ACTIVIST MOM WINS GOLDMAN PRIZE
People in the Ohio Valley have spent 15 years fighting one of the world's largest toxic waste incinerators, known as WTI.[1] One grass-roots community leader in the WTI fight, Terri Swearingen, was honored this week by receiving the Goldman Environmental Prize for North America --the environmental equivalent of the Nobel Prize.
The WTI incinerator, in East Liverpool, Ohio, was initiated in 1982 by one of President Clinton's wealthy political backers in Arkansas --Jackson Stephens of Stephens, Inc., in Little Rock.
President Clinton and Vice President Gore visited East Liverpool while campaigning for election in 1992; at that time, Mr. Clinton said that, if he were elected, WTI would never be allowed to operate. Mr. Clinton was elected in 1992.
In 1992, U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) admitted during Congressional hearings that it had illegally issued an operating permit to WTI. The huge incinerator began burning hazardous waste in 1993, 1100 feet from an elementary school. Mr. Clinton has not returned to East Liverpool since he became President.
Here is Terri Swearingen's acceptance speech for the Goldman Environmental Prize, given April 14, 1997.]
by Terri Swearingen
I am like the turtle on the fencepost. I did not get here alone. In addition to the many caring and courageous people I work with in the Ohio Valley, special recognition goes to Greenpeace, and to Dr. Paul Connett and his wife, Ellen.[2] And all my love, respect and deepest gratitude go to my husband, Lee, my daughter, Jaime, and my family. I accept this award on their behalf, and on behalf of all the environmental activists across the country who are working just as hard, but whose work has not been recognized in such a profound way. It is appropriate that the work of grass-roots activists be recognized. I am excited about this award, not just for personal reasons, but I believe it vindicates the efforts of thousands and thousands of grass-roots activists in this country, and around the world, who work on environmental issues on a daily basis. To the Goldman family, my most heartfelt thanks.
I am not a scientist or a Ph.D. I am a nurse and a housewife, but my most important credential is that I am a mother. In 1982, I was pregnant with our one and only child. That's when I first learned of plans to build one of the world's largest toxic waste incinerators in my community. When they began site preparation to begin building the incinerator in 1990, my life changed forever. I'd like to share with you some of the lessons I have learned from my experiences over the past seven years.
One of the main lessons I have learned from the WTI experience is that we are losing our democracy. How have I come to this sad realization? Democracy is defined by Merriam Webster as "government by the people, especially rule of the majority," and "the common people constituting the source of political authority." The definition of democracy no longer fits with the reality of what is happening in East Liverpool, Ohio. For one thing, it is on the record that the majority of people in the Ohio Valley do not want the WTI hazardous waste incinerator in their area, and they have been opposed to the project from its inception. Some of our elected officials have tried to help us, but the forces arrayed against us have been stronger than we or they had imagined. Public concerns and protests have been smothered with meaningless public hearings, voodoo risk assessment and slick legal maneuvering. Government agencies that were set up to protect public health and the environment only do their job if it does not conflict with corporate interests. Our current reality is that we live in a "wealthocracy"--big money simply gets what it wants. In this wealthocracy, we see three dynamics at play: corporations versus the planet, the government versus the people, and corporate consultants or "experts" versus common sense. In the case of WTI, we have seen all three.
The second lesson I have learned ties directly to the first, and that is that corporations can control the highest office in the land. When Bill Clinton and Al Gore came to the Ohio Valley, they called the siting of the WTI hazardous waste incinerator --next door to a 400 student elementary school, in the middle of an impoverished Appalachian neighborhood, immediately on the bank of the Ohio River in a flood plain--an "UNBELIEVABLE IDEA." They said we ought to have control over where these things are located. They even went so far as to say they would stop it. But then they didn't! What has been revealed in all this is that there are forces running this country that are far more powerful than the President and the Vice President. This country trumpets to the world how democratic it is, but it's funny that I come from a community that our President dare not visit because he cannot witness first hand the injustice which he has allowed in the interest of a multinational corporation, Von Roll of Switzerland. And the Union Bank of Switzerland. And Jackson Stephens, a private investment banker from Arkansas. These forces are far more relevant to our little town than the President of the United States! And he is the one who made it that way. He has chosen that path. We didn't choose it for him. We begged him to come to East Liverpool, but he refused. We begged the head of EPA to come, but she refused. She hides behind the clever maneuvering of lawyers and consultants who obscure the dangers of the reckless siting of this facility with theoretical risk assessments.
I always thought of the President of the United States as an all-powerful person, who could even, if necessary, launch a war to protect his nation's people. But in the case of WTI, we have this peculiar situation where the President dare not come to East Liverpool, Ohio. It may be the one place in the whole of this country, maybe even the world, where he cannot go. He cannot go to East Liverpool to see for himself what he has allowed. He cannot go to East Liverpool to see with his own eyes where this incinerator is operating. We know that if he came to East Liverpool to see it for himself, he would not be able to say that it is okay. We know that he would never have allowed his own daughter, Chelsea, to go to school in the shadow of this toxic waste incinerator. And that's precisely why he dare not come to East Liverpool. He knows that it is wrong. He knows that it is unacceptable. The decision to build the incinerator there was political, and the decision to allow it to operate, despite the stupidity of its location, is political. The buck stops with President Clinton. No child should have to go to school 1000 feet from a hazardous waste facility, and no president should allow it. He cannot shove off the responsibility to a bureaucracy. I believe you cannot have power without responsibility.
The third thing that I have learned from this situation, which ties in with the first two, is that we have to reappraise what expertise is and who qualifies as an expert. There are two kinds of experts. There are the experts who are working in the corporate interest, who often serve to obscure the obvious and challenge common sense; and there are experts and non-experts who are working in the public interest. From my experience, I am distrusting more and more the professional experts, not because they are not clever, but because they do not ask the right questions. And that's the difference between being clever and being wise. Einstein said, "A clever person solves a problem; a wise person avoids it." This lesson is extremely relevant to the nation, and to other countries as well, especially in developing economies. We have learned that the difference between being clever and being wise is the difference between working at the front end of the problem or working at the back end. Government that truly represents the best interest of its people must not be seduced by corporations that work at the back end of the problem --with chemicals, pesticides, incinerators, air pollution control equipment, etc. The corporate value system is threatening our health, our planet and our very existence. As my good friend, Dr. Paul Connett, says "WE ARE LIVING ON THIS PLANET AS IF WE HAD ANOTHER ONE TO GO TO." We have to change the way we look at the world. We must change our thinking and our attitude. This is so important. We MUST change the value system. We have to live on this planet assuming that we do not have another one to go to! We must get to the front end of problems so that we avoid the mistakes of the past. Thinking about our planet in this way puts a whole new perspective on what we do and how we act. For example, if we are dealing with issues of agriculture, we need to be thinking about sustainable agriculture with low chemical input. If we are looking at energy, we need to look at solar energy, energy that is sustainable. If we are discussing transportation, we should be looking at ways of designing cities to avoid the use of cars. And when it comes to hazardous waste, we should [be] talking about clean production, not siting new incinerators. We should be trying to get ahead of the curve. People at the grass-roots level get taught this lesson the hard way --they get poisoned by back-end thinking. They learn that we have to shift to front-end solutions if we are to save our communities and our planet. Citizens who are working in this arena --people who are battling to stop new dump sites or incinerator proposals, people who are risking their lives to prevent the destruction of rainforests or working to ban the industrial uses of chlorine and PVC plastics --are often labeled obstructionists and anti-progress. But we actually represent progress --not technological progress, but social progress. We have become the real experts, not because of our title or the university we attended, but because we have been threatened and we have a different way of seeing the world. We know what is at stake. We have been forced to educate ourselves, and the final exam represents our children's future. We know we have to ace the test because when it comes to our children, we cannot afford to fail. Because of this, we approach the problem with common sense and with passion. We don't buy into the notion that all it takes is better regulations and standards, better air pollution control devices and more bells and whistles. We don't believe that technology will solve all of our problems. We know that we must get to the front end of the problems, and that prevention is what is needed. We are leading the way to survival in the 21st century. Our planet cannot sustain a "throw-away society." In order to survive, we have to be wise, not just clever. This is why, ultimately, it is so disastrous that there are people who think that they've solved the WTI problem with more technology. You cannot patch up an injustice --an unjust situation --with technology. The developers behind WTI made a fundamental mistake in the beginning by building the incinerator next door to an elementary school and in the middle of a neighborhood. This is a violation of human rights and common decency. As Martin Luther King said, "INJUSTICE ANYWHERE IS INJUSTICE EVERYWHERE."
Even after seeing so much abuse of the system that I have believed in, I still hold on to the slender hope that my government could once again return to representing citizens like me rather than rapacious corporate interests. If they do, then perhaps there is a future for our species; if they don't, we are doomed.
---April 10, 1997---
HEADLINES:
BAD DECISIONS AGAIN AND AGAIN
The corporate decision in 1923 to add toxic lead to gasoline changed the chemistry of planet Earth, particularly the northern hemisphere. According to the National Research Council (NRC), in 1983 industrial emissions of lead into the atmosphere exceeded natural lead emissions by a factor of 700.[1,pg.105] In other words, by 1983, humans were putting 700 times as much lead into the atmosphere as were natural processes such as volcanoes, sea spray, etc.[1,pg.103] In 1983, humans put 363,000 tons (330,000 metric tonnes) of lead into the atmosphere, 75% (272,800 tons) of it from automobile exhausts. (One ton is 2000 pounds; one metric tonne is 2200 pounds).
About 90% of lead emissions occur in the northern hemisphere where the lead remains because it falls to Earth before it has time to float across the equator.[1,pg.105]
In addition to putting 363,000 tons of lead into the atmosphere, humans in 1983 put another 1.2 million tons of lead directly onto the land in the form of commercial waste (330,000 tons), mine tailings (330,000 tons), municipal waste (8800 tons), sewage sludge (6600 tons), fly ash from burning coal (154,000 tons), and so forth.[1,pg.105]
As a result, says the NRC, "the pandemic scale of lead contamination... has increased lead concentrations throughout the Northern Hemisphere by a factor of at least 10."[1,pg.107] In other words, the northern half of the planet now has at least 10 times as much lead in soil and water as it had before the arrival of Europeans in North America.
Naturally this translates into contamination of all parts of the ecosystem. According to the NRC:
** Lead concentrations in terrestrial organisms of all kinds are 100 times as high as natural concentrations.[1,pg.107] In other words, all animals, birds, worms, insects, etc., now carry 100 times as much lead in their bodies as they used to. In sum, everything has been poisoned.
** The NRC says humans have pulled about 300 million metric tonnes (330 million tons) of lead out of the Earth and "Most of the 300 million metric tons of lead ever produced remains in the environment, largely in soil and dust.... Today's production evolves into tomorrow's background exposure, and despite reductions in the use of lead for gasoline, overall production continues to grow and federal agencies have not addressed the impact of future increases of lead in the environment."[1,pg.18]
In other words, all of the lead that is mined out of the deep earth eventually becomes environmental contamination; it is very long-lived, resulting in the progressive, cumulative poisoning of the environment with a potent neurotoxin. All creatures --especially humans, who eat at the top of the food chain --have been severely contaminated and are no doubt suffering subtle and not-so-subtle impairments today.[2]
It is worth emphasizing that lead "consumption" in the U.S. only diminished 8% between 1970 and 1990 even though major uses of lead were banned by the U.S. government.[3] The lead industry is very creative in finding new uses for lead, and, because it is organized in the form of corporations, the industry is incapable of feeling remorse for the irreversible damage it is doing to life on Earth. Corporations cannot voluntarily curb their misbehavior because they have only one duty: to return a profit to investors, no matter what the costs may be to others. So long as poisoning is legal, corporations will poison (and if poisoning is profitable, they will spend millions on election campaigns to make sure poisoning remains legal.) (See REHW #308, #388, #449, #488, #489.)
The amount of lead in a person's blood that is officially considered "safe" today is 10 micrograms of lead in each deciliter of blood, or 10 ug/dL. (A microgram is a millionth of a gram; there are 28 grams in an ounce. A deciliter is a tenth of a liter; a liter is approximately a quart.) According to the most recent estimates, in the period 1991-1994, somewhere between 613,000 and 1.4 million American children younger than 6 years old (mostly African Americans and Hispanics living in large cities) had average blood lead levels of 10 ug/dL or more; a third of these children had blood lead levels of 15 ug/dL or more.[4]
The NRC said in 1993, "There is growing evidence that even very small exposures to lead can produce subtle effects in humans. Therefore, there is the possibility that future [safety] guidelines may drop below 10 ug/dL as the mechanisms of lead toxicity become better understood."[1,pg.3] The NRC offers evidence that lead at 5 ug/dL (half the official "safe" level) can cause attention deficit in children and in monkeys; reduced birthweight in children; and hearing loss in children.[1,pgs.69,254-256]
The NRC summarizes a series of recent studies, then says, "Those studies support the general conclusion that there is growing evidence that there is no effective threshold for some of the adverse effects of lead."[1,pg.67] In other words, there is growing evidence that there is NO level of lead below which no adverse effects occur. If this is true, it means the only safe level is zero.
One way to get today's "safe" level of lead (10 ug/dL) into perspective is to compare it to the natural background levels found in the blood of prehistoric people --people who lived in an environment that had not been poisoned by the members of the Lead Industries Association.
According to careful measurements of human bones, pre-Columbian inhabitants of North America had average blood lead levels of 0.016 ug/dL --some 625 times lower than the 10 ug/dL now established as "safe" for our children. On the face of it, it seems unlikely that levels of a potent nerve poison 625 times as high as natural background can be "safe" for children.[5]
The decision to add toxic lead to gasoline could have gone differently back in 1925. Charles F. Kettering, president of the Ethyl Corporation, explained the options facing the corporation: "...We will use 12 billion gallons of gasoline this year [1925] and 15 billion next year, and at the increasing rate we have GOT to do one of two things: We must build motors which are more efficient--we must build motors of very much smaller size and sacrifice a great many factors which we now enjoy in the motor industry, or we must do something which will allow us to get more work out of the fuel unit. Now, in regard to the building of such motors, there is nothing of a patentable or unknown thing in the building of higher-efficiency motors. Our neighbors on the other side [of the Atlantic Ocean] a few years ago built high compression, relatively higher efficiency motors, because we shipped to them a better grade of gasoline than we use in this country."[6,pgs.8,9]
The basic problem was engine "knock." In a high-compression engine, the fuel tended to explode instead of burning evenly. As a result, the engine made a "knocking" sound, power fell dramatically and the engine could eventually be damaged. As Mr. Kettering said, the British (and later the Japanese) solved this problem by burning a higher grade of gasoline in a smaller, more efficient engine. The Americans chose another path: they continued to develop larger, less efficient engines fueled by lower-quality gasoline, which they improved with an anti-knock additive.[7] As a result of this basic strategy, Americans consumed 80% of all the world's leaded gasoline until 1970.[2,pgs.16-17]
Even the decision to select lead as the anti-knock additive could have gone another way. In 1925, Dr. Harriet Hardy of Harvard, told a lead-in-gasoline conference, "I would like to make a plea to the chemists to find something else, and I am utterly unwilling to believe that the only substance which can be used to take the knock out of a gasoline engine is tetraethyl lead... I think it is not unreasonable to ask that our chemists set about it to do away with tetraethyl lead, by finding something else that will do the same work."[6,pg.99] And Yandell Henderson of Yale told the same conference that such alternatives existed: "I have asked some of the chemists, my colleagues in Yale University, and I have found that lead is not by any means the only substance which, on theoretical grounds, or even on the basis of experiments, can be used as an antiknock medium."[6,pg.63]
The real problem was the decision-making process that the corporations were allowed to follow.
If the corporations had been required by law to study all available alternatives (a process described in the federal National Environmental Policy Act of 1969) and then to adopt the least-damaging alternative, the poisoning of the northern hemisphere could have been averted.
Instead, the corporations poisoned every creature on half the planet WITHOUT SERIOUS, OPEN DISCUSSION OF HOW THEY MIGHT HAVE BEHAVED DIFFERENTLY. If they had been required to assess all available alternatives and then to pick the least-damaging path, every creature in the northern hemisphere --including every human --would be healthier, would feel better, and would be smarter today.
The Ethyl Corporation went on to compound its errors. When the corporation was forced in 1972 to start phasing out leaded gasoline, Ethyl began selling one of leaded gasoline's components --ethylene dibromide, or EDB --as a pesticide. Eleven years later, in 1983, EPA (U.S. Environmental Protection Agency) took EDB off the market because it readily caused cancer in several species of animals, damaged sperm cells and sperm production in humans, and harmed reproduction in other ways. At the time EDB was banned, the U.S. was putting 20 million pounds of it into soils each year and it was showing up in cake mixes and cereal.[8]
This is another instance where a proper assessment of alternatives would have spared the world millions of pounds of a supremely potent poison.
In 1995 the Ethyl Corporation did it AGAIN. The corporation began marketing a new anti-knock gasoline additive, methylcyclopentadienyl manganese tricarbonyl, or MMT, a compound of the toxic metal manganese.
According to a group of scientists who have studied the dangers of manganese, MMT gives us reason for "major concerns." "Inhalation is an abnormal route of intake for manganese and may be associated with increased risk of toxicity, particularly to the central nervous system and the lungs. Certain susceptible subpopulations, such as the young, the old, and the malnourished, may be at greatly increased risk of adverse effects from exposure to manganese in the environment."[9] Ethyl Corporation insists that manganese is safe. However, to this day Ethyl Corporation also insists that leaded gasoline is safe.
Isn't it time we changed the way corporations make decisions? Shouldn't we require an assessment of all available alternatives and selection of the least-damaging? And shouldn't the burden of proof of safety be placed on the Ethyl Corporation --and others like it --and not on the public? Where can all this poisoning be taking us?
--Peter Montague
HEADLINES:
HISTORY OF PRECAUTION, PART 2
As we saw last week, the U.S. Public Health Service held a one-day conference on May 20, 1925, to determine whether public health would be harmed if oil and automotive corporations added the toxic metal, lead, to gasoline.[1] (See REHW #539.) By 1925, lead had been a documented hazard in America for at least 100 years, but the corporations had discovered that leaded gasoline allowed them to create more powerful engines, so they started adding lead to gasoline in 1923. In the manufacture of the lead product (called tetraethyl lead by chemists, and "ethyl" by the corporations) hundreds of workers were poisoned and this created headlines. The corporations temporarily suspended sale of leaded gasoline and the U.S. Public Health Service convened a conference to determine whether (a) leaded gasoline could be safely manufactured; and (b) whether lead from automobile exhausts would harm the general public.
The morning session on May 20 was devoted to speeches by General Motors, Standard Oil of New Jersey, DuPont, and their new joint venture, Ethyl Corporation, which they had created to market leaded gasoline. The afternoon was devoted to discussions of health.
Late in the afternoon, Dr. Yandell Henderson of Yale University summarized what he had heard, as follows: "We have in this room, I find, two diametrically opposed conceptions. The men engaged in industry, chemists, and engineers, take it as a matter of course that a little thing like industrial poisoning should not be allowed to stand in the way of a great industrial advance. On the other hand, the sanitary experts take it as a matter of course that the first consideration is the health of the people."[1,pg.62]
Various speakers established that: lead would be emitted from automobile exhausts as a fine dust; lead is a potent brain-damaging poison and dust is its most dangerous form; when caged laboratory animals were dosed with automobile exhaust, lead dust built up on the bottoms of their cages; lead is a cumulative poison; it passes through the placenta and harms the unborn; it causes low birth weight, spontaneous abortion and stillbirth. (See REHW #539.) On these points, there was no disagreement.
However, views were split that day in 1925: the corporations wanted to press ahead rapidly, putting about 2 grams (1/14th of an ounce) of lead into every gallon of gasoline. Health officials, on the other hand, urged caution; they wanted to consider the consequences for public health. Without giving it a name, health officials in 1925 were embracing the principle of precautionary action, which says, first, that the burden of proof of safety should be borne by the proponent of a new technology, not by the public; and second, that, where there are threats of serious or irreversible damage, lack of scientific certainty should not be used as an excuse for postponing measures to prevent environmental degradation.[2]
For example, Yandell Henderson ended his afternoon talk by describing a recent paper by Dr. Harriet Hardy (Harvard professor, and one of the nation's acknowledged experts on lead) in the most recent JOURNAL OF THE AMERICAN MEDICAL ASSOCIATION: "In that article, Doctor Hamilton expresses the matter as fully and as clearly as anyone possibly can. In the last sentence of her paper she sets up this very simple proposition that this substance, this new industrial hazard, should not be put into general use, or its use should not be extended until we have adequate and full information assuring us that we are not introducing another health hazard into our daily lives."[1,pg.66] A clear statement of the precautionary principle.
Professor Joseph C. Aub of Harvard calculated that if all the gasoline to be sold in 1926 were leaded, then 50,000 tons of lead would be spewed as a fine dust across America's highways, roads and urban streets. "I am not certain that this would cause poisoning," said Professor Aub, "but whether it would cause poisoning is a very serious question.... It seems to me that this should be very thoroughly investigated before tetraethyl lead is again put on the market."[1,pgs.72-73] Another clear statement of the precautionary principle.
The American Federation of Labor (AFL) had two representatives at the conference, both of whom embraced the precautionary principle:
Grace M. Burnham, representing the Workers' Health Bureau of the AFL, said, "...I think that the United States should be self-respecting enough to realize that, when there is a public health hazard involved which affects the entire population, that hazard ought to be investigated out of public funds and by a responsible public agency. ...And I believe that until that time, and until the manufacture, distribution, and use of tetraethyl lead has been proved conclusively to be safe, its use should be discontinued."[1,pg.95]
Mr. A.L. Berres, representing the Metal Trades Department of the AFL, said, "I feel that, as has been stated here by some of the previous speakers, until such time as it can be definitely determined that there is no hazard in the manufacture and handling of this gas [leaded gasoline], its use ought to be prohibited...."[1,pg.96]
Dr. Haven Emerson, professor of public health at Columbia University in New York City summarized, "I presume that it is the inclination of every health officer to urge a continuance of the cessation of the use or sale of the ethyl gasoline which has been voluntarily determined upon by the company."[1,pg.84]
In sum, in 1925, the public health community, as represented at the May 20th conference, urged the principle of precautionary action: faced with a known hazard of unknown size, they urged that the hazard by prevented.
The corporations, on the other hand, used arguments that are still common today:
** The dangers have not been proven;
** Animal studies cannot tell us what we need to know about humans;
** Efficiency requires us to adopt new technologies even though some people may have to be sacrificed;
** People should act strictly upon available facts, not upon fears for the future or opinions about what MIGHT occur.
Sometimes these arguments were combined. For example, Frank A. Howard representing the Ethyl Corporation, said "Our continued development of motor fuels is essential in our civilization.... Now, as a result of some 10 years' research on the part of the General Motors Corporation and 5 years' research by the Standard Oil Co., or a little bit more, we have this apparent gift of God--...of tetraethyl lead...
"...Because some animals die and some do not die in some experiments, shall we give this thing up entirely?... I think it would be an unheard-of blunder if we should abandon a thing of this kind merely because of our fears.... Possibilities can not be allowed to influence us to such an extent as that in this matter. It must be not fears but facts that we must be guided by. I do not think we are justified in trying to reach a final conclusion in this matter on fears at all; nor are we justified in saying that we will cease this development because of fears we entertain. This development must be stopped, if it is stopped at all, by proofs of the facts."[1,pg.106]
Dr. Robert Kehoe, a medical consultant to the Ethyl Corporation, gave a similar argument: "I must say, from the standpoint of industry, that when a material is found to be of this importance for the conservation of fuel and for increasing the efficiency of the automobile it is not a thing which may be thrown into the discard on the basis of opinions. It is a thing which should be treated solely on the basis of facts."[1,pg.70]
Since the "facts" could not include any poisonings until such poisonings had already occurred (until they occurred, they would be nothing more than speculative "fears" or "opinions"), the argument for basing policy strictly on "facts" produced a policy of experimenting on the public and waiting for the sick and the dead to accumulate. This, then, became the official way of doing business in the U.S. Today the language is slightly different; we hear calls for policy based on "sound science" (not on "facts") but it is the same argument.
Shortly after the May conference, Dr. Emery Hayhurst --a paid consultant to the Ethyl Corporation --wrote an unsigned editorial for the AMERICAN JOURNAL OF PUBLIC HEALTH titled "Ethyl Gasoline."[4] (He was a member of the JOURNAL's editorial board.) In it, he described newspaper advertisements by the Ethyl Corporation which claimed that leaded gasoline was being used around the country with "complete safety and satisfaction." Hayhurst's editorial concluded, "Observational evidence and reports to various health officials over the country, previous to and following the above advertisements have, so far as we have been able to find out, corroborated the statement of 'complete safety' so far as the public health has been concerned."
The May, 1925, conference ended with a unanimous resolution calling upon the U.S. Surgeon General to appoint a seven-member blue-ribbon panel to render an opinion on the dangers of lead by January 1, 1926. For about six months, the committee studied 252 garage mechanics, filling station attendants and chauffeurs in Dayton and Cincinnati and concluded, "There are at present no good grounds for prohibiting the use of ethyl gasoline." In sum, the "facts" argument overwhelmed the precautionary principle.
In June, 1926, GM, DuPont, Standard Oil of New Jersey and their joint venture, the Ethyl Corporation, started selling leaded gasoline again, and they continued to do so until Congress finally outlawed it completely in 1989.5 They still sell their brain-damaging product in third-world nations today. Between 1926 and 1985, 7 million metric tons of toxic lead dust (15.4 billion pounds) were distributed into the environment by the automobile corporations.
In 1965, MIT professor Clair C. Patterson examined the situation and concluded that "the average resident of the United States is being subjected to severe chronic lead insult."[6] Patterson went on, "Intellectual irritability and disfunction are associated with classical lead poisoning, and it is possible, and in my opinion probable, that similar impairments on a lesser but still significant scale might occur in persons subjected to severe chronic lead insult." Subsequent studies have confirmed and reconfirmed this view.
The period of greatest lead use was 1945-1971, after which it began to decline. In those years, 165,000 to 275,000 TONS of lead dust spewed from the exhaust pipes of American automobiles EACH YEAR. Americans born during these years have 300 to 1000 times as much lead in their bodies as pre-Columbian indigenous people had.[7] Thus the generation of decision-makers in power today --in government and in corporations --is made up of people who are suffering mental irritability and disfunction as a result of severe chronic lead insult. Reviewing the history of the past 25 years, it seems clear that the nation and the world have already paid a terrible price for their irritability and disfunction. Leadership by the most lead-damaged (those born around 1970) lies just ahead.
--Peter Montague
