Pesticides, A Love Story by Michelle Mart

Author:Michelle Mart [Mart, Michelle]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: History, United States, 20th Century, Nature, Environmental Conservation & Protection, Political Science, Public Policy, Environmental Policy
ISBN: 9780700626496
Google: HR-FswEACAAJ
Publisher: University Press of Kansas
Published: 2018-01-26T00:39:25+00:00

Conclusion

Public opinion at the start of the 1980s had been shaped by a decade of new regulations and a new understanding about the human relationship to the natural world. For some, such as the leaders of the sagebrush rebellion, this led to a backlash against the changes of the 1970s. Others remained convinced that these developments had been basically sound, and they rejected what they perceived to be extreme voices trying to turn their backs on an environmental consciousness. It is easy to reject extreme positions, but such rejection often leads to the political embrace of a compromise or moderate position. James Watt, Anne Gorsuch, and others may have left the Reagan administration, but the cost/benefit litmus test for environmental regulations remained. What also remained was a regulatory system inadequate to address the complex issues of pesticide use. The Federal Insecticide, Fungicide, and Rodenticide Act, even as amended in 1972 by the Federal Environmental Pesticide Control Act, was ineffective. By 1986, only 6 of the 600 active ingredients in pesticides had been tested for health and safety.113 The drawn-out controversies over EDB and DBCP illustrated the weaknesses of the system. In addition, FIFRA did not cover chemicals exported for use in other countries. Thus, pesticides were routinely exported to other countries, and their residues remained on food imported back into the United States, sometimes endangering workers as well as US consumers.

The 1980s was a potential turning point in American attitudes toward pesticide use. Many Americans embraced the nascent environmentalism of the previous decade and rejected extremist efforts to eliminate new regulations. But once extremist voices were quieted, people could settle back into a comfortable confidence that environmental issues were being addressed; in a way, the new laws of the 1970s gave many false confidence and obscured the systemic and philosophical impact of industrialization on the environment. In this way, many remained blind to the widespread environmental effects of pesticides.

Similarly, it is easy to react with horror to a large environmental disaster of dramatic proportions. People expressed their outrage that thousands of innocent Indians in Bhopal had died in one night and others remained seriously ill afterward. The initial shock at the disaster—which many called “the Hiroshima of the chemical industry”—was both understandable and predictable.114 But with time, that reaction wore off. The ebb and flow of publicity was true of chemical contamination in the United States as well—even if the victims fared better. Thus, residents of Love Canal were compensated and the area cleaned up, but there was little lasting attention to the causes of the pollution or to the particular chemicals involved, including pesticides. Love Canal might have been a watershed in environmental legal history and in waste disposal regulations, but it did not lead to deeper questioning about the overall industrial system or the human relationship to the environment. Similarly, Bhopal could have been a turning point, a moment to raise fundamental questions about the production of food and the impact of industrialized agriculture on ordinary people. Instead, the moment passed, the opportunity was lost, and the embrace of pesticides remained strong.

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