The Poisoning of America

Belatedly, the campaign begins to control hazardous chemical wastes

In the last 200 years, and with staggering acceleration in the last 25, the power, extent and depth of man's interventions in the natural order seem to presage a revolutionary new epoch in human history, perhaps the most revolutionary the mind can conceive. Men seem, on a planetary scale, to be substituting the controlled for the uncontrolled, the fabricated for the unworked, the planned for the random. And they are doing so with a speed and depth of intervention unknown in any previous age of human history.

—Barbara Ward and René Dubos. Only One Earth

Of all of man's interventions in the natural order, none is accelerating quite so alarmingly as the creation of chemical compounds. Through their genius, modern alchemists brew as many as 1,000 new concoctions each year in the U.S. alone. At last count, nearly 50,000 chemicals were on the market. Many have been an undeniable boon to mankind, mitigating pain and disease, prolonging life for millions and expanding the economy in myriad ways by stimulating the creation of new products. There is, however, a price to pay for an industrial society that has come to rely so heavily on chemicals: almost 35,000 of those used in the U.S. are classified by the federal Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) as being either definitely or potentially hazardous to human health. Although cause-and-effect relationships between many chemicals and specific illnesses are still difficult to prove, the danger is clearly growing. Long concerned about the more familiar pollution problems of nuclear wastes, dirty air and befouled lakes and rivers, the nation has only belatedly begun to recognize the threat of chemical wastes poisoning America's earth and—more ominously —its underground reservoirs.

Last week, sounding the most authoritative warning yet, Julius Richmond, the Surgeon General of the U.S., declared that throughout the 1980s the nation will "confront a series of environmental emergencies" posed by toxic chemicals that "are adding to the disease burden in a significant, although as yet not precisely defined, way." Said the Surgeon General's report to the Senate: "The public health risk associated with toxic chemicals is increasing, and will continue to do so until we are successful in identifying chemicals which are highly toxic and controlling the introduction of these chemicals into our environment." His report was supported by a study of 32 major chemical-contamination incidents that was conducted by the Library of Congress. The library's survey said these cases "represent the tip of an iceberg of truly unknown dimensions" and concluded that toxic chemicals "are so long lasting and pervasive in the environment that virtually the entire population of the nation, and indeed the world, carries some body burden of one or several of them."