Crimes Against Nature Read online

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  The EPA was primed to do Graham’s bidding. Among the EPA team was Adam Sharp, associate assistant administrator for Prevention, Pesticides and Toxic Substances. Sharp was a former official with the American Farm Bureau who has testified before Congress opposing air quality regulations for industrial agriculture.

  33 The EPA developed a new set of regulations along the lines of Graham’s recommendations.

  Smithfield couldn’t have asked for more. One key provision allowed the company to shirk responsibility for getting rid of most of its waste: Big “integrators” like Smithfield hire contractors to raise their animals. Smithfield, for example, owns approximately 260 factory farms in North Carolina but operates another 1,200 that are owned by desperate contract farmers under tight control by Smithfield. Under the contract terms, Smithfield owns the pigs and feed, while the unfortunate farmer owns only the mortgage on the hog house — built to Smithfield’s specifications — and the manure. It’s up to the farmer to get rid of the waste. When it ends up in the air, water, and groundwater, the state has no recourse, since the farmer has no money.

  The agency also dropped the provision requiring meat factories to monitor groundwater, leaving communities vulnerable to nitrogen and other contaminants. Elevated nitrogen levels can cause blue baby syndrome or death in infants. In addition, the EPA removed a provision that required factory farms to consult with certified specialists in developing “nutrient management plans,” and instead allowed polluters to write their own plans without oversight. It also altered the standards so that these plans, which are effectively a license to pollute, don’t have to be made available for public notice and comment.

  After signing off on Graham’s recommendations, the EPA formally submitted the new regulations to OIRA in September 2002. Documents from the agency’s rule-making record indicate that even those weakened rules were battered to death during OIRA’s final review, which lasted three months. During this time, OIRA staff again met with a number of affected industry groups, including the American Farm Bureau, acquiescing to its request to leave the issue of dumping manure to the states.

  The new regulations, in a coup de grace, decreed that tons of toxic waste oozing from giant lagoons were not subject to the Clean Water Act.

  “The Clean Water Act was one of the few tools that small farmers had to take on the big multinational industrialists,” David Friedman, the president of the American Farmers Union, the country’s largest organization of independent family farmers, told me. “Now the Bush White House has stolen it from us.”

  As soon as the new rules were issued, Smithfield went out and got permits for all of its facilities. The permits are illegal under the Clean Water Act, and the NRDC and Waterkeeper are suing the EPA. But the meat bullies have won many years of reprieve, a result that went far beyond their wildest dreams.

  As I drive through industrial farm country with Rick Dove, I can see the desperate, ruined communities the meat moguls have left in their wake: deserted main streets; bankrupted hardware and feed stores; banks, churches, and schools shut down. The heartland and its historic landscapes are being emptied of rural Americans and occupied by corporate criminals. These industries are murdering Thomas Jefferson’s vision of an American democracy rooted in tens of thousands of independent freeholds owned by family farmers, each with a strong personal stake in our system.

  In violating our federal antipollution laws like the Clean Air and Clean Water Acts, the meat barons are stealing something that belongs to the American public — the purity of our land and waterways, healthy air, abundant fisheries. They have lulled people into accepting unhealthy, unsavory meat and have gained a stranglehold on U.S. commodity production that poses a genuine threat to our food independence and national security.

  But our battle is more than a fight to save American farmers and fishing communities. It is a fight to preserve human dignity. Like some deadly spider, John Graham sits in his secretive office and spins a dangerous web, weaving backroom deals with industry lobbyists and making a mockery of democratic government.

  Science Fiction

  As Jesuit schoolboys studying world history, we learned why Copernicus and Galileo kept their discoveries under wraps: a less restrained heliocentrist, Giordano Bruno, was burned alive in 1586 for the crime of sound science. With the encouragement of our professor, Father Joyce, my classmates and I marveled at the capacity of human leaders to corrupt noble institutions. Lust for power had caused the Catholic Church to ignore its most central purpose: the search for existential truths. It was my first exposure to the idea that money and political power can trump science.

  Today, the Bush administration and Congress are similarly twisting science to consolidate power. John Graham’s schemes to massage data and pervert the regulatory process in the inner sanctum of OIRA are part of a larger plan. To justify its agenda, the Bush White House is suppressing studies, purging scientists, and doctoring data to bamboozle the public and press. It is a campaign to suppress science arguably unmatched in the western world since the Inquisition.

  In his infamous 2003 memo to his Republican brethren, GOP strategist Frank Luntz warned that the environment is the party’s Achilles’ heel.

  1 He urged his pals to change their rhetoric. “Climate change,” he wrote by way of example, “is less threatening than global warming. While global warming has catastrophic connotations attached to it, climate change suggests a more controllable and less emotional challenge.” Luntz’s advice to GOP leaders seems clear: Find scientists willing to hoodwink the people. “You need to continue to make the lack of scientific certainty a primary issue,” he wrote, “by becoming even more active in recruiting experts sympathetic to your view.” In that banal sentence, Luntz summed up the ethos of the administration he serves.

  Science-bashing is nothing new. During my early days as an environmental litigator prosecuting polluters on behalf of Hudson River fishermen, I grew accustomed to seeing industry money corrupt talented scientists. But a succession of Republican-controlled Congresses has allowed this practice to infiltrate our government. When faced with a mounting body of evidence that runs counter to the interests of major campaign donors, sympathetic senators and congressmen parrot the industry complaint that “more study is needed,” while wielding budget knives to see that more study never occurs. The Bush administration has followed suit in slashing funding for environmental science. The president’s proposed budget calls for double-digit cuts in research at the EPA, the U.S. Geological Survey, the Department of Agriculture, and the Energy Department’s Office of Science, among others.

  2

  The anti-environmental zealots have at their disposal Wise Use’s lavishly funded brigade of hired guns and “biostitutes” — crooked scientists on industry payroll, housed in fancy think tanks that publish junk science — to persuade the public that there are no environmental crises and to undo the laws challenging their pollution-based profits. They argue that pesticides are harmless; that global warming is a myth; that Mount Pinatubo, not chlorofluorocarbons, caused the ozone hole; that clear-cutting is good forest management; and that Alaska’s caribou love the pipeline.

  “At the shallowest level it’s a cheap deception of the general public,” says Princeton University geo-scientist Michael Oppenheimer. “At its worst, this approach represents a serious erosion in the way a democracy deals with science. You create high-sounding credentials and talk in tones that seem scientifically sensible, while all the time you are just fronting for a political agenda.”

  3

  I have had my own experiences with Torquemada’s successors in the White House. At the time of the September 11 attacks in New York and Washington, I had just opened an office at 115 Broadway, catty-corner to the World Trade Center. When my partner Kevin Madonna returned to the office in November, he suffered a burning throat, nausea, and a headache that was still pounding 24 hours after he left the site. Despite the EPA’s claims that the air was safe, Kevin refuse
d to return, and we closed the office. Many workers did not have that option; their employers relied on the numerous EPA press releases between September 15 and December reassuring the public about downtown Manhattan’s wholesome air quality. On September 18, none other than EPA administrator Christine Todd Whitman proclaimed, “I am glad to reassure the people of New York and Washington, D.C., that their air is safe to breathe.”

  4

  Not everyone bought the party line. New York’s Senator Hillary Clinton and Congressman Jerrold Nadler, whose district encompasses the World Trade Center site, asked the EPA’s ombudsman office to look into the matter.

  5

  The ombudsman’s office is an independent complaint department within the EPA whose function is to give the public a voice in cleanups of major hazardous waste sites that otherwise might devolve into backroom deals between regulators and polluters. Ombudsman investigators have a bloodhound’s nose for corruption, and the stench at the World Trade Center site set them to howling.

  In particular, they knew that Christine Todd Whitman was juggling some heavy-duty conflicts of interest: Whitman’s husband has a deep and continuing financial involvement with Citigroup, which owns Travelers, one of the insurance companies responsible for compensating victims of the attack.

  6 Citigroup stood to save hundreds of millions of dollars from Whitman’s assurances about safety: The faster people went back to their homes, the less Travelers would have to pay for alternative housing. Whitman and her husband were also major bondholders in the New York–New Jersey Port Authority, which owns the World Trade Center and might benefit from downgrading the risks.

  7

  The EPA’s ombudsman at the time was Robert Martin. He appointed a 30-year solid-waste veteran, Hugh Kaufman, a master engineer and policy analyst for the EPA’s Office of Solid Waste and Emergency Response, to work on Nadler and Clinton’s complaint. Kaufman and Martin discovered that Whitman had downplayed the risks of Ground Zero to the point of lying. They interviewed a large group of EPA employees and other scientists who felt that Ground Zero was far more contaminated than many Superfund sites where respirators and moon suits are mandatory. They were alarmed that government officials were not advising appropriate precautions.

  8 When Juan Gonzalez of the Daily News started reporting Martin’s and Kaufman’s findings, the EPA blasted the claims as “irresponsible.”

  9 In November 2001 Whitman removed Kaufman and Martin from the case and issued an order closing the ombudsman’s office.

  10 During a weekend in the following April, she sent five agents to confiscate Martin’s files and padlock his office. Exhausted from the battle, Martin resigned, hoping that Congress would step in.

  11 He’s still waiting.

  Three months later Kaufman won a ruling by the Department of Labor, which found that there was “no evidence of a valid reason for his removal” and ordered him reinstated.

  12 Despite Kaufman’s victory the independent ombudsman’s office was effectively abolished.

  The cat was out of the bag, however, and in August 2003, another watchdog within the EPA, the Office of the Inspector General, finally released a report that condemned the administration’s handling of the aftermath of the World Trade Center attacks. The inspector general’s report, based on the damning documents assembled by Kaufman and Martin, found that on the day that Whitman declared the air “safe,” the EPA had not yet received the results of the first tests for toxins like cadmium, chromium, dioxin, or PCBs.

  13 Days after the attack, the EPA announced that asbestos dust in the area was very low or entirely absent. In fact, more than 25 percent of the samples that the agency had collected around that time showed the presence of dangerous levels of asbestos.

  14

  The IG report found that White House officials had altered language in the EPA’s news releases to make them less alarming, pressuring the EPA “to add reassuring statements and delete cautionary ones.” The White House blocked public access to raw data from the EPA’s air testing and ordered the agency to delete warnings advising “sensitive populations” to avoid exposure and reword its directive that all residents in the area have their apartments professionally cleaned of toxic dusts. The White House forced the EPA to add language to a press release announcing that “our tests show that it is safe for New Yorkers to go back to work in New York’s financial district” at a time when the EPA’s tests were showing levels of asbestos 200 to 300 percent above those considered safe by the agency. The EPA associate administrator admitted to the inspector general that the desire to reopen Wall Street was a consideration when the press releases were being prepared. “EPA’s basic overriding message was that the public did not need to be concerned about airborne contaminants caused by the World Trade Center collapse,” says the IG report.

  15

  A subsequent newspaper story described “screaming telephone calls” between EPA associate administrator Tina Kreisher and Sam Thernstrom, communications director for the White House Council on Environmental Quality. Kreisher, who now works as a speechwriter for Gale Norton, later acknowledged that she “felt extreme pressure” from Thernstrom.

  16 Thernstrom’s boss was Council on Environmental Quality director James Connaughton, a former asbestos-industry lawyer who had left industry for “public service” three weeks before. According to the inspector general’s report, Connaughton did not want data on health hazards given to the public.

  The government’s reassurances may have endangered the health of firefighters, police, construction workers, and residents, including schoolchildren. Testing by outside sources has since revealed that contaminant concentrations at Ground Zero were among the highest ever recorded. For example, scientists from the University of California at Davis, who had conducted over 7,000 similar tests at contaminated sites worldwide, found particulates at levels they had never before seen.

  17 One study done by Mount Sinai Medical Center in New York found that 78 percent of rescue workers suffered lung ailments and 88 percent had ear, nose, and throat problems in the months following the attack; half of those still had persistent lung and respiratory symptoms 10 months later.

  18

  Dan Tishman, whose company, Tishman Construction, was involved in the reconstruction at 140 West Street, required his crews to wear respirators, but he recalls seeing many rescue and construction workers laboring unprotected — no doubt relying on the government’s assurances. “The frustrating thing,” Tishman lamented to me, “is that everyone just counts on the EPA to be the watchdog of public health. When that role is compromised, people can get hurt.”

  19

  “In the World Trade Center, the White House and the EPA were basically lying to the people of New York,” Kaufman said. “It’s public be damned at the EPA.”

  20

  Alas, this was not merely a desperate measure taken at a desperate time; this White House routinely goes to great lengths to withhold vital health information from the public. In May 2003, it blocked the EPA staff from publicly discussing contamination by the chemical perchlorate — an ingredient in solid rocket fuel. In an apparent effort to please defense contractors, the administration also froze federal regulations on perchlorate, even as new research revealed that alarmingly high levels of the chemical — which can compromise fetal development — had been detected in water in more than 20 states.

  21

  For nine months the White House Office of Science and Technology sat on a report exposing the frightening impact of mercury on our children’s health, finally releasing it in February 2003.

  22 Among the report’s findings was the disturbing fact that the bloodstreams of 1 in 12 American women are coursing with enough mercury to cause neurological damage, permanent IQ damage, and a grim inventory of other diseases in their unborn children.

  23 (A more recent EPA study has found that 1 in 6 women carry dangerous levels of mercury and that some 630,000 children born each year are at risk.


  24 )

  Then, in March 2004, the administration compounded that cover-up by helping the tuna industry conceal from consumers the true extent of mercury contamination in fish. Under pressure from tuna-industry lobbyists, the EPA and the FDA issued, instead, a mild warning about fish consumption by young children and women of childbearing age, after rejecting the recommendation of an FDA advisory committee. The advisory gently observes that albacore tuna “has more mercury than canned light tuna” but does not discuss frightening results of recent tests by the FDA that found canned albacore tuna to have about three times the mercury of canned light tuna, which itself is too contaminated for children or fertile women to eat frequently.