in the many institutions that have come under the influence of pseudoscientific advisors.” (2)
POISON SPRING-VALLLIANATOS
Feynman’s warning against faith in the phony trappings of “cargo cult science” fell on deaf ears. Policies affecting every aspect of our lives are now based on dangerous forms of ignorance.
A prime case in point is the noble edifice of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, where a high-ranking EPA official was recently jailed and fined for collecting pay and bonuses for decades of non-existent work while he claimed to be working elsewhere for the CIA. Such long-standing fraud would hardly come as a surprise to Evaggelos Vallianatos, who toiled for a quarter of a century in the EPA’s Pesticide Division, ostensibly responsible for protecting human health and the environment from commercial poisons. His new book, Poison Spring: The Secret History of Pollution and the EPA, documents a culture of fraud and corruption infesting every corner and closet of the agency.
The EPA, created with much fanfare by Richard Nixon in 1970, was an agency crippled at birth by inadequate funding, political hypocrisy, and laws protecting industry profits above all. Vallianatos points out that one of the fledgling agency’s greatest handicaps was its initial staffing with personnel from USDA, steeped in the religion of corporate agriculture and lethal technologies. With USDA staff came also USDA’s outdated pesticide registrations, which were to be reviewed and reregistered by EPA. In addition, hundreds of new pesticide applications accumulated every year, each supported by industry-produced safety studies to meet new federal requirements. Hired as scientists, EPA staffers spent their time cutting and pasting industry studies and conclusions into rubber-stamped registration approvals. Under industry-crafted laws, once a pesticide was registered, it could never be unregistered without massive, unequivocal evidence of harm.
As if such misuse of science weren’t bad enough, audits by FDA and EPA soon found that most of the thousands of industry safety studies used to approve pesticide registrations were fraudulent. Alerted by FDA scientist Adrian Gross, EPA had discovered in 1976 that Industrial BioTest Laboratories [IBT], which had conducted many of the pesticide safety tests submitted to EPA by manufacturers, had been routinely faking tests, falsifying data, and altering results for years. Subsequent investigations of other testing laboratories found similar practices in more than half the labs whose tests supported EPA registrations of pesticides.
“IBT was not a unique case of scientific fraud,” Vallianatos writes, “it was emblematic of a dark and deviant scientific culture, a ‘brave new science’ with deep roots throughout agribusiness, the chemical industry, universities, and the government.” (3)
In 1979, during the seven years of EPA dithering over this scandal, Vallianatos came to work at EPA. He soon learned that not a single pesticide registration was to be canceled due to fraudulent or nonexistent test data. Instead, he notes, EPA’s reaction was to outsource science. It shut down its own testing laboratories, closed its own libraries of toxicity data on thousands of chemicals, and outsourced all evaluations of industry-sponsored studies. “The unspoken understanding in this outsourcing of government functions has been the near certainty of finding industry data satisfactory – all the time.” This issue is relevant today, given that chemicals such as 2,4-D and glyphosate (Roundup™), whose uses have been vastly increased by GMO practices, were originally registered on the basis of invalid IBT studies.
During Vallianatos’s first year at EPA,1980, some 1.1 billion pounds of pesticide active ingredients were applied to U.S. food crops, a number that does not include home and garden uses, parklands, golf courses, playing fields, and municipal landscapes. In 2011, two billion pounds of pesticides were sold in the U.S. Most if not all of those pesticides lacked valid testing data then, and still lack such data today. Furthering the fraud, Vallianatos points out, the active ingredient is only the tip of the iceberg, being as little as one percent of the product; the remainder is a trade secret stew of untested, unknown “inert” ingredients that are often more toxic than the active ingredients. What he calls “The Big Business of Fraudulent Science” has replaced even the semblance of environmental protection.
Poison Spring chronicles some of the consequences of that fraud in an agency snared in its own tangled lies: cover-ups of dioxin levels in drinking water and in dead babies; routine suppression of data linking pesticides to soaring rates of cancer, birth defects, and chronic disease; industry access to everything; “revolving door” administrators serving corporate bosses; political appointees dismantling EPA labs and data libraries to dispose of damaging evidence; the cutting of research funds for nontoxic alternatives; the harsh retribution visited on whistleblowers; and ever and again, bureaucrats, with full knowledge of the consequences, setting policies that result in death and suffering. For 25 years, Vallianatos saw and documented it all.
“EPA officials know global chemical and agribusiness industries are manufacturing science,” Vallianatos writes. “They know their products are dangerous…. [EPA] scientists find themselves working in a roomful of funhouse mirrors, plagiarizing industry studies and cutting and pasting the findings of industry studies as their own.”
“This entire book is, in a sense, about a bureaucracy going mad,” Vallianatos adds.
Bureaucracy does not go mad by itself, however. Public indifference to the ignorance of experts and public tolerance of lies are what allow such madness to flourish, enabled by the scientific community’s silence. Inexorably, Vallianatos found, “science and policy themselves have been made a prop to the pesticides industry and agribusiness.”
Such monumental fraud demands drastic remedies, which Vallianatos bravely urges: rebuild an EPA completely independent from industry and politics, remove incentives for huge scale, chemically-dependent corporate agriculture, and address the underlying problem by encouraging small family farms and agriculture without chemical warfare.
“Traditional (and often organic) farmers – until seventy-five years ago, the only farmers there were – are slowly beginning to make a comeback. They have always known how to raise crops and livestock without industrial poisons,” Vallianatos points out. “They are the seed for a future harvest of good food, a healthy natural world, and democracy in rural America – and the world.”
These are facts, and this is a book that scientists and citizens alike ignore at great peril.
[Carol Van Strum is a writer, editor, farmer, parent, and chronic thorn in the side of those who endanger the health and safety of people and the environment. She lives and works in the Oregon Coast Range. She is the author of A Bitter Fog: Herbicides and Human Rights.]
Footnotes
(1) See his account of the investigation into the Challenger disaster in What Do You Care What Other People Think? By Richard P. Feynman, 1988.
(2) Richard Feynman, What is Science? Presented at the fifteenth annual meeting of the National Science Teachers Association, 1966 in New York City, and reprinted from The Physics Teacher Vol. 7, issue 6, 1969, pp. 313-320 by permission of the editor and the author.
(3) For more information about the extent of this lab fraud, see A Bitter Fog: Herbicides and Human Rights, by Carol Van Strum, 1983, revised 2014 with full texts of Peter von Stackelberg’s exposé of the issue in a new appendix.
This review originally ran on Independent Science News.
- WATCH: Economic Media: For the Decolonization of Money [Jonathan Beller]
- WATCH: Professor Ellen Meiksins Wood: The Imperial Paradox: Ideologies of Empire [2008]
- Before Collapse, Credit Suisse Quietly Conquered an Obscure Debt Market – Debt-for-nature Swaps
- WATCH: Next Floor (A Short Film by Denis Villeneuve)
- WATCH: How American Imperialism Works [in 5 Minutes]
- Where Are We Now? The Epidemic as Politics
- Liberalism in India – a Beast that Devours By Way of Shapeshifting
- Briefing: SDG 13 & the Carbon Capture Boom
- A SYSTEM ON LIFE SUPPORT
- WATCH: The Betrayal by Technology: A Portrait of Jacques Ellul
- Forgive Us Our Debts
- ‘Our Defeats’ Review: A striking Post-Mortem of the Revolutionary Dream
- When Thinking About Fossil Fuel Phase-outs: The Key Word is ‘Unabated’
- Why Many Progressives Misrepresented and Condemned the Ottawa Trucker Protest
- The Outrageous Depths to Which the Fallen Left Have Descended
- Ukraine, International Law, and a Left Worth Wanting
- Freedom Convoy – Support Black Truckers
- WATCH: Negating Colonial Lies About Russia
- WATCH: Russia & Ukraine – What’s Really Happening? [Feb 23, 2022]
- Western Reporting – News From Nowhere
- A Message from Mohawk Women from Grand River Concerning Vaccine Mandates & Freedom
- Message from Candy Sero, Mohawk Elder, After Being Trampled by Trudeau’s Henchmen
- Interview with Candy Sero, Mohawk Elder, Prior to Being Trampled by Trudeau’s Henchmen on Horses
- LISTEN: Kanenhariyo (Mohawk War Chief) Discusses Ontario’s “State of Emergency” in response to Truckers Rebellion
- Support for Canadian Truckers Skyrockets – Alongside Vaccine Injuries in Canadian Children
- How the Left betrayed the Truckers
- As Workers Resist, the Left Recoils
- Now is the Time for Mass Resignations from Within the Ruling Class
- Parasite Empire Unravelled
- Climate Warriors and Flagships from Hell
- The Left’s Covid Failure
- Stealth Game: “Community” Conservancies Devastate Land & Lives in Northern Kenya
- WATCH: Digital ID: Freedom-As-A-Service. The Lure of Entitlement as the Method for Entrapment.
- LISTEN: 5 Key Takeaways from COP26, Glasgow 2021
- Revolt of the Essential Workers
- LISTEN: Dr. Mordecai Ogada – A Case for Scrutinizing the Climate Narrative
- The Big Green Lie
- Wall Street’s Takeover of Nature Advances with Launch of New Asset Class
- What’s Really at Stake with Vaccine Passports
- WATCH: The New Financial Markets on Nature’s Destruction Explained to my Grandmother – Frederic Hache
- You Cannot Make This Stuff Up: Klauss Schwab Is A Rothschild On His Mother’s Side – BIG BROTHER in the 21. Century on The Manufacturing of Greta Thunberg – A Decade of Social Manipulation for the Corporate Capture of Nature [ACT VI – Crescendo]
- Is this man a Russian agent operating in the Black community of St. Louis? – ? CommunistNews.net on Standing Rock: Profusion, Collusion & Big Money Profits [Part 5]
- Freedom of Speech Not Allowed for Black Organizations on Standing Rock: Profusion, Collusion & Big Money Profits [Part 5]
- Misanthropic Philanthropy , #WrongKindofGreen #SettledSeance – Not The Grub Street Journal on The Manufacturing of Greta Thunberg – for Consent: The Political Economy of the Non-Profit Industrial Complex [ACT I]
- Vanessa Beeley Presents Exposé on White Helmets at Swiss Press Club in Geneva | Arrêt sur Info on SYRIA: Avaaz, Purpose & the Art of Selling Hate for Empire
Recent Posts
Categories
Recent Comments
Archives
Share the Knowledge

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.
One Comment