Quotations on Pollution

The earth dries up and withers,
the world languishes and withers;
the heavens languish together with the earth.
The earth lies polluted under its inhabitants;
for they have transgressed laws, violated the statutes
broken the everlasting covenant.
Therefore a curse devours the earth,
and its inhabitants suffer for their guilt.

-the prophet Isaiah (c.760-690 B.C.)
Isaiah 24:4-6 in the New Revised Standard Version of the Bible  

For the first time in the history of the world, every human being is now subjected to contact with dangerous chemicals, from the moment of conception until death.

-Rachel Carson (1907-1964), Silent Spring, 1962  

As the eagle was killed by the arrow winged with his own feather, so the hand of the world is wounded by its own skill.

-Helen Keller (1880-1968)  

Ecological devastation is the excrement, so to speak, of man's power worship.

-Ernest Becker (1924-1974), Escape from Evil, 1975 *  

The quality of American life is an insult to the possibilities of human growth . . . the pollution of American space, with gadgetry and cars and TV and box architecture, brutalizes the senses, making gray neurotics of most of us, and perverse spiritual athletes and strident self-transcenders of the best of us.

-Susan Sontag, "What's Happening in America"
in Partisan Review, 1966  

Chemical contamination starts in the womb. Even before a baby takes a breath, her body contains chemicals passed on by her mother.  Tests of umbilical cords show that a newborn's body contains nearly 300 compounds -- among them mercury from fish, flame retardants from household dust, pesticides from backyards, hydrocarbons from fossil fuels.

-Marla Cone, “Products derived from natural, nontoxic ingredients -
once seen as fringe -- are now mainstream,”
Los Angeles Times, 14 Sept 2008

Who would have predicted a century ago that the richest civilizations in history would be made up of polluted tracts of suburban development dominated by the private automobile, shopping malls, and a throwaway economy? Surely, this is not the ultimate fulfillment of our destiny.

-Alan Durning, How Much Is Enough?, 1992  

Suburbs...have become the heirs to their cities' problems. They have pollution, high taxes, crime. People thought they would escape all those things in the suburbs. But like the people in Boccaccio's Decameron, they ran away from the plague and took it with them.

-Charles Haar, New York Times, 16 Mar 80

Is it not enough for you to feed on the good pasture? Must you also trample the rest of your pasture with your feet? Is it not enough for you to drink clear water? Must you also muddy the rest with your feet? Must my flock feed on what you have trampled and drink what you have muddied with your feet?

-Ezekiel 33:18-19 NIV Bible

The people have a right to clean air, pure water, and to the preservation of the natural, scenic, historic and aesthetic values of the environment. Pennsylvania's public natural resources are the common property of all the people, including generations yet to come. As trustee of these resources the Commonwealth shall conserve and maintain them for the benefit of all the people.

-the Pennsylvania State Constitution, Article 1, section 27

They have poisoned the Thames and killed the fish in the river. A little further development of the same wisdom and science will complete the poisoning of the air, and kill the dwellers on the banks...I almost think it is the destiny of science to exterminate the human race.

-Thomas Love Peacock (1785-1866), Gryll Grange, 1860 *

You know that the air and water are being polluted, as is everything we touch and live with, and we go on corrupting the nature that we need. We don’t realize we have a commitment to God to take care of nature. To cut down a tree, to waste water when there is so much lack of it, to let buses poison our atmosphere with those noxious fumes from their exhausts, to burn rubbish haphazardly – all that concerns our alliance with God.

-Oscar Romero (1917-1980), The Violence of Love, March 11, 1979

God then makes people whom he puts right in the middle of all this loaded creation. Commanding them to care for creation, to manage it, to lovingly use it, to creatively order it… They are environmentalists. Being deeply connected with their environment is who they are. For them to be anything else or to deny their divine responsibility to care for all that God has made would be to deny something that is at the core of their existence. This is why litter and pollution are spiritual issues.

-Rob Bell, Velvet Elvis: Repainting The Christian Faith, 2004

Man was the outlaw, the rebel, the distorted shape that scarred the earth, the voice that silenced the music of Eden, the hand that raised up obscenities and blasphemies. Man was the pariah-dog, the moral leper in this translucent mirror of Heaven. He was the muddier of crystal waters, the despoiler of forests, the murderer of the innocent, the challenger against God. He was the assassin of the saints and the prophets, for they spoke of what he WOULD NOT HEAR, in the darkness of his spirit!

-Taylor Caldwell (1900-1985)  

A dense blanket of pollution, dubbed the "Asian Brown Cloud," is hovering over South Asia, with scientists warning it could kill millions of people in the region, and pose a global threat. In the biggest-ever study of the phenomenon, 200 scientists warned that the cloud, estimated to be two miles (three kilometers) thick, is responsible for hundreds of thousands of deaths a year from respiratory disease. By slashing the sunlight that reaches the ground by 10 to 15 percent, the choking smog has also altered the region's climate, cooling the ground while heating the atmosphere, scientists said on Monday. The potent haze lying over the entire Indian subcontinent -- from Sri Lanka to Afghanistan -- has led to some erratic weather, sparking flooding in Bangladesh, Nepal and northeastern India, but drought in Pakistan and northwestern India.

Marianne Bray, “‘Asian Brown Cloud’ poses global threat,” 
CNN.com 12 Aug 02  

The American people today are involved in a warfare more deadly than the war in Vietnam, but few of them seem aware of it and even fewer of them are doing anything about it. This is a war that is being waged against the American environment, against our lands, air, and water, which are the basis of that environment.

-Norman Cousins (1915-1990)
Testimony before the U.S. Senate Public Works Subcommittee,
June, 1966 *  

Like a muddied spring or a polluted well
is a righteous man who gives way to the wicked.

-Proverbs 25:26 NIV Bible

How would you describe the difference between modern war and modern industry—between say, bombing and strip mining, or between chemical warfare and chemical manufacturing? The difference seems to be only that in war the victimization of humans is directly intentional and in industry it is "accepted" as a "trade-off." Were the catastrophes of Love Canal, Bhopal, Chernobyl, and the Exxon Valdez episodes of war or of peace? They were in fact, peacetime acts of aggression, intentional to the extent that the risks were known and ignored.

-Wendell Berry, "Feminism, the Body, and the Machine"
from What Are People For?, 1989  

The Public Relations Committee realizes that public fear of chemicals is a disease which will never be completely eradicated. It may lie dormant or appear from time to time as a minor rash, but it can flare up at any time as a major and debilitating fever for our industry as a result of a few, or even one instance, such as the Mississippi fish kill, or the publication by some highly readable alarmist, or as an issue seized upon by some politician in need of building a crusading image.

-Cleveland Lane,
member of the Chemical Industry's Public Relations Committee
while working for Goodrich-Gulf Chemicals Inc., 1964  

The "developed" nations had given to the "free market" the status of a god, and were sacrificing to it their farmers, farmlands, and communities, their forests, wetlands, and prairies, their ecosystems and watersheds. They had accepted universal pollution and global warming as normal costs of doing business.

-Wendell Berry, “Thoughts in the Presence of Fear,”
OrionOnline.org, 24 Sep 2001

Every one of you sitting here today is carrying at least 500 measurable chemicals in your body that were never in anybody’s body before the 1920s… We have dusted the globe with man-made chemicals that can undermine the development of the brain and behavior, and the endocrine, immune and reproductive systems, vital systems that assure perpetuity… Everyone is exposed. You are not exposed to one chemical at a time, but a complex mixture of chemicals that changes day by day, hour by hour, depending on where you are and the environment you are in… In the United States alone it is estimated that over 72,000 different chemicals are used regularly. Two thousand five hundred new chemicals are introduced annually—and of these, only 15 are partially tested for their safety. Not one of the chemicals in use today has been adequately tested for these intergenerational effects that are initiated in the womb.

-Theo Colburn, Speech at the State of the Word Forum, 
San Francisco, 3 Oct 96

Without requiring lab tests to determine their safety, the U.S. government has approved thousands of chemicals for use in such products as sofa cushions, soaps, paints and baby bottles. On average, two more chemicals are approved every day.  The result: Consumers are unwittingly part of a vast, uncontrolled lab experiment.  "We're treating [people] worse than lab rats," said Karen Florini, a lawyer with the nonprofit group Environmental Defense. "At least with lab rats, somebody bothers to collect the data."

-Tom Avril, “U.S. chemical regulation leaves much unknown” 
Philadelphia Inquirer, 4 Nov 03

More than eight million pounds of persistent toxic metals (like lead and mercury) were released into our waterways (in 1997), an increase of more than 50 percent from the previous year and the largest amount since at least 1992. Nearly 900,000 pounds of reproductive toxins like toluene were released into U.S. waterways, an increase of 60 percent from the previous year and the largest amount released since at least 1992. More than 2.5 million pounds of carcinogens (like vinyl chloride and benzene) were released into U.S. waterways. The parent corporations with the greatest amounts of toxic pollution to waterways were Armco Inc., PCS Nitrogen Fertilizer LP, BASF Corporation, E. I. Du Pont De Nemours & Co., and Vicksburg Chemical Co.

-Cat Lazaroff, "Polluters Sully US Waters Despite Federal Regulations"
Environment News Service, 17 Feb 00  

Finally, since human beings are uniquely capable of producing materials not found in nature, environmental degradation may be due to the resultant intrusion into an ecosystem of a substance wholly foreign to it.  Perhaps the simplest example is a synthetic plastic, which unlike natural materials, is not degraded by biological decay.  It therefore persists as rubbish or is burned—in both cases causing pollution.  In the same way, a substance such as DDT or lead, which plays no role in the chemistry of life and interferes with the actions of substances that do, is bound to cause ecological damage if sufficiently concentrated.  In general, any productive activity which introduces substances foreign to the natural environment runs a considerable risk of polluting it.

-Barry Commoner, The Closing Circle, 1971

If you visit American city,
You will find it very pretty.
Just two things of which you must beware:
Don't drink the water and don't breathe the air.

Pollution, pollution,
They got smog and sewage and mud.
Turn on your tap and get hot and cold running crud.

See the halibuts and the sturgeons
Being wiped out by detergents.
Fish gotta swim and birds gotta fly,
But they don't last long if they try.

Pollution, pollution,
You can use the latest toothpaste,
And then rinse your mouth with industrial waste.

-Tom Lehrer, musician and satirist from song "Pollution"  

Over increasingly large areas of the United States, spring now comes unheralded by the return of the birds, and the early mornings are strangely silent where once they were filled with the beauty of bird song.

-Rachel Carson, Silent Spring, 1962  

By the time the Raccoon River winds through the western hills here, passing corn fields and livestock pens before reaching Des Moines miles to the east, it is so polluted the city has to put it through a special nutrient filter to meet government standards for drinking water. The culprits are not industrial plants or mines belching toxins into the river. They are Iowa farms, which send fertilizer and animal wastes into the groundwater and into the river. "Farmers are the problem," said L. D. McMullen, the general manager of the Des Moines Water Works. "And they are entirely unregulated." The issue goes beyond Iowa. Across the country, metropolitan water agencies are battling increasing pollution from the countryside. The river pollution is spreading and helping to cause dead zones in the open seas. A recent study by the Pew Oceans Commission, an independent group examining government policies, called huge livestock feedlots and farm fertilizer runoff among the fastest-growing sources of pollution in oceans thousands of miles away.

-Elizabeth Becker, "Big Farms Making a Mess of U.S. Waters, Cities Say,"
The New York Times, 10 Feb 02  

Hundreds of millions of tiny plastic pellets, or nurdles -- the raw materials for the plastic industry -- are lost or spilled every year, working their way into the sea. These pollutants act as chemical sponges attracting man-made chemicals such as hydrocarbons and the pesticide DDT. They then enter the food chain. "What goes into the ocean goes into these animals and onto your dinner plate. It's that simple," said Dr Eriksen.

-Kathy Marks & Daniel Howden, “The World’s Dump,”
The Independent UK, 6 Feb 08

Along with the possibility of extinction of mankind by nuclear war, the central problem of our age has therefore become the contamination of man's total environment with such substances of incredible potential for harm—substances that accumulate in the tissues of plants and animals and even penetrate the germ cells to shatter or alter the very material of heredity upon which the shape of the future depends.

-Rachel Carson (1907-1964), Silent Spring, 1962  

An unfolding technology has increased our economic strength and added to the convenience of our lives. But that same technology—we know now—carries danger with it. From the great smoke stacks of industry and from the exhausts of motors and machines, 130 million tons of soot, carbon and grime settle over the people and shroud the Nation's cities each year. From towns, factories, and stockyards, wastes pollute our rivers and streams, endangering the waters we drink and use. The debris of civilization litters the landscapes and spoils the beaches. Conservation's concerns now is not only for man's enjoyment—but for man's survival.

-Lyndon B. Johnson (1908-1973) 36th President of the United States,
Special Message to Congress, "To Renew a Nation"
8 Mar 68  

Dust and soot in the air contribute to between 20 and 200 early deaths each day in America's biggest cities, according to the largest coast-to-coast scientific study of the problem. Ill health from particulates, tiny specks smaller than the width of a human hair, is spread across 20 of the largest cities in the United States--including Los Angeles, Santa Ana-Anaheim, San Bernardino and three other California areas--which are inhabited by about 50 million people, the new research indicates. Elderly people are the most frequently harmed. … The Environmental Protection Agency has been attempting to tighten limits on emissions of particles. Critics in the business community are challenging those new rules in the Supreme Court, arguing that the regulations are too costly and that the scientific evidence behind them is too sketchy. The new study, conducted by a team of researchers at Johns Hopkins University in Maryland and published in the current edition of the New England Journal of Medicine, is likely to bolster the EPA's case. The researchers found strong evidence that dust and soot particles, not other factors suggested by industry, appear to be causing the harmful effects. And they found that the ill effects occur even in cities that meet existing national air pollution standards--suggesting that stronger controls would protect public health.

-Gary Polakovic, "Study Links Deaths to Airborne Particles,"
Los Angeles Times 14 Dec 00

If we are really serious about protecting the environment, the discharge pipes and stacks of industry would all plug directly into their intake side, and costs would not be externalized to a voiceless environment.

-Wes Jackson, "Farm Debt," Altars of Unhewn Stone, 1987

Between November of 1999 and December of 2000, EPA filed lawsuits against nine power companies for expanding their plants without obtaining New Source Review permits and the up-to-date pollution controls required by law. The companies named in our lawsuits emit an incredible 5 million tons of sulfur dioxide every year (a quarter of the emissions in the entire country) as well as 2 million tons of nitrogen oxide. As the scale of pollution from these coal-fired smokestacks is immense, so is the damage to public health. Data supplied to the Senate Environment Committee by EPA last year estimate the annual health bill from 7 million tons of SO2 and NO2: more than 10,800 premature deaths; at least 5,400 incidents of chronic bronchitis; more than 5,100 hospital emergency visits; and over 1.5 million lost work days. Add to that severe damage to our natural resources, as acid rain attacks soils and plants and deposits nitrogen in the Chesapeake Bay and other critical bodies of water. Fifteen months ago, it looked as though our lawsuits were going to shrink these dismal statistics… Yet today, we seem about to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory. We are in the ninth month of a "90 day review" to reexamine the law, and fighting a White House that seems determined to weaken the rules we are trying to enforce. It is hard to know which is worse, the endless delay or the repeated leaks by energy industry lobbyists of draft rule changes that would undermine lawsuits already filed.

-Eric V. Schaeffer, Director of U.S. Environmental Protection Agency's
Office of Regulatory Enforcement, Resignation Letter, 27 Feb 02  

Short-term exposure to low levels of particulate air pollution may increase the risk of stroke or mini-stroke, according to new research conducted in Texas that suggests current exposure standards are not sufficient to protect the public. Stroke is the third leading cause of death in the United States.

-Environment News Service,
“Breathing Dust and Soot Raises Risk of Stroke,” 2 Jun 08

The tiny particulate pollution from cars, power plants and factories does more than clog your lungs. It leads to development of heart disease, according to a BYU researcher… "It's very different from what we thought previously," said professor and epidemiologist Arden Pope of Brigham Young University, who led the study. While exposure clearly impacts the lungs, "long-term, chronic exposure to air pollution seems to manifest more in cardiovascular disease than it does in respiratory disease." The link between air pollution and increased deaths has been shown in research by Pope and others. His most recent study, however, shows the biological mechanism by which long-term exposure to tiny-particle pollution can actually lead to ischemic heart disease, which causes heart attacks, as well as irregular heart rhythms, heart failure and cardiac arrest.

-Lois M. Collins, “Pollution in the air can cause heart ills” 
Deseret Morning News, 16 Dec 03

The three largest electricity companies in the United States — American Electric Power, the Southern Company and the Tennessee Valley Authority — together accounted for 17 percent to 24 percent of total industry emissions of the four pollutants tracked in the study. Those are sulfur dioxide and nitrogen oxides, which contribute to acid rain and haze; mercury, which is toxic to humans; and carbon dioxide, which is widely linked to global warming.

-Neela Banerjee,
"Study Ranking Utility Polluters Aims to Sway Emissions Debate,"
The New York Times, 21 Mar 02  

The Environmental Protection Agency believes that about 630,000 of the roughly 4 million babies born annually in the United States — twice as many as previously thought — may be exposed to dangerous levels of mercury in the womb, according to an analysis released Thursday. The primary source of newborns' exposure to mercury is the fish and shellfish their mothers eat. Mercury in children can impair motor functions, learning capacity, vision and memory, and can cause a variety of other symptoms related to neurological damage. The EPA's analysis reflects a new understanding among scientists in the U.S. and Japan that umbilical cord blood has higher mercury concentrations than a mother's blood

-Elizabeth Shogren, “Estimate of Fetuses Exposed to High Mercury Doubles,” LATimes.com, 6 Feb 04

The Environmental Protection Agency has determined that more than half of all freshwater fish it sampled from America's lakes could be unsafe for women of childbearing age to eat twice a week, according to data disclosed by environmental groups. More than three-quarters of the fish sampled also had mercury levels that may be unhealthy for children younger than 3. The data, collected between 1999 and 2001 on 2,547 fish from 260 lakes, are part of the first-ever nationwide study the EPA has conducted on freshwater fish in an ongoing four-year project.

- Juliet Eilperin, “Most Fish From Lakes Is Too High In Mercury,” 
Washington Post, 4 Aug 04

The threat to health from mercury emissions is far more widespread than previously supposed, the United Nations says. It is urging governments to introduce drastic reductions. A United Nations Environment Programme (Unep) report says 70% of mercury emissions of human origin come from coal-fired power stations. Yet the technology to eliminate most of them already exists. …The report says coal-fired power stations and waste incinerators produce about 1,500 tonnes of atmospheric mercury emissions a year, with a further 4-500 tonnes estimated to come from mining of gold and silver using basic, non-industrial methods. It says higher temperatures, increased storminess and more extreme weather will increase releases of mercury from soils and sediments. High levels of acidity in rivers and lakes also appear to trigger releases.

-Alex Kirby, “UN urges 'drastic' cuts in mercury,” BBC News, 4 Feb 03

We are told that we cannot afford clean air and water and health for our children. Yet in the first few months of 2001, you and I spent over $2 billion buying videos. Brides-to-be will spend over $35 billion on weddings this year, and Americans will spend a staggering $550 billion on gambling. Corporations will spend untold billions on advertising.

-Jackie Alan Giuliano, "Earth Day 2001 - A Celebration or a Wake?"
Environmental News Service, 20 Apr 01  

What can be done? Well, the governments of the world can undertake what amounts to a vast clean-up campaign and a vast campaign of organic renewal. The problem is the cost of an effective operation, which is enormous, and thus must be paid by someone via some form of taxes. There are only two someone's: either the firms that are considered to have been the perpetrators of the waste, or the rest of us. If it is the former, the pressure on the profit margins will be impressively high. If it is the latter, the tax burdens will mount significantly, a problem to which we are coming. Furthermore, there is not much point in cleanup and organic renewal if the practices remain as at present, since it would amount to cleaning an Augean stable. Hence, the logical inference is to require the total internalization of all costs. This however would add still further to the pressure on the profits of individual firms. I do not see any plausible solution for this social dilemma within the framework of a capitalist world-economy

-Immanuel Wallerstein, "Globalization or The Age of Transition?  
A Long-Term View of the Trajectory of the World-System," 1999

What is involved in the cost of inputs? It is not only the price at which they are bought from a different firm but also the cost of treating them. Now while the cost of purchase is normally borne entirely by the firm that will eventually get the profits, the costs of treating the materials is often partially borne by others. For example, if in treating the raw materials, there is toxic or cumbersome waste, part of the cost involved is getting rid of such waste, and if toxic, in a safe manner. Firms of course desire to minimize these costs of disposal. One way they can do thus, a way very widely practiced, is by placing the waste somewhere away from the factory site after minimal detoxification, for example, by dumping chemical toxins into a stream. This is called by economists "externalizing the costs." Of course, this is not the end of the costs of disposal. To stick to the example, if toxins are dumped into a stream, this may poison the stream, and eventually (perhaps decades later) there will be damage to people or to other matter (at costs that are real, if difficult to calculate). And there may be a social decision to clean up the toxins, in which case the body that undertakes the clean-up, often the state, is bearing the cost. Another mode of reducing costs is to utilize raw materials, but not to provide for (that is, pay for) their renewal, a problem especially true of organic matter. Such externalization of costs significantly reduces the costs of raw materials to given producers and hence increases the margin of profit.

-Immanuel Wallerstein, "Globalization or The Age of Transition?  
A Long-Term View of the Trajectory of the World-System," 1999

When it comes to acid rain or oil spills or depleted fisheries or tainted groundwater or fluorocarbon propellants or radiation leaks or sexually transmitted diseases, national frontiers are simple irrelevant. Toxins don't stop for customs inspections and microbes don't carry passports. North America became a water and free-trade zone long before NAFTA loosened up the market in goods.

-Benjamin R. Barber, Jihad vs. McWorld, 1995  

Reducing air pollution in just four of the world's largest cities--New York; Mexico City; Sao Paulo, Brazil; and Santiago, Chile--could prevent 64,000 premature deaths and 37 million lost workdays over the next two decades, according to research that examines the health effects of the use of fossil fuels. Worldwide, the burning of coal, oil and other fossil fuels leads to pollution that can result in elevated rates of infant mortality, asthma, cardiovascular problems and respiratory ailments and could cause millions of avoidable deaths worldwide over two decades, according to the new work, which reviewed more than 1,000 scientific studies… Also, "the benefits of lowering emissions are immediate" because many of the gases emitted when fuels are burned are also pollutants, said George Thurston, one of the review's authors and an associate professor of environmental medicine at the New York University School of Medicine. "Universal studies have shown when air pollution levels go up, you get an increase in the numbers of deaths and hospital admissions, missed days at work and school, and other adverse effects"

-Aparna Surendran,
"Fossil Fuel Cuts Would Reduce Early Deaths, Illness, Study Says,"
Los Angeles Times, 17 Aug 01  

America's cities, blanketed with smog and climate-altering carbon dioxide, have become cradles of ill health and are fostering an epidemic of asthma, according to a report yesterday from a leading group of Harvard University researchers and the American Public Health Association. Particularly hard hit are preschool-aged children, whose rate of asthma rose by 160 per cent between 1980 and 1994 (more than twice the national average), the report says. …The extra heat trapped underneath the CO{-2} causes plants to grow more, and produce more pollen and fungus, generating more spores. As well, the higher temperatures favour opportunistic plant species such as ragweed. Erratic weather in some parts of the United States has led to floods and damp homes, which in turn produce moulds and trigger asthma. As well, particulates -- or small bits -- from burned diesel fuel attach themselves to mould and pollen, which in turn is delivered deep into human lung sacs. The particulates sensitize the lungs to allergic reactions. A measure of the impact is that a quarter of the children living in Harlem are asthmatic, and they are concentrated along bus routes, the researchers said.

-Alanna Mitchell, “Global warming linked to high asthma rates,” 
The Globe and Mail 30 Apr 04

Now our biggest environmental problems come from our own actions, our own choices, rather than pollution produced by big business.

-former Minnesota Governor Jesse "The Body" Ventura, 
quoted in "Ventura: Pollution control starts with individuals,"
St. Paul Pioneer Press 24 Apr 01  

Worrying is less work than doing something to fix the worry. Everybody wants to save the earth; nobody wants to help Mom with the dishes.

-P.J. O'Rourke, All the Trouble in the World, 1994

Among industries, electric power generation has a particularly large impact on the natural environment. Power plants are responsible for:

• 64 percent of all emissions of sulfur dioxide (SO2), the leading component of acid rain and fine particulates;
• 40 percent of all man-made emissions of carbon dioxide (CO2), the leading greenhouse gas believed to contribute to global warming;
• 26 percent of all emission of nitrogen oxides (NOX), a key component of ozone (smog), acid rain, and fine particulates.

In addition, water pollution, nuclear waste, toxic waste, and impacts on birds and fish can be attributed to various types of power generation.

-U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, Acid Rain Program,
E-Grid, 23 Dec 99  

Acid rain, which corrodes car paint and kills trees, has caused far more environmental damage than projected a decade ago, the researchers report in the journal BioScience. To bolster 1990 limits placed on acid rain's main component, sulfur dioxide, the team says, an additional 80 percent reduction is needed to bring sensitive streams back to non-acidic levels within 25 years. ''In 1990, the businesses, politicians, and public took a collective sigh of relief and said `that problem is over,' and it's not,'' said Gene E. Likens, one of the report's authors and director of the Institute of Ecosystem Studies in Millbrook, N.Y.

-Shannon McCaffrey, Associated Press
reported in Albany Times Union 26 Mar 01  

Another agricultural trend of growing concern is the increased nutrient content of coastal waters resulting from fertilizer runoff in agricultural regions. Augmented by urban sewage discharge in some situations, this results in huge algal blooms, which, as they die and decay, deplete the oxygen content in the water, leading to the death of the fish…Each summer, for example, nitrogen and phosphate washing from farmlands in the Mississippi Valley enter the Gulf of Mexico, creating a massive algal bloom covering some 16,000 square kilometers. As the blooms die off, this area – roughly the size of New Jersey – is so deprived of oxygen that no fish survive.

-Lester A. Brown, Michael Renner, Brian Halweil, Vital Signs 1999, 1999  

The Gulf of Mexico's largest-ever dead zone, an 8,000-square-mile blanket of water devoid of sufficient oxygen to support life, has formed along the floor of the Gulf coastline from the Mississippi River to an area west of Sabine Pass in Texas, a Louisiana scientist reported Thursday. Louisiana Universities Marine Consortium researcher Nancy Rabalais, who heads a team of scientists that has measured the low-oxygen area for 17 summers, blamed the growth on nutrients carried into the Gulf by spring flooding along the upper Mississippi River and on increased rainfall along the river's watershed this summer.

-Mark Schleifstein, "Gulf's dead zone has gone Godzilla, expert says,"
The Times-Picayune 27 July 01  

The dead zone this summer reached 8,500 square miles about as big as Massachusetts, to become the largest mass of oxygen-starved water ever recorded in the Gulf of Mexico. Shrimp die. Fish flee. Crab carcasses lie covered in a bacterial mat as if spray painted white. In pockets where oxygen is totally depleted, the surface may appear clear, if a bit too glassy, while bottom waters faintly smell of rotten eggs. “Call it the Berlin Wall of the gulf,” said former Louisiana shrimper Donald Lirette, “because life can’t cross it from either side.”

-Rick Montgomery, Knight Ridder News Service, 
"Sea suffocates in 'dead zone'," St. Paul Pioneer Press, 29 Oct 02

A first-of-its-kind study of Iowa's 132 lakes shows they are among the most fertilizer-polluted waters on Earth. "We suspected Iowa has some of the most nutrient-rich water in the world, and this proves it," Iowa State University researcher John Downing said Monday. He plots the state's waters at the upper reaches of a worldwide chart. Downing's conclusion is based on three rounds of samples from each of Iowa's 132 lakes, all taken last summer. The samples show heavy concentrations of nitrates and phosphorus, two common ingredients in farm and yard runoff.

-Perry Beeman, "Iowa's lakes among filthiest in the world"
The Des Moines Register, 6 Mar 01  

Little Boy Blue
Come blow your horn—
They’ve sprayed extra chemicals
On the corn
The soil is dying
The rivers could weep
And the people to stop it
Are fast asleep

-Barbara Jurgensen & Murray Goodwin, A Polluter’s Garden of Verses, 1975

...the fouling of the nest which has been typical of man's activity in the past on a local scale now seems to be extending to the whole world society.

-Kenneth E. Boulding (1910-1993),
The Economics of the Coming Spaceship Earth, 1966  

…for nearly 40 years, while producing the now-banned industrial coolants known as PCBs at a local factory, Monsanto Co. routinely discharged toxic waste into a west Anniston creek [Alabama] and dumped millions of pounds of PCBs into oozing open-pit landfills. And thousands of pages of Monsanto documents -- many emblazoned with warnings such as "CONFIDENTIAL: Read and Destroy" -- show that for decades, the corporate giant concealed what it did and what it knew. In 1966, Monsanto managers discovered that fish submerged in that creek turned belly-up within 10 seconds, spurting blood and shedding skin as if dunked into boiling water. They told no one. In 1969, they found fish in another creek with 7,500 times the legal PCB levels. They decided "there is little object in going to expensive extremes in limiting discharges." In 1975, a company study found that PCBs caused tumors in rats. They ordered its conclusion changed from "slightly tumorigenic" to "does not appear to be carcinogenic."

-Michael Grunwald, "Monsanto Hid Decades Of Pollution,"
Washington Post, 1 Jan 02  

Corporate polluters, their phony think tanks and political toadies like to marginalize environmentalists as tree huggers, or radicals. But there is nothing radical about clean air or water.

-Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.

During those years, St. Louis-based Monsanto flushed tens of thousands of pounds of PCB's and other toxic wastes into Snow Creek each year… More than 45 tons of PCB's, a highly efficient industrial insulator, were discharged in 1969 alone, according to company documents. Monsanto also deposited millions of pounds of PCB's in a hillside landfill just above the plant …In the first two weeks of testimony, the plaintiffs' lawyers have established through Monsanto memorandums that the company was aware of the level of its discharges and that it at least partly understood the risks as early as the mid-1960's, if not earlier. But it did not begin improving pollution controls until 1970, a year before it stopped making PCB's in Anniston… A witness for the plaintiffs testified on Thursday that PCB levels in the blood of many plaintiffs was elevated. The 16 plaintiffs in the first phase of the trial had average PCB levels of 46 parts per billion, 27 times the national norm, said Dr. Ian Nisbet, a Massachusetts toxicologist and a consultant for the plaintiffs. "This is by far the most contaminated community — as indicated by the levels in their blood — that I've ever encountered," Dr. Nisbet said.… "We would all rather live in a pristine world," said Jere White, a lawyer for Monsanto and Solutia, in his opening argument two weeks ago. "We are all going to be exposed to things on a daily basis. Our bodies can deal with it."

-Kevin Sack, "PCB Pollution Suits Have Day in Court in Alabama,"
New York Times, 27 Jan 02  

But, biologically speaking, [PCBs] are quite reactive. Just how reactive became apparent in 1968 when PCBs accidentally leaked into cooking oil in Japan. Children born to mothers who consumed the contaminated oil during their pregnancy showed behavioral disorders and were of below normal intelligence. An uncanny similar accident in Taiwan a decade later resulted in almost identical problems: children exposed prenatally showed profound developmental delays and mental deficits. Furthermore, so did children born several years after their mothers were exposed. In the wake of these findings, PCB production in the United States ceased in 1976. Although no consumer product now on the market is made with PCBs, much older electrical equipment, especially that in use by industry, still contains this oily fluid. So, of course, does all scrapped equipment rusting away in landfills and out back on old military bases. Indeed, the quantity of PCBs still in use plus the quantity still languishing in waste dumps exceeds the total amount that has already escaped into the general environment. Without a program to recall and contain them, semivolatile PCBs will continue to insinuate themselves into the food chain for decades.

-Sandra Steingraber, Having Faith, 2001  

PBDEs are added to plastics, electronics, textiles, and construction materials as components of a common fire retardant. Fetal exposure of mice to PBDEs causes permanent neural defects. The Swedish government has moved to ban some forms of PBDEs based on the findings of an earlier study conducted in Europe that showed a ninefold increase of PBDEs in human blood samples between 1977 and 1999. The first EHP study, by researchers at the Indiana School of Medicine and the Indiana University Department of Chemistry and School of Public Health and Environmental Affairs, found that women in Indiana have PBDE blood concentrations 20-70 times higher than levels reported in the European study. The Indiana study also measured concentrations of PBDEs in cord blood from the women's newborn infants and found equally high levels suggesting "that the human fetus may be exposed to relatively high levels of PBDEs," according to the study authors. The authors go on to suggest that exposure to PBDEs may present a health hazard because of the similarity of the chemicals' molecules to those of another class of chemicals, polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs). The authors say that PBDEs' structural similarity to PCBs, which are known to have neurotoxic and carcinogenic action, raises the question of potential biological hazards associated with PBDEs.

-Erin Hollingshead, “Significant Amounts of Potentially Harmful Chemical 
Found in Blood of Mothers and Babies,”
Environmental Health Perspectives, 10 Mar 03    

A chemical widely found in food packaging and other plastics may cause severe genetic defects in embryos, at levels people are commonly exposed to, according to a scientific study published today. Laboratory experiments by geneticists at Case Western Reserve University in Ohio showed that bisphenol A disrupts the way that chromosomes align to produce the eggs of mice, leading to aneuploidy, which is the main cause of miscarriages and Down's syndrome in humans. Scientists say the study is the first to show that exposure to a small amount of an environmental contaminant that mimics the hormone estrogen disrupts the growth of embryos, killing them or leading to genetically abnormal offspring. …BPA ranks among one of industry's top chemicals, with 2 billion pounds used yearly.

-Marla Cone, “Study Links Plastics to Embryo Ills,” 
Los Angeles Times, 1 Apr 03

The air is full of a farewell—
deserted by the silver lake
lies the wild world, overturned.
Cities rise where the mountains fell,
the furnace where the phoenix burned

-Kathleen Raine, from On Leaving Ullswater, Collected Poems, 1956  

The Environmental Protection Agency concluded yesterday that long-term exposure to exhaust from diesel engines likely causes lung cancer in humans and triggers a variety of other lung and respiratory illnesses. The study, the culmination of decades of research, highlights the health problems posed by the complex mix of gases and fine particles emitted by heavy-duty diesel engines operating on the nation's highways, farms and construction sites. "Overall, the evidence for a potential cancer hazard to humans resulting from chronic inhalation exposure to [diesel emissions] is persuasive," the report states.

-Eric Pianin, "EPA Links Lung Cancer, Diesel Exhaust,”
The Washington Post, 4 Sep 02

Air pollution is not merely a nuisance and a threat to health.  It is a reminder that our most celebrated technological achievements—the automobile, the jet plane, the power plant, industry in general, and indeed the modern city itself—are, in the environment, failures.

-Barry Commoner, The Closing Circle, 1971

Anyone who studies our poisonous drugs, our denatured food, our deathtrap automobiles and houses, our lung-rotting cities, must concede that we accept a good deal of murder as inevitable simply because it is done to make or save money.

-Joy Davidman, Smoke on the Mountain, 1953  

These sprays, dusts, and aerosols are now applied almost universally to farms, gardens, forests, and homes - nonselective chemicals that have the power to kill every insect, the "good" and the "bad," to still the song of birds and the leaping of fish in the streams, to coat the leaves with a deadly film, and to linger on in soil - all this though the intended target may be only a few weeds or insects. Can anyone believe it is possible to lay down such a barrage of poisons on the surface of the earth without making it unfit for all life? They should not be called "insecticides," but "biocides."

-Rachel Carson (1907-1964), Silent Spring, 1962  

Children frequently exposed to household insecticides used on plants, lawns and in head lice shampoos appear to run double the risk of developing childhood leukaemia, research suggests.  A study by French doctors, published today in the journal Occupational and Environmental Medicine, supports concerns raised in recent years about the use of toxic insecticides around the home and garden — including plant sprays, medication shampoos and mosquito repellents — and a possible correlation with increased rates of acute leukaemia in children.

-Sam Lister, “Household insecticides could double child leukaemia risk,” 
The London Times, 17 Jan 06

Exposure to the pesticide methyl bromide and six other pesticides have been linked with an increased risk of prostate cancer among pesticide applicators in North Carolina and Iowa, U.S. government scientists reported Thursday. Methyl bromide is a fumigant gas used to protect crops from pests in the soil and to fumigate grain bins and other agricultural storage areas. Prostate cancer risks were two to four times higher among pesticide applicators than among men who were not exposed to methyl bromide.

-Environment News Service, 
“Methyl Bromide Exposure Raises Prostate Cancer Risk,’ 2 May 03

The United Nations says the amount of pesticide waste which seriously endangers people and the environment around the world is five times greater than a previous estimate two years ago. In a new report the UN Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) says almost 500,000 tonnes of old and unused toxic pesticides have been abandoned on sites. Most of that is in the developing world.

-BBC News, "Global waste pesticide warning" 9 May 01  

Last year approximately 400,000,000 gallons of chemical termiticides were pumped onto American soil. That's enough chemical to fill 80,000 semi-tanker trucks. …Even though the termite insecticide chlorpyrifos (Dursban) has been banned from store shelves, builders and pest control companies can use stocks to treat new homes until 2006. "Current termite control practices are hazardous for new homeowners, who are not even required to be notified of toxic chemical use (soil poisons)," said Jay Feldman, executive director of the Washington, D.C.-based group Beyond Pesticides/National Coalition Against the Misuse of Pesticides. A 2000 square foot home requires that 380 gallons of pesticide be pumped into the ground. In a 100 home subdivision, that's about 38 thousand gallons put where children and pets play, and the family gardens. Under pressure from EPA, Dow Chemical pulled Dursban from retail shelves at the end of 2001, but continues selling it for termite pretreatments in new home construction.

-E-Wire Press, "Hidden Pesticide Hazards Lurk in Newly Built Homes,"
17 Apr 02  

What, then, is the effect of pesticides? Pesticides have created a legacy of pain, and misery, and death for farm workers and consumers alike. The crop which poses the greatest danger, and the focus of our struggle, is the table grape crop. These pesticides soak the fields. Drift with the wind, pollute the water, and are eaten by unwitting consumers. These poisons are designed to kill, and pose a very real threat to consumers and farm workers alike. The fields are sprayed with pesticides: like Captan, Parathion, Phosdrin, and Methyl Bromide. These poisons cause cancer, DNA mutation, and horrible birth defects. The Central Valley of California is one of the wealthiest agricultural regions in the world. In its midst are clusters of children dying from cancer. The children live in communities surrounded by the grape fields that employ their parents. The children come into contact with the poisons when they play outside, when they drink the water, and when they hug their parents returning from the fields. And the children are dying.

-Cesar E. Chavez (1927-1993), Speech 12 Jan 90  

We're conducting a vast toxicological experiment and we are using our children as experimental animals.

-Philip Landrigan, MD quoted in Trade Secrets: A Moyers Report  

…laws governing pollution tend to move pollutants from one medium to another.  So, for example, we scrub SO₂ from power plants only to dispose toxic sludge on land.  We “clean” water only to disperse toxic-laced solids on farmland or landfills.  Pollution control becomes a kind of giant shell game by which we move pollutants between air, water, groundwater, and land.

-David W. Orr, The Last Refuge, 2004

Unborn U.S. babies are soaking in a stew of chemicals, including mercury, gasoline byproducts and pesticides, according to a report to be released Thursday… The report by the Environmental Working Group is based on tests of 10 samples of umbilical cord blood taken by the American Red Cross. They found an average of 287 contaminants in the blood, including mercury, fire retardants, pesticides and the Teflon chemical PFOA. "These 10 newborn babies ... were born polluted," said New York Rep. Louise Slaughter, who planned to publicize the findings at a news conference Thursday. "If ever we had proof that our nation's pollution laws aren't working, it's reading the list of industrial chemicals in the bodies of babies who have not yet lived outside the womb," Slaughter, a Democrat, said.

-Maggie Fox, “Unborn Babies Soaked in Chemicals, Survey Finds,” 
Reuters 14 Jul 05

In Finland—which has a high-quality registry—children born to women employed during their first trimester of pregnancy in agricultural occupations involving pesticides had twice the risk of cleft lips and palates. In Spain, oral clefts were three times more likely among babies born to women similarly employed. In addition, these children had greatly increased risks for multiple anomalies and defects of the nervous system. Also in Spain, the rates of surgical repair for undescended testicles is higher in areas of high pesticide use. These findings were mirrored in Denmark, where the sons of women who worked as professional gardeners in greenhouses, orchards, or nurseries were found to have a significantly increased risk of undescended testicles. Norwegian researchers documented strong associations between spina bifida as well as hydrocephaly and maternal work in orchards or greenhouses. Here in the United States, a study of nearly 700 women in California showed an increased risk of fetal death among babies whose mothers lived near crops when certain pesticides were sprayed. The largest risks were found among pregnant women exposed during the critical first trimester and among those who lived in the same square mile where pesticides were used.

-Sandra Steingraber, Having Faith, 2001  

Diseases caused by environmental degradation kill one in five children before age five in the poorest areas of the world, international health experts said Friday. Worldwide, almost one-fourth of disease was linked to environmental factors of poor water and sanitation, indoor and outdoor air pollution, and vector-borne diseases, according to a report by the United Nations, the World Bank and the World Resources Institute, a Washington-based think tank.

-Reuters News Service article reported by CNN Earth News, 1 May 98  

Children whose developing lungs are particularly vulnerable suffer the most from air pollution. For children, breathing the air in cities with the worst pollution, such as Beijing, Calcutta, Mexico City, Shanghai, and Tehran, is equivalent to smoking two packs of cigarettes a day.

-Lester A. Brown, Michael Renner, Brian Halweil, Vital Signs 1999  

Lead may be harmful even at very low blood concentrations, scientists from three institutions have found. The results of a five year study released today show that children with blood lead concentrations below the federal definition of an elevated lead level suffer intellectual impairment from the exposure… "In this sample of children we find that most of the damage to intellectual functioning occurs at blood lead concentrations that are below 10 micrograms per deciliter," said Richard Canfield of the Division of Nutritional Sciences at Cornell University and primary author on the study.

"Minuscule Blood Lead Levels Impair Intelligence,” 
Environment News Service, 16 Apr 02

Children eat, drink, and breathe more for their body weights than adults do, so they get bigger proportional doses of whatever is out there.

-Herbert Needleman, University of Pittsburgh psychiatrist who pioneered
studies linking lowered intelligence with early childhood exposures to 
lead, quoted in Trade Secrets: A Moyers Report

Hundreds of thousands of children throughout the country are attending schools that were built on or near toxic waste sites, putting them at increased risk of developing asthma, cancer, learning disorders and other diseases linked to environmental pollutants, according to a new study. The report, prepared by an environmental coalition called Child Proofing Our Communities Campaign and released yesterday, found that most states and public school systems lack environmental standards for selecting school construction sites. Instead, school projects are regulated only by local land-use laws, which the report called haphazard when it comes to evaluating environmental hazards. Consequently, the report said, many cash-strapped systems have opted to build on relatively cheap land on or near toxic waste sites… No state except California has a law requiring school officials to investigate potentially contaminated property and no federal or state agency keeps records of public or private schools that operate on or near toxic waste or industrial sites… However, the study notes there has been a sharp increase in the number of children afflicted with asthma, cancer, diminished IQs and learning disabilities during the past two decades and that experts say that children exposed to harmful toxins at home, at play or at school are particularly at risk to those health and developmental problems.

-Eric Pianin & Michael A. Fletcher,
"Many Schools Built Near Toxic Sites, Study Finds,"
The Washington Post Online, 21 Jan 02  

Children exposed to lead at levels now considered safe scored substantially lower on intelligence tests, according to a Cincinnati researcher who suggests one in 30 children in the United States suffers from its effects. Children with a lead concentration of less than 10 micrograms per deciliter of blood scored an average of 11.1 points lower than the mean on the Stanford-Binet IQ test, the researchers found. The mean is the intermediate value between the lowest and highest scores. "There is no safe level of blood lead," said Dr. Bruce Lanphear of Children's Hospital Medical Center and lead author of the lead study presented Monday at the Pediatric Academic Societies meeting.

-Jeanne A. Naujeck, "Even a little lead harms kids, Tristate doctor finds"
Cincinnati Enquirer, 1 May 01  

The broadest study yet of toxic chemicals that Americans absorb in their bodies showed a continuing decline in the clearest threats, like lead, pesticides and tobacco residues, but turned up numerous other findings that federal scientists and other experts called troublesome yesterday. The study tested blood and urine collected in 1999 and 2000 from more than 2,000 volunteers chosen as a representative slice of the American population. It determined that almost 8 percent of the roughly 50 million American women ages 16 to 49 had blood levels of mercury exceeding 5.8 parts per billion, the precautionary standard set by the Environmental Protection Agency… Among other findings, the new study disclosed that children had higher levels of residues from secondhand smoke, some pesticides and plastics than adults, and that Mexican-Americans have three times the levels of a DDT residue of other Americans.

-Andrew C. Revkin, “Study Finds Lower Level of Old Toxins but 
New Trends Are Worrying,” New York Times, 1 Feb 03

Female babies exposed to the pesticide DDT while they were in the womb had more trouble getting pregnant as adults than those who weren't exposed, according to a new study that concludes the pesticide's harmful results can take decades to appear. The study, published in the latest issue of the British medical journal Lancet, highlights DDT's long and troublesome reach. "This is the first research that shows it is possible that these exposures can cause problems 30 years down the line. It's the long-term, two-generational aspect that makes this study unique," said lead researcher Barbara Cohn, an epidemiologist at the University of California, Berkeley's Public Health Institute.

-David Kohn, "DDT Exposure said to hinder conception,"
Maryland’s SunSpot.net, 30 Jun 03

Pollution control authorities in the southern Indian state of Tamilnadu have ordered Hindustan Lever Limited, a subsidiary of Anglo-Dutch multinational Unilever, to export to the United States 286 tons of waste contaminated with mercury from its controversial thermometer factory in Kodaikanal, now closed… The controversial Hindustan Lever factory was exported to India in 1983 after it was shut down in Watertown, New York… In March 2001, workers, community members and nongovernmental organizations forced the factory to suspend operations after discovering that the company had dumped wastes contaminated with mercury at several public locations including a local scrapyard and on the sensitive watershed forests adjoining the factory. The factory imports all its mercury, primarily from the United States, and exports all of the thermometers it produces to U.S. based Faichney Medical Company.

-Nityanand Jayaraman, 
“Hindustan Lever Will Export Mercury Waste to USA” 
Environment News Service, 31 Mar 03 

One third of all of our cancers are from tobacco. It's one of the big killers in America and more than half of our kids still have environmental tobacco smoke exposure when environmental tobacco smoke is known to be associated with sudden infant death syndrome, with ear infections, respiratory infections and the rest. If we had to pick something to really go after, that would be one that I would really argue is an extraordinarily high priority and something people can actually do something about.

-Dr. Richard Jackson, director of National Center for Environmental Health
 quoted in “Toxic Chemical Study Sounds Warning for Children,” 
Environment News Service, 4 Feb 03

A laboratory test of 22 types of lettuce purchased at Northern California supermarkets found that four were contaminated with perchlorate, a toxic rocket-fuel ingredient that has polluted the Colorado River, the source of the water used to grow most of the nation's winter vegetables… The four lettuce samples all contained substantial quantities of perchlorate. One, a packaged variety of organic mixed baby greens, had a level of perchlorate contamination at least 20 times as high as the amount California considers safe for drinking water. The other three were packaged butter lettuce and radicchio, romaine lettuce and radicchio and a head of iceberg lettuce. All were at least five times as high as the state considers safe for water. State and federal environmental officials believe that perchlorate, a salt widely used by the U.S. government to help power missiles and the space shuttle, may cause health problems, even in trace amounts. Because it is known to affect the production of thyroid hormones, which are critical to early brain development, researchers believe perchlorate exposure may be especially dangerous for pregnant women and young children.

-Miguel Bustillo, “Lettuce Samples Found Tainted,” 
Los Angeles Times 28 Apr 03 

The nationwide price tag of perchlorate cleanup could be in the tens of millions, and possibly even billions, of dollars, according to water officials and other experts, who say it has the potential to dwarf California's problems with MTBE, a gasoline additive that tainted groundwater supplies. Perchlorate, which is highly soluble, has been detected in water supplies in California and at least 19 other states, usually near defense contractors or military bases. The Colorado River, which supplies drinking water to about 15 million people in the Southwestern United States, contains perchlorate that leached from the site of a former Nevada rocket fuel factory.

-Miguel Bustillo, “Lettuce Samples Found Tainted,” 
Los Angeles Times 28 Apr 03 

It's very likely that every one of the 3,200 outdoor firing ranges in the U.S. is so highly contaminated with lead that a massive cleanup effort would be required to make it safe for any other industrial or residential use.

-Jane Houlihan, research director of Environmental Working Group,
quoted in "Missing the Target - Green Bullets"
Environment News Service, 27 Jun 01  

A small neighborhood in Bossier City, Louisiana has some of the highest levels of chemical contamination, cancers and birth defects ever documented in the United States, according to National Institutes of Health (NIH) scientists. The Lincoln Creosote plant is now a Superfund site on the National Priorities List of the most hazardous sites in the country. It was operated in a 20 acre field next to a residential area from 1935 to 1969 by several different owners and operators, producing telephone poles and railroad ties. The wood was pressure treated with creosote, copper-chromium arsenate and pentachlorophenol (PCP) and hung out to dry. Eventually, two large creosote ponds formed leaving arsenic and carcinogenic polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs) as deep as 15 feet in the ground. Large residential neighborhoods border the Lincoln Creosote facility to the north, northeast, south and west… According to Dr. Patricia Williams, the high incidence of cancers and birth defects in Bossier City was probably caused by the contamination in the ground, air and water. Dr. Williams found that the incidence of leukemia from the late 1970s to the mid-1990s is as much as 40 times higher than normal populations, the rate varies depending on the type of leukemia. Breast cancer incidence is as much as five times higher than normal. Incidences of birth defects are 300 percent higher that those recorded during a comparable time period in Osaka, Japan which is near Hiroshima where an atomic bomb was dropped in 1945 to end World War II.

-Marie Marzi, "Creosote Contaminates Louisiana Community for Generations,"
Environment News Service 5 Sep 01  

According to the latest data available from the American Wood Preservatives Institute's 1995 statistical report, about 1.6 billion pounds of wood preservatives are used to treat wood each year, including 138 million pounds of CCA, 656 million pounds of penta, and 825 million pounds of creosote. The three wood preservatives targeted by the lawsuit are linked to a wide range of health problems including cancer, birth defects, kidney and liver damage, disruption of the endocrine system and death. Two of the components of CCA, arsenic and chromium (VI), are classified as known human carcinogens. Penta, classified as a probable carcinogen and a known endocrine disruptor, is contaminated with dioxins that the National Institutes of Health has classified as known human carcinogens. Creosote, a mix of toxic chemicals, is a cancer causing agent and is can cause nervous system damage.

-Cat Lazaroff, “U.S., Canada Groups Sue Over Toxic Wood Preservers,” 
Environment News Service, 11 Dec 02

Birds are being affected by lead on a massive scale. As of February 4, more than 176 trumpeter swans have been picked up dead or dying on the ponds they use in northern Washington state. It takes only three or four lead pellets to cause lead poisoning in a swan. Lead is a soft metal that is ground down easily in the gizzard of a bird. It then enters the blood stream quite rapidly. Lead shotgun shells used for hunting contain about 280 lead pellets. A hunter usually fires five or six shells for every bird that is hit. Only a few of the pellets actually hit the bird. The rest, often more than 1,000 pellets, fall to the ground or into the water. For years, duck hunters left about 6,000 tons of lead shot annually in United States ponds, lakes and rivers before the US Fish and Wildlife Service banned its use in waterfowl hunting. Lead shot is still used to hunt other kinds of game birds.

-Jackie Alan Giuliano, Ph.D., "Missing the Target - Green Bullets"
Environment News Service, 27 Jun 01  

You shall not pollute the land in which you live; for blood pollutes the land, and no expiation can be made for the land, for the blood that is shed in it, except by the blood of the one who shed it.

-Numbers 35:33 from the New Revised Standard Version of the Bible  

Most Americans carry detectable amounts of plastics, pesticides and heavy metals in their blood and urine, a government survey has shown for the first time. The substances include many shown to cause brain damage, reproductive problems, cancer and other toxic effects in animals. However, the amounts found in the average person are far below the levels at which those problems occur. Nearly all of the 27 chemicals in the survey of 3,800 people conducted by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in 1999 hadn't been previously measured in a national sample of the American population. Consequently, it's impossible to say if exposure is rising, falling or unchanged. Whether there are any health effects of trace amounts of the substances is similarly unknown in most cases.

-David Brown, "Study Tallies Americans' Exposure to Toxins"
The Washington Post, 22 Mar 01  

Of all the problems of conservation, none is more urgent that the polluted air which endangers the American people. We have been fortunate so far. But we have seen that when winds fail to blow, the concentrations of poisonous clouds over our cities can become perilous. Air pollution is a threat to health, especially of older persons. It contributes significantly to the rising rates of chronic respiratory ailments. It stains our cities and towns with ugliness, soiling and corroding whatever it touches. Its damage extends to our forests and farmlands as well. The economic toll for our neglect amounts to billions of dollars each year.

-Lyndon B. Johnson (1908-1973) 36th President of the United States,
Special Message to Congress, "To Renew a Nation"
8 Mar 68  

I've always thought that underpopulated countries in Africa are vastly underpolluted.

-Lawrence Summers, chief economist of the World Bank,
explaining why toxic wastes should be exported to Third World countries 

At 18 mpg, a car emits about 6 tons of carbon dioxide per year.

-Minnesota Pollution Control Agency

Children living near heavily traveled streets or highways are at greater risk of developing cancer, including childhood leukemia, a new study conducted in the rapidly expanding Denver metropolitan area shows. When researchers looked at the occurrance of cancer in children living in homes close to both high traffic corridors and high current capacity power lines, they found the cancer risks were greater than in children in high density traffic areas alone… The new study showed that homes adjacent to street corridors carrying 20,000 or more vehicles per day had roughly a six-fold increase in risk for children contracting cancer, including childhood leukemia.

-Environment News Service, 
"High Traffic Streets Linked to Childhood Cancers"
1 Mar 00

We can break the mountains apart; we can drain the rivers and flood the valleys. We can turn the most luxuriant forests into throw-away paper products. We can tear apart the great grass cover of the western plains and pour toxic chemicals into the soil and pesticides onto the fields until the soil is dead and blows away in the wind. We can pollute the air with acids, the rivers with sewage, the seas with oil - all this in a kind of intoxication with our power for devastation at an order of magnitude beyond all reckoning.

- Fr Thomas Berry (1914-2009), The Dream of the Earth, 1988

But now, O our God, what can we say after this? For we have disregarded the commands you gave through your servants the prophets when you said: "The land you are entering to possess is a land polluted by the corruption of its peoples. By their detestable practices they have filled it with their impurity from one end to the other."

-Ezra 9:10-11 NIV Bible

More than a quarter of the world's coral reefs have been destroyed by pollution and global warming, experts said Monday, warning that unless urgent measures are taken, most of the remaining reefs could be dead in 20 years. In some of the worst hit areas, such as the Maldives and Seychelles islands in the Indian Ocean, up to 90 percent of coral reefs have been killed over the past two years due to rises in water temperature. Coral reefs play a crucial role as an anchor for most marine ecosystems, and their loss would place thousands of species of fish and other marine life at risk of extinction

- Associated Press in the Deseret News,
"Coral reefs in grave peril, scientists say,"
24 Oct 00  

Untreated sewage continues to contaminate a record number of popular beaches, according to the 10th annual beach report from the Natural Resources Defense Council released today. Contamination from sewage spills, storm drains, runoff or leaking septic systems were reported in 1999 and the first seven months of this year in Cape May County, New Jersey; the Florida Keys, and Miami and Pensacola Beach in Florida; San Diego, California; and the Caribbean island of St. Croix… The 6,160 closings and advisories last year were almost 50 percent higher than those in 1997, indicating that increased monitoring continues to reveal serious water pollution at U.S. coastal, bay and Great Lakes beaches.

-Cat Lazaroff,
"Record High Number of American Beaches Closed Due to Pollution,"
Environmental News Service, 4 Aug 00

The hard-to-control sources of nutrients flowing into our coastal waters grew dramatically in the last half of the 20th century due to increases in chemical fertilizers, animal agriculture, and emissions of fossil fuels. We have only recently removed nutrients from treated waste, and new emission standards, if fully implemented, could reduce atmospheric deposits of nitrogen by 40 percent. Reduction in agricultural sources of nutrients is also feasible through improved agricultural practices and watershed restoration.

-Dr. Donald Boesch, University of Maryland Center for Environmental Science,
Pew Oceans Commission Report 27 Feb 01

Asbestos, EMFs, and CFCs have given us a degree of humility. When yesterday's "triumph of modern chemistry" turns out instead to be today's deadly threat to the global environment, it is legitimate to ask what else we don't know.

-Denis Hayes, speech, Museum of Natural History, New York City, 8 Nov 89 *

Ten-thousand Americans die each year from asbestos-related diseases and the number appears to be increasing in a growing public health crisis, according to a report by an environmental research group released on Thursday. The analysis by the Washington-based Environmental Working Group also projects that more than 100,000 people in the United States will die of four asbestos-related diseases -- mesothelioma, asbestosis, lung cancer and gastrointestinal cancer -- over the next ten years. The nonprofit research organization said it based its analysis on 25 years worth of U.S. government data on asbestos mortality and examined the toll from just two causes of asbestos deaths -- mesothelioma and asbestosis. 

-JoAnne Allen, “Study Warns U.S. Faces Asbestos Disease Crisis,” 
Reuters, 4 Mar 04

Chemicals used to make household products fire-resistant are being discovered in several Arctic species. The chemicals, brominated flame retardants, appear to be concentrated in the Norwegian Arctic. They are being found in the region's polar bears, whose cubs have a lower survival rate than elsewhere. They are also turning up in seabirds' eggs, and local people are now being warned not to eat them.

Alex Kirby, "Chemicals Spark Arctic Alert," BBC News Online,26 Sep 02

Analyses of human fat, mother's milk, blood, breath, semen and urine demonstrate that everyone - not just those living near major pollution sources - now carries a "body burden" of toxic organochlorines in his or her tissues. At least 190 organochlorines, including dioxins, PCBs and DDT, have been identified in the tissues and fluids of the general population of the U.S. and Canada. Hundreds more are present, but have not been chemically characterized. Organochlorines have been linked to immune system suppression, falling sperm counts and infertility, as well as learning disabilities in children. More than 100 organochlorines cause cancer in laboratory animals or humans. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency will officially release a report Friday finding that dioxin - the most toxic of the organochlorines - is a human carcinogen.

-Cat Lazaroff, "World Awash in Chlorine Based Poisons,"
Environmental News Service 8 Jun 00  

Every American has dioxin in their body. According to the EPA, about ninety percent of the American public's exposure results from ingestion of common foods, mostly dairy and meat products. Dairy cows and beef cattle absorb dioxin by eating contaminated feed crops. The crops become contaminated by airborne dioxins that settle onto soil, water, and plants. Dioxin then accumulates in the grazing animals that eat these crops. People ingest dioxin when they eat meat, dairy products, and eggs. Some exposure also results from eating dioxin-contaminated fish. Dioxin gets into our food supply from emissions from garbage, medical and hazardous waste incinerators, the bleaching of paper, and the manufacture and disposal of chlorinated plastics and pesticides. Dioxin can result in serious health problems including cancer, attention deficit disorder, learning disabilities, weakened immune system, infertility, birth defects, and endometriosis.

-Center For Health, Environment and Justice, "Behind Closed Doors," 2001  

The pulp and paper industry is the third-largest industrial polluter in both Canada and the U.S., releasing more than 220 million pounds of toxic pollution into the air, ground and water each year. Much of that pollution is the byproduct of the three million tons of chlorine used annually to bleach wood pulp white. Chlorine bleaching is a major source of the potent carcinogen dioxin, which is routinely discharged into rivers and streams with wastewater. As a result, dioxin is now ubiquitous in our environment, found throughout the world in air, water, soil and food. Every woman alive today carries some trace of dioxin in her breast milk. Dioxin is considered one of the most toxic substances ever produced, and has been known to cause cancer, liver failure, miscarriage, birth defects and genetic damage in laboratory animals. The U.S. paper industry has been aware of the dioxin problem since at least 1985, but has been very slow to act on alternatives.

-Jim Motavalli, “The Paper Chase,” E-Magazine, May/Jun 04

On January 19th, the National Toxicology Program (NTP) announced today the publication of an addendum to its Ninth Report on Carcinogens that adds 2,3,7,8-tetrachlorodibenzo-p-dioxin, also known as TCDD or Dioxin, to the list of substances "known to be human carcinogens." Kenneth Olden, Ph.D., Director of the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences and the NTP, which has the responsibility for preparation of this report, said that publication of this addendum follows the recent ruling by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit dismissing a request for an injunction to prevent the listing of TCDD as a "known human carcinogen" pending appeal of the district court's decision upholding the listing. The change in the listing of TCDD from the "reasonably anticipated"to the "known to be a human carcinogen" category had been planned to occur in the Ninth Report, but the designation was delayed by litigation.

-State of Michigan Department of Environmental Quality,
Office of the Great Lakes Activity Report, February 2001  

Frogs given trace amounts of DDT and other pesticides experience a near-total collapse in their immune systems, a finding that could help explain the rise in human autoimmune diseases such as asthma and allergies, Canadian researchers say. The scientific team also says the work could shed light on the global decline in amphibians, animals that may no longer have strong enough immune systems to survive exposures to viruses and parasites. The pesticides had an effect on frogs identical to cyclophosphamide, a drug used on human transplant recipients to suppress their immune systems so they don't reject their new organs. Frogs and mammals essentially have the same type of immune system, so the finding could have implications for humans, who also have elevated pesticide exposures.

-Martin Mittelstaedt, "Study finds DDT may spur disease,"
Toronto Globe and Mail, 24 Apr 02  

Frogs exposed to a mix of pesticides at extremely low concentrations like those widely found around farms suffer deadly infections, suggesting that the chemicals could be a major culprit in the global disappearance of amphibians, UC Berkeley scientists reported Tuesday. When tadpoles were exposed in laboratory experiments to each pesticide individually, 4% died before they turned into frogs. But when atrazine and eight other pesticides were mixed to replicate a Nebraska cornfield, 35% died.  … At least one-third of amphibians worldwide, or 1,856 of the known species of frogs, toads, salamanders and caecilians, are in danger of extinction, according to an international group of conservation biologists.

- Marla Cone, “A New Alarm Sounds for Amphibians,” 
Los Angeles Times, 25 Jan 06

The health of our constituents and the Great Lakes ecosystem will be affected for years to come by how completely and how quickly the most dangerous persistent organic pollutants are removed the earth's air and water... A large body of scientific literature indicates that POPs have devastating and long-lasting impacts on wildlife, ecosystems, and human health in the U.S. and around the world. In spite of strong domestic environmental legislation such as the Clean Air Act, the Clean Water Act, and the Pollution Prevention Act, POPs originating in the U.S. and abroad pose a continued threat to our environment and the health of our citizens.

-Letter from Sherrod Brown and 35 other Democratic Congressmen
to U.S. Secretary of State, Madeleine Albright, 29 Sept 00

These new findings amount to an estimated 375,000 babies being born each year at risk of neurological problems due to exposure to mercury in the womb… Data in the Centers for Disease Control report indicate that at least 10 percent of women of childbearing age have levels of mercury in their bodies that exceed what the [U.S. Environmental Protection Agency] considers acceptable and this translates to nearly six million women.

-Michael Bender quoted in "Mercury Poses Risk to One in 10 U.S. Pregnancies"
Environment News Service, 5 Mar 01

The common dentist office practice of flushing old mercury-containing fillings down the drain makes dentists the single largest discharger of the toxic metal into the nation's wastewater treatment plants, according to a national study by a Boston-based public health group. Most of the mercury is eventually discharged into bodies of water. …In 1985, dentists were about the sixth-largest user of mercury, behind batteries and factories that use it to produce chlorine, paint, and measuring instruments, according to the report. Now, with mercury in many products outlawed, phased-out, or reduced, dentists are the third-largest user of mercury, behind the makers of wiring devices and switches, and chlorine. The report says dentists use about 44 tons of mercury each year, most of which is eventually released into the environment. ''To me, it's plain and simple,'' says G. Robert Evans, a dentist with West Newton Dental Associates. Evans said he gave up using mercury in fillings close to 20 years ago. ''It's going to accumulate in the environment if we don't keep it out. So I keep it out.''

-Beth Daley, “Mercury report targets dentists,” The Boston Globe, 5 Jun 02

In June, a coalition of citizens' health and environmental groups filed suit against the American Dental Association for allegedly deceiving consumers into thinking amalgam fillings are made of silver, when in fact the major component (about 50 percent, according to the suit) is mercury. They also claim that the ADA has failed to disclose information regarding the significant risk of harm associated with the fillings in order to promote the continued use of amalgams, a product in which it has a financial stake as a paid endorser. "If mercury is so safe, why do they try to hide it?" says Charlie Brown, one of the lawyers representing Consumers for Dental Choice (CDC), a plaintiff in the suit.

-Francesca Lyman, "Are Silver Fillings Safe?" MSNBC 11 Jul 01  

Many of the companies that benefit from the Department of Energy's fossil fuel and nuclear programs are large corporations responsible for polluting air and water, and threatening public health. In 1997 alone, the coal industry mined over 900 million tons of coal that, when burned, contributed 51 tons of mercury and 2 billion tons of carbon dioxide into the air and water. "Taxpayers should be outraged," said Cena Swisher of Taxpayers for Common Sense. "While these industries received billions in government handouts, prices for gas and heating oil have soared." Many of the subsidies to the oil, gas, coal and nuclear industries are outdated and were instituted decades ago during wartime or economic depression to increase economic development. The beneficiaries of these tax breaks and subsidies are some of the largest, most prosperous corporations in the nation, earning a net income of $29.8 billion in 1997.

–Friends of the Earth Press Release,
"Polluting Energy Industries to Receive Over $26 Billion from Taxpayers"
23 Mar 00  

Why should Kentucky be the nation's leading coal-producing state if all we get out of it is crippled and dead miners, silted streams and lakes, torn up roads, uprooted forests and holes in the ground?

-Harry Caudill (1922-1990) from his letter to the editor
Louisville Courier-Journal, 5 Jan 81  

Automobiles are one of the nation's largest sources of toxic mercury emissions, show two new studies released today by leading environmental organizations. Despite practical, inexpensive alternatives and industry commitments to phase out its use, mercury continues to be widely used in new automobiles, the groups charge. …The bulk of mercury releases occur when contaminated steel, recovered from scrap automobiles, is melted in electric arc furnaces (EAFs). The study estimates that EAFs emit 15.6 metric tons of mercury each year, which is more than all manufacturing sources combined. Automobiles are likely the single largest source of mercury contaminated scrap, the groups found. The report finds that EAFs are not only the largest manufacturing source of mercury air emissions in the U.S., but the fourth largest overall - behind only coal fired power plants and municipal waste incinerators. …auto manufacturers have continued to use mercury in product design and purchasing decisions despite known concerns and available alternatives.

-Cat Lazaroff, "Automobiles Drive Toxic Mercury Into Environment"
Environmental News Service 22 Jan 01  

U.S. automakers have failed to make good on promises to end the use of harmful mercury in cars and trucks, a new report claims. Environmental groups say mercury used in electrical switches and lighting ends up polluting lakes and contaminating fish when cars and trucks are scrapped, compressed and recycled in steel mills. High, prolonged exposure to mercury can lead to brain or kidney damage. The report, prepared jointly by the Ecology Center in Ann Arbor, Great Lakes United and The University of Tennessee, said automotive electrical switches account for 11 percent of mercury emissions today. In 1995, General Motors Corp., Ford Motor Co. and Chrysler Corp. pledged to phase out the use of mercury switches as alternatives became available. But in 2000, the companies sold vehicles that contained 6.6 million to 9.2 million mercury switches

-Jeff Plungis, "Auto mercury levels criticized"
Detroit News Washington Bureau, 23 Jan 01  

"As a U.S. auto analyst, I'm very concerned about the risk side of the equation,'' said Mr. Casesa of Merrill Lynch. "For the domestic auto companies, we've had an accommodating energy policy, but there are new issues like climate change, and there are new geopolitical issues, defense issues, that relate to our energy policy.  "There's the potential for a confluence of events to occur,'' he added. "Americans could be more concerned about climate change, while at the same time we try to reduce our dependence on the Middle East for oil, for national security or political reasons. If these two strands come together, that would put a lot of pressure on policy makers, which would invariably lead back to higher fuel-economy standards.''

-Danny Hakim, “Catching Up to the Cost of Global Warming,” 
The New York Times, 25 Jul 04

Most oil pollution in North American coastal waters comes not from leaking tankers or oil rigs, but rather from countless oil-streaked streets, sputtering lawn mowers and other dispersed sources on land, and so will be hard to prevent, a panel convened by the National Academy of Sciences says in a new report. The thousands of tiny releases, carried by streams and storm drains to the sea, are estimated to equal an Exxon Valdez spill — 10.9 million gallons of petroleum — every eight months, the report says. When fuel use on water, either inland or offshore, is also taken into account, the report says, about 85 percent of the 29 million gallons of marine oil pollution in North America each year comes from users — drivers, businesses, boaters — and not from the oil industry. In particular, spills from tankers, barges and other oil transport vessels totaled less than a quarter-million gallons in 1999, down from more than six million in 1990.

-Andrew C. Revkin,
"Offshore Oil Pollution Comes Mostly as Runoff, Study Says,"
New York Times, 24 May 02  

Buried gas storage tanks have leaked hazardous material into at least 25,000 sites around Florida, causing concern among scientists that the state's absorbent, sandy soil may be in danger, the Florida Department of Environmental Protection said. Scientists said the pollution is a result of Florida's high use of gasoline. The state ranks third, after California and Texas, in gas consumption, burning nearly 20-million gallons a day, according to the U.S. Department of Energy. About 22,000 of the leak sites have been near gas stations and other facilities, according to the Florida Department of Environmental Protection. Many of the leaks are occurring in areas near a drinking-water water source, scientists said.

Associated Press, “Leaking fuel tanks a hazard, say officials,”
St. Petersburg Times, 8 Jul 02

Built just three years after the disk drive was invented at IBM ARC in 1956, the Cottle Road plant was the first among dozens of manufacturing facilities -- including those operated by Intel, Hewlett-Packard, Applied Materials and National Semiconductor -- discovered in the early 1980s to have collectively leaked tens of thousands of gallons of organic solvents and other toxic contaminants into the groundwater of Silicon Valley. Today, the valley is home to more EPA Superfund sites (29) than any other county in the nation, with the most notorious of those sites -- from a leaking tank at a Fairchild Semiconductor fabrication plant -- poisoning a well that served the south San Jose neighborhood of Los Paseos. A subsequent study by the state's Department of Health Services found 2.5 to three times the expected rate of miscarriages and birth defects among pregnant women exposed to the contaminated drinking water, leading to a lawsuit and multimillion-dollar settlement in 1986 with over 250 claimants.

-Jim Fisher, "Poison Valley," Salon.com 30 Jul 01  

A groundbreaking investigation by an international coalition of environmental organizations has revealed that huge quantities of hazardous electronic wastes (E-wastes) are being exported to China, Pakistan and India where they are processed in operations that are extremely harmful to human health and the environment… The investigation uncovered an entire area known as Guiyu in Quangdong Province, surrounding the Lianjiang River just 4 hours drive northeast of Hong Kong where about 100,000 poor migrant workers are employed breaking apart and processing obsolete computers imported primarily from North America. The workers were found to be using 19th century technologies to clean up the wastes from the 21st century. The operations involve men, women and children toiling under primitive conditions, often unaware of the health and environmental hazards involved in operations which include open burning of plastics and wires, riverbank acid works to extract gold, melting and burning of toxic soldered circuit boards and the cracking and dumping of toxic lead laden cathode ray tubes. The investigative team witnessed many tons of the E-waste simply being dumped along rivers, in open fields and irrigation canals in the rice growing area. Already the pollution in Guiyu has become so devastating that well water is no longer drinkable and thus water has to be trucked in from 30 kilometers away for the entire population.

-Silicon Valley Toxics Coalition,
"High-Tech Toxic Trash From USA Found to be Flooding Asia,"
News Release, 25 Feb 02  

The Basel Action Network, a U.S. group campaigning for a crack-down on hazardous waste, said last year 500 containers of computers were being shipped into Lagos every month. As many as 75 per cent of these ended up being dumped and burned, releasing hazardous fumes that can contain lead, cadmium, barium, beryllium, mercury and brominated flame retardants used in computer manufacture. The United Nations estimates that 20 to 50 million tonnes of electronic waste is produced every year, and checks by an European watchdog last year showed that 48 per cent of EU waste exports were illegal.

-Oliver Bullough, “African deaths highlight illegal toxic-waste trade,” 
The Toronto Star, 27 Sep 06

There simply hasn't been enough testing and research into the health hazards posed by low-level exposure to combinations of toxic chemicals. If anything, the experience of the semiconductor industry should be sobering -- the complexity of the chemical cocktails at use in modern high-tech industrial manufacturing is mind-boggling, and it is always getting more so. There is little chance, warn these experts, of ever catching up with the public health challenges inherent in new advances in technology, especially when the rate of change continues to accelerate. We may know that mercury is deadly, we're pretty sure that drinking water contaminated with trichloroethane isn't a good idea and we may finally be waking up to the dangers of making clean-room workers breathe the same recirculated air, laden with complex chemicals, all day long. But what do we know about the explosion of research in biotech, and microelectronic machines, or the next wave of advances in semiconductor manufacturing?

-Jim Fisher, "Poison Valley," Salon.com 30 July 01  

Ozone levels over the Arctic have fallen dramatically this winter, say scientists. An international group of researchers found cumulative ozone losses of more than 60% at around 18 kilometres (11 miles) above the polar region between January and March. "These are among the largest chemical losses at this altitude observed during the last 10 years," said the European Commission, a main sponsor of the research, in a statement.

–BBC News, "Severe Loss to Arctic Ozone," 5 Apr 00  

The hole in the ozone layer over Antarctica is now three times larger than the United States — the biggest it's ever been, scientists at NASA said Friday. In a sign that ozone-depleting gases churned out years ago are just now taking their greatest toll, this year's South Pole ozone hole spreads over about 11 million square miles… "The fact that it's real big right now is kind of a surprise," said Dr. Paul A. Newman of NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md. The center detected an ozone hole of about 11 million square miles on Sept. 3. That was the biggest ever, beating the previous record of 10.5 million square miles on Sept. 19, 1998, it said…Depletion of the ozone layer over Antarctica and the Arctic is being monitored because ozone protects Earth from harmful ultraviolet radiation. Too much UV radiation can cause skin cancer and destroy tiny plants at the beginning of the food chain.

–Associated Press reported on MSNBC.com,
"Largest ozone hole on record spotted," 8 Sep 00  

The hole in the ozone layer over Antarctica stretched over a Chilean city when it ballooned to a record size last month, the first time it has reached a population center, scientists said Thursday. Previously, the hole had only opened over Antarctica and the surrounding ocean. Citing NASA data, atmospheric research scientist Stephen Wood said the hole covered 11.4 million square miles -- an area more than three times the size of the United States -- on Sept. 9 and 10. For those two days, the hole extended over Punta Arenas, a southern Chile city of about 120,000 people, exposing residents to high levels of ultraviolet radiation. Too much UV radiation can cause skin cancer and destroy tiny plants at the beginning of the food chain.

-Associated Press in St. Paul Pioneer Press,
"Ozone hole reaches a city for first time," 6 Oct 00  

The "hole in the moral ozone" is really what's behind the hole in the ozone.

-Leonard Sweet, SoulTsunami, 1999

Who gets the risks? The risks are given to the consumer, the unsuspecting consumer and the poor work force. And who gets the benefits? The benefits are only for the corporations, for the money makers.

-Cesar E. Chavez (1927-1993) "The Danger of Pesticides"

...a United Nations research team has confirmed that depleted uranium from weapons used in Bosnia and Herzegovina in 1994 and 1995 has contaminated local supplies of drinking water, and can still be found in dust particles suspended in the air. Depleted uranium is used in armour penetrating military ordinance because of its high density, and also in the manufacture of defensive armor plate.

-Environment News Service, 
“Depleted Uranium Contaminates Bosnia-Herzegovina” 25 Mar 03

A long-deferred cleanup is now under way at 114 of the nation’s nuclear facilities, which encompass an acreage equivalent to Rhode Island and Delaware combined. Many smaller sites, the easy ones, have been cleansed, but the big challenges remain. What’s to be done with 52,000 tons of dangerously radioactive spent fuel from commercial and defense nuclear reactors? With 91 million gallons of high-level waste left over from plutonium processing, scores of tons of plutonium, more than half a million tons of depleted uranium, millions of cubic feet of contaminated tools, metal scraps, clothing, oils, solvents, and other waste? And with some 265 million tons of tailings from milling uranium ore—less than half stabilized—littering landscapes?

-Michael E. Long, 
“Half Life: the Lethal Legacy of America’s Nuclear Waste,” 
National Geographic, July 2002

Brothers and Sisters: Our ancient homeland is spotted today with an array of chemical dumps. Along the Niagara River, dioxin, a particularly deadly substance, threatens the remaining life there and in the waters which flow from there. Forestry departments spray the surviving forests with powerful insecticides to encourage tourism by people seeking a few days or weeks away from the cities where the air hangs heavy with sulphur and carbon oxides. The insecticides kill the black flies, but also destroy much of the food chain for the bird, fish, and animal life which also inhabit those regions. The fish of the Great Lakes are laced with mercury from industrial plants, and fluoride from aluminum plants poisons the land and the people. Sewage from the population centers is mixed with PCBs and PBS in the watershed of the great lakes and the Finger Lakes, and the water is virtually nowhere safe for any living creatures.

“Haudenosaunee Statement to the World,” 
Akwesasne Notes, 1979 
quoted in Winona LaDuke’s All Our Relations 1999

Native communities are focal points for the excrement of industrial society.

-Winona LaDuke

This is so typical of what happens on reservations these days. There are very few successful economic development projects, and tribes face a choice between gambling casinos or nuclear wastes, because they bring the quickest cash revenue. There have got to be better choices for us.

-Alberta Mason, 
executive director of the nonprofit Environmental Justice Foundation
quoted by Tom Meersman in the Minneapolis Star Tribune 9 Jul 00

After the U.S. government has stolen most of our lands, your government believes that whatever Indian land is left is still good to be used as a garbage dump for your nuclear wastes that no one else with any good sense wants. I cannot speak the words to tell you how absolutely abhorrent this concept is to me.

- Kerry Cartier of the Native American Tribal Organization,
quoted by Tom Meersman in the Minneapolis Star Tribune 9 Jul 00

People of color are likely to be endangered because their neighborhoods are not only poor but also relatively politically powerless. To outsiders, the siting of toxic waste facilities or refineries in minority communities may seem like a coincidence, or the consequences of the poor's political marginality. To people who live in these communities, the very decisions that dump toxics in and around their homes seem, at best, like de facto racism.

-Ruth Rosen from "Who Gets Polluted," Dissent, 1994  

There are a lot of Indian communities that have military bases on or adjacent to them, because historically the military forts were often situated right next to the Indian reservations to keep an eye on the Indians. The military is the largest polluter in the country, and so you have a lot of military waste contaminating reservations -- as, for example, on the Skull Valley Goshute Reservation, where 5,000 sheep died in some kind of experimental military nerve gas test 10 years ago. Many of our communities are dealing with that kind of waste, and an absence of political will to clean them up.

-Winona LaDuke,
"Native Struggles for Land and Life; An Interview with Winona LaDuke,"
Multinational Monitor, December 1999

Put quite simply, justice is a compassionate approach toward people who are hurting and toward a creation that has been degraded. It is love in action...In this day and age, we need to ask ourselves if we are doing a very good job of loving our neighbor. Can we say that we love our neighbor when our extravagant lifestyles guarantee the poverty of those whom Christ loves? Can we say that we love our neighbor when we belch polluted air into their backyards? When we dump our waste into a stream? "Good riddance!" "Out of sight; out of mind." But that waste will end up in someone's water supply. Is this what the Bible calls living as a good neighbor?

-Myron S. Augsburger from "Love Thy Neighbor"
in The Best Preaching on Earth, 1996

In North Carolina there are approximately 2,500 intensive hog operations, and they are located disproportionately in areas that are poor and nonwhite. The public health and environmental injustice implications of this geographical pattern extend beyond the physiologic impact of airborne emissions to issues of well-water contamination and the negative impact of noxious odors on community economic development

-Dr. Steven Wing, UNC-CH Department of Epidemiology,
quoted in Hog Hell in North Carolina, Environmental News Service

While the rich reap most of the benefits of technological development, the poor bear an unequal burden of dealing with the consequences of the resulting increased pollution. The poor continue to live in greatest proximity to the sources of pollution, the infrastructure and machinery of industry. They work in the most polluted and physically dangerous workplaces. And these same individuals, living and working closest to the sources of environmental catastrophe, are also the ones most lacking decent health care.

-James H. Cone, “One Earth, One Struggle,” 
The Other Side, Jan-Feb 2004

There is no level playing field. Any time our society says that a powerful chemical company has the same right as a low income family that's living next door, that playing field is not level, is not fair.

-Robert Bullard, director of the Environmental Justice Resource Center,
Clark Atlanta University, 
cited in David Pace’s “More Blacks Living With Pollution,” 
Associated Press, 13 Dec 05

An Associated Press analysis of a little-known government research project shows that black Americans are 79 percent more likely than whites to live in neighborhoods where industrial pollution is suspected of posing the greatest health danger. Residents in neighborhoods with the highest pollution scores also tend to be poorer, less educated and more often unemployed than those elsewhere in the country, AP found.  "Poor communities, frequently communities of color but not exclusively, suffer disproportionately," said Carol Browner, who headed the Environmental Protection Agency during the Clinton administration when the scoring system was developed. "If you look at where our industrialized facilities tend to be located, they're not in the upper middle class neighborhoods."

-David Pace, “More Blacks Living With Pollution,” 
Associated Press, 13 Dec 05

A 1987 study, "Toxic Waste and Race," by the United Church of Christ Commission for Racial Justice - the first national study to correlate waste facilities and demographic characteristics - which found that race was the most significant factor in determining where waste facilities are located. Among other findings, the study revealed that three out of five African Americans and Hispanic Americans live in communities with uncontrolled toxic waste sites, and that 15 million African Americans live in communities with at least one site.

-Cat Lazaroff in "People of Color Battle Toxics in Communities Across the U.S.",
Environmental News Service, 11 Feb 00

Low-income minority residents are most at risk from toxic chemicals, according to a study released Tuesday by the Indianapolis Urban League Environmental Coalition… Those who earn less than $15,000 a year are about twice as likely to live within 550 yards of a toxic-release facility as the average person. People with incomes greater than $75,000 are 58 percent less likely to live that close… Statistics are similar throughout the nation.

-David Rohn, "Toxic risk greater for minorities,"
The Indianapolis Star, 24 May 00

Blacks are more likely than whites to live near areas polluted by power plants and suffer adverse health consequences as a result, civil rights and environmental activists said yesterday. Several U.S. groups, including the Atlanta-based Georgia Coalition for the People's Agenda and Washington based Black Leadership Forum, released a study showing that 68 percent of blacks lived within 30 miles (48 km) of a coal-fired power plant, compared with 56 percent of U.S. whites. Thirty miles is the distance within which people experience the maximum effects of smokestack emissions, the study said. Nationwide, 71 percent of blacks live in counties that don't meet federal air pollution standards, compared with 58 percent of whites, the study said.

-Karen Jacobs, “Blacks hurt more by power plant pollution - US study” 
Reuters News Service, 24 Oct 02

It's amazing how people can get so excited about a rocket to the moon and not give a damn about smog, oil leaks, the devastation of the environment with pesticides, hunger, disease. When the poor share some of the power that the affluent now monopolize, we will give a damn.

-Cesar E. Chavez (1927-1993)

Uranium mining has devastated a number of Indigenous communities in North America. Uranium mining in northern Canada has left over 120 million tons of radioactive waste. This amount represents enough material to cover the Trans-Canada Highway two meters deep across the country. Present production of uranium waste from Saskatchewan alone occurs at the rate of over 1 million tons annually. Since 1975, hospitalization for cancer, birth defects and circulatory illnesses in that area have increased dramatically - between 123 and 600 percent in that region. In other areas impacted by uranium mining, cancers and birth defects have increased to, in some cases, eight times the national average. The subsequent increases in radiation exposure to both the local and to the larger north American population are also evidenced in broader incidences of cancer, such as breast cancer in North American women, which is significantly on the rise. There is not a distinction in this problem caused by radiation whether it is in the Dene of northern Canada, the Laguna Pueblo people of New Mexico, or the people of Namibia.

-Winona LaDuke,
statement at the United Nations Fourth World Conference on Women,
Bejing, China, 31 Aug 95

Over 24 years, the government and private research agencies dumped almost 48,000 55-gallon drums of radioactive waste just a few miles west of the Golden Gate Bridge. That waste now is leaking into the Gulf of the Farallones National Marine Sanctuary--and no one knows how much contamination it is causing in seafood. Federal officials say they don't have the money to determine the extent of the damage… Most agree that cleaning the area could make things worse. Some of the drums were sunk with bullet holes, and most are so corroded that moving them would spread more radioactive waste. Even with money, getting to the drums would be difficult. They were dumped over 540 square miles in water 300 to 6,000 feet deep along the edge of the continental shelf, an area crisscrossed with canyons and gullies. Most submarines that dive deeper than 2,000 feet aren't available on the West Coast… Most of that waste is radioactive material and contaminated gloves and uniforms from national laboratories administered by the University of California and now-defunct Naval Radiological Defense Laboratory in San Francisco. It was dumped between 1946 and 1970 at what then was called the Farallon Islands Nuclear Waste Site.

-Colleen Valles, "Bay Area May Be in Hot Water Over Dumping,"
LATimes.com, 17 Feb 02

President Vladimir Putin said Wednesday that 15 percent of Russia's territory could be classified as an environmental disaster zone and called on his government to take urgent action… Putin identified poor environmental conditions as one of the most serious problems facing the livelihood of ordinary Russians. "The ecological situation is far from ideal," Putin told a meeting of a government advisory body called the State Council. "Nearly 15 percent of our territory is in a critical or near-critical state," Putin said. He added that the worst affected regions were the heavily industrialized zones of central Siberia and the Urals mountains region. "Ecology must become an important element in our government policy," the Kremlin chief said.

“Fifteen percent of Russia badly polluted, says Putin,” 
Terra Daily, Agence France-Presse, 05 Jun 2003

Artificial lakes containing more than 14 billion cubic feet of waste from the Mayak nuclear processing plant are filled to capacity and within a few years may leak into the region's rivers, Gov. Pyotr Sumin of the Chelyabinsk region in the Ural Mountains wrote in a letter to Prime Minister Mikhail Kasyanov… Mayak, a major nuclear weapons plant during Soviet times, has been the site of several accidents, including a 1957 waste-facility explosion that contaminated 9,200 square miles. The region has been called the most radioactive place on the planet because of accidents and Soviet-era nuclear waste dumping into lakes and rivers. The vice governor of the Chelyabinsk region, Gennady Podtyosov, said in a telephone interview Friday that the water level in the lakes was just 12 inches below the limit. If action is not taken, contaminated water could burst the dam within three to four years, he said. ``It would be a major catastrophe,'' Podtyosov said. ``Waste would pollute rivers and flow into the Arctic Ocean.''

-Vladimir Isachenkov,
"Russian lakes of nuclear waste threaten Ural rivers, official says,"
San Jose Mercury News, 18 Aug 01

Radioactive fallout from Cold War nuclear weapons tests across the globe probably caused at least 15,000 cancer deaths in U.S. residents born after 1951, according to data from an unreleased federal study. The study, coupled with findings from previous government investigations, suggests that 20,000 non-fatal cancers — and possibly many more — also can be tied to fallout from aboveground weapons tests… When fallout from all tests, domestic and foreign, is taken together, no U.S. resident born after 1951 escaped exposure, the study says. The data show that global fallout blanketed much of the USA, with heavy pockets in Iowa, Tennessee, California, Oregon, Washington and Idaho. Fallout from the Nevada tests settled more in the mountain and Midwest states, including Utah, Idaho, Colorado, Kansas, Nebraska, Iowa and Missouri… It concludes that about 22,000 cancers, half of them fatal, probably occurred from external exposure to radioactive fallout. Those could include everything from melanoma to breast cancer. The study attributes thousands of additional cancers to internal radiation exposure, such as inhalation or eating tainted food. Those cancers include at least 550 fatal leukemias and about 2,500 thyroid cancer deaths.

-Peter Eisler, "Fallout likely caused 15,000 deaths" USA Today, 28 Feb 02

It isn't pollution that's harming the environment. It's the impurities in our air and water that are doing it.

-former Vice President Dan Quayle

Industrial vomit...fills our skies and seas. Pesticides and herbicides filter into our foods. Twisted automobile carcasses, aluminum cans, non-returnable glass bottles and synthetic plastics form immense middens in our midst as more and more of our detritus resists decay. We do not even begin to know what to do with our radioactive wastes -- whether to pump them into the earth, shoot them into outer space, or pour them into the oceans. Our technological powers increase, but the side effects and potential hazards also escalate.

-Alvin Toffler, Future Shock, 1970 *

There is still very limited awareness of the nature of the threat. This is an era of specialists, each of whom sees his own problem and is unaware of or intolerant of the larger frame into which it fits. It is also an era dominated by industry, in which the right to make a dollar at whatever cost is seldom challenged. When the public protests, confronted with some obvious evidence of damaging results of pesticide applications, it is fed little tranquilizing pills of half truth. We urgently need an end to these false assurances, to the sugar coating of unpalatable facts. It is the public that is being asked to assume the risks that the insect controllers calculate. The public must decide whether it wishes to continue on the present road, and it can do so only when in full possession of the facts.

-Rachel Carson (1907-1964), Silent Spring, 1962

A federal ban on two popular household insecticides has significantly reduced the number of underweight babies born in neighborhoods where the chemicals had been widely used, a study has found. Researchers at Columbia University found that infant birth weights and birth lengths in upper Manhattan improved immediately after the pesticides chlorpyrifos and diazinon, used in a number of household products, were banned for indoor use by the Environmental Protection Agency beginning in 2000. "We were surprised to see such a significant association between exposure to the pesticides and birth weight," said principal author Robin M. Whyatt of Columbia's Mailman School of Public Health. "There is no question that this is an instance where regulation worked -- that the EPA imposed a ban and there was immediate benefit from it."

- Marc Kaufman, “Birth Weights Up After EPA Pesticide Ban, Study Finds,” 
Washington Post 25 March 04

Before Alar, there was EDB, a potent human carcinogen allowed in the grain supply and other food for more than a decade after it was known to be dangerous. There was heptachlor, linked to leukemia, and aldicarb, which poisoned thousands of California watermelons, yet is still allowed in potatoes and bananas at levels exposing up to 80,000 children a day to what EPA itself says are unacceptable high risks. Trust the government? Why should we?

-Al Meyerhoff, 
"EPA And Food Safety: Managing Cancer, Not Preventing It"
Prop65 News, Jan 1990

Children in agricultural communities are being exposed to pesticides at higher levels than federal regulators consider safe, a University of Washington study indicates. In urine tests, more than half the preschool children of farmworkers repeatedly showed evidence they had been exposed to possibly unsafe levels during spraying season, researchers found. None of the children in the study was engaged in farm work. Rather, they were exposed through spraying itself and pesticide residue in their homes, and from food consumption. "It's cause for concern, but not cause for alarm," said Dr. Richard Fenske, director of the study. "The point is, we don't understand what pesticides do or don't do in small children. And we need to keep an eye on those who get more exposure than others."

-Warren King, "Kids' pesticide levels unsafe," Seattle Times, 25 Apr 00

A combination of two widely used agricultural pesticides - but neither one alone - creates in mice the exact pattern of brain damage that doctors see in patients with Parkinson's disease. The research offers the most compelling evidence yet that everyday environmental factors may play a role in the development of the disease… Cory-Slechta's team studied the effects of a mixture of two very common agrichemicals, the herbicide paraquat and the fungicide maneb. Each is used by farmers on millions of acres in the United States alone. Maneb is applied on such crops as potatoes, tomatoes, lettuce and corn. Paraquat is used on corn, soybeans, cotton, fruit and a variety of other products. In the experiment, mice exposed to either one had little or no brain damage, but mice exposed to both share a significant trait with people in the very early stages of the disease: Though they appear healthy, key brain cells known as dopamine neurons are dying. The mice exposed to the mixture carried nearly all of the molecular hallmarks of Parkinson's disease as seen in humans.

-Cat Lazaroff, Combination of Pesticides Linked to Parkinson's Disease,
Environmental News Service, 3 Jan 01

The most widely used pesticide in the United States appears to be causing developmental defects in a common Midwestern frog, according to a new study that has sparked a high-stakes debate over a chemical long considered environmentally safe. Led by UC Berkeley biologist Tyrone B. Hayes, the study is the first evidence from field studies to show a link between the controversial weed killer, called atrazine, and health problems in a native species of amphibian in the United States…. Atrazine has been used commercially in the United States since the late 1950s. In 1999, an estimated 80 million pounds were applied to U.S. corn and soybean crops, as well as golf courses, orchards and lawns... The researchers say they found high numbers of feminized male frogs in watersheds even lightly contaminated with atrazine. In the most extreme case, 92 percent of the male frogs had abnormal gonads in water with just 0.1 part per billion of the farm chemical. The EPA allows 3 parts per billion in drinking water. Hayes speculates that lower doses of the chemical may actually be more harmful than higher doses. Heavy exposures may trigger biological defenses, he said, that allow the frogs to adapt, and in some cases thrive in watersheds contaminated with concentrated farm runoff.

-Carl T. Hall, “Field study finds deformed frogs
 UC Berkeley prof's research links pesticide to abnormalities,” 
San Francisco Chronicle, 31 Oct 02

The Delaney standard for cancer-causing chemicals in food is zero. EPA and the food chemicals industry want to get rid of the zero standard. What EPA and the food chemicals industry want instead is a "one-in-a-million" risk standard. Such a standard would allow EPA and FDA risk assessors to manipulate mathematics to calculate an amount of a cancer-causing pesticide that would offer "negligible" risk to the public… EPA defines a "negligible risk" as the risk of killing one in every million citizens each year by giving them cancer. The negligible risk standard is calculated for each food use of each pesticide. In other words pesticide A on asparagus is allowed to kill one in every million citizens each year; pesticide A on peaches is allowed to kill another one in a million each year; pesticide B on asparagus can kill an additional one in a million each year, and so on. Nowhere in the risk assessment process does the government ever tally up all the deaths that have been allowed by issuing permits for the many different chemicals put onto many different foods.

-Peter Montague, Ph.D, "NRDC Defends Delaney"
from Rachel's Environment and Health News 3 Jun 93

In the mid-1960s, Vietnamese journalists began reporting high numbers of deformities born in rural areas that had been heavily sprayed with herbicides by U.S. troops. The original purpose of this clandestine program was to clear the sides of the roads to prevent ambush, and the main tool used to do this was a mix of chemical defoliants called Agent Orange. By 1962, the operation had expanded to include the deliberate spraying of food crops and, late, to carry out the policy called "area denial," that is, the creation of widespread zones of contamination intended to force civilians to relocate. Most famously, defoliants were deployed over forests suspected of hiding guerilla groups. By 1971, 19 million gallons had been sprayed over 14 percent of the land in South Vietnam. Countless acres of crops and forests lay in leafless ruin. Some critics compared the use of Agent Orange in Vietnam to the Romans' salting the land after destroying Carthage.

-Sandra Steingraber, Having Faith, 2001

Not only did the U.S. military use far more Agent Orange and other herbicides during the Vietnam war than previously thought, the amount of cancer causing dioxin chemicals in the defoliates was seriously underestimated, finds a new Columbia University study published in the journal Nature. The scientists found that 77 million liters of Agent Orange - seven million liters more than previously estimated - were sprayed during the war. Overall, the scientists estimate the amount of dioxin sprayed during the war was almost double previous estimates. The results of the five year study examined operational records of individual spraying missions over Vietnam, comparing them to records of which defoliates were sprayed at which times. The U.S. military says it dumped the massive amounts of defoliates to allow U.S. and South Vietnamese forces to better spot enemy forces moving with Vietnam's dense forests.

-“U.S. Understated Agent Orange Use,” 
Environment News Service, 17 Apr 03

The reality of life is that we are exposed to a multiplicity of toxic substances. Calculating the combined risks of these exposures is problematic; some 300 pesticidal active ingredients are used on food as well as an imperfectly examined large number of "inert" ingredients. For the most part, existing EPA pesticide tolerances for allowable pesticide residue levels do not even attempt to calculate the aggregate human health risks presented, nor do they address the cumulative and synergistic effects on multiple pathways of exposure. For this reason, ultimately, the overall policy underlying the Delaney clause-- that we should avoid unnecessary and involuntary exposures to cancer-causing agents--remains as valid today as when enacted.

-Al Meyerhoff, "The Delaney Clause Dilemma"
from Rachel's Environment and Health News 3 Jun 93

The safe disposal of sewage sludge is an enormous task. American sewage treatment plants produce 11.6 billion pounds of sewage sludge each year. More than a third is spread on farmland or otherwise mixed into soils. In addition to being "human manure," sewage sludge can contain toxic chemicals, heavy metals and pathogens.

-Michael Vatalaro, "EPA Intimidates Sludge Critics, Congress Told"
Environmental News Service 22 Mar 00

To suggest that toxic sludge is good for fish because it prevents them from being caught by man is like suggesting that we club baby seals to death to prevent them from being eaten by sharks.

Rep. George Radanovich (R-Calif.), on an internal U.S. EPA document
suggesting that toxic sludge dumped by the Army Corps of Engineers 
into the Potomac River encourages fish to leave toxic areas 
and keeps them away from anglers' hooks
reported in The Daily Grist, 21 Jun 2002

The report by the Hoosier Environmental Council and Clean Air Task Force, titled "Laid to Waste: The Dirty Secret of Combustion Waste from America's Power Plants," reveals that waste from coal fired power plants are totally exempt from federal oversight and protections… "It's time to recognize coal plant waste disposal facilities for what they are - huge, unregulated toxic dumps," said Jeff Stant of the Indianapolis based Hoosier Environmental Council. "Some of the dumps are nothing more than abandoned strip mine pits and mine shafts where they pollute the groundwater we depend on for drinking and agriculture. The power industry has been poisoning America's heartland for years, not only with air pollution but also with toxic waste. It's time for EPA to put a stop to it."

-Cat Lazaroff, "Power Plant Wastes Threaten Environment, Public Health"
Environment News Service, 2 Mar 00

In bug-filled Florida, pressure-treated lumber has been a modern miracle. It stands up to termites, beetles and the rot that comes from relentless humidity… But now, it turns out, pressure-treated wood might be Florida's newest environmental hazard. All over the state, pressure-treated boards and posts are leaking poisonous arsenic into the soil. The arsenic comes from chromated copper arsenate, or CCA, a powerful pesticide brew that is injected into the boards to give them long life against the elements. Arsenic is leaking out of huge wooden playgrounds that volunteers built all over Tampa Bay. It's leaking beneath decks and state park boardwalks, at levels that are dozens of times -- even hundreds of times -- higher than the state considers safe. And discarded pressure-treated lumber is leaking arsenic out of unlined landfills, state experts say, posing a threat to drinking water… Americans haven't demanded a more environmentally friendly product because the bad news about pressure-treated wood isn't widely known here.

-Julie Hauserman, "The poison in your back yard,"
St. Petersburg Times, 11 Mar 01

Independent testing of arsenic treated wood shows that the public remains at risk from high levels of arsenic leaching out of pressure treated wood in older decks, playsets and picnic tables, shows a new report based on samples collected by consumers across the nation. The report contradicts reassurances offered earlier in the year by the federal government and the wood products industry. The results from the largest ever testing program for arsenic treated wood were reported last week by the Environmental Working Group (EWG). The report, "All Hands on Deck," suggests that the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) may have erred in reassuring the public earlier this year about the safety of existing backyard structures. 

-Cat Lazaroff, “Consumer Samples Implicate Arsenic Treated Wood”  
Environment News Service, 3 Sep 2002

The type of car or truck we drive has a larger impact on the environment than any other consumer choice we make -- much more than recycling or fretting over whether to use paper or plastic grocery bags at the supermarket. Driving is a huge contributor to both air pollution and global warming. And thanks to SUVs, that damage is on the rise. Many of the more than 2.5 million SUVs sold in 1998 average no more than 13 to 17 miles per gallon, spewing over 50 percent more global warming pollution than cars.

-Howard Ris, executive director of the Union of Concerned Scientists
and Jason Mark, transportaion analyst
"SUVs Take Consumers for a Ride", Chicago Tribune 14 Jun 99

The United States and Japan have led the effort to reduce the use of lead, and a large fraction of their car fleets can now run on unleaded gas. Between 1976 and 1986, total annual lead emissions in the United States decreased by 94 per cent. The health benefits are unequivocal: Over the same period, the average lead level in American's blood dropped more than a third.

-Michael Renner
from Worldwatch Paper: Rethinking the Role of the Automobile, 1988

Lead is poison, a potent neurotoxin whose sickening and deadly effects have been known for nearly 3,000 years... Odorless, colorless and tasteless, lead can be detected only through chemical analysis. Unlike such carcinogens and killers as pesticides, most chemicals, waste oils and even radioactive materials, lead does not break down over time. It does not vaporize, and it never disappears. For this reason, most of the estimated 7 million tons of lead burned in gasoline in the United States in the twentieth century remains--in the soil, air and water and in the bodies of living organisms. Worldwide, it is estimated that modern man's lead exposure is 300 to 500 times greater than background or natural levels. Indeed, a 1983 report by Britain's Royal Commission on Environmental Pollution concluded that lead was dispersed so widely by man in the twentieth century that "it is doubtful whether any part of the earth's surface or any form of life remains uncontaminated by anthropogenic [man-made] lead."

-Jamie Lincoln Kitman, "The Secret History of Lead,"
The Nation, 20 Mar 00

Exposure to toxins may play a crucial role in the development of neurological disorders, new research indicates. Studies suggest a link between exposure to lead on the job and risk of developing Alzheimer's disease, and a connection between use of pesticides in the home and risk of developing Parkinson's disease. At the American Academy of Neurology's 52nd Annual Meeting, held last week in San Diego, researchers presented compelling evidence that environmental toxins can permanently alter nervous system function. The studies provide further evidence that some neurological disorders, long associated with the aging process, may have more to do with a person's work or leisure history than with a person's age.

-Cat Lazaroff, 
"Environmental Toxins Linked to Alzheimer's, Parkinson's Diseases"
Environmental News Service, 8 May 00

In the face of all that is known today, the leaderships of foreign countries who continue to poison their people with TEL should be harangued to phase out lead from their gasoline--on a daily basis, by the United Nations as well as by governments, agencies and medical officials from around the world. Until then, the merchants of tetraethyl lead--or any other unnecessary additive known to be dangerous--are no better than criminals. They should be dealt with accordingly. Maybe in this new century they will be.

-Jamie Lincoln Kitman, "The Secret History of Lead,"
The Nation, 20 Mar 00

The real issue is not "environment vs. jobs," but what we want our economy to produce. If we want a clean environment along with other goods and services, the industries that contribute to that end will have a higher output and employment, and those that damage the environment will have less...When personal computer sales boomed, typewriter sales declined, but no politician or lobbyist has said "Our economy can't afford to have personal computers because it will destroy jobs in the typewriter industry." Yet they routinely claim that we can't afford clean air because it will destroy jobs in the coal-mining or some other industry.

-Robert Repetto, economist with the World Resource Institute
quoted in Paul & Anne Ehrlich's Betrayal of Science and Reason, 1996

I find man utterly unaware of what his wealth is or his fundamental capability is. He says time and again, "We can't afford it." For instance, we are saying now that we can't afford to do anything about pollution but after the costs of not doing something about pollution have multiplied many fold beyond what it would cost to correct it now, we will spend many fold what it would cost us now to correct it.

-Buckminster Fuller (1895-1983), The World Game, 1969

We must recognize that the goal of a cleaner environment will not be achieved by rhetoric or moral dedication alone. It will not be cheap or easy and the costs will have to be borne by each citizen, consumer and taxpayer. How clean is clean enough can only be answered in terms of how much we are willing to pay and how soon we seek success… It is simplistic to seek ecological perfection at the cost of bankrupting the very tax-paying enterprises which must pay for the social advances we seek.

-Richard Nixon, 37th President of the United States,
Message to the Congress, 6 Aug 71

We are committed to cleaning up the air and cleaning up the water. But we also are committed to a strong economy, and we are not going to allow the environmental issue to be used sometimes falsely and sometimes in a demagogic way basically to destroy the system—the industrial system that made this the great country it is.

-Richard Nixon, 37th President of the United States,
Remarks at a Question-and-Answer Session with 
the Economic Club of Detroit, 23 Sep 71

Draconian limits on economic growth and on the use of the automobile should not be necessary in order to give Americans clean air at levels they are willing to pay for, but it will require significant Federal, State, and local leadership and innovative approaches from government and industry.

-George Bush, 41st President of the United States,
Message to Congress, 23 Jun 89

Breast cancer is the most common form of cancer in U.S. women, with some 182,000 invasive cases newly diagnosed each year, as well as another 1,400 in men. Surprisingly, though, little is known about the causes of this complex, multi-factorial disease, a fact that is frustrating to advocates… Pollution, some say, may very well be a key factor. According to a 1989 study published in Archives of Environmental Health, breast cancer rates were higher in the 339 counties with hazardous waste sites and groundwater contamination than in counties that had no such sites. Other high clusters of breast cancer have been linked to specific geographic areas suffering from pollution.

-Francesca Lyman, "The new breast cancer revolution," MSNBC 25 Oct 00

Human breast milk is now one of the most contaminated food sources on the planet. Flame retardants and DDT are just two of the many chemicals found in breast milk. These substances are persistent, biocumulative, and bioactive, and are moving all over the globe on wind currents, being deposited in places where they’re not used. DDT is not used in the Arctic, where there is no malaria, yet that’s where the insecticide is concentrating, because of wind patterns. We need to reverse the damage we’ve created, to restore tallgrass prairies, marine fisheries, and breast milk. And we need to bear witness to the suffering that has already occurred through our foolishness. I want to be able to tell the young mother dying of cancer that we will do our utmost to insure that her daughter doesn’t get cancer. In so doing, we alleviate suffering.

-Carolyn Raffensperger, “Before We Leap,” interview in The Sun Nov 02

If we stand back and look at the appalling incidence of cancer, sterility, developmental defects, and inherited abnormalities in humans, we find a common thread. The answer lies not in the stars or in the genes, but in how our genes are affected by the contaminated food we eat, the water we drink, and the air we breathe. Tragically, some people are genetically more susceptible than others to agripoisons and industrial pollutants. Genetic engineering to correct these medical problems is a narrow (reductionistic) and instrumental (mechanistic) response to a problem that is fundamentally conceptual: namely, our attitude toward life and our mistreatment of the Earth, plants, and animals—and ourselves in the process.

-Michael W. Fox, Superpigs and Wondercorn, 1992

The creation of each gram of plutonium, reactor fuel element, and container of enriched uranium produced radioactive waste - virtually all of which remains with us today. The graphite bricks Enrico Fermi used for the first "atomic pile" at the University of Chicago were buried in a Cook County forest preserve. The acid used to extract plutonium from the first atomic test in the New Mexico desert is still stored at the Hanford Site in the State of Washington.

-Linda Rothstein from "Nothing Clean About Cleanup"
in The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, 1995

When the LORD could no longer endure your wicked actions and the detestable things you did, your land became an object of cursing and a desolate waste without inhabitants, as it is today. Because you have burned incense and have sinned against the LORD and have not obeyed him or followed his law or his decrees or his stipulations, this disaster has come upon you, as you now see.

-the prophet Jeremiah (c.628–586 B.C.)
from Jeremiah 44:22-23 from the New International Version of the Bible

Radioactive contamination of rivers around a top-secret Russian nuclear weapons complex in Siberia has reached "staggering" levels, the worst ever monitored, and is out of "rational control", a joint team of Russian and American radiation monitors said yesterday. Following a monitoring expedition in July and August to the closed plutonium complex at Seversk, near Tomsk in western Siberia, the Russian and American nuclear watchdogs said they had registered alarming levels of radioactivity in tributaries of the River Ob, a key Siberian waterway…"The nuclear waste is being piped straight into the environment"

-Ian Traynor, "Worst ever' radioactive leaks found in Siberia"
The Guardian Observer 3 Nov 00

American taxpayers could be on the hook for some $80 billion in damages because of the U.S. Energy Department's contractual failure to dispose of the nation's ever growing piles of spent nuclear fuel. Republican lawmakers and nuclear power industry representatives issued the warning today during a sometimes combative Senate committee hearing… (A) court decision clears the way for nuclear utilities to sue the U.S. government under the provisions of the 1982 Nuclear Waste Policy Act, which required the Department of Energy to have a geologic repository in place to receive spent nuclear fuel by January of 1998… But until Yucca Mountain or another suitable facility is open for business, thousands of tons of spent nuclear fuel will continue to pile up at power companies and temporary DOE storage sites around the country, lamented Senator Frank Murkowski, an Alaska Republican who chairs the Energy and Natural Resources panel. "This country is choking on its own nuclear waste," Murkowski said. "If we don't solve the problem of our spent nuclear fuel soon, the American taxpayer will bear the costs of the financial liability."

-Brian Hansen, "Yucca Mountain Delays Could Cost U.S. Taxpayers Billions,"
Environment News Service, 28 Sep 00

The DOE's (Department of Energy) nuclear waste complex consists of 113 geographic waste sites located throughout the country. The cleanup of these sites is managed by the EM (Office of Environmental Management) program. The EM portion of the annual DOE budget generally has been level at approximately $6 billion for the past few years. DOE recently estimated that cleanup of the nuclear waste complex will cost between $151 and $195 billion over the next 70 years. This estimate does not include the $51 billion EM already has spent between FY1990 and FY1999. EM reports that it already has completed cleanup at 69 of its 113 geographic waste sites. However, cleaning up DOE's remaining 44 geographic waste sites is estimated to cost an additional $151-195 billion, 86% of which will be spent at just 10 sites.

-Incinerating Cash: The Department of Energy's Failure to Develop and Use Innovative Technologies,
Staff Report prepared for the use of the Committee on Commerce,
U.S. House of Representatives, Oct 2000

The nuclear peril is usually seen in isolation from the threats to other forms of life and their ecosystems, but in fact it should be seen at the very center of the ecological crisis, as the cloud-covered Everest of which the more immediate, visible kinds of harm to the environment are the mere foothills.

-Jonathan Schell from The Fate of the Earth, 1982

The majority of America's current and former nuclear weapons sites will never be cleaned up enough to allow public use of the land, says a new report by the National Research Council… "At many sites, radiological and nonradiological hazardous wastes will remain, posing risks to humans and the environment for tens or even hundreds of thousands of years," the report says. "Complete elimination of unacceptable risks to humans and the environment will not be achieved, now or in the foreseeable future." Almost 150 sites around the country are contaminated, a result of weapons production for the nuclear arms race. DOE has concluded that even after planned cleanup activities are completed - or found to be infeasible - at these so-called "legacy" waste sites, 109 of them will never be clean enough for unrestricted use. The National Research Council report, commissioned by the Department of Energy (DOE), says that the only option may be to declare some of America's weapons sites as permanently off limits to public use. But the report also warns that the federal government lacks the money, technology and techniques to keep radioactive and chemical contaminants from spreading outside these areas, as they already have in some cases.

-Cat Lazaroff, "Former U.S. Nuclear Weapons Sites May Be Radioactive Forever"
Environmental News Service, 8 Aug 00

We cannot cheat on DNA. We cannot get round photosynthesis. We cannot say I am not going to give a damn about phytoplankton. All these tiny mechanisms provide the preconditions of our planetary life. To say we do not care is to say in the most literal sense that "we choose death."

-Barbara Ward (1914-1981) in Who Speaks for Earth?, 1973

The most alarming of all man's assaults upon the environment is the contamination of air, earth, rivers, and sea with dangerous and even lethal materials. This pollution is for the most part irrecoverable; the chain of evil it initiates not only in the world that must support life but in living tissues is for the most part irreversible. In this now universal contamination of the environment, chemicals are the sinister and little recognized partners of radiation in changing the very nature of the world--- the very nature of its life.

-Rachel Carson (1907-1964), Silent Spring, 1962

Every year the pulp and paper industry discharges millions of pounds of toxic chemical into rivers and coastal waters, where they subsequently enter the food chain. Paper mills also emit sulfur dioxide (a contributor to acid rain), acetone, methanol, chlorinated compounds and other fumes, making them a significant source of air pollution. While the manufacture of recycled paper has less of an environmental impact than virgin paper production, the majority of recycled waste paper must be deinked using a process that creates a sludge that most mills dispose of in landfills. Some companies opt to burn the sludge, creating airborne emissions.

-Nikki & David Goldbeck, Choose to Reuse, 1995

As we have become increasingly dependent on many chemicals and metals, we have become acutely aware of the potential toxicity of the materials entering our environment. Each year hundreds of new chemicals are commercially marketed and some of these chemicals may pose serious potential threats. Many existing chemicals and metals, such as PCB's (polychlorinated biphenyls) and mercury, also represent a hazard. It is essential that we take steps to prevent chemical substances from becoming environmental hazards. Unless we develop better methods to assure adequate testing of chemicals, we will be inviting the environmental crisis of the future.

-Richard Nixon (1913-1994), 37th President of the United States,
Special Message to the Congress Proposing the 1971 Environmental Program
8 Feb 71

Between 45,000 and 100,000 chemicals are now in common use; 75,000 is the most frequently cited estimate. Of these, only about 1.5 to 3 percent (1,200 to 1,500 chemicals) have been tested for carcinogenicity. The vast majority of commercially used chemicals were brought to market before 1979, when the federal Toxics Substances Control Act (TSCA) mandated the review of new chemicals. Thus, many carcinogenic environmental contaminants likely remain unidentified, unmonitored, and unregulated. Too often, this lack of basic information is paraphrased as "there is a lack of evidence of harm," which in turn is translated as "the chemical is harmless."

-Sandra Steingraber, Living Downstream, 1997

With chemicals, it's shoot first and ask questions later.

-Al Meyerhoff, 
a co-author of the Environmental Protection Initiative of 1990

As currently written, the laws require certain manufacturers and users of such chemicals to report any and all environmental releases—either accidental or routine—to air, water, or soil. The Toxics Release Inventory is the main registry of such events, and it is available to the public through the Environmental Protection Agency. It is hardly comprehensive. Toxic emissions reported to the federal government are thought to account for only 5 percent of all chemical releases. Nevertheless, the Toxics Release Inventory is the most complete record we have. I took a look at the 1997 data. The list of U.S. toxic releases for that year includes forty-seven different chemicals classified as known or suspected fetal toxicants. The volume released totals 989,700,000 pounds. Chemical manufacturing is the single largest source of these emissions, with paper, metal, rubber, and electric power-generating industries closely following.

-Sandra Steingraber, Having Faith, 2001

Moscow and 184 other Russian cities, where 61 million people live, have air with a noxious gas content beyond acceptable limits, the ITAR-TASS news agency reported Wednesday. It quoted the head of the state's ecology committee, Viktor Danilov-Danilian, as saying that in more than 120 Russian cities, the noxious gases in the air were five times more than the limit. The main sources of pollution are metallurgical, chemical and oil factories according to specialists, who say that Moscow, Arkhangelsk in the northwest, Ekaterinburg in the Urals and Norilsk in the north are the most polluted cities in Russia.

-Agence France Presse,
"More Than One-Third of Russians Live in Polluted Atmosphere"
reported in Russia Today, 10 Feb 00

Industrialized countries have disproportionately more cancers than countries with little or no industry (after adjusting for age and population size). One half of all the world's cancers occur in people living in industrialized countries, even though we are only one-fifth of the world's population. Closely tracking industrialization are breast cancer rates, which are highest in North America and northern Europe, intermediate in southern Europe and Latin America, and lowest in Asia and Africa. Breast cancer rates are thirty times higher in the United States than in parts of Africa, for example. Breast cancer incidence in the United States is five times higher than it is in Japan, but this gap is rapidly narrowing. Of all the world's nations, Japan has the most rapidly rising rate of breast cancer.

-Sandra Steingraber, Living Downstream, 1997

Very few people would choose to have even the most fabled assortment of goods if it meant getting cancer within the year. But the choice involves not the certainty of cancer very soon but an increased probability of cancer at some time in the future. The cancers are no less real; millions will die painfully and prematurely because of what we do to our environment. But the choice is not an easily visualizable one, and our capacity of denial comes strongly into play - as it tends to whenever we must weigh future costs against immediate benefits.

-Paul L. Wachtel from The Poverty of Affluence, 1989

Just a little rain falling all around
The grass lifts its head to the heavenly sound
Just a little rain, just a little rain
What have they done to the rain?

Just a little boy standing in the rain
The gentle rain that falls for years
And the grass is gone and the boy disappears
And the rain keeps falling like helpless tears
And what have they done to the rain?

Just a little breeze out of the sky
The leaves nod their heads as the breeze blows by
Just a little breeze with some smoke in its eye
And what have they done to the rain?

-Malvina Reynolds (1900-1978) from the song
What Have They Done to the Rain?, 1962

Despite nearly a decade of effort by the golf industry to mitigate the sport's environmental impacts, golf courses remain as controversial as ever and the sport's soaring popularity has enlarged, not shrunk, its ecological footprint. Golf is big business, contributing more than $49 billion a year to the economy, according to the National Golf Foundation. During the past decade, there has been an explosion in new golf courses. The United States is now home to nearly 18,000 golf courses, more than half the world's 35,000 golf courses, according to the Worldwatch Institute, a think tank that monitors global environmental trends. In the United States, golf courses cover more than 1.7 million acres and soak up nearly 4 billion gallons of water daily, the institute estimates. They also use pesticides and fertilizers that contribute to water pollution.

-Joan Lowy, “Thirsty golf courses drive environmental protests,” 
Scripps Howard News Service, 22 Apr 04

Suppose we assume for a moment that the most conservative estimate concerning the proportion of cancer deaths due to environmental causes is absolutely accurate. This estimate, put forth by those who dismiss environmental carcinogens as negligible, is 2 percent. Though others have placed this number far higher, let's assume for the sake of argument that this lowest value is absolutely correct. Two percent means that 10,940 people in the United States die each year from environmentally caused cancers. This is more than the number of women who die each year from hereditary breast cancer - an issue that has launched multi-million dollar research initiatives. This is more than the number of children and teenagers killed each year by firearms - an issue that is considered a matter of national shame. It is more than three times the number of non-smokers estimated to die each year of lung cancer caused by exposure to secondhand smoke - a problem so serious it warranted sweeping changes in laws governing air quality in public spaces. It is the annual equivalent of wiping out a small city. It is thirty funerals every day.
      None of these 10,940 Americans will die quick, painless deaths. They will be amputated, irradiated, and dosed with chemotherapy. They will expire privately in hospitals and hospices and be buried quietly. Photographs of their bodies will not appear in newspapers. We will not know who most of them are. Their anonymity, however, does not moderate this violence. These deaths are a form of homicide.

-Sandra Steingraber, Living Downstream, 1997

In the struggle for freedom from environmental pollution, the battle is ultimately won not by force but by healing, and within this framework we must all become healers.

-Michael Samuels from Soaring, 1971  

There are flood and drought
Over the eyes and in the mouth,
Dead water and dead sand
Contending for the upper hand.
The parched eviscerate soil
Gapes at the vanity of toil,
Laughs without mirth.
This is the death of the earth.

-T. S. Eliot (1888–1965) from Little Gidding in Four Quartets

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