Umeda writes (some links removed):
When I saw news headlines online on March 7, 2022, saying that a study found Americans born before 1996 might have a lower IQ from exposure to leaded gasoline, I seriously thought that my own IQ could be lower for the same reason, having grown up in Japan.
I checked when Japan banned leaded gasoline and found that actually, I was safer in Japan. Japan was the first country to ban leaded gasoline.
Legal and political claims about environmental chemicals typically address such substances on a molecule-by-molecule basis. This article argues that this approach is not determined solely by the nature of chemicals. Rather, it is the product of legal structures, administrative procedures, regulatory lists, information systems, and nomenclature conventions, which I collectively term “molecular bureaucracy.” This article traces the development of molecular bureaucracy, a global framework of environmental governance grounded in American regulatory infrastructure, and its political and environmental consequences. It does so by following the history of per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances, synthetic chemicals in widespread use since the 1950s whose toxicity has become a prominent subject of research and public concern since the late 1990s. Molecular bureaucracy originated in a classification system based on molecular identity developed to make chemical information accessible to the late nineteenth-century synthetic chemicals industry. It came to structure environmental law and politics through, first, the efforts of 1960s US policy-makers to render toxic hazards subject to government control through computer-based information coordination and, second, a vision of chemical holism within the nascent US Environmental Protection Agency and the Toxic Substances Control Act, which sought to accommodate the global environment to rational administration by aggregating diverse toxic hazards and reframing them as abstract chemical substances. The history of molecular bureaucracy offers valuable insights for present-day efforts to ground toxic substances scholarship and politics in alternative conceptions of environmental chemicals.
(Chemická informatika)
Why has environmental law, an area of widespread popular engagement and legal activity, met with such limited success in the last half century? Corporate money? Special interests? Neoliberalism? These usual villains are not innocent, but I am interested here in how companies and their lobbyists used provisions of law, namely the 1948 Administrative Procedures Act (APA), to thwart stronger regulation....
My focus has been the Toxic Substances Control Act (TSCA) of 1976. This was the first US law aimed at providing environmental and health oversight of all commercial chemicals. The act was introduced in 1971 as part of the Nixon administration’s environmental initiatives, and different versions of the bill passed both houses by the fall of 1972, only to die in Senate-House Conference Committee during the 92nd session of Congress. In 1974, amidst the Watergate scandal and Nixon’s resignation, the Senate and House of Representatives again passed different versions of TSCA. Once again, the legislation died in committee. Early on, it appeared that none of the bills would not become law, a simple solution for its opponents.
In July 1975, a scandal reignited political pressure for chemicals regulation. Dozens of workers at chemical factory in Virginia were poisoned through their exposure to Kepone, a neurotoxic pesticide manufactured in the plant. The Ford administration made it clear that some version of TSCA needed to be signed into law to appease political pressure. Representatives for the Manufacturing Chemists Association (MCA), a trade group representing the chemical industry, began hammering out the details of a bill with Congressional staffers. The final statute specified numerous procedural hurdles for EPA in fulfilling its mandate to regulate chemicals. These hurdles were not conceptual slipups, but compromises made to produce a bill acceptable to industry. James T. O’Reilly, an industry lawyer who actually helped write the provisions, has said: “The 1976 Toxic Substances Control Act (TSCA) contains such obscure and inconsistent phrases that its supporters were doomed to frustration.” The legal scholar Kevin Gaynor, who analyzed the law shortly after it was enacted, called it “a regulatory morass.” Even its provisions “ensuring transparency of safety data” became “rigid procedural handcuffs.” This was a statute designed to make industry oversight difficult.
Many of these complexities had to do with how TSCA addressed requirements of the APA. For example, rather than make toxicity testing of commercial chemicals required for either old or new chemicals, the bill stipulated that EPA would have to issue a rule to require testing of any individual substance. Requiring rule-making on a chemical-by-chemical basis meant that the agency could only request testing data on a limited number of commercial chemicals, of the 60,000 on the market and thousands added each year.
(from Environmental Working Group)
The poisonous history of the Bunker Hill Company should be as well known to environmental historians as the Battle of Bunker Hill is to historians of the American Revolution. Located in the Silver Valley in northern Idaho, Bunker Hill mining and smelting operations polluted the surrounding area and poisoned residents and workers with lead for a century. In the 1970s, Bunker Hill’s operations wrought “the worst community lead exposure problem in the United States,” according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The silver lining to the Silver Valley disaster was that it fueled new and stronger national regulations for lead pollution.
In Leaded, Mix seeks to unearth the “root causes” of mining and smelter pollution in the Silver Valley. He argues that pollution went unabated for most of the twentieth century because the government sought to empower Bunker Hill in the pursuit of economic development and western settlement. Countervailing forces were either too weak or too dependent on the company to resist the massive pollution externalities the company foisted on others. Workers and Silver Valley residents often spurned criticism of the company—“Uncle Bunker” as locals called it—for fear of losing the area’s key employer. Similarly, state politicians feared losing a thriving business and a source of taxes. Bunker Hill’s economic and political power produce favorable legislation and the company benefited from judges and regulators who sided with the industry over labor and those harmed by pollution. Bunker Hill’s power was also rooted in knowledge. The state government lacked the resources to know much of what Bunker Hill knew, or could have known, about the poisoning of workers and the community.
Until the 1970s, the federal government did nothing to change this situation. Federal courts doled out, at best, piddling compensation for land and livestock poisoned by mines and smelters. Federal environmental laws were weak until President Richard Nixon created the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and Congress passed legislation that could force states to meet air and water pollution standards. Meanwhile, in 1973, a fire destroyed part of Bunker Hill’s already outdated pollution control system. But with lead prices soaring, the company chose to continue operating its smelter anyway. The resulting widespread poisoning of children in the community, which came to light over the 1970s, catalyzed the EPA’s first air lead standard, promulgated in 1977, and provided evidence for a relatively low acceptable lead level. According to Mix, the air lead standard, along with more stringent occupational health standards, “signified an end for most western lead smelters,” since they could not profitably meet the new technology requirements. Bunker Hill shut down in 1981.
October's Environmental History had a review by Erik Loomis of Adam Tompkins's Ghostworkers and Greens: The Cooperative Campaigns of Farmworkers and Environmentalists for Pesticide Reform (Cornell UP, 2016). Tompkins's book seems to add to a growing body of work on the labor movement as a force behind important developments in environmental regulation. From the review:Because legislation excluded agricultural workers from the New Deal’s labor protections, farmworkers lacked political power, forcing them to seek alliances with middle-class organizations to win their battles and protect themselves from the chemicals used by growers. Environmental organizations needed farmworkers to counter accusations of being anti-worker and to ground their claims in the lived experiences of the most affected populations. The UFW’s 1970 grape contract included provisions that banned growers from using chlorinated hydrocarbons such as DDT and dieldrin. This laid critical groundwork for environmental groups’ final push for an EPA ban on DDT in 1972. As the 1970s went on, the Sierra Club and other leading environmental organizations developed a growing awareness of social justice and believed they had a natural alliance with farmworkers. This can be overstated, as the 1990 letter sent by the Southwest Organizing Project to major environmental organizing accusing them of “racist and exclusionary practices” demonstrates. Perhaps Tompkins could have evaluated these accusations in the context of his work on environmentalist work with farmworkers, but he does not.
Three later chapters on state-level activism in Arizona, California, and Florida are where Tompkins digs deep into the details of coalition building. In Arizona, years went by with suburban white environmentalists and rural Latino farmworkers missing each other as they each went through waves of activism over pesticides. Finally, the two groups built a meaningful alliance after agricultural pesticide drift threatened expanding suburbs in the mid-1980s, leading to the Arizona Environmental Quality Act in 1986. In California, both groups fought Governor George Deukmejian’s deregulation efforts in the 1980s, but often with different priorities that hampered close cooperation, even as good relationships between them were cultivated and maintained. Finally, Tompkins closes the book with an examination of how farmworkers and environmentalists worked together in Florida and California against methyl bromide after growers’ associations launched a battle to resist the limitations on its use the United States agreed to in the Montreal Protocol in 1987 to fight ozone depletion. Greens and workers could not completely counter the growers’ power, but their work did raise public awareness about the chemical and led to growers seeking alternatives, even as it is still used today.
While the Superfund Act [CERCLA] resulted from national awareness of Love Canal, and though Newman focuses on the success that legislation represents, we conclude with a troubling denouement. Love Canal is now Black Village Creek, filling up with a new round of working-class residents enticed by homes priced 10 – 20% below market value. Though former residents including Gibbs fought the relocation, they lost this battle. Developers won. The results have been tragic; as Newman recounts, health problems and toxic exposures have reemerged in this ‘remediated’ community, despite the extensive, state-of-the-art environmental engineering schemes used to filter leachate and otherwise remediate the site.
Newman’s Love Canal succeeds in highlighting for readers an exceptionally timely notion: before the institutionalization of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s Superfund Program, the American landscape was riddled with unregulated, unmonitored, and often unknown chemical and industrial dumps from America’s dizzying participation in the Industrial Revolution. Communities like Love Canal that dealt with these historical mistakes, Newman shows, contended with rampant pollution, contested and rare health outcomes, and instances of deep disempowerment. Newman showcases for his readers the immense risks and voluminous unintended consequences that emerge when environmental regulations are absent and when the precautionary principle is eschewed in favor of industrial economic development, in one era after another. His historical details, and his careful examination of the numerous barriers faced by Love Canal activists, display that regulatory programs that protect public and environmental health are relatively new, have been hard won, and are constantly vulnerable to eradication. Indeed, these are the very programs that have most swiftly come under attack under the Trump Administration – which makes Newmans’s message so relevant and timely.
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| Symbolic Petition of Chippewa Chiefs, presented at Washington, January 28, 1849, headed by Oshcabawis of Monomonecau, Wisconsin |
Ojibwe Gichigami (“Ojibwa’s Great Sea”) is the spirit name for Lake Superior; it is also the homeland of the Keweenaw Bay Indian Community (KBIC) where Gichigami fishing has sustained the people for nearly a millennia. As signatories to the 1842 Treaty With The Chippewa, the KBIC retain rights for hunting, fishing, and gathering, and worship within ten-million acres of ceded land and water territory. However, due to elevated levels of toxics such as methyl-mercury and polychlorinated-biphenyls (PCBs), Lake Superior is currently under numerous fish consumption advisories that inform the public of harmful contamination levels. Thus, harvesting provides socio-cultural and spiritual wellbeing for the KBIC, and simultaneously, places their physical health at great risk. By using ethnographic methods and oral histories, this article illustrates how an intersecting history of KBIC treaty rights, tribal fish harvesting, and toxic risk is the center of their water story. Over the course of several decades, they have encountered dire consequences due to federal assimilation policies, state regulatory control over their harvesting, and environmental degradation and contamination. KBIC present-day perspectives of toxic risk are rooted in this history. In 1971, the Michigan Supreme Court presented a landmark decision: the People v. Jondreau reaffirmed 1842 treaty rights for the KBIC. This precedential decision was followed by Great Lakes states issuing the nation’s first fish advisories. The KBIC historical context is imperative to understanding present day environmental policy and its relevance (or irrelevance) for those most at-risk, emphasizing how social injustices are manifested through a people’s water history.
Environmental historians will be especially interested in the first two chapters, in which Bohme describes the development of the nematode problem and the chemical companies’ marketing of DBCP. Bohme describes, in great detail, how Dow and Shell manipulated the regulatory process that developed warning labels and guidelines for use but ultimately “projected a false image of DBCP’s safety”. What’s worse, most of the science came from laboratory tests on animals, which clearly indicated problems regarding sterility, but Shell decided to make health claims based on incomplete worker health data instead. The early chapters also describe well the transnational banana and chemical markets, and the limits of US regulation, which sought to protect American consumers but failed to protect foreign workers, even from threats that came from inside the United States.
These workers, the afectados who suffered health consequences and sought justice in court, are at the heart of the book. Bohme has employed the rich detail of legal documents generated by workers who sued in Texas courts for compensation for sterility caused by DBCP exposure on banana plantations in Costa Rica and Nicaragua. Exploited in the fields, these workers were not well served by the courts, suffering from translation problems, in which workers were doubly disadvantaged, as English was translated to Spanish and legalese was translated into layperson’s terms. The workers also suffered from location problems, as they sought justice in American courts, largely because they (and their lawyers) could expect a larger settlement in the United States.
While this is a truly transnational story, involving major corporations and court systems from several nations, as well as the international movement of goods and money, Bohme concludes that the outcome confirms the continuing importance of the state in our neoliberal age. The state remains the essential site of regulation and the arbitration of justice. The other arguments of the book are well anticipated: inequalities of power and knowledge left workers exposed. They were clearly exploited by their employers and by the companies that produced and sold chemicals that they knew to be health hazards. And later, after the lawsuits began to accumulate, the US judicial system seemed more concerned with protecting American corporations than in finding justice for those who were harmed. After a very long process many workers won modest settlements, but Bohme concludes, “The same deep and broad inequalities that shaped the contours of DBCP exposure also limited afectados’ success in holding corporations accountable”.
Childhood lead poisoning was linked to lead paints in 1904. France, Belgium and Austria banned white-lead paint in 1909. The National Lead Company admitted lead was a poison in 1921. The League of Nations banned white-lead interior paint in 1922 (you know an environmental regulation is old if it was issued by the League of Nations), but the U.S. declined to implement the ban. Instead, the U.S. waited nearly half a century (1971) to pass the Lead Poisoning Prevention Act (42 U.S.C. 4822), although some local jurisdictions started banning it as early as the 1950s. The ban on lead paint was fully implemented in the U.S. 1978, 74 years after childhood lead poisoning was linked to lead paints.
(courtesy Thester11)
Even though scholars and activists did not begin identifying environmental racism until the 1980s, Spears reveals how the unequal allocation of environmental hazards extends across space and time. In the first four chapters, Spears explains how Anniston became a model city of the New South and home to the chemical industry, which developed close ties to the US military during the two world wars. In doing so, she unpacks the problematic relationship between the former by explaining how a lack of regulatory oversight led to the tragic contamination of human bodies and ecosystems. As the Cold War escalated, so too did the military’s involvement with chemical development and production, which found a new home at Anniston’s Fort McClellan in the 1960s, “the free world’s largest training center for chemical, biological, and radiological warfare” (p. 94). By placing the modern environmental justice movement within this historical context, Spears is able to show the ways in which privileged toxic knowledge developed among corporations and created hazardous landscapes in Anniston that reflected the legacy of social and environmental disparities in the United States.
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But Anniston’s residents were not passive victims. In chapter 5, Spears explores the tradition of nonviolent protest in the city to demonstrate that residents owed much to the civil rights movement, which shaped contemporary environmental justice campaigns by linking social justice to environmental issues. Prior to the campaign to hold Monsanto accountable for PCB contamination and the initiative for safe disposal of chemical weapons, Anniston attracted national attention with the burning of the Freedom Riders bus on Mother’s Day in 1961. White and black residents were versed in the language and experience of protest—be it in support of equality or not. Thus the Anniston campaigns also revealed important challenges created by racial and class differences: white middle-class and professional people dominated the anti-incinerator fight whereas the African American community spearheaded the PCB initiative, largely as a result of residential geography. When activists in both efforts joined forces, they did so uneasily. For instance, Spears reveals that the Monsanto campaign linked whites whose relatives and friends had been mid-century instigators of racial violence with residents of color who had sometimes been the targets of that violence. Despite these conflicts, legal victory over Monsanto and the emergence of a national campaign that forced the army to both provide residents with protective equipment and operate with greater transparency revealed the the power of grassroots activism.
In the remaining chapters, Spears explores the rise of PCB as the world’s most notorious chemical and the factors that drove chemical policy reform in the early 1970s, most important, the passage of the Toxic Substances Control Act, which led to the end of PCB production. But as Spears reveals, the aftermath of those reform efforts bred citizen action. In Anniston, Monsanto began burying its chemical wastes and the army announced plans to build a hazardous waste incinerator to dismantle outdated Cold War-era chemical weapons at the Anniston Army Depot. In the late 1980s people locally began to question those practices. Thus, a grassroots, cross-class, and ultimately biracial and bipartisan movement emerged to challenge environmental injustice—activists used coffins to block Monsanto’s bulldozers, staged die-ins, filed lawsuits, and donned hazmat suits at rallies. In her final chapter and epilogue, Spears offers an assessment of their achievements.
Despite the amplitude of the literature, occupational health historians have devoted surprisingly little attention to the relationship between health and safety activism and the post–World War II civil rights and feminist movements, or the role of health and safety activism in the rise of the environmental justice movement.
Rector's article focuses on occupational cancer in American auto plants as a case study. I hope we'll continue to see more work by him and others (see for example recent articles by Gregory Alexander and Stefania Barca) on working class environmentalism and environmental law.Meanwhile, the nascent historiography of the environmental justice movement, largely written by social scientists, has tended to ignore labor's contributions, with the important exception of the United Farm Workers 1968–1971 campaigns against pesticide exposure. Most books about environmental justice, including many brilliant and formidable works of scholarship, present a brief, potted history of the movement, beginning with the struggle over polychlorinated biphenyl (PCB) dumping in Warren County, North Carolina, in 1982. Scholars of the topic have neglected the fact that as early as 1970 occupational health and safety activists used the term environmental justice to refer to the right to protection from toxic hazards codified by the Occupational Safety and Health Act (OSH Act) and the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA). Few scholars, moreover, have noted that the UAW's 1976 Working for Environmental and Economic Justice and Jobs National Action Conference in Black Lake, Michigan, helped popularize environmental justice. This elision is ironic, since the disproportionate exposure of workers and people of color to toxic hazards was a major theme of the conference—one of the first to gather civil rights, feminist, labor, and environmental activists for sustained dialogue.
Ford's River Rouge Plant (1931)
The former editor of the American Journal of Public Health, he was a South African-born progressive, who collaborated with his wife Zena Stein. I had just began to seriously look at the problem of how to prove causation of disease in occupational illness cases where no exact mechanism of injury could be identified. Susser gave me direction as I represented the Trial Lawyers Association in the asbestos-related disease case Landrigan v. Celotex, a landmark guide in the use of scientific evidence.
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Mervyn Susser, like the great progressive epidemiologists Irving Selikoff and Sir Austin Bradford Hill, was motivated by the fight against disease and the need to identify causal relationships. The epidemics of heart and lung disease associated with tobacco and asbestos motivated Selikoff and Hill. Susser, a pioneer of community medicine, worked in a clinic treating Black citizens in Johannesburg. In the progressives view causal inference was to be achieved neither by idolatry of formal tests of statistical significance nor by anecdotal snapshots. Rather the public health called for a socially aware observational perspective informed by clinical methods, pathology, and biostatistics. No single factor was decisive. The health of patients called for effective strategies, not skepticism.
*****
Dr. Susser explained that scientific skepticism is to be doubted. “We have to practice believing”. He wrote:
In the end, a quality which lawyers should understand better than any- judiciousness- matters more than any. Scientists use both deductive and inductive inference to sustain the momentum of a continuing process of research. The courts of law, and the courts of application, use inference to reach decisions about what action to take. Those decisions often cannot rest on certitudes, most especially when population risks are converted into individual risks. It is my firm belief, nonetheless, that practical decisions that draw sustenance from scientific inference will be better decisions than those that do not.
Langston is persuasive in connecting the FDA’s failure to follow the precautionary principle to a set of conditions, some specific to DES and others more a consequence of a generation’s commitment to “better living through chemistry.” One factor involved the uncertainties over contemporary definitions of toxicology. Most scientists held to the belief “the dose makes the poison.” As a Yale website states, “All chemical substances will exhibit toxic effect given a large enough dose. If the dose is low enough, even a highly toxic substance will cease to have harmful effect.” The problem, as Langston explains, is that DES and other endocrine disrupters violate that principle. They are not dose dependent. In fact, they have biological effects at dose levels far below those of other toxins. Further, the effects do not correlate to an individual’s size but more to age. Exposed fetuses and infants face far higher risk than adults. Finally, the effects often occur long after the initial exposure, so that affected fetuses may not face cancer or reproductive problems until puberty.
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| Anthophyllite asbestos, Georgia (USGS) |
Asbestos is a natural mineral with observable, repeatable effects that have long been observed and repeated. Despite experiential and scientific evidence illustrating its deleterious impact on human health the worldwide production and consumption of asbestos remains substantial. The objective of the present study is to highlight the global decline and resurgence of asbestos over the period 1960–2011. This history is characterized by the predominance of asbestos in the industrialized countries until 1970, decline thereafter, but the precipitous increase of asbestos consumption in the developing countries, particularly the industrializing middle-income nations. In turn, global asbestos consumption in 2011 approximates that observed in 1960; notwithstanding voluminous evidence illustrating it is associated with asbestosis, lung cancer, and mesothelioma. Further, I highlight the rhetoric of denial consistently employed by the industry to generate uncertainty and sustain the demand for asbestos. The conclusion reiterates the need for environmental justice scholars and activists to consider the transnational movement, or risk transference, of recognized occupational and environmental hazards.I would add that there is room for comparative legal research here, as well: Why has tort law put asbestos companies out of business in the US, but apparently allowed them to flourish in other countries?
