For the past half century, society has been repeatedly misled by activist-orchestrated campaigns on the supposed environmental impact of chemicals in general and pesticides in particular. Starting with erroneous accusations against DDT leveled by Rachel Carson in her 1962 book Silent Spring and continuing today with claims that the herbicide atrazine harms frogs or that minute traces of chemicals pose significant health risks, the news media have demonstrated an astonishing resistance to facts and science in favor of the grand simplistic narratives advanced by groups whose primary goal is the banning of chemicals.

The lamentable result of this toxic journalism can be counted in the millions of needless malaria dead, billions of preventable illnesses, and untold increases in consumer costs that society has incurred over the past half century.

The Pesticide Activism: Fifty Years of Panic and Propaganda report details the long history of toxic journalism, the new and historical facts and science the media ignore in propping up “the grand narrative”[1], and why this problem is likely to get worse. That is why this issue needs to be addressed as society grapples with the growing human health and welfare challenges in a more crowded and resource-limited world of the 21^st century.

This report was prompted by several recent developments:

• The move to/toward “precaution-based” regulatory regimes in several key economic regions, especially Europe
• Increasing political agitation for enacting such “precaution-based” regulations here in the U.S., often based on the “grand narrative” advanced by activist groups
• The ongoing, accelerated re-review of atrazine’s safety by the U.S. EPA that appears to be politically, rather than scientifically driven
• The recent publication of a thorough and compelling history of DDT and the toxic journalism that convinced the public it was a dire threat to wildlife (and, possibly mankind) in spite of facts and reality[2]
• The discovery of a revealing 1945 letter by Rachel Carson that exposes her inclination to believe the worst about pesticides.

Full report is available here.

[1] The Grand Narrative is: Manmade chemical harms wildlife, chemical banned, wildlife recover = proof chemical was bad.

[2] Roberts, D and Tren, R. 2010. The Excellent Powder: DDT’s Political and Scientific History. Dog Ear Publishing, Indianapolis, IN.

Dr. Tyrone Hayes of UC Berkeley—in his personal quest to demonize the herbicide atrazine just as a previous generation successfully demonized Alar—gave an encore performance before the EPA’s fourth Scientific Advisory Panel on this subject on Wednesday.

I say encore, because Hayes mostly recycled old claims that the EPA has previously investigated and discarded. Hayes attacked me before the panel for claiming that he refuses to release his data. Of course, all I did was quote a senior EPA official who publicly distanced the agency from Hayes in a letter earlier this year to an Illinois state senator. In that letter, the EPA explicitly tries to put the Hayes-generated controversy to rest, clearly stating that Hayes has indeed refused to make his data public. Hayes ignored this letter completely.

He must know that the EPA won’t be fooled. But that wasn’t his purpose. He was playing to the cameras. You see, he brought a documentary film crew with him.

The sad part is that a lot of this will actually look good when edited down into the now-familiar hero-scientist narrative. Viewers will not know that most of what Hayes presented to the SAP is old data that has been thoroughly refuted by the EPA already.

One example: Hayes went on at length about a study of elevated incidences of prostate cancer in workers at an atrazine plant in St. Gabriel, Louisiana. EPA looked closely at this years ago and determined that the “x” factor at work wasn’t atrazine, but the manufacturer’s aggressive health screening for employees.

Another example: Hayes purported to show that atrazine renders frogs infertile, transforms many males into females and other males into “homosexual frogs.” Viewers of the Hayes documentary hagiography will never know that EPA also looked into this too —and dismissed it.

Hayes’ biggest problem, however, is that all these massive assaults on frog fertility simply don’t show up in the field – quite literally, in farmer’s fields, where atrazine use is the highest. In fact, frogs seem to do just fine there.

This is an important point about the quality of Dr. Hayes’s “science.” It deserves to be explicated at length.

Hayes has claimed to find subtle hormonal impacts of atrazine at specific, low concentrations in his California laboratory. These claims arose after studies using the African clawed frog, Xenopus laevis, a non-native species to North America and considered the “lab rat” of the amphibian world.

However, seeing as there are no African frogs native to North America, Hayes did subsequent laboratory research using laboratory-reared specimens of the Northern leopard frog, Rana pipiens, obtained from a laboratory supplier in Boston, Massachusetts.

Hayes reported finding subtle hormonal impacts in these lab experiments in this species, too.
Subsequently, Hayes set out on a major field expedition to corroborate the impacts seen in the lab with real-world observations. Yet instead of finding proof of the laboratory findings, Hayes found conflicting and contradictory observations. He found higher numbers of “malformed frogs” in places with no history of atrazine use and/or barely detectable atrazine traces. There was no dose response and no dearth of frogs. In fact, it takes a careful reading of his papers to find that Northern leopard frogs were abundant at all surveyed locations.

This was especially in areas where corn was grown under irrigated conditions, indicating habitat was a critical factor, not atrazine use.

We now know from Yale researchers that Northern leopard frogs have higher numbers of gonadal abnormalities in urban areas than in rural, agricultural areas.

As Hayes’s own field research with native leopard frogs failed to further his grand narrative (and, in fact, showed their relative abundance despite 50 years of atrazine use) and other researchers findings undercutting his past claims that atrazine posed a serious risk to amphibian populations, Hayes has returned to his artificial crisis world of the laboratory using an African species of frog that has thrived in Africa despite widespread and decades-long atrazine use in farming.

Crises are so much easier to propagandize and hype when they are unencumbered by inconvenient truths like abundant frogs and conflicting data.

In April, the National Resources Defense Council issued an update in its all-out campaign to demonize and ban the herbicide atrazine.  The scope of its attack shows that the NRDC has learned a thing or two from the 1980s, when it ginned up a successful campaign to demonize the apple growth regulator, alar.

After the alar ban, investigative journalist Robert Bidinotto uncovered just how flimsy the science behind that scare actually was.  In a recent update [http://biggovernment.com/rbidinotto/2010/05/17/son-of-alar-the-new-pesticide-scare-campaign/#more-121062], he says that “many people—echoing the rock group The Who—concluded that ‘we won’t be fooled again’ by environmentalist fear-mongers.”

Well, guess what . . . A lot of people are being fooled again.

In the NRDC report, “Poisoning the Well,” a reasonable person who knew nothing about atrazine would be alarmed, chocked full as it is with many pocket descriptions of studies alleging ill effects from atrazine on humans, wildlife and the environment.  Such reports and the studies they publicize are routinely—and uncritically—the source of news stories that in turn do what they are intended to do: Inflame public opinion against atrazine, just as NRDC once successfully did against alar.

This time, the stakes are much bigger than alar.  The attack on apple growers was a one-time hit.  The Wall Street Journal [http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748703630404575053510187558820.html] reports that the environmental lobby “figures that if it can take down atrazine with its long record of clean health, it can get the EPA to prohibit anything.”

The activists at NRDC are nothing if not entrepreneurial.  Knowing they can’t pull off another alar on the shoulders of a celebrity endorser like Meryl Streep before a jaded public, this time they come armed with a plethora of serious-sounding, peer-reviewed studies.  Exposed to this kind of advocacy for the first time, reporters and policymakers alike might be forgiven for stampeding in panic.  This is the NRDC, however.  Given this NGO’s checkered history, journalists should ask the NRDC and its allies a few questions—

Why do you have so much money and time to spend on an all-out campaign against an herbicide that has been safely used for more than fifty years?  Why are you so motivated in overturning the findings of the EPA in 2006, the governments of Britain and Australia, as well as the World Health Organization?  In short, who are you and what are you really about?

And should activists get a free ride when it comes to full disclosure?

Let’s take these questions each by each.

Who Are These People?

The official filings of the National Resources Defense Council reveal the outlines of an NGO behemoth.  According to its most recently available tax return from 2007, the NRDC received revenues of more than $100 million.  It has net assets of more than $187 million.  According to the Green Tracking Library, former NRDC president and founder John H. Adams had a combined 2006 income of $757,464.
Just because the NRDC is officially non-profit does not mean it cannot make money from its attacks.  In going after alar, the NRDC caused apple farmers to lose more than $100 million.  In the aftermath of this campaign, PR strategist David Fenton said, “We designed [the alar campaign] so that revenue would flow back to the National Resources Defense Council from the public, and we sold this book about pesticides through a 900 number and the Donahue show.  And to date there has been $700,000 in net revenue from it.”

And these are the pure ones not tainted by the dirty fingers of commerce?

While often portraying industry meetings with federal regulators in the most sinister light, the NRDC itself is financially intertwined with the federal government.  By 2004, this 501(c) (3) non-profit had received nearly $6.5 million in discretionary grants from the EPA since 1993.  (The EPA concedes that all the discretionary grants awarded to NRDC were awarded without competition.)  Tax returns show NRDC received $350,000 in government money in 2007.  The allied Land Stewardship Project also gets about 14 percent of its money from government grants.

So while taking in money from the government, the NRDC lobbies that same government with its 501 (c) (4) and 527 political organizations.  Could a critic infer a conflict of interest here?

Corporate competitors also fund NGO attacks, though you will rarely see a charge of a conflict of interest here, either.  NRDC’s ally, PANNA, (whose stated goal is “moving persistent pesticides toward global elimination,”) owes much of its roughly $3 million budget to financial support from organic food companies that presumably would be interested in scaring consumers away from the competition.

PANNA, NRDC and LSP share one very powerful, controversial funding source: the Tides Foundation, a far-Left philanthropy powerhouse that helped start and nurture the now-defunct, scandal-ridden ACORN.  The related Tides Center also supports the Huffington Post Investigative Fund, which frequently weighs in on the NRDC’s anti-pesticide stories.  The Huffington Post calls the fund “our fiscal sponsor” which “provides administrative support” for its journalists.

The Tides Center, which spent more than half-a-billion dollars as a fiscal sponsor to 677 projects, does not release the identity of its donors.  (Tides founder, Drummond Pike, told The Chronicle of Philanthropy that “Anonymity is very important to most of the people we work with.”)  It is widely believed that Tides receives significant donations from wealthy trial lawyers—possibly the same trial lawyers who have a moneyed interest in lawsuits against the very pesticides these organizations are characterizing as unsafe.

In the case of atrazine, as Bidinotto writes, the attack on atrazine (and by inference, the whole corn economy of the Farm Belt) is being “led by the notorious Texas law firm of Baron & Budd” and “attorney Stephen Tillery, operating in the litigation paradise of Madison County.”

These people are no strangers to junk science.  Is it fair for reporters to ask if they are strangers to the Tides Foundation, either?

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Alex Avery, Director of Research and Education at the Hudson Institute’s Center for Global Food Issues, released a video criticizing new research by University of California Berkeley professor Dr. Tyrone Hayes alleging endocrine disruption in amphibians caused by the popular herbicide atrazine.

“For the last ten years I’ve been watching closely the research and activism of Dr. Tyrone Hayes from the University of California – Berkley. And for ten years Dr. Hayes has tried to claim that atrazine is an eminent threat to amphibian populations because it feminizes frogs at some, but not all, concentrations,” says Avery.

Avery points out that Dr. Hayes’ research is flawed due to the small sample size of the experiment. He cites several recent papers that have used sample sizes much larger and allowed the EPA full access to their research that contradict Hayes’ research, finding no impact on feminization of males. Avery goes on to criticize Dr. Hayes for releasing his findings “via press release orchestrated by environmental organizations instead of doing research by the book without bias.

We have to weigh one or the other. I don’t think Dr. Hayes has really stepped up to the plate. He continues to do research that according to the EPA is ‘insufficient’and ‘scientifically flawed.’  They [the EPA] also complain that Dr. Hayes would not share his raw data.

Finally Avery addresses Dr. Hayes research directly, asking if his research is correct then frog populations in areas where atrazine has long been used would not be thriving as many are today. He also refers to a Yale University study which found frogs in urban areas having more of a feminization problem than rural areas, where atrazine is used.

The Environmental Protection Agency, in a George Orwellian move, has just announced that it has suddenly decided to put the herbicide atrazine through yet another regulatory wringer, despite having just completed a comprehensive, multi-year regulatory review of the safety of atrazine begun in 1994. Only three months ago the EPA announced that after reviewing hundreds of scientific studies, atrazine “is not likely to cause cancer in humans” and does not affect the reproductive development of frogs and other amphibians. Atrazine has been used safely for more than 50 years in the U.S. and has been upheld as safe by the World Health Organization and the governments of Canada, France, the UK and others.

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The timing suggests that politics is the overriding concern. Atrazine was already slated for a 2010 human health review, but no such headline impact has ever been found. The new team didn’t dare bet on finding a human health flaw now. Instead, they decided to re-do the just-completed review process, betting that they can produce enough new smoke to deregister atrazine on some lesser charge. Since the review process still requires a series of expert review panels, EPA needed to start immediately or risk losing their Obama chance.

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Atrazine is one of the most widely used herbicides, helping farmers control weeds while protecting topsoil from erosion via no-plow and other conservation cropping methods. Without herbicides, farmers must use plows and other bare-earth weed control methods that lead to far greater soil erosion and far more fossil fuel use. Atrazine is a critical tool in the no-plow revolution: it helps combat resistance to other weed killers, maintain high soil organic carbon levels in our fields (supposedly something the EPA promotes) and protects rivers and streams from sediment pollution (another environmental good). Economic studies show atrazine provides more than $2 billion in direct economic benefits to our nation, even beyond the benefits in soil sustainability and stream pollution prevention.

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So why should you care if farmers lose atrazine? Because it will mean higher food costs, more soil erosion, less sustainable farming, and more environmental degradation. It’ll mean putting more of our farming eggs in fewer baskets. As we’ve learned with the unwelcome but inevitable return of bed bugs to our major cities, needlessly eliminating pesticides from society’s toolbox leaves us more vulnerable to the scourges of nature.

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With world population still growing and overall food demand set to double over the next 40 years, we need all the farming tools we have (and more) just to keep our heads above the rising tide of farm product demand. We’re all in this struggle together and the farmer’s loss hits our environment and pocketbooks.

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The atrazine witch hunt is being driven primarily by the Natural Resources Defense Council, a powerful eco-activist group that simply won’t take no for an answer. Review after review by the EPA, starting in the 1980s, has found that atrazine poses no health risk to humans or other risk to wildlife. Yet the NRDC knows that actual evidence is simply unnecessary; all they need is enough concocted public fear to cow the EPA into reacting to the politics.

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They’ve done it before. Nearly twenty years ago, the NRDC perpetrated one of the biggest scams ever on the American public, claiming that a product called alar, used in growing apples, was the “most potent cancer-causing agent in our food supply.” NRDC ranted that alar was a “cancer-causing agent used on food that the EPA knows is going to cause cancer for thousands of children.” Alar, it turns out, was far less a cancer risk than tap water or peanut butter, as the EPA’s own Scientific Advisory Panel finally ruled.

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Why did NRDC perpetrate the fraud? According to boasts from the NRDC’s public relations firm, it was all an elaborate (and highly successful) fundraising scheme. When their lies were exposed—sadly too late to save mass parental anguish over supposedly poisonous apple juice or to save apple farmers tens of millions in market losses—the NRDC equivocated. “We never said there was an immediate danger,” they said as they laid blame on journalists who “muddled” their report and the public who “overreacted.”

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The NRDC is now trying to do to atrazine what they did to alar. Make no mistake, the NRDC (and current political operators within the EPA) will continue to go back to the scientific wishing well until they “frighten” the EPA into banning atrazine.  This time around, the herbicides makers and corn farmers aren’t backing down. Will we stand up with them for sound science, or allow the further politicization of our regulatory agencies?

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DENNIS T. AVERY is an environmental economist and senior fellow for the Hudson Institute in Washington, DC. Alex Avery is director of research and education at the Hudson Institute’s Center for Global Food Issues. Readers may email them at cgfi@hughes.net

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