The History and Dangers of Pesticides

Your book, The Chemical Age, touches on a lot of subjects that I find very fascinating, particularly pesticides. I am consistently terrified of pesticides. I ran into a man once that I met on a ranch and he had an artificial thigh bone. His femur had been replaced with a piece of metal, a metal bone. He told me he got bone cancer from pesticides they use on a golf course that got into local water supply and a bunch of people in that area got cancer. There was some large scale lawsuit against the, I don't know if it was against the chemical company or the golf course or both, but I remember thinking, whoa, okay, I didn't even think of that. Of course, if you're going to have all that green grass, you have to do something about the weeds, you have to do something about the bugs. All that stuff is terrifying. When I was listening to your podcast, the Science History Podcast, and your friend was interviewing you, who was it? Pete Myers. Pete Myers was interviewing you and you were talking about the prevalence of these pesticides and chemicals that we use all over the world and he said, I think his exact quote was, am I wrong in saying that there's a square centimeter of this planet that's not somehow or another polluted by humans and our chemicals? You said that's accurate. That's accurate. Yeah, it's amazing, isn't it? That's insane. Yeah, and you think of, you've been to Alaska and you go to Alaska, it looks pristine, it's beautiful, and you think everything is perfectly clean, but in fact, even the most remote places in the world like Alaska are getting atmospherically deposited chemicals, including pesticides that are used at lower latitude. And so there really isn't anywhere on the earth that's not polluted, unfortunately. And you're explaining the way these chemicals get into the atmosphere and then get distributed all over the world akin to a still, like a whiskey or a moonshine still. Yeah, exactly. If you go back and you look at an old still, the way it works, you would have a heat source like a Bunsen burner that's heating up a liquid, and that liquid volatizes, some of it evaporates into a gas. And then that is connected via a glass tube to a glass ball that has cold water on it, and that whatever vaporizes from that heat is going to condense on that cold surface where the cold water is. So that's the basics of how you would make a distillery. And the earth works really in the same way. So the equator is the part of the earth that's most directly facing the sun. It's getting the most intense solar radiation. So you have these contaminants like many pesticides, PCBs, a lot of other things that some portion of them will volatize. They'll become a gas. And they'll be in the atmosphere. They'll move in the atmosphere. And then they'll condense out of the atmosphere when it gets colder, so when it's wintertime. And it'll be a little higher in latitude. And the next summer, they'll volatize again. They'll evaporate again. And they'll move north again. It's called the Grasshopper effect. And so over some number of years, they move their way north. When they get to the north pole to the south pole, those are hemispheric sinks for these contaminants. It's cold year round. And so the amount of deposition from the atmosphere is far greater than the amount of evaporation. And therefore, the poles have the highest concentrations of certain classes of these so-called persistent organic pollutants. They're the ones that are relatively light that can move through the atmosphere. As a result, and these are also fat soluble, so they get into the food web. And as you go up each food trophic level, you end up with higher and higher concentrations. So the animals with the highest concentrations of these certain kinds of persistent organic pollutants on Earth are these high trophic level long-lived animals in the Arctic, like the killer whale and the polar bear. That'll have millions of times the background concentration of these contaminants. Things like DDT, mercury, a lot of other chemicals, a lot of pesticides, flame-retarding chemicals, and so on. Wow. So polar bears. So when they test these animals, so if the people in these areas eat these animals, are they at risk of being infected by these contaminants? Or is it not at a level where it's going to harm them? No, it's a really sad case of environmental injustice because you have subsistence peoples, the indigenous peoples of the Arctic, that they're living off the marine environment. They're eating bowhead whale and walrus and ice seals and polar bear. And every single one of their meals they're getting in the fat, in the rendered oil, they take the blubber and they render oil, which goes onto all of their meals. Every single meal they're getting hundreds of parts per billion of PCBs and pesticides and things like that. So it's just grossly unfair when you think about it because they never use these chemicals. They didn't benefit economically from these chemicals. And yet they're subject to some of the highest concentrations in the world. And you were also saying that their breast milk is contaminated with it. Yeah, actually the way this whole problem was discovered was in the 1980s, scientists in Canada wanted to understand breast milk contamination of women who lived in southern Canada, in the industrial and agricultural areas of Canada. And so they were thinking, where can we find a reference population of people who have no exposure to these chemicals? So they decided to go to Baffin Island in northeastern Canada to look at the Inuit people that live there. And they were surprised to find that the women on Baffin Island, their breast milk contained 10 to 20 times higher concentrations of chemicals like DDT and PCBs and mercury than the women who lived in the industrial areas where these chemicals were used. So that was the first kind of global alert that actually were poisoning the people, people of the Arctic were poisoning them. And that's how the rights of indigenous people in the Arctic to live in a clean environment became part of the Stockholm Convention on persistent organic pollutants. There's representatives from these tribes who go to the negotiations every time. It's because of this problem. It's called global distillation because of this fact that it's like a still, the way that it works. Now, we know this problem exists. Is there a solution that's on the table or a possible solution, a theoretical solution to try to extract that? Yeah, and actually the problem is kind of twofold. So we've talked about one aspect of it, which is this atmospheric transport of contaminants. But the other aspect of it is there are also thousands of locally contaminated sites in the Arctic. I do a lot of work on this, things like formerly used defense sites from the Cold War. So the military built thousands of these, US military, Europe, Russian military. And these sites have terrible problems with contamination. And typically when the military pulled out of them, they just left everything behind. We have sites we've worked in in Alaska where there's just fields of barrels and you don't know what's in the barrels and they're leaking. And you know, you test it and you find there's all kinds of nasty things, flame retardants and pesticides and PCBs. So it's been there a long time. It's been there for decades. And unfortunately, these chemicals, many of them persist for decades. That's why they were so wonderful. You know, PCBs were so wonderful because they were stable. They could last for decades. But that's also why they're so bad because they're carcinogenic. They disrupt the hormone system. They cause a lot of different problems. So in terms of what can we do about it? The main thing is to not be using these chemicals and to be using. There's a field called green chemistry, which seeks to instead use safe chemicals in place of these toxic chemicals. But in terms of cleaning up, yeah, there's also things to do to clean up. We're involved with that in some places. And it's an important thing to do. But we have to stop the problem even before it gets going. When did this problem start? Like when did human beings start using large scale pesticides? So large scale pesticides started in the 1880s. And at that time, they were based on metals and metalloids. So naturally occurring toxic metals that would kill insects or kill fungal pests, things like that. And those are actually quite dangerous. Things like lead and arsenic being used in in these pesticides. They were dangerous because they ended up on the food. So you'd buy an apple and if you didn't wash it well, you get a dose of lead poisoning that continued until about World War Two. And in World War Two, we made a dramatic shift from using these metal based products using synthetic organic compounds. So in World War Two, we saw the origin of the organochlorine compounds and the organophosphate compounds. And and those really became the basis for pesticide use then. And then there were broadcasts all over the environment following World War Two and until today. So in the 1880s, when they were using they were using lead and they were using arsenic, what were they combating? Locusts? Like what were they what were they trying to kill? So the very first commercial pesticide was actually copper based pesticide. And it was used in France to stop the mildew that was destroying the vineyards. And once it was found that it could destroy, as it's called a water mold, once it was found that could destroy the water mold and save the vineyards, scientists realized you could also use it against the potato blight, which had caused the famine in Ireland in the 1840s and other famines around the world. So it became a very powerful tool to prevent famine. And, you know, one thing I like to look back on is, is you can think, why did people poison the world like this with these horrible things? But really, their motivations initially were quite positive. They were trying to stop famine. Ireland had just been through this devastating famine. They were trying to stop infectious diseases that were vectored by insects, things like malaria and yellow fever. So the motivation was good. But unfortunately to use for public health, it became, instead of just using it for public health, we started using it in the house and for convenience for everything. It is really crazy when you think that the human species has been around for hundreds of thousands of years. And it took till 1880 before we decided to fuck everything up with pesticides. That's a long time. Yeah. And we fucked things up pretty fast because now we have a world that is, like you said, anywhere you go in this world, you're going to find contaminated animals. You go to Antarctica and you measure pesticides in penguins and their eggs and you'll find very high concentrations. And are they seeing health effects of the Inuit people and the people that eat these animals? Is it, is it having a detrimental effect on them? It does. And in fact, the cancer rates are quite high. And among the people who are subsistence hunters in the Arctic. And that's really how I got involved with this kind of work is that people reported very high cancer rates, also high rates of developmental disorders. It could be due to these, these chemicals disrupting development in the womb. And, and so there, there are groups that bring together teams of scientists to work on this. I was brought in as an ecotoxicologist to work on some aspects of this. And, uh, but yeah, there's quite a few health problems associated with this. And are these subsistence hunters, are they free of all the other problems that many Inuit folks have in terms of like cigarettes and alcohol and a lot of people that have been introduced to some of the vices of the Western world? Now, Ian, it's the same kind of problems also with these communities in Alaska. There's high tobacco use and, and a lot of problems with alcohol. How do they parse whether or not it's a contributing factor, you think? It's a contributing factor and it's very hard to parse it out. And actually this is a justification. The government often uses to say, well, it's not the contaminants from this military site that's causing the problem. They'll say, look, the cancer rates are no higher in this village that's next to the military site than they are in this village that's away from the military site. But you know, it's, it's a, you can't actually solve the problem with epidemiology. We're talking about tiny communities. It might be the villages I work in typically are no more than 800 people. And so how can you do a proper study of a rare health effect when you have a small population? So I'm sure it's contributing to the health problems. And unfortunately people use the fact that there are these other issues that cause health problems like smoking in order to justify not doing anything about the pollution. And so when you go to these villages, is it uniform that most of them are using cigarettes and alcohol? So it's not uniform. So in Alaska, actually most of the villages are legally dry and and so it's, it's illegal to have alcohol. It's illegal to bring in alcohol. Really? But many people do or they home brew. Is this because the village has realized the problem with this in the community? Yeah, exactly. And so they have passed their own laws. They're, you know, they're, they have their sovereign governments and they've passed their own laws to make their villages dry. But there are still problems of course, with alcohol and drugs, even in dry communities. So they pass these laws, they make them dry, but people sneak the stuff in anyway. Yeah. Yeah. In fact, when we fly into these villages and in small airplanes, there's typically a state trooper searching through, looking to see if anyone's bringing alcohol in. Cigarettes as well? I know cigarettes are allowed. So is there anywhere you can study that has this issue with the pollutants, but doesn't have the issue with alcoholism? And is there a village that's figured it out and avoided the alcohol? So that's a great question. I don't know. I, I've not come across any communities that don't have multiple, you know, multiple problems. It's difficult. And it's the same in other parts of the world where I've done work like in Australia with Aboriginal communities. There's, there's a whole bunch of things going on that are harmful to health, but the part that I'm focused on is a contribution of contaminants. Right. I just was wondering if there was a place where you could examine only the contaminants, if somehow or another these people had figured out how to be free of the It's a great question, right? It would be a, it would be a great way to study it, but I don't know. Now you were telling me before that you also work with some Native American tribes as well. Is this the same issue? So different kinds of contaminants. I'm doing work down on the Arizona, Mexico border. That's mostly on pesticide use. And we're working with migrant farm workers there. And so if, if you think about the pesticides that were common when we were kids and, and a little bit earlier, these organochlorine pesticides like DDT, they were pretty safe to handle. And the problem was that they were destroying wildlife causing species to go extinct. It's why the bald eagle almost went extinct. Why the peregrine Falcon almost went extinct. It was from DDT. And, and so countries, including the United States, phased those chemicals out. They were replaced by the organophosphate chemicals, pesticides. And these were developed by Nazi scientists during World War II. They're very similar to the Nazi nerve gas poisons like tabon and sarin. And those chemicals are incredibly toxic, but they break down faster in the environment. So we ended up trade doing a trade off where the organochlorines would end up as residues on food and consumers would, would end up with two unacceptable levels. Like if you go back into the 1960s, the average American had 12 parts per million DDT in their body fat. And that's the toxic level of DDT. And that was the average. So really terrible consequences for health. So in order to prevent that, we switched to organophosphates, but then that caused another problem because then we're asking the farm workers instead of using this relatively safe chemical to use, to use something that's quite dangerous. A lot of people get killed in during application and the farm workers are some of the most vulnerable people in our society. They're typically migrants from Mexico or other parts of Latin America. They're coming up, they're working incredibly hard. They don't have the right protective equipment and then they're spraying these chemicals that are incredibly poisonous. So I also work on that on, on health effects of pesticides in the border region, both with migrant farm worker communities and with some of the tribes there. 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