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April 1, 1999
EXCREMENT HAPPENS -- PART 1
Recently we came upon a history of the management of human excreta -- urine and feces -- starting back in the mists of time and working forward to the present day.[1] It turns out that this unlikely topic can tell us something important about the way humans make environmental decisions. For that reason, we're going to recap the story here. The original author, Abby A. Rockefeller, deserves credit for all the original work, though not, of course, blame for any of our lapses or misinterpretations in the retelling. Where we have supplemented Ms. Rockefeller's history with additional facts, they appear inside square brackets.
Humans began to lead a settled life, growing crops to supplement hunting and gathering, only about 10,000 years ago. For all time before that, humans "deposited their excreta -- urine and feces -- on the ground, here and there, in the manner of all other land creatures." The soil and its communities (including plants, small animals and microorganisms) captured almost all of the nutrients in animal excrement and recycled them into new components for soil. In this way, the nutrients were endlessly recycled within the soil ecosystem and largely kept out of surface water.
As a result, what we call "pure water" is low in nutrients, particularly the major nutrients nitrogen and phosphorus. Because these conditions have existed for a very long time, life in lakes, rivers, and oceans is accustomed to the relative absence of these nutrients. Over the past couple of billion years, life has flourished in this low-nutrient environment, growing complex and interdependent in the process -- an aquatic condition we call "clean" and "healthy."
When a body of water is suddenly inundated with nutrients -- especially nitrogen and phosphorus -- things change drastically. One or a few organisms flourish and begin to crowd out the others. We can all recall seeing a body of water that is pea-soup green from overgrowth of algae. Such a water body is clearly sick, choked, its diversity vastly diminished.
Today, much of the surface water of the planet is in a state of ill health because of misplaced nutrients. And a main contributing culprit is misplaced human excreta.
Long ago, human civilizations split into two camps regarding the management of excreta. Many Asian societies recognized the nutrient value of "night soil" (as it became known). For several thousand years, and up until very recently, Asian agriculture flourished by recycling human wastes into crop land.
The opposing camp, particularly in Europe, had ambiguous feelings about human waste -- was it valuable fertilizer or was it a nasty and embarrassing problem to get rid of?
most euIn Europe, a pattern evolved: The first stage was urinating and defecating on the ground near dwellings. As population density increased, this became intolerable and the community pit evolved. For privacy, this evolved into the pit privy or "outhouse" -- a privacy structure atop a hole in the ground. Despite what many people may think, the pit privy is not environmentally sound -- it deprives the soil of the nutrients in excrement, and by concentrating wastes it promotes pollution of groundwater by those same nutrients.
Before the advent of piped water in the late 18th century, European towns stored excreta in cesspools (lined pits with some drainage of liquids) or in vault privies (tight tanks without any drainage). The "night soil" was removed by "scavengers" and was either taken to farms, or dumped into pits in the ground or into rivers. In general, Europeans never developed a clear and consistent perception of the nutrient value of excrement, as Asians had done.
In ancient Rome, the wealthy elite had indoor toilets and running water to remove excrement via sewers. Later, European cities developed crude sewer systems -- usually open gutters but sometimes covered trenches along the center or sides of streets -- though they had no running water until the 18th or even 19th centuries. The putrefying matter in these stagnant ditches did not move until it rained -- thus the name "storm sewers" -- and many cities prohibited the dumping of human wastes into such sewers.
With the advent of piped water, things changed dramatically. In this country, the first waterworks was installed in Philadelphia in 1802 and by 1860 136 cities were enjoying piped water systems. By 1880, the number was up to 598. With piped water, per-capita water use increased at least 10-fold, from 3-5 gallons per person per day to 30-50 gallons per person per day or even more.
Water piped into homes had to be piped out again. This caused cesspools to overflow, thus increasing the problems of odors and of water-borne diseases. To solve these problems, cesspools were connected to the city's crude sewer systems which ran along the streets. The result was epidemics of cholera. In Paris in 1832, 20,000 people died of cholera. Around the world, the combination of piped water and open sewers has consistently led to outbreaks of cholera.
To solve this problem, engineers designed closed sewer systems, pipes using water as the vehicle for carrying away excrement. This solution engendered a debate among engineers: some wanted to return sewage to agricultural land, others argued that "water purifies itself" and wanted to pipe sewage straight into lakes, rivers, and oceans. By 1910, the debate was over and sewage was being dumped into water bodies on a grand scale.
In the cities, cholera epidemics abated. However, cities drawing their drinking water downstream from sewage discharges began having outbreaks of typhoid. This engendered another debate: whether to treat sewage before dumping it into water bodies used for drinking, or whether to filter drinking water. Public health officials favored treating sewage before dumping it; sanitary engineers favored dumping sewage raw and filtering water before drinking. The engineers prevailed. As cities began to filter and disinfect their drinking water, typhoid abated.
Throughout the 20th century, the U.S. and Europe industrialized rapidly. Industry developed a huge demand for low-cost waste disposal, and sewers were the cheapest place to dump because the public was paying. As the pressure for greater waste disposal capacity increased, industrialized nations allocated vast sums of money to construct centralized sewer systems to serve the combined needs of homes and factories.
As a result, the nutrients in excrement became mixed with industrial wastes, many of them toxic. So by the 1950s, essentially every body of water receiving piped wastes was badly polluted with a combination of excessive nutrients and toxicants. This led to a demand to treat wastes before dumping them into water. Thus began the "treatment" phase of the "get rid of it" approach to human waste.
As centralized sewer systems evolved, first came "primary treatment." This consists of mechanically screening out the dead cats and other "floatables." All other nutrients and toxic chemicals remain in the waste water that is discharged to a river or ocean.
Next came "secondary treatment" which speeds up the biological decomposition of wastes by forcing oxygen into them, by promoting bacterial growth, and by other means. This is an energy-intensive process and therefore expensive. Unfortunately, it, too, leaves many of the nutrients and toxic chemicals in the discharge water.
[The Congressional Research Service recently estimated that the federal government spent $69.5 billion on centralized sewage treatment plants, 1973-1999.
Despite this huge expenditure, the Congressional Research Service said in 1999, "States report that municipal discharges are the second leading source of water quality impairment in all of the nation's waters (rivers and streams, lakes, and estuaries and coastal waters). Pollutants associated with municipal discharges include nutrients..., bacteria and other pathogens, as well as metals and toxic chemicals from industrial and commercial activities and households."[2]]
To the extent that primary and secondary treatment are successful, they move nutrients and toxicants (combined) into a new form: sludge. Sludge is the de-watered, sticky black "cake" created in large quantities by modern sewage treatment plants. Sludge contains everything that can go down the drains in homes and industries and which a treatment plant is able to get back out.
In the FEDERAL REGISTER November 9, 1990, U.S. Environmental Protection Agency describes sludge this way:
"The chemical composition and biological constituents of the sludge depend upon the composition of the wastewater entering the treatment facilities and the subsequent treatment processes. Typically, these constituents may include volatiles, organic solids, nutrients, disease-causing pathogenic organisms (e.g., bacteria, viruses, etc.), heavy metals and inorganic ions, and toxic organic chemicals from industrial wastes, household chemicals, and pesticides."
Industry is currently using 70,000 different chemicals in commercial quantities; any of these may appear in sludge. About 1000 new chemicals come into commercial use each year, so any of these, too, may appear in sludge. A description of the toxicants that may be found in sludge would fill several books. The U.S. General Accounting Office has reported -- not surprisingly -- that municipal sludge contains radioactive wastes (from both medical and military sources).[3]
With hundreds of sewage treatment plants producing toxic sludge in mountainous quantities, the next question was, what in the world to do with it?
For many years, coastal cities dumped sewage sludge into the oceans, where it created large "dead zones" that could not support marine life. Other communities dumped their sludge into landfills, where it could pollute their groundwater. Still others incinerated their sludge, thus creating serious air pollution problems, then landfilled the remaining ash or simply heaped the ash on the ground for the wind to disperse.
In 1988 Congress outlawed the ocean dumping of sewage sludge. At this point, many communities faced a real waste crisis. There was no safe (or even sensible) place to put the mountains of toxic sludge that are generated every day by centralized sewage treatment systems.
It was at this point in history that U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) -- feeling tremendous pressure to "solve" the sludge disposal problem -- discovered that sewage sludge is really "night soil" -- the nutrient-rich product that has fertilized crops in Asia for several thousand years. EPA decided that the expedient thing to do with sewage sludge was to plow it into the land.
Shortly after 1992, when the ban on ocean dumping went into effect, EPA renamed toxic sludge "beneficial biosolids," and began aggressively campaigning to sell it to the American people as fertilizer.
STUDYING A TOWN TO DEATH
Lompoc, California is a small city of 42,000 people that lies within a valley along California's central coast, about 100 miles above Los Angeles. Lompoc is separated from the Pacific Ocean by 7 miles of rich, flat farmland. Here, farming is a year-round activity, so pesticides waft up the valley into the city most of the year, carried by the ocean breeze.
According to California's state Environmental Protection Agency (Cal EPA), the people of Lompoc have been lodging formal complaints about pesticide drift and health problems for at least six years, since 1993. George Rauh, a teacher who moved to Lompoc in 1989, says, "For the first two years, I thought it was great. Then I got chronic bronchitis. I had never had anything like it, and I knew something was wrong. I started asking around and I found many, many people had problems -- bronchitis, asthma, headaches, the flu when it wasn't flu season, even reproductive problems, and a host of other ailments. It was obvious that there was something really wrong." In 1992 Rauh and his neighbors formed Volunteers for a Healthy Valley and began asking local and state health officials to pay attention.
Now, if you have ever complained to your health department about an environmental problem, you know that the response is rarely swift or decisive. Of course this is not always true, but as a general rule public health officials are reluctant to admit that there is a problem, or even to look for a problem diligently. There seem to be two main reasons for this: If health officials admit there is a problem today, they are admitting that someone failed to do their job in the past. Secondly, if a problem is identified today, health officials are obligated to do something about it, and this often puts them into conflict with one or more polluters -- many of whom have considerable political clout. Therefore, despite what a civics textbook may say, public health officials often do not respond positively when the public asks for help. Indeed, officials often begin to define the victims of pollution as "the problem" and spend their time trying to discredit the victims instead of looking into the underlying public health questions.
Lompoc is no exception to this general rule. After getting no satisfactory answers from state officials for more than a year, Volunteers for a Healthy Valley conducted a letter-writing campaign to Region 9 of U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (U.S. EPA). U.S. EPA responded by asking Cal EPA's Department of Pesticide Regulation (DPR) to conduct a study. Reluctantly, DPR then asked Cal EPA's Office of Environmental Health Hazard Assessment (OEHHA) to study health conditions in Lompoc.
Cal EPA's OEHHA began to study cancer incidence in Lompoc 1988-1995, birth defects in Lompoc 1987-1989, live births in Lompoc 1988-1994, and hospital discharges in Lompoc 1991-1994. The study did not collect any new data but examined only existing data. Government officials were caught falsifying data and the study took three years to complete.
Meantime, Cal EPA's Department of Pesticide Regulation (DPR) decided to study pesticide use in the Lompoc Valley. They initially proposed to study two pesticides "but we laughed them off the stage," says Rauh. Then DPR agreed to study all pesticides used in the valley. Since 1991, California has maintained detailed records of pesticide use -- the only state in the nation to do so. Six months later, DPR reported that about 50 different pesticides are used regularly in the Lompoc Valley, many of them carcinogens and many of them nerve poisons.[1]
In June, 1998, Cal EPA announced the results of its three-year health study:[2]
** The people of Lompoc have 37% more lung cancer than people in the surrounding three counties (San Luis Obispo, Santa Barbara, and Ventura). This finding was statistically significant at the 0.01 level -- an unusually strict statistical standard. (It means that there was only 1 chance in 100 that the results of the study occurred by chance.) Another part of the study found that the incidence of chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) was low among Lompoc residents, "suggesting a lower prevalence of smoking among adults." High lung cancer and a low smoking rate. Curious.
The study also found elevated rates of breast cancer, kidney cancer, liver cancer, cancers of the female reproductive organs, non-Hodgkins lymphomas, multiple myelomas, all cancers combined, and all cancers combined excluding lung cancer. However, none of these elevated rates passed the test of significance at the 0.01 level, so Cal EPA disregarded the pattern as meaningless statistical flukes.
** The incidence of 7 kinds of birth defects was investigated; nothing unusual turned up.
** Cal EPA studied what proportion of hospital discharges in Lompoc was attributable to particular illnesses. (Hospital discharge records are assumed to represent serious illnesses, after subtracting out normal births.) The study divided hospital discharges into 18 groups of illnesses. Of the 18 groups, two were elevated in Lompoc -- a "respiratory" group and a "reproductive" group. For the respiratory group, bronchitis and asthma were consistently elevated the most. Compared to the surrounding area, people leaving the hospital in Lompoc had 69% more bronchitis and 58% more asthma. By a different measure, Cal EPA found asthma and bronchitis 85% more common in Lompoc than in the three surrounding counties. Bronchitis occurred in the young and the old; asthma was elevated only among adults.
The "reproductive" group of illnesses included abnormal birth outcomes and female reproductive cancers. Four other groups of diseases were considered "suggestive" -- female breast cancer, pleurisy-pneumonia, headaches and seizures, and all respiratory malignancies.
Abnormal birth outcomes showed "a strong pattern for infant respiratory conditions," Cal EPA reported. Compared to infants in surrounding counties, Lompoc infants had a two-fold or greater chance of being hospitalized for respiratory disorders.
In sum, Cal EPA now knew that 50 pesticides were being used in a geographic setting that channeled drifting poisons into a residential community on a continuing basis. By this time, people had been complaining for 5 years of bronchitis, difficulty breathing, headaches, and flu-like symptoms, among other medical complaints. Using rigorous statistical criteria, Cal EPA's three-year health study had documented 37% more lung cancer, 69% more bronchitis and 58% more asthma in Lompoc, compared to surrounding communities, plus a two-fold increase in respiratory problems requiring hospitalization of infants.
Given this information, ordinary citizens in Lompoc saw a pretty clear pattern. They came to believe that they are being poisoned by year-round exposure to a thin soup of mixed pesticides. But Cal EPA scientists concluded only that "without information on potential exposures, we can only speculate as to why respiratory illnesses appear to be elevated in Lompoc."
So another study is begun. The plan is to monitor the air in Lompoc for all 50 pesticides for a year. This will provide the exposure data that the scientists say they need to reach a conclusion. However, such a study requires $142,000 in funds and Cal EPA drags its feet and the state legislature drags its feet. So instead of a year-long study of 50 pesticides, Cal EPA can only conduct a one-month study of 12 pesticides late in the growing season of 1998.
The results of this study are released in February, 1999. According to the Department of Pesticide Regulation (DPR), which conducted the study, 179 air samples were taken during a 28-day period. Of these 179 samples, 140 (78%) showed no detectable levels of pesticides, DPR said. Furthermore, the study looked for two metals, manganese and aluminum, because these are found in three common pesticides, maneb, mancozeb, and fosetyl-aluminum. Manganese and aluminum were not elevated in the air in Lompoc "suggesting no appreciable exposure" to these 3 pesticides, DPR said.[3] This is now known as the "Phase I" study.
According to the WALL STREET JOURNAL, Lompoc farmers "seized upon the Phase I numbers as proof that pesticides pose no health threat to valley residents."[4] In sum, it looked as if Volunteers for a Healthy Valley had been proven wrong.
However, when DPR's data were subjected to close scrutiny by a former chemistry professor from the University of California at Berkeley, the picture changed. Dr. Susan Kegley, now staff scientist for the Pesticide Action Network in San Francisco, found that "DPR made numerous mistakes -- and led the public to believe that fewer than one quarter of air samples taken in Lompoc contained pesticides. An independent and scientific analysis shows that pesticides were detected in 97% of the air samples..."[5] Kegley also pointed out that DPR had waited six weeks before analyzing samples of pesticides that would degrade within a week's time. In sum, "DPR drew erroneous conclusions from data that were not collected in a scientifically valid way," Kegley wrote.
Kegley was particularly scornful of DPR's study of manganese and aluminum. She wrote, "Because aluminum and manganese are very abundant in soils, looking for the 'extra' aluminum and manganese as an indicator of exposure to these pesticides is like adding a bucket of water to the ocean and looking for the 'extra' water. This method is not a valid one for analysis of metal-containing pesticides, and it is impossible to conclude that the data show there is 'no appreciable exposure.'" No one has refuted Kegley's criticism of Cal EPA's study.
In sum, Cal EPA -- the health officials responsible for determining what is killing people in Lompoc (few people survive lung cancer) and making others sick -- were shown to be incompetent, or liars, or both.
As far as the people of Lompoc are concerned, they now have sufficient data: excess illnesses and deaths have been rigorously documented; the use of 50 pesticides has been documented; and 97% of air samples taken in their town contain one or more pesticides.
What is the response of California health officials? Are they ready to advocate pollution prevention and the precautionary principle? Are they ready to help Lompoc farmers phase out expensive, toxic pesticides and shift to organic farming methods that produce higher yields and higher financial returns[6] than chemical methods? No. Cal EPA now wants to conduct a new, longer study of air quality in Lompoc before reaching any conclusions.
Why are health officials studying this town to death and refusing to act? Perhaps it is because 4 million people in California live adjacent to fields that are sprayed year round with dangerous pesticides.[7] If health officials confront the truth in Lompoc, they will be opening a Pandora's box of trouble for chemical agriculture and for the chemical corporations that invented it. If they really open that box, no telling where it might end.
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