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Read Excerpts from the Book
Excerpt from The Next Green Revolution
Chapter 7 The Sorcerer’s Apprentice: Step 6– Manage Pests with
Minimal Environmental Impact
On summer evenings, as the sun inched towards the horizon and the air
began to cool and the constant Great Plains wind died, we would wait expectantly
for the buzz of the crop duster. The other kids in the community and I
liked to watch these little planes appear over the fields of cotton, trailing
long white chemical tails.
The pilots, often veterans of World War II or Korea, were daredevils
who seemed to have no fear as they sped across the fields, turning on
a dime. With military precision, they would fly down those cotton rows,
so low they might catch a few stalks, then pull up to miss the fence but
still passing low enough to zoom under the rural electric power lines.
The dust or spray would float down on the green cotton plants like fog.
If there was any breeze, the chemical would fall on the garden and on
us. Before long, the boll weevils and bollworms would be dead, one more
hurdle overcome on the road to making a good harvest.
To earn a little bit of extra cash, my father sometimes worked as a marker
or spotter for a crop duster named Gunnar Schultz, who was a World War
II veteran and a skillful flyer who now lived in our community. A marker's
job was to stand, usually at the end of a row, so the pilot could center
on him; then he would move over sixty feet to mark the new center, and
so on until the job was done. Markers such as my father were invariably
doused with dust or spray.
We called in the crop duster only when we didn’t have time to do
it ourselves from a tractor. Cotton seemed to demand regular dousing with
insecticide; we sprayed often with some very toxic chemicals. In the fall,
we sprayed arsenic-based defoliants in preparation for harvest. We seldom
took safety measures. Because of the sediment-laden well water we used
to mix the spray, the sprayer nozzles clogged and we had to clean them
often. It was more easily done with our bare hands than while wearing
gloves, so that's what we did. I remember my father's fingernails being
eaten away and then falling off from contact with the arsenic spray.
In those days we called the array of 'cides-- insecticides, fungicides,
herbicides, miticides– by a simple name: "poison." Despite
our understanding of the nature of the beast, we still did not consider
the poison a risk to us. No one told us the sprays were dangerous. After
all, they were made to kill insects, weeds or fungi, not people. And they
were diluted with water. How dangerous could they be?
This was before Rachel Carson warned us of their dangers in Silent Spring,
before the Environmental Protection Agency was even thought of, in an
age when everyone still believed in better living through chemistry. We
accepted spraying as part of the business of growing cotton. I remember
the local conventional wisdom that said if you started spraying, you couldn’t
quit. (In other words, total annihilation of the pest was the Holy Grail.)
Furthermore, as farmers in southwestern, Oklahoma we were grateful that
these sprays helped us make a living in a place where making a living
was not easy. Farmers here spent their lives trying to overcome weevils,
hail, drought, low prices, and swings in government subsidy programs all
while living in tornado alley. Snyder, a nearby town, was dubbed "Cyclone
City" because it had been nearly decimated twice.
This kind of living makes people tough. We could be knocked down, but
we wouldn't stay down. Although this is laudable, frontier culture has
its downside. When trouble, in the form of the boll weevil, came around,
we pushed back, hard, in the only way we knew how: with strong chemicals.
And we grew callous to the effects. One day, my grandfather and I walked
the two miles down to Otter Creek to fish. We arrived at a good spot on
the bank only to find the surface of the creek dotted with dead fish.
I don't know for certain what caused the fish kill, but we could smell
the insecticide in the air from the adjoining cotton field.
At the time, I viewed the incident as a curiosity. No one thought much
about pesticides entering the water supply, and even when there was a
fish kill, no one was very concerned. We fished in the creek, fish kill
or no fish kill. Now, when I think about the way the Otter Creek bottom
reeked from the smell of chemicals and the look of those dead fish, it
makes me sick. And, in the end, all the spraying we did to make a crop
each year, didn't save our farm or the farms around us.
And it didn't provide my father with a contented old age. In 1967, he
complained of feeling weak. After several days of this he went to the
doctor who put him in the hospital. There he was diagnosed with acute
leukemia; he died three days later. He was 42 years old....
Trading Health for Production
Many pesticides in use have been shown to be carcinogenic in animals.
But there are other ways to assess the risk to humans. Epidemiologists
use statistical methods to try to establish links between diseases, such
as cancers, and their possible causes. This is often the only way when
there is a long lag time between cause and effect or, as is the case with
pesticide exposure and cancer, other influencing factors such as individual
physiological differences, or unknowns such as the effect of cumulative
exposure. As analysts at the Center for Rural Affairs in Nebraska have
pointed out, "If enough studies show people who use chemicals die
of particular causes more often than other people, eventually we can conclude,
as primitive people concluded that water makes plants grow, that the chemicals
are somehow related to the deaths."
Looking at such studies is probably the closest I will ever get to knowing
whether my father's leukemia was caused by his exposure to pesticides.
Studies of farmers both here and abroad found that we have increased risk
of cancers of the primary central nervous system, lung, and lymph nodes.
A 1986 study by the National Cancer Institute found that Kansas farm workers
exposed to herbicides more than twenty days per year had a six-time-higher
risk of developing non-Hodgkins lymphoma than non-farm workers. Specifically,
agricultural use of herbicides such as 2,4-D has been associated with
two- to eight-fold increases in this cancer in studies conducted in Sweden,
Nebraska, Canada, and elsewhere, according to a study published in 1992
in the journal Cancer Research.
Most telling for me, in thinking about what may have caused my father's
death, are studies in Nebraska and Iowa which found that people living
in counties with high herbicide and insecticide use were significantly
more likely to die of leukemia.
The Next Green Revolution: Essential Steps to a Healthy
Sustainable Agriculture
by James E. Horne, PhD and Maura McDermott
Copyright 2001 by The Haworth Press, Inc.
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