Morton Biskind, a physician from Westport, Connecticut, was a courageous man. At the peak of the cold war, in 1953, he complained of maladies afflicting both domestic animals and people for the first time. He concluded that the popular insect poison DDT was the agent of their disease. DDT, he said, was “dangerous for all animal life from insects to mammals.”

The Reign of DDT
Yet, he was astonished at what little was done to restrict or ban DDT. On the contrary, officials and scientists defended it:

“[V]irtually the entire apparatus of communication, lay and scientific alike, has been devoted to denying, concealing, suppressing, distorting… [the bad news about DDT]. Libel, slander and economic boycott have not been overlooked… And a new principle of toxicology has… become firmly entrenched…: no matter how lethal a poison may be for all other forms of animal life, if it doesn’t kill human beings instantly, it is safe. When… it unmistakably does kill a human, this was the victim’s own fault – either he was “allergic” to it… or he didn’t use it properly,” he wrote (Biskind 1953).

The warnings of Biskind went nowhere. The Pentagon was testing nuclear weapons above ground and agribusiness was expanding its conquest of rural America — and the world. The strategic interests of the Pentagon coincided with those of agribusiness.

Rachel Carson, the author of “Silent Spring,” listened to Biskind. She denounced the hegemony of chemical pesticides, “the sinister and little-recognized partners of radiation in changing the very nature of the world – the very nature of its life.” She said America’s single-crop farming clashes with how nature works.

Instead, “we allow the chemical death rain to fall…. The crusade to create a chemically sterile world seems to have engendered a fanatic zeal on the part of many specialists and most of the so-called control agencies… there is evidence that those engaged in spraying operations exercise a ruthless power.” (Rachel Carson, Silent Spring)

Meanwhile, federal agencies and official science pretended nothing was wrong. The US Environmental Protection Agency, born in 1970, had to start from the beginning with toxic chemicals some 17 years after Biskind’s complaint. The political and economic forces of agribusiness, the chemical industry, and politicians forged an unofficial alliance between the Pentagon and big agriculture, with agriculture borrowing the Pentagon’s chemical warfare strategy for American farmers. Furthermore, the missionaries of agricultural industrialization adopted and spread the profitable new approach to chemical danger — what Biskind aptly called “a new principle of toxicology” — that still reigns supreme among the practitioners of conventional science and politics in the early twenty-first century. Like a gigantic octopus, the chemical industry put its tentacle all over Congress, the White House and land grant universities.

No wonder most toxic chemicals have been entering the market without being tested for health and environmental effects. Only the Federal Insecticide, Fungicide and Rodenticide Act (FIFRA) and the food and drug part of the Food, Drug and Cosmetic Act require testing of chemicals. The Occupational Safety and Health Act, the Toxic Substances Control Act, the cosmetic provisions of the Food, Drug and Cosmetics Act, as well as all other federal laws require no testing for the chemicals or other products entering the market. This does not prevent the industry men and women say the products of their companies “meet EPA standards.”

DDT came out of that careless chemical culture – and war. DDT was successful in fighting malaria during World War II. For that reason, in 1948, its inventor, the Swiss scientist Paul Miller, received the Nobel Prize for medicine. By then DDT was used widely in America. The US Department of Agriculture “registered” it in 1945.

The popularity of DDT had nothing to do with its presumed “safety.” DDT killed more than insects. DDT doomed birds by making it impossible to give birth to live chicks. Their brittle shell cracked under the weight of the adult bird during hatching. DDT was particularly deleterious to predatory birds, bringing peregrine falcons, osprey, brown pelicans, and bald eagles to the brink of extinction. DDT also killed many insects it had not been designed to target, and also small animals, which ate DDT-poisoned fish and wildlife.

The deathly legacy of DDT and DDT-like chemicals has been a long one. The reason is their chemical properties: DDT belongs to the organochlorines, a huge group of chlorine-based poisons that last for decades in nature while accumulating in the fat of the animal ingesting them.

It was the human effects of DDT that convinced EPA to ban it in 1972. EPA considered DDT “a potential human carcinogen.” By that time, the early 1970s, DDT had contaminated “staple human foods, especially meat and milk.” In 1973, a federal judge did not know what to do since DDT had contaminated nearly all foods.

He said, “Although the cancer aspects of DDT are frightening, the obvious solution to that problem, that is, a total ban on foods containing DDT, is not available. Virtually every food contains some DDT… DDT has presented, and apparently will continue to present a massive dilemma both for EPA and for society.” (USA vs Goodman, 1973)

The same happened to the global environment. In 1979, two Wildlife Society scientists, Steven G. Herman and John B. Bulger, reported that DDT was “the most widespread and pernicious of global pollutants.” (Herman and Bulger 1979).