Horror on the Hudson
Tucker, William
"Horror on the Hudson" Junk Sciences Green Gangsters & The Pursuit of PCBs BY WILLIAM TUCKER The Hudson River is one of America's most treasured natural resources. An early avenue of commerce, it offered NewYork...
...PCBs absorb heat much more safely, breaking down only at temperatures as high as 2000 degrees Fahrenheit...
...i ack Welch, then a GE vice president based in Pittsfield, was one of the first people at the company to take the PCB controversy seriously (see "In the Crosshairs," page 65...
...In order to justify a project, EPA must show costs and benefits...
...54 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR • JANUARY/FEBRUARY 2002 AhCommencement Bay, Wash ington...
...Phase 3 will dredge 1.2 miles of inland waterway...
...But all was not well...
...A marine biologist by trade, Carson had become a beloved popular writer by combining her craft with her literary talents to author Under the Sea-Wind (1941), The Edge of the Sea (1955) and The Sea Around Us, which won the National Book Award in 1951...
...Congressman John Sweeney, a Republican who represents the Upper Hudson in Washington, asked for negotiations...
...Egged on by environmentalists, the FDA lowered permissible levels from 4 ppm to 2 ppm, a standard that Hudson River fisheries could not meet.The fishermen complained they ate Hudson River fish all the time without suffering any effects, but to no avail...
...Five hundred new chemicals to which the bodies of men and animals are required somehow to adapt each year, chemicals totally outside the lim its of biological experience...
...They successfully challenged the DEC on the grounds that the facility was not permitted by Fort Edward zoning...
...robber barons who had laid out great estates amid the Highlands' spectacular scenery and whose descendants had fought fiercely since the turn of the century to preserve the views for themselves and the public "These people had excellent connections with the NewYork media, particularly The New York Tirnes...
...In the mid-1980s, Kennedy and Cronin teamed up to perform some marvelous environmental detective work in the HudsonValley.Armed with the 1972 CleanWaterActand its promise of a cut of any fines collected-they tackled the Quassaic Creek, a tributary of the Hudson that ran through the City of Newburgh, the severely depressed small city just north of Storm King...
...What's that smell like to you;' I asked...
...The wood-rotting fungus Lepista nuda produces 14 organochlorines, including several phenols of the type that ironically are on the Priority Pollutant list of the Environmental Protection Agency," he said...
...There are several `hot spots' in the Thompson Island pool about five miles south of Fort Edward...
...Well before the ban, New York's Department of Environmental Conservation had been concerned about overfishing...
...Determined to follow in his father's footsteps, Robert Jr...
...After DDT was banned in the U.S...
...Among humans the only disease definitely found related to TCDD is chloracne, which devel ops shortly after exposure...
...The fate of two upstate Nlew•York counties will hang in the balance during this Superfuiid protect...
...Over the years, less than one percent of the material processed through the plant seeped into the adjacent Hudson as waste...
...Uncle George, " he writes in Riverkeepers, dropped from a helicopter to ride eight hundred-pound musk ox on one of his famous trips "above the DEW line...
...One pipe...
...After an expedition in western Canada, he had mysteriously promised us "Christmas seals...
...Contamination levels in Hudson River fish have declined almost 90 percent in the last 62 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR • JANUARY/FEBRUARY 2002 20 years, however, and are now close to the FDA limit for human consumption of 2 ppm...
...When Congress adopted the Toxic Substances Control Act in 1977, PCBs were the only chemical specifically banned by the new statute...
...Through this densely wooded section-often compared to the Rhine-the mountains slope directly to the water's edge like the burly shoulders of huge animals...
...This was the money (along with the prison labor) that Kennedy was to use in setting up shop on the Osborn estate two years later...
...He would don his tank suit and enter the aquarium to feed the fish...
...In 1892, Edison consolidated his patents for incandescent bulbs into the General Electric Company Although headquartered in New York City, GE began taking over older factories in the Hudson Valley...
...How long would they persist...
...Virtually all the nation's other great fisheries are in danger of collapse...
...In 1957 the United States Department of Agriculture launched one of the most remarkable publicity campaigns in its history.The fire ant suddenly became the target of a barrage of government releases, motion pictures, and government-inspired stories portraying it as a despoiler of southern agriculture...
...Phase 2 would dredge 112 mile of river beginning at Pittsfield, Mass...
...Paper products, glass, cigars, shoes, and leather goods all thrived, first on water power, then on the Robert Fulton's steam engine, which was moved to the factory floor to power the intricate series of belts and pulleys that powered 19th century industry...
...Pulver has grown accustomed to being portrayed as a tool of GE...
...Selikoff pub lished his results from the cancer study of GE employees...
...Although the worst concentrations were in the 40-mile stretch from Hudson Falls to the Troy Lock and Dam, fish as far south as the Tappan Zee, 120 miles downriver, were contaminated...
...People actually liiing in these communities don't share this vision...
...environmentalism...
...Its publication is commonly considered the opening bell of the environmental movement...
...We think the .05 standard is justified," says Ned Sullivan, Scenic Hudson's executive director...
...In 1984, under the Reagan Administration, the EPA investigated the Hudson and concluded that disturbing sediments was likely to cause more damage than it would solve...
...almost five hundred annually...
...This built an important constituency since, as late as the 1970s, more than 200 commercial fishermen still worked the river...
...Meanwhile, the state selected another site, a 100-acre farm owned by Ennio and Sharon Ruggi...
...This new study provides strong evidence that even long-term human exposure to PCBs at higher levels than are found in the environment is not related to an increase in deaths from cancer or any other diseases, she concluded...
...PCBs present from 4,000 to 200,000 ppm...
...Underdeveloped countries-already overpopulated-were now facing astronomical population growth that would quickly wipe out the world's ecosystems...
...Dredge We Must Comings court house mar you...
...Some substances will cause cancer in rats but not guinea pigs or vice versa...
...By 2000 the whole county was in an uproar over dredging...
...n 1999, the Athens Generating Com pany, a division of Pacific Gas & Electric, proposed combined-cycle, natural-gasfired power station in Athens, NewYork...
...PCB concentrations from 6DD-900 ppm, from a variety of industrial sources...
...Biological controls are used wherever possible...
...The long list of anticipated effects-cancer, mutations, muscular dysfunction, impotence-had been induced by feeding extremely high doses to guinea pigs, an animal that proved to be unusually susceptible to its effects.As the long-term results of major public exposures emerged, it became clear that these results do not occur in humans...
...The Riverkeepers were appalled to find the NewYork State Department of Conservation barely interested in their findings...
...In 1973 the dam had been demolished...
...Most hospital disinfectants are chlorine compounds...
...0 ver time, much of the alarm about chlorinated hydrocarbons began to be questioned...
...Everyone nervously awaited the cancer and birth-defects epidemic that was sure to follow Even more disastrous was another chlorinated hydrocar bon-2,3,7,8-tetra chlorodibenzo-p-dioxon or TCDD, colloquially known as "dioxin...
...That put it in the village of Cornwall, where local officials could hardly believe the tax windfall the plant would create...
...These findings are then transferred to human populations, with the conclusion that three people in 1,000 would develop cancer over the course of a lifetime from exposures of 3 ppm...
...One obvious reason is that most creatures are in the business of making the world safe for themselves...
...Cities and towns were developing plans to restore their waterfronts...
...when the EPA turned down dredging as too dangerous in 1984, it left open the possibility that the decision could be reconsidered...
...They were told to apply for damages through small claims court...
...The pest insect is studied carefully to determine exactly where and when it does its damage...
...In truth, when push came to shove, the environmentalists were always ready to jettison the fishermen for their own concerns...
...He was already in a rehabilitation program in 1983 when he was arrested for heroin possession in a South Dakota airport and his addiction became public...
...We were undeterred by trespass laws, since "neces sary to stop a crime in progress" is a defense to trespass in New York State...
...Calling on all her extraordinary talents as a scientist, researcher and lyrical writer, Carson turned out Silent Spring in 1962.The book became an international sensation, going through six printings the first year...
...The judge told us even he isn't allowed to question an EPA decision...
...They first developed chloracne, a severe skin rash, then fatigue, nausea, swelling of the limbs and ultimately liver disorders...
...went to Harvard and to the University ofVirginia Law School.This earned him a stint as an assistant prosecutor in the offices of Manhattan District Attorney Robert Morgenthau...
...To be able to achieve the desired benefits, therefore, the EPA pushed its goal down, to .05 ppm forty times lower than the FDA's safe level for edible fish and a standard not achieved even by animals in many pristine parts of the world...
...Cronin and a volunteer fromVassar Col lege in nearby Poughkeepsie, Karin Limburg, set out to investigate an adhesive tape factory that was dumping huge barrels of waste into the river...
...Hexachlorophene (C13C16H6O7) is a crystalline antibacterial agent often used in soap...
...Besides remarking that "all the little tree birds" seemed to have disappeared after the land had been treated, most of these people reported losses of livestock, poultry, and household pets...
...When the crate came off the truck on Christmas Day, out came a young California sea lion, who took up residence in our swimming pool ...A giant leopard tortoise wandered the rooms of Hickory Hill...
...One young man attracted to the boat was 22-year-old John Cronin, a college dropout who had bummed the West for a year, washing dishes in Phoenix and bagging groceries in Boulder, before settling in the Hudson Valley to paint houses...
...Many...
...EPA agreed to cap the remaining contamination with dean sediment...
...On the long-term side, Carson showed that, unlike most other organic compounds, chlorinated hydrocarbons persisted in the environment for decades...
...Phase 1 will dredge 55,000 cubic yards of sedlrrrem tram 12 acres as a demonstration project...
...Small infestations are tolerated...
...Early efforts to determine toxicity and cancer-causing effects had been achieved by feeding ultrahigh doses to rats, guinea pigs and other lab animals...
...Opponents argued that pumped storage would not work.They claimed it would actually increase air pollution.They expressed a preference for nuclear plants, kerosene-fired turbines, "rninemouth" coal generators," fuel cells, gas turbines-anything and everything except the project at hand...
...And so the matter seemed settled-but not quite.Another group of NewYork City expatriates with country homes on the back of Storm King now found their privacy invaded.As word spread, the group began to explore tactics for delaying or opposing the plant...
...Its broader implications are probably best not discussed in polite company...
...Nor did her naturalist's mind stop there.What would happen to the bees and butterflies that subsisted on these flowers...
...A variety of seaweeds produce chloroform and tetrachloride plus perchloro ethylene and trichloroethylene, two compounds used in dry cleaning...
...At almost exactly the moment when Silent Spring was hitting the best-sell er lists, Consolidated Edison of New York made a proposal for a novel power plant that soon touched off what was to become the environmental movement's first great legal battle...
...In 1939, Swiss chemist Paul Muller discovered that, although harmless to humans, DDT was remarkably toxic against insects, particularly the lice, fleas, and mosquitoes long known to be vectors of typhus, malaria, yellow fever and bubonic plague...
...In January 2001, Scenic Hudson announced it would drop its opposition in exchange for a $2.5 million donation to the Hudson Fisheries Foundation-the same NewYork-based nonprofit that received the $12 million Storm King and $2 million Exxon settlements.The money will be used to buy surrounding property and offset the plant's visual impact, they said...
...Epidemiological studies on industrial workers exposed to TCDD over many years show that it has a weak carcinogenic effect at high-dose exposures and no effect whatsoever at low dose exposure...
...At Boyle's insistence, the utility was forced to pay $12 million to endow a Hudson River Foundation whose mission would be to conduct research on the Hudson fisheries," write Kennedy and Cronin...
...This exhaustspewing thoroughfare's chief public amenity is a 22-foot-wide jogging track and bicycle lane, running its entire 4.2-mile length...
...but rather, in Bob Boyle's words, from 'death by a thousand cuts...
...In March 1999, she published her results in the Journal of Occupational and Environmental Medicine...
...The federal government had already banned most uses of PCBs but allowed their continued use in "closed containers," i.e., electrical transformers and capacitors...
...Although their initial efforts were vastly productive, the Hudson River environmentalists eventually tired of tracking down small-time polluters in obscure river towns such as Newburgh...
...it represents the triumph of truth over deception, good over evil, the will of the people over the massive and relentless anti-environment campaign of a corporate giant...
...The U.S...
...In the fall of 2001, Pulver and Ruggi made a tour of downstate counties, explaining the risks to their drinking water...
...Using his column in Sports Illustrated, Boyle educated the public about pollution and created a strong constituency for cleaning up the river...
...She did key research at Love Canal and influenced the EPA's decision to ban hexachlorophene...
...They collected samples, analyzed them, and took pictures of trucks making deliveries to the plant, drawing a map of 23 illegal discharge points...
...Thirty years later, Robert F Kennedy, Jr., now one of the most prominent environmental lawyers in the Hudson Valley, could write without irony in his book The Riverkeepers (co-written with John Cronin): "The committee quickly found support among the well-heeled residents of the Hudson Highlands...
...Robert F Kennedy, Jr., came from what can only be called a "privieged background...
...In 1827, a Palmyra farm boy named Joseph Smith claimed to have found a set of gold plates that supplemented the Bible and led him to found the Church of the Latter Day Saints...
...Absorbed by plants and insects, they underwent "bio-magniflca tion;' accumulating in greater and greater concentrations as they worked their way up the food chain...
...Are they having trouble with their motor skills?' I told them, `Listen, Fort Edward High School just finished second in the state football championship...
...Then he attended Albany Law School, specializing in environmental law...
...Urgent protests were made by most of the state conservation departments, by national conservation agencies, and by ecologists and even by some entomologists [insect specialists], calling upon the then Secretary of Agriculture, Ezra Benson, to delay the program at least until some research had been done to determine the effects of [chlorinated pesticides] on wild and domestic animals and to find the minimum amount that would control the ants.The protests were ignored...
...Columbia University law professor [Abraham T. Sofaer] who conducted hearings on state pollution charges against the General Electric company said here today that yesterday's agreement to stop the company's chemical contamination of the Hudson River was 'an effective precedent for dealing with situations of joint culpability,"' said the accompanying article...
...are produced by marine and terrestrial plants, bacteria, fungi lichens, insects, marine animals...
...Between 1955 and 1977, manufactur er discharged 400,000 pounds of PCBs into Town Creek, a major tributary of Lake Hartwell...
...Instead of constructing yet another new 1,000-megawatt plant, it would build a 2,000MW hydraulic "storage battery...
...The chemicals to which life is asked to make its adjustment are no longer merely the calcium and silica and copper and all the rest of the minerals washed out of the rocks and carried in rivers to the sea...
...We found ourselves going to meetings until 11 o'clock at night and then getting up at 4:30 a.m...
...Peck studied economics at Cornell, then spent a year as a legislative assistant for Vermont Senator Jim Jeffords, working on agricultural issues...
...At a public hearing in Saratoga Springs, she told officials that people in the Hudson Valley shouldn't be concerned about PCBs...
...Pressure was brought through the U.S...
...Subsequent research, how ever, discounted most of these inferences, which were based on the effects of very high doses ofTCDD on guinea pigs and other peculiarly susceptible animals...
...A broad vista of aching natural beauty, it gave birth to the nation's first school of painting...
...Down in NewYork CityThomas Edison was experimenting with direct current and electrical power stations, while rival genius Nikolai Tesla had invented alternating current...
...Summarizing these studies, the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health (NIOSH) concluded:"One would expect that adverse human health effects from exposure to PCBs, if they exist, would most readily be identified in groups with the greatest exposures...
...Phase 1: EPA dredged 6,000 cubic yards from 500 feet of river...
...But a Pleistocene glacier cut a path through the Hudson Highlands, a 15-mile fiord that stretches from Newburgh Bay to Haverstraw Bay and the Tappan Zee...
...As she drove through the countryside, Carson was troubled by vast dry stretches where the state highway department had used herbicide to keep weeds from encroaching on the roadway Where were the wildflowers that always crowded the roadside at this time of year...
...Bob's deadpan reply was, `Oh, about $2 million...
...Raymond Novak, director of the Institute of Chemical Toxicology at Wayne State University, "you're probably not going to see it...
...Because water was used for power, transport and waste disposal, factories were almost always built next to rivers...
...With the development of chemicals of broad lethal powers, there came a sudden change in the official attitude toward the fire ant...
...Finally, the sloop Clearwater served the Hudson cleanup as another popular rallying point...
...Boston's "Big Dig," which buried its peripheral highway and opened up the waterfront, is just now being completed after twenty years of effort.Westway's biggest amenity would be a 93-acre waterfront park...
...I'c.dlN have turned out to be relatively harmless...
...Even in those days, New York was a tough place to do business, and both men soon moved out of the city to hard-working manufacturing cities upstate.Tesla combined with George Westinghouse, the successful manufacturer of railroad air brakes, to form Westinghouse Electric Company, with a large manufacturing component in the Hudson River city of Albany...
...Carson herself was no sentimentalist about this...
...Human beings have long been exposed to chlorinated hydrocarbons in nature...
...Ostensibly, it is to remove the last 151),I)(1II pounds of PCBs, a chlori nated hydrocarbon that u-as dumped into the riser by General Electric Company from 11)47 to 1977...
...Now that they are manning the steam shovels, environmentalists are much more casual about the impact on nature...
...Although the loss of DDT in American agriculture was not harmful-substitutes were available-scientists in international health and agriculture were not so easily convinced...
...After Cronin collected effluent samples from Exxon's tanker, for instance, he took ajar over to Boyle's house...
...On Superfund projects, the EPA usually awards a Technology Assistance Grant to some local organization as a means of distributing patronage and building support within the community...
...One of the most concentrated sources was GE's plants in Hudson Falls and Fort Edward...
...Spoils were de-watered and placed in local landliNs, Macsen L KY General Motors For mdry...
...I don't think we're having any problem with our motor skills...
...This intensifies the river's tidal shifts, which bring salt water to Newburgh and ebbs and flows as far north as Albany In geological times, the Hudson joined the Delaware and Susquehanna watersheds...
...Of the 209 JANUARY/FEBRUARY 2002 - THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR 55 possible combinations, about six of these gummy, foul-smelling oils proved useful as dielectrics-nonconductors-and fire retardants...
...In 1995, EPA commissioned dredging of 13,000 square yards of sediment,After 32 passed the conuac to concluded that the site couldn't be dewed to the desired level by 4redgi Too much being re-suspended...
...Now it turned out the precise 4.2 miles of Lower Manhattan shoreline-particularly its rotting piers was the striped bass's new "critical habit...
...As patron saints of nature and the nation's bearers of good taste, environmentalists wield enormous power-although they hardly seem to realize it themselves...
...Dredging would bring the fish to a safe level only a few years before it would be achieved by natural degeneration...
...Under Governor DeWitt Clinton, they commissioned the $7 million Erie Canal, a 363-mile series of locks that lifted barges and schooners only four feet over the gentle breast of the central NewYork plain, then lowered them again into Buffalo...
...Nevertheless, GE would look for substitutes...
...In November, Peck founded Farmers Against Irresponsible Remediation to take on the issue...
...His formative years were spent at Hickory Hill, a Virginia estate that he and his family occupied while his father, Robert F Kennedy, was U.S...
...To their astonishment, Cronin and Lim burg found the federal attorneys entirely receptive...
...Just as Rachel Carson had predicted, these highly stable compounds had entered the food chain, being taken up by microorganisms in the sediment and water column, then by insect larvae and hatchlings, and finally by fish that feed on the insects...
...The fish can swim away," says Rich Schiafo, Scenic Hudson's resident expert on dredging...
...It] is now the only major estuary in the East with all spawning stocks of its historical fish species...
...When it comes to environmentalists, Peck eschews sociological explanation...
...In 1981, the National Institute of Occupational Health and Safety (NIOSH) studied 224 workers exposed at an electrical equipment manufacturing plant...
...In offering alternatives to what they criticize as the "reindustrialization" of the Hudson, the river the center of social activity.Yet that is exactly what the Westway attempted to do in NewYork City...
...The state would match its contribution, since it had been partially responsible by permitting GE to dump...
...Cancer mortality among this group was actually lower than among the general U.S...
...and brought it home in a suitcase under diplomatic protection, Kennedy was fourteen when his father was shot dead in Los Angeles just after winning the California Presidential primary...
...By 1996, the entry for "dioxin" in Encyclopedia Britaniiica read as follows: Toxicologists mistakenly concluded from studies on laboratory animals that TCDD was one of the most toxic of all man-made substances...
...The `smell of the ocean,"' Gribble noted, "is prob ably due to these volatile organochlorines and other organohalogens, which seem to serve as antibacterial agents for seaweeds...
...Eighty-five percent of all synthetic pharmaceuticals and vitamins are made directly or indirectly through chlorine chemistry...
...One group that was less than enthusiastic was a little colony of wealthy NewYorkers who had long ago built castles and summer homes in the Hudson Highlands...
...People will be enjoying this park a hundred years from now" said NewYork Governor Mario Cuomo in environmentalists environmentalists are now trying to convince Hudson River communities to "open up their waterfronts to public use and create a mix of commercial and residential development-make JANUARY/FEBRUARY 2002 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR 611 introducing the proposal in 1984...
...Human beings were threatened as well...
...There was a general sense of optimism, even elation, about the condition of the river.The fishery was in better condition than it had been in years ...There was talk that public swimming beaches would soon be open again...
...Basically, I think they're in it for the money," he says...
...The world of chlorinated hydrocarbons was turning into a nightmare, much worse than Rachel Carson had ever predicted...
...senator...
...How would they survive this disruption of nature's food chain...
...Riverkeeper and the Fishermen's Association eventually collected $1.25 million, with the remaining $750,000 going to the state Department of Environmental Conservation...
...We've got 350 milk cows here so we're basically milking round the clock," he says.The cows pasture in the summer, then spend the winter in a free-stall barn where they are kept healthy by giving them room to roam...
...What she did not entirely realize is that much of this terrible intensity involves chemical warfare-a warfare frequently carried on with chemicals similar or identical to the ones we created in our laboratories...
...An early avenue of commerce, it offered NewYork City the first gateway to the Midwest, assuring the city's premier place on the American continent...
...Farming is a $100 million industry in this county," he says...
...Phase 2 will try to dredge 39 miles...
...A replica of an eighteenth-century Dutch sloop, the Clearwater...
...18,000 aces contaminated by factory outflows along the Acushnet River, 1940s to 1970s...
...Suffice to say, to a generation of cleancut American college students looking for ways to "oppose the Establishment," it all made sense...
...Fox River Wisconsin...
...One is a habit of shaking money out of opponents in a manner that bears an uncanny resemblance to good-old-fashioned municipal graft...
...We're not going to settle that one," he said with conviction...
...then eventually embedded 1n concrete and shipped oil by rail for ultimate disposal near Buffalo or Houston.When this is all done...
...Knowledge that had been passed on for six generations came to a dead end...
...The road to Middle America was open...
...A mighty campaign was announced, in which the federal government . . . would ultimately treat some 20,000,000 acres in nine southern states...
...By the time all this was sorted out, however, Niagara Mohawk had decided to raze its aging Fort Edward Dam, which was no longer in use and considered a hazard...
...These findings are then extrapolated downward...
...As PCBs break down they become more water-soluble...
...Much more persistent than DDT, they seemed to be ubiquitous...
...We feel the fund will help mitigate the adverse impact of the plant," he said...
...launched in 1969, plied the river carrying supportive entertainers like Pete Seeger, and bringing publicity and education on environmental issues to river communities...
...Quite the contrary, they are useful precisely because they are harmful...
...Although later analysis showed that PCBs themselves were not the culprit (see Welch, p. 65), because of the Yusho incident Monsanto voluntarily discontinued production of PCBs...
...General Motors PaAwtrain facility emitted PCB fluids in hydraulic madrinery...
...Carson brought the concept of positive and negative feedback loops to studies of the environment...
...They knocked on the door at 6 o'clock one evening and announced they would be taking our farm," recalls Ruggi...
...They are...
...In this age of engineering innocence, Con Ed was so enthusiastic about its technology that it provided a cutaway drawing showing the underground tunnels that would run beneath the mountain.As the picture circulated, some people got the impression that this pie-slice view of the mountain's interior would be the way the mountain would look when the project was finished...
...he concluded "that 64 percent of the striped bass habitat would be destroyed...
...Rather than strive for "zero pollution" or "total clean- up," government agencies should evaluate the risks and set reasonable goals that can be achieved without creating fur ther environmental disruption...
...Whereas an ordinary steam plant needs more than an hour to get going, the turbines at Storm King could come online almost instantly...
...Just why environmentalists opposed the Westway will probably never be understood...
...Instead, they are relatively harmless residues that creatures have been exposed to and carried around in their bodies for eons...
...With one neighboring farm family, the Pulvers founded CEASE-Citizen Environmentalists Against Sludge Encapsulation-to oppose the dredging...
...According to Kennedy and Cronin, at least one committed suicide...
...Another more important deviation is that they have forgotten the lesson of Rachel Carson's Silent Sprin`,--that it is better to work with nature than against it...
...When the dawn failed to bring the Second Coming, Miller and his followers sheepishly climbed down again and resumed their daily rounds...
...Now, with commercial fishing effectively banned, fish populations thrived...
...discharged liquid into a holding pond at fifty gallons per niinute.We took samples by swimming the pond in wet suits at night...
...Consequently it was not in place to prevent the Great Blackout of July 1977, a much uglier affair that set off widespread riots, wreaked a billion dollars in damages and nearly brought the city to its knees.Yet even this historic event-which would have been prevented by Storm King-has disappeared from environmental memory...
...Ned Sullivan, executive director of Scenic Hudson, still defends the agreement...
...They were not "novel chemicals" wreaking havoc on our unprepared immune systems...
...I've been around Washington and to me this smells like a fitndraiser.They need this Hudson issue to dun their members...
...Over the years, Hudson River environmentalists have made a habit of extracting financial settlements from their victories...
...Putting three chlorine atoms on methane (CH4) produces chloroform (CCI3H), the anesthesia...
...When I hear Scenic Hudson and the Sierra Club making their nasty little remarks about how we're just a bunch of backwoods farmers up here and don't know anything, I get really annoyed," she says...
...Manistique Harbor Midli gan.1.7 square mile area of Manistique Bay in lake Michigan...
...The agreement was announced on September 9, 1976, with a front-page story in The New York Times headlined, "G.E.-State Pact on PCB Is Praised As Guide in Other Pollution Cases...
...Over the next decade, 51 Yusho patients died, eleven due to cancer, more than 50 percent higher than would have been expected in a similar population...
...That question was answered, more or less in the affirmative, by Paul Ehrlich, who published the next holy writ of the environmental movement, The Population Bonib, in 1968...
...Proposed (CK) treatment by thermat separation, carbon adsorption...
...Thus, to these people, it is the process of dredging itself that is perceived as the risk to their enjoyment of the river and a risk to their economic livelihoods...
...They won by a 2to-1 majority in 2001 in an election dominated by the dredging issue...
...Muller won the Nobel Prize in 1948 for his efforts...
...Although the EPA never fails to iiicIitioII "suspected carcinogen" in its press releases, the ,~,ti.Il •cientitic justification for the dredging is some sketchv and con tested evidence that PCBs may cause some temporarv retarda non 1-11 learning or motor skills among infants ,,,-ho are highly exposed in the womb...
...million-one ounce in 32 tons or a re•i spoon over five acres.Working eight een hours a day for five years, tl...
...Silent Spring is still an extraordinary book, worthy of the many prizes it has received...
...By ordinary standards, some of Kennedy's early experiences with "nature" and "wild JANUARY/FEBRUARY 2002 • THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR 59 ness" actually seem to resemble those of a Turkish pasha...
...And how would they affect humans if their residue began climbing the food chain...
...Using prison labor provided by the state and funds from the settlement of the Storm King case, I was [soon] transforming a compound of farmhouses on the Osborn family estate into a scientific field station for the study and protection of the Hudson River...
...What is not generally recognized," he wrote, "is that more than 1,800 naturally occurring organochlorine compounds have been identified.These organchloride...
...Meanwhile, "brownouts" and electrical shortages were on the rise...
...We haven't found any suggestion of increased risk," Kenneth Wilcox, chief of the bureau, told the Detroit News in 1997...
...Instead, Scenic Hudson, the Clearwater, Riverkeeper and the Hudson River Fishermen's Association found it more rewarding to join high-profile controversies, where their interests were tangential...
...Based largely on Kimbrough's findings, the conference recommended that PCBs be considered as a human carcinogen...
...Here is how it evolved...
...Using chlorine to alter organic molecules may create harmful chemicals but that doesn't mean other creatures haven't used them...
...Water from the Hudson would be pumped uphill overnight using otherwise idle generating capacity, then released again to drive the turbines during the next day's peak consumption hours...
...On probation, his career in shambles, Kennedy took a volunteer job with the Natural Resources Defense Council...
...In Sri Lanka, it went from 2.8 million to 17...
...The Storm King battle spawned a whole group of HudsonValley environmental groups, some thoroughly blue-blooded, others of which made credible attempts to build popular support...
...When FAIR contested the EPA's September 2001 Record of Decision, however, it found that, under Superfund law, no one is allowed to challenge a remedial action until after the project is completed "There's basically no opportunity for public input," he says...
...military in Vietnam...
...Housatonic Rim Pittsfeld, Mass...
...On the Upper Hudson-where local communities almost unanimously oppose the dredgingit is dairy farmers who worry about the resuspension of toxins...
...I had captured it in Kenya's northern frontier in 1963 during a safari with my cousin Bobby Shriv er and his father, Peace Corps director Sargent Shriver...
...Fishing, boating and rearion north of Albany will end for .1t least live years...
...District Attorney's Office...
...Accumulating in birds, they mimicked natural hormones and, Jensen surmised, were probably responsible for the eggshell-thinning phenomenon that had been observed in several major species...
...We were happy with our lives...
...With all these regulations coming down, we could be hurt badly without knowing something was coming...
...Being an environmentalist means never having to admit you're wrong...
...On the train ride down I joked with Karin Limburg that it was we, not the company, who were headed for trouble...
...Both generate heat...
...The adhesive company was forced to pay a $205,000 fine...
...What would be their long-term effect...
...The problem, Carson wrote, was that human beings were now being asked to develop biological defenses to novel chemicals at an impossible pace...
...Within days Kennedy had met the Hudson River's new "Riverkeeper," 34-year-old John Cronin...
...PCBs present at 390 ppm...
...In 1975, the Environmental Protection Agency sponsored a National Conference of Polychlorinated Biphenyls...
...I had some pretty unpleasant conversations with Whitman after that, but nothing happened...
...This lack of community involvement has contributed to the impasse relative to the appropriate course of action to be taken on the Hudson River...
...I began to see the environment not as a privilege that was part of my affluent background, but as a right for every American, one that was being subverted by greedy, powerful, and corrupt interests within our society...
...70-75% of the organochlorine substances in the River Rhine can only be explained by these natural chlorination processes " Among these natural compounds are PCBs...
...GE would pay $3.5 million for a river cleanup fund...
...Would they kill just weeds or other plants as well...
...As with all groups who think they represent good against evil, environmentalists often commit their own excesses...
...Substituting chlorine for hydrogen in a carbon chain often produces surprising results...
...To some people on the upper Hudson River, the process of dredging is perceived as "coercion" and is seen as being controlled by "others...
...If contaminants at the bottom i "rt II,I c nded stirred up and carried doyn5n-e:un--existing Irrisation practices will spread them across hundreds of res of prince tartnland.Tsvns that now- draw' their inking water from the Hudson may be Iook for new supplies.Wildlife will be chased Dither and von by this shoreline-to-shore line operation...
...Testing TCDD on guinea pigs, scientists soon called it "one of the most toxic substances known to man...
...Federal JudgeThomas P Griesa bought the entire argument about the magically appearing striped bass and scuttled the project...
...Soon the company's manufacturing complex stretched from Schenectady-where it employed 40,000 to Pittsfield, east of the river in Massachusetts...
...Almost as soon as she took office a year ago, EPA Administrator Christie Whitman faced the question of reaffirming the Clinton Administration's decision on the Hudson...
...Terrestrial organisms synthesize similar compounds...
...some higher animals, and a few mammals, including man...
...In 1966, Jensen revealed his findings in Britain's New Scientist...
...Up to W 27 miles of estuary along the Palo Verdes Teft Mostly DDT from Los Angeles Sewer System but some PCSs from a Westinghouse plant...
...With blood concen trations at .3 ppm, they showed no ill effects, not even chloracne...
...At first, electrical companies used organic oils as coolant, but these proved volatile, internally emitting gas that could explode when hit by a spark...
...Ehrlich was contemptuous of international health practitioners, whom he called "death controllers...
...It's our farms and livelihoods at stake...
...Broad use of DDT in the Third World had improved crop yields and virtually wiped out malaria, which had previously killed three million a year and sickened hundreds of millions more...
...U ne result of Silent Spring was that wholesale spraying was replaced by "integrated pest management...
...People who handled them for hcades in an occupational setting have proved to have lower cancer rates than the rest the population...
...In 1976 it emerged that a Michigan grain company had accidentally filled grain bags with another organic halogen, polybrominated biphenyls-PBBs, also used as a fire retardant.The feed sacks had been delivered to farmers, who had fed the PBBs to their cattle.The mistake was only noted when hundreds of cattle got sick and died...
...They thought it was just a matter of punishing GE...
...Today only about 25 commercial fishermen remain on the river...
...T]he communities along the Hudson River are not a part of any active decisionmaking processes, despite an elaborate community involvement structure that has been established (see www.epa.gov/hudson/ public-participation.htm...
...Birds and fish were particu larly susceptible...
...It's easy enough for them to sit down there talking about dredging, but we're the ones who will have to live with it for five years...
...But it has always been the favorite fantasy of the Hudson's landed aristocracy-possibly the closest thing America has ever come to producing a true leisure class...
...Because they so often find themselves pitted against the economic interests of local populations, environmentalists never hesitate to resort to larger arguments...
...is the microbial product vancomycin, the antibiotic and the drug of choice to treat penicillin-resistant Staphylococcus infections...
...By its own standards, the EPA is preparing to spend $500 million-all of it billable to General Electric-to ensure that a woman with child can live by subsistence fishing along the Hudson River...
...Go back and read it: All concepts about living with nature that have become second nature to us-diminishing returns, the law of unintended consequences, working with nature instead of against it-leap out of its pages...
...Lake Hartwell...
...Even dioxins, thought be a colossal mistake of human manufacture, occur naturally...
...times chosen by the EPA project managers, not the community...
...Predictably, malaria has made a ferocious comeback...
...It is also cheaper...
...PCBs are created by joining two doublebonded phenyl rings and substituting chlorine at any of the eight hydrogen bonds.The more chlorine, the more stable and less watersoluble the molecule becomes...
...As the dump trucks labor night and day, as the lawsuits pile up on how to get rid of the mountains of silt, as it becomes clear that all this is being undertaken for virtually no purpose whatsoever, the real agenda will become clear.The Hudson River dredging is the en-,ironmentalists'Ahab-like pursuit of the vision that nature can be completely cleansed of every vestige of industrial society...
...Once the river's course spills into the broadTappan Zee, however, its path is clear to NewYork Harbor...
...One is to tell the poor that the rich have too much money.The other is to tell the rich that there are too many poor people...
...I told her that when we had finished presenting our evidence to the U.S.Attorney, he would quietly usher us into another room where federal marshals would take as way, never to be seen again...
...It's used in Great Lakes fish...
...Then they packed their information in a box and took the train to NewYork City to show the U.S...
...John and I climbed on [the company's] roof to check the emissions sources...
...Immediately after World War II, DDT was used to wipe out malaria in tropical regions and the swamplands of southern Europe and America...
...One man was "irate against the control workers...
...Marilyn Pulver from Fort Edwards went to New York City for the EPA announcement...
...Irving Selikoff, the country's leading expert in occupational cancers, to study the problem...
...People were alarmed at the loss of natural beauty but concerns went much deeper...
...In 1962, Con Edison revealed plans for putting a pumped storage hydroelectric generating plant behind Storm King Mountain, at the northern end of the Hudson Highlands...
...None of the published occupational or epidemiological studies, however, have shown that occupational exposure to PCBs is associated with any adverse health outcome...
...One group of millennialists, led by one William Miller, climbed a mountain in upstate NewYork on October 22, 1844, to await the End of the World...
...Electricity cannot be stored on a large scale-it is used as it is produced.As a result, Con Ed was continually forced to add new generating capacity, even though peak loads might occur only one or two days each year...
...As Kennedy and Cronin point out, the Hudson is now "one of the richest water bodies on earth, producing more fish per acre and more biomass per gallon than any of the other major estuaries in the North Atlantic...
...Scenic Hudson opposed the plant, however, on grounds of incompatibility with the surrounding scenery...
...I grew up in the city of Yonkers," wrote Cronin...
...Chlorinated hydrocarbons accumulated in fat tissues, simulating metabo lites and possibly interfering with reproduction...
...Would anything ever grow again on this tainted ground...
...2 aces affected...
...to give Bob Boyle a sniff, hydrocarbon fumes filled his living room...
...Tracing huge naphthalene discharges back to an Anna Textile plant, Kennedy and Cronin engaged in a bit of cloak-and-dagger...
...in Technology magazine...
...Federal transportation funds would pay most of the costs...
...Project not yet underway...
...Eradicate" was a word she wished to eradicate from the people's minds...
...Environmentalists argued that dredging techniques have been improved, so that resuspension of contaminants was no longer a problem...
...In 1972despite a recommendation from its own scientific committee that DDT was doing no noticeable harm to human beings or wildlife the newly formed Environmental Protection Agency yielded to popular pressures and banned DDT from manufacture and use in the United States...
...The additional power would also be available instantly in case of power failures...
...Determined to see the matter through to the end,Welch began an investigation of the long-term effects of PCBs at GE plants...
...On the Delaware River, environmentalists oppose dredging for connriercial navigation, because it would "reintroduce toxics into the water column and the food chain-toxics which are now held captive on the river floor by the sediments...
...The Hudson River community involvement process used by EPA does not appear to allow community involvement in any decisionmaking or even in problem formulation phases and does not appear to be responsive to community needs and frustrations...
...After extensive investigation, including a public hearing in Albany, the committee published a 400-page report, A Risk Management Strategy for PCB-Contaminated Sediment...
...The PCBs backed up behind it had gone cascading down the Hudson toward the Troy Lock and Dam 40 miles to the south...
...Surveys show they command five times as much public respect as American industry and four times as much as elected officials.When they have been willing to do the heavy lifting, environmentalists have also made enormous contributions to American life, transforming the way we think about industry and nature...
...are identical to their manmade counterparts...
...Renate Kimbrough, who published the original PCB rat studies in 1975, went on to become one of the world's leading experts on chlorinated hydrocarbons...
...Cronin was immediately captivated...
...What is rlie purpose of all this...
...All this was done by wildly overestimating the dangers of the pest insect and with complete disregard for the consequences to people on the ground...
...All the support for dredging comes from environmentalists, who want to punish GE and people who have fallen for the demagoguery about PCBs.They don't care about the people living up here...
...To adjust to these chemicals would require time on the scale that is nature's...
...Although the report does not specifically condemn plans for Hudson River dredging, the committee frequently cited EPA's efforts in the Hudson Valley as a classic example of how not to go about solving problems: The strategy selected should be one that actually reduces overall risk, not merely transfers risk to another site or another affected population...
...One of the most widely known and respected wildlife biologists in the country, Dr...
...By all accounts, the community is allowed to provide input or feedback to the planning processes at selective times...
...I've never seen why that was such a problem...
...It began in 1828 when 28-year-old Freidrich Wohler synthesized urea, the main component of urine, shattering forever the notion that the chemicals in living organisms contained a "vital force" that forever separated them from the rest of the chemical world...
...In 1982, Dr...
...But her description of these chemicals as a Faustian invention promising destruction of the natural world was wrong...
...Over the next fifteen years, Scenic Hudson and other Storm King opponents led New York through an incredible maze of alarms and conflicting claims that have come to typify most environmental battles...
...Their efforts were spectacularly fruitful...
...GE received a permit from New York State to continue this small discharge.The material quickly settled into the silt that had long backed up behind the Niagara Mohawk hydroelectric dam at the south end of Fort Edward...
...Support among the Hudson River's 200-or-so commercial fishermen, however, proved short-lived...
...Attaching chlorine atoms to organic molecules had produced a witches' brew that seemed to portend disaster for the human race...
...What has been forgotten is that the biggest villain of the book is heedless bureaucracies...
...Overloading an animal's system with almost anything can produce adverse effects...
...Kimbrough is now reviled by environmentalists for being in the pay of GE...
...Yet all this has now fallen under a shadow...
...They formed the Scenic Hudson Preservation Committee...
...In 1980, for example, the Scenic Hudson- Fishermen's alliance finally cornered Con Ed with a federal order to build closed-cycle cooling towers at Indian Point, in order to prevent fish kills caused by taking water from the river.The fishermen favored the cooling towers, but Scenic Hudson didn't want them marring the landscape...
...Given complete access to GE's records since the 1940s, Selikoff began investigating the occupational hazards of PCBs...
...A]s a consequence e should expect to find it one of the least responsive of the classes of society of the demands which the situation makes for a further ;,rowth of institutions and a readjustment to an altered industrial situation.The leisure class is the conservative class...
...In 1964, Swedish researcher Soren Jensen began searching for evidence of chlorinated hydrocarbons in Europe...
...Another significant event was the 1920s development of polychlorinated biphenyls...
...As they wrote in Riverkeepeis, the Newburgh project "dovetailed with our growing realization that the Hudson's apocalypse was less likely to come from a catastrophic mega project like Storm King...
...I felt like I had just sent a four-hundredfooter into the Yankee Stadium bleachers," Cronin recalls in Riverkeepers...
...A quick inventory of the chemicals industry revealed they had been used in paints, solvents and paper products such as "carbonless copy paper...
...If not, then we can go ahead with the rest: We thought we had a win-win situation, but on the day of the announcement the Washington EPA called and said, `The cat is already out of the bag...
...I realized that was the one place we were vulnerable," he says...
...DDT was already detectable in "parts per million"-the new terminology-in mothers' milk...
...As Europe and American entered a war fought extensively in the tropics, DDT proved a miraculously valuable resource...
...Then they would load up on fresh water for Exxon's Aruba refinery...
...Department ofAgriculture, which was carrying on scorched-earth policies, spraying entire regions of Alabama or Indiana, killing everything from cows to crawdads, in a futile attempt to eradicate a single species of insect-usually a moderate pest such as the fire ant or gypsy moth...
...Marilyn and David Pulver had lived on their Washington County dai far for ry m ten years when NewYork State Department ofEnvironmental Conservation officials announced in 1979 that they would be purchasing an adjoining 220acre farm, to dispose of several million cubic yards of PCB-laden sludge dredged from the Hudson River...
...y the time the anonymous mentor told Dustin Hoffman to consider "plastics" in the 1966 film The Graduate, organic chemistry was over a hundred years old...
...Despite having PCB blood concentrations as high as 3.5 ppm, they showed no adverse effects.The same year, NIOSH studied maintenance workers exposed to PCBs at two utility companies...
...In 1989 the EPA dredged 10,000 cubic yards of sediment from five acres of 'hot spots, containing 45 percent of the PCSs Dredging reduced contamination, although there was considerable re-suspension...
...For decades this courageous little band of aristocrats and their admirers have fought a rear-guard action against power plants, factories, and anything to do with industrial life...
...Today, ironically, New York City is just completing a five-mile, eight-lane "boulevard," once again sealing off Lower Manhattan from the Hudson River...
...Attorney's Office, however, and eventually DEC leveled $350,000 in fines...
...During the Clinton administration, on a petition from the State of NewYork, the federal agency began reconsidering...
...The Castle Rock Field Station would include a fully equipped laboratory, overnight quarters for field scientists, and offices for environmental advocacy groups...
...The entire river was poisoned...
...The strategy avoids the boomerang of growing genetic resistance and destruction of helpful insects that comes with attempts at complete eradication...
...But they also have their own agenda...
...Widfiatnr Trcker is aurlr(,r t)( Progress and Privilege: Anierica in the Age of Environmentalism...
...But environmentalists produced an expert who, according to Rieerkeepeis, examined the same data...
...Experiments have produced cancer in lab animals by giving them large doses of vitamin C or salt water...
...in essence, ThorsteinVeblen's "leisure class," the secondand third-generation plutocrats who have reached the conclusion that, now that their trust fund is paying good distributions, niaking money isn't all that important anymore: The leisure class is in great measure shel tered from the stress of those economic exi gencies which prevail in any modern, high ly organized industrial community...
...EPA now deW ng whether Phase 2 is worth the effort...
...We found plenty of crimes in progress on Annals roof...
...By the late 19th century, researchers were exploring the seemingly endless new possibilities of the large carbon chains that form the backbone of organic molecules...
...The most common use, however, was electrical capacitors and transformers, which were often discarded in garbage dumps, where the PCBs leaked into the environment...
...Upon closer analysis,Jensen discovered most of these chlorinated residues were an entirely different class of molecule, PCBs...
...In 1826, the Marquis de Lafayette fired a cannon in Buffalo that was answered by a succeeding volley every five miles all the way down the Canal, the Mohawk and the Hudson, until its echo reached New York Harbor two hours later...
...Ironically, this did wonders for the fish population...
...Carbon tetrachloride (HC14), the simplest substitution, is a powerful solvent...
...Carson was correct in arguing that these chemicals were being absurdly overutilized by heedless bureaucrats in the 1950s...
...Today Marilyn Pulver is supervisor of the Town of Fort Edward and Ruggi sits with her on the town council...
...All the middle and upper riverbank counties except Dutchess-home of Scenic Hudson-agreed to stay neutral or oppose the dredging...
...Local economies HUN, never be the same...
...Probably not one in a thousand could tell you that, but for Hudson River environmentalists, they might be enjoying a 93-acre waterfront park...
...The total pool of chlorinated compounds in peat bogs in Sweden is several hundred million kilograms, in areas of Sweden where these chemicals can only be of natural origin...
...The EPA decision [to dredge];' Alex Matthiessen, the executive director of Riverkeeper, tells his members, "represents more than just a regulatory victory...
...Different animals also have different metabolisms...
...And what about the pesticides such as DDT that were being used indiscriminately on everything from rose gardens to 10,000-acre cotton farms...
...Altogether...
...Since there is no evidence that PCBs cause cancer, EPA concentrated on studies that show some potential harm to infants exposed to PCBs in utero...
...After spending an afternoon hammering nails and singing sea chanteys with Seeger, he signed on as an unpaid assistant...
...Some babies born to exposed mothers appeared smaller than normal...
...When she reached Maine, Carson found the wildflower spraying was the talk of the event...
...later wrote...
...attorney general and later U.S...
...T kings have changed considerably since Rachel Carson first argued that chlorinated hydrocarbons were a novelty in nature...
...If the fish don't like it, they can move to New Jersey," complained NewYork Mayor Ed Koch, to no avail.A study by the NewYork State Department of Environmental Protection and the Army Corps of Engineers had projected that Westway construction would harm the habitat for less than .04 percent of the Hudson River's striped bass...
...PCBs were manufactured under the name Aroclor by the Swan Corporation, later bought by Monsanto Chemical Company of St...
...He had darted or lassoed them in Canada and brought them across the border in the trunk of his El Camino...
...South Carolina...
...Much to everyone's surprise, Dr...
...Estimated 33 tons of PCBs from paper mills that manufactured carbonless copy paper...
...This was considered conclusive proof that a substance is carcinogenic...
...His death, of course, was the traumatic experience of young Robert's life...
...If you haven't seen (cancer) in twenty years," added Dr...
...My constituents want to see the river cleaned, but they don't want to see their lives ruined in the process...
...Now the company made a surprising proposal...
...Diver-assisted dredging proposed...
...In particular, Carson singled out DDT the popular pesticide that was already losing some of its value in American agriculture because of overuse...
...The reporters kept asking us, `Are your children a little retarded up there...
...Public opinion is probably 80-to-20 in opposition to the dredging up here," says Pulver...
...Asked whether Scenic Hudson would settle for a buyout on the Hudson River dredging, however, he was adamant...
...In the partsper-billion range in rodents, dioxin could cause muscular dysfunction, inflammations, impotency, birth defects, genetic mutations, and nervous disorders...
...A variety of conformnants including arsenic, cadmium, copper lead, Zinc, chromium, nicke1, mercury from storm runoff and contaminated groundwater of industrial operations...
...I was a mother raising small children," she recalls...
...The most notable was NewYork City's effort to rebuild the collapsed West Side Highway as the Westway...
...General Electric Company used Aroclor, adapted and renamed Pyronol, in the capacitors built at its plants in Hudson Falls and Fort Edward...
...All this inspired Kennedy to believe they were part of a vast popular upheaval...
...At high doses, a certain number may develop cancer...
...B ill Peck is a 32-year-old Saratoga County dairy farmer living on a homestead his family has owned for six generations...
...Fishermen and maverick citizens began calling them with tips about midnight dumps and secret polluters.At one point they caught Exxon sending oil tankers 50 miles upriver to Hyde Park-home of the Roosevelts-in order to rinse their holds, often within 1,500 feet of a municipal drinking-water intake...
...Each weekend this narrow strip of asphalt is overwhelmed by runners, walkers, bicyclists, roller bladers, and every kind of fitness buff...
...By the 1840s, western New York was America's "Midwest," a sea of farmlands and budding communities that attracted immigrants from the East Coast.These "frontier" towns spawned utopian communities, millennial sects and whole new religions...
...Soon the major NewYork newspapers launched a campaign to "Save Storm King...
...By the 1940s, upstate New York was one of the most prosperous areas of the country, with GE its most esteemed corporate citizen...
...Even today the river is a centerpiece of commerce and history...
...in 1972, hard-core environmentalists went after it worldwide...
...Experience soon proved, for example, that the coronation of dioxin as "one of the most toxic chemicals ever synthesized by man" was vastly exaggerated...
...It decided against dredging...
...By the 1990s, under pressure from agencies such as the U.S...
...With the advent of air conditioning, electrical consumption had soared to unprecedented heights...
...In conjunction with the United Brotherhood of Electrical Workers, GE hired Dr...
...Attorney General's Office immediately brought suit under the new 1972 Clean Water Act...
...Because of inevitable contamination, DEC said, the Pulvers would be unable to put their cows out to pasture or grow any more crops...
...The real purpose of the dredging will be to prove to the people of the Hudson Valley that nineteenth and twentieth century industrialization was a gigantic mistake-a 'pollution-based prosperity" that never should have happened in the first place...
...What were going to be the repercussions...
...Many of its founding members were the children and grandchildren of the...
...Several studies have demonstrated that the natural production of chlorinated phenols outweighs their anthropogenic [i.e., man-made] sources...
...Utopian communities and farm villages soon grew into cities...
...Cronin and Kennedy built a popular following in towns along the river...
...64 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR • JANUARY/FEBRUARY 2002...
...They said we didn't have any choice-there was no sense in fighting it...
...More than half of this amount-8200.00--was awarded to Riverkeeper and its subsidiary, the Quassaic Creek Fund...
...There are, in fact, far more lead residues than PCBs in the sediments, the result of paper manufacturing, but since the lead cannot be tied to GE or any other deep-pocketed corporation, the EPA generally ignores them...
...In fact, normally occurring exposure to TCDD appears to be less of a carcinogenic risk than similar exposure to asbestos, radon, or cigarette smoke...
...In other words, Rachel Carson's condemnation was premature...
...the EPA will their dig up another 2 billion pounds of sand and gravel front somewhere and dump it back into the river, trying to recreate the aquatic environment...
...Perhaps the most medicinally important...
...PCBs deposited by implosion at a GE transformer manufacturing facility...
...Did we want to go back to malaria epidemics...
...NewYork State, however, was determined to push ahead...
...As Kennedy wrote,"The fishermen gave environmentalism its human face...
...All the support is from environmentalists way down the river, especially NewYork City...
...Another group of Scenic Hudson members turned to the national stage and founded the Natural Resources Defense Council, which, along with the Sierra Club and the Environmental Defense, forms the Big Three of mainstream U.S...
...But that is only the official explanation...
...Most gave up or drifted away...
...If there's resuspension of lead or any of these newer PCB compounds, a lot of farmers are going to be put out of business...
...Now the peak loads were occurring in summer and consumption was rising to unprecedented heights...
...The organization is supposed to use the grant to assemble scientific information on the case and make it available to all parties.With Hudson dredging, the EPA's $45,000 TAG went to the Scenic Hudson Preservation Council, headquartered in Poughkeepsie, ninety miles away...
...In Sardinia, the annual death toll was reduced from 50,000 to seven in three years...
...In the most comprehensive study ever undertaken, also published in 1981, NIOSH studied cancer mortality among 2,500 capacitor plant workers, more than half of whom had spent at least twenty years on the job...
...Portions of Hudson's bed near Newburgh, fifty miles north of New York City, are actually below sea level...
...We're farming thousands of acres in the floodplain, with a lot of farmers using the river for irrigation...
...I was raised in that house, the third of eleven brothers and sisters, drawn from the beginning to nature and wilderness, and lucky enough to be able to see some of the prettiest places on earth...
...The one consistency of environmental positions is that they are always anti-commerce...
...Cronin was assigned to the "People's Pipewatch," a project conceived by Tom Whyatt, an activist whom Boyle-borrowing an old idea from Europe-had appointed as the Hudson's first official "Riverkeeper...
...PCBs present only at 25 ppm...
...Phase I will dredge 2.5 miles of inland waterway...
...PBBs were found in milk, meat, and eggs, and had entered the bodies of 90 percent of the people living in Michigan...
...Within a year they had negotiated a settlement...
...First and foremost was the U.S...
...Obvious candidates for modifying organic chemicals were halogens-light gases that substitute easily for hydrogen in hydrocarbons.The most common halogen is chlorine, which is ubiquitous in sodium chloride, the common table salt that fills the world's oceans...
...Dusted onto uniforms, it saved an estimated half a million American soldiers' lives in the Pacific, Southeast Asia, North Africa and Southern Italy...
...After 1947, the electrical industry began substituting PCBs to reduce flres.They were so successful that fire insurance underwriters and even city building codes began requiring them for any transformer used near human haunts, such as households, hospitals, locomotives and ships...
...Slowly but surely, scientists have come to realize that they are actually quite common...
...We proposed to take things one step at a time," says Sweeney whom environmentalists contemptuously dismiss as "the Congressman from GE...
...Although they embraced the environmental cleanup, the 1976 FDA order against eating Hudson River fish turned them against the purists...
...This method has basic flaws.As Paracelus, the sixteenth century dean of toxicologists wrote: "All things are toxic, only the dose matters...
...In 1968, on the island of Kyushu, Japan, PCBs were accidentally mixed into rice oil in higher concentrations2,000-3,000 ppm-and consumed by some of the island's inhabitants...
...These animals have short life spans...
...They had no idea what was going on," says Pulver...
...In 211,14, rhc Environmental Protection Administration ss•iil hevi:h the largest dredging operation in history n 1 quixotic attempt to rid the Hudson of the 1,1,, traces of a relatively harmless industrial chemical present only it] a few parts 1...
...Although unexpected, these results have been duplicated many times...
...The humic acids in decaying wood routinely combine with chlorine from soil microbes to produce chemicals very similar to our herbicides and pesticides...
...More than 1,300 people became ill with what was called "Yusho disease...
...AhPeto Verdes, California...
...In the 1980s, dioxin was implicated in a variety of illnesses stemming from illegal dumping of chemical wastes in Times Beach, Missouri.The entire town was evacuated...
...Hospital, prisons, businesses, municipalities-almost everyone was found to be dumping wastes directly into the Hudson...
...it would require not merely years of a man's life but the life of generations...
...Uncle Jimmy's house in Bel Air was filled with giant aquariums housing sharks, abalone, octopus and other creatures...
...Even when birds or aquatic animals were not killed outright by spraying, the bio-magnification of long-lived chlorinated hydrocarbons might still drive them to extinction...
...Clarence Cottam, called on some of the farmers whose property had been treated...
...In 2000, the National Research Council, the principal agency of the National Acade NOVEMBER/DECEMBER • THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR 63 my of Sciences, established a 15-member committee to study the problem of PCB remediation...
...He soon found residues everywhere-in soil, plants, birds and mammals-so much, in fact, that he became convinced it all couldn't be DDT...
...In 1991, GE approached her to expand Dr...
...In the end, the Storm King plant was never built...
...Most of us walk unseeing through the world," she wrote,"unaware alike of its beauties, its wonders, and the strange and sometimes terrible intensity of the lives that are being lived about us...
...Cronin was hired to a paid position with a local pollution-hunting group, Project Pipeline, and spent the next two years bringing identical cases...
...They think we're not smart enough to understand our own interest...
...Con Ed agreed to move the plant around the corner of Storm King, facing Newburgh Bay...
...malarial deaths in Africa are now the highest in history...
...marine who lived in Westchester, Boyle pulled together a coalition of commercial and sports fishermen, around the issue of river pollution...
...Only when the crop is in imminent danger does the farmer resort to wholesale spraying and then injudicious amounts...
...EPA plans to excavate a 40-mil stretch north ofAlbany of nearly 2. r million cubic yards of silt .itic mud-enough to cover 40 tooth• I fields to a height of five stories.ThcIe spoils will he carted off by huge dump trucks to who-knows-where, to be spread upon the landscape in "de-water ing" ponds...
...The first tenant '[was] the Hudson River Fishermen's Association...
...Agency for International Development, most Third World countries had banned DDT, even for dusting inside houses where it is phenomenally effective...
...Still, PCBs seemed only part of a much larger problem-halogenated hydrocarbons in general...
...Of course, the catastrophic blackouts that Con Ed had predicted if the Storm King Plant wasn't built never occurred," Robert F Kennedy, Jr...
...Another break through was dichloro-diphenyltrichloroethane-DDT, originally synthesized in 1874...
...Phase 2 will dredge 3,000 feet of Sit cum Waterway and 5,200 feet of Milwaukee Waterway...
...The New }ark Times announced that "dangerous" levels of PCBs had been discovered in the Hudson...
...The equivalent in environmental remediation is the emerging strategy of "risk management...
...Then on August 6, 1975, all optimism came to an end...
...The basic principle is that you have to learn to live with a few pest insects.What integrated pest management seeks to avoid is the extremes of disastrous infestation or self-defeating efforts at "eradication...
...After twenty years of monitoring 4,000 people heavily exposed to PBBs in the Michigan cattle-feed epidemic, the Michigan Department of Community Health's Bureau of Epidemiology similarly found no long-term effects...
...If 30 percent of the animals contract cancer at exposures of 3,000 ppm, it is presumed that .03 percent would get cancer at 3 ppm...
...As Allan Talbot documented in the 1968 book PowerAlong the Hudson, until 1950 electrical usage in NewYork City peaked on Christmas Day when Con Ed's system was strained by millions of Christmas lights and newly assembled toy trains...
...Millions of tons of dairy products were destroyed...
...When my brother and I were very young, my mother would bring us down to the river to cool ourselves on a hot summer day.This was the early 1950s, just before we learned that the water was too polluted for swimming, in the days when the river was still a part of our lives rather than a boundary...
...population...
...They had the ultimate weapon on their sides the Hudson River fish, which now seemed to move around the river at the environmentalists' command...
...TCDD was an unwanted byproduct in the manufacture of 2,4,5-trichlorophenol, a common herbicide that was the major ingredient of "Agent Orange" the defoliant used by the U.S...
...Henry Fairfield Osborn, curator of the American Museum of Natural History, looked out his window one morning and realized he would be able to see the transmission lines running down the side of Storm King on the other side of the river...
...Kennedy had picked up a drug habit in prep school and was soon spiraling out of control...
...The best and cheapest controls of vegetation are not chemicals but other plants," she wrote.The best and cheapest controls of insects are not chemicals but other insects...
...Instead, Scenic Hudson let Con Ed off the hook in exchange for permanently 60 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR , JANUARY/FEBRUARY 2002 abandoning Storm King.There was one other aspect to the agreement...
...Organochlorines cannot be banned-anymore than gravity or photosynthesis can be banned...
...Since the turn of the century, electrical companies had been manufacturing capacitors and transformers-devices that store electricity or step up its voltage for longdistance transmission or step it down for local distribution...
...Environmental protection was not only praiseworthy it could also be profitable...
...Both the Sierra Club and the Natural Resources Defense Council have national campaigns encouraging utilities to "back out" their old coal- and oil-burning plants and replace them with combinedcycle natural gas...
...First suggested by radical critic Paul Goodman in the 1960s, the proposal was to bury the West Side Highway beneath 250 acres of landfill between Battery Park and 42nd Street, opening the waterfront to commercial and residential development...
...Gasfired, combined-cycle- technology is the power plant of choice today among environmentalists...
...By the end of the nineteenth century Upstate NewYork was dotted with manufacturing centers-Albany, Rochester, Syracuse, Binghamton, Utica, Troy, all of them thriving on the New York Central Railroad, built along the Erie Canal...
...there were twenty-four illegal pipes and stacks discharging liquid and chemical fumes...
...Rachel Carson's prophecy had proved true...
...In 2000, just before leaving office, Clinton EPA Administrator Carol Browner announced that the agency had finally decided to move ahead with the project...
...Selikoff, of New York's Mt...
...Suddenly we were going up against the State of New York...
...a broad avenue of recreation and tourism that teems with fish...
...The main use of chlorine compounds is controlling bacteria...
...Introduced to the old Hudson River aristocracy, Kennedy immediately found himself among kindred spirits...
...The first principle of risk management is that you can never eliminate environmental hazards completely...
...After nearly a century of being hemmed in by infrastructure, NewYork would once again become a waterfront city...
...Selikoff found no excess of cancer deaths or other serious side effects among 300 workers exposed to PCBs over a course of 30 years...
...to milk cows...
...Ambigol, a natural chlorinated PCB from a terrestrial blue-green algae, is active against HIV reverse transcriptase, which is an enzyme crucial for the AIDS virus...
...On one bright morning, George Wald, winner of the Nobel Prize for medicine and a prominent Storm King opponent, demanded at a press conference that Con Edison simultaneously be forbidden from building any more generating plants in NewYork and be forced into bankruptcy for failing to provide NewYork with enough electricity...
...Louis...
...The project was variously supported by both Governors Mario Cuomo and Hugh Carey, Mayors Abe Beame and Ed Koch, Republican Senator Al D'Amato and Democratic Senator Daniel Moynihan, as well as the editorial pages of all three of New York's major newspapers.Yet to environmentalists, as Kennedy and Cronin later wrote, the roadway would only "destroy air quality and the unique character of Lower Manhattan...
...Once Till night to he a serious cancer risk...
...Hundreds of farmers were forced to shoot their cows...
...Selikoff's study with a complete investigation of all 7,025 employees ever employed at the Fort Edward and Hudson Falls plants...
...We want GE to clean the river...
...We carried backpacks filled with sampling vials, flashlights, maps, notepads, a camera, and, occasionally, fishing rods to avoid suspicion...
...Now, with state and federal laws in place and agencies willing to enforce them, the river 58 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR • JANUARY/FEBRUARY 2002 was making a comeback...
...In fact there was always tension between commercial and sports fishermen...
...The Corning Glass Works, originally a utopian settlement, succeeded wildly, turning Corning into a glassmaking center that still thrives in today's fiber-optic world...
...Fifteen years earlier, according to Kennedy and Cronin,"the Hudson River in the vicinity of the Storm King plant was one of two principal spawning grounds for America's Atlantic Coast striped bass population . [C]lose to 90 percent of striped bass eggs in the entire Hudson were collected in the seven-and-a-half-mile stretch . . . where Storm King is situated...
...He called Con Edison and JANUARY/FEBRUARY 2002 • THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR 57 asked if the project might be moved...
...39 miles of sediment contaminated from Lake Winne to DePere...
...By the summer of 1975, it appeared that a decade of Hudson River activism had paid off handsomely," wrote Cronin...
...Ehrlich's argument belonged to the latter variety...
...In Fort Edward (site of the action in The Last r f t/ie Mo/i/cans) and neighboring Hudson Falls, where the Hudson is barely 100 yards wide, GE took over older paper factories right on the river...
...In 1975, Renate Kimbrough of the Food and Drug Administration published a paper in the Journal of the National Cancer Institute, showing rats fed varying doses of PCBs developed liver cancers.The results showed a "dose-response curve," meaning that the more PCBs the rats were fed, the more they developed the disease...
...He kept live mountain lions at his home...
...DDT was not the only new chemical in the environment...
...Nevertheless, the environmentalists did not have to clarify this puzzling logic...
...as he said he buried or otherwise disposed of 19 carcasses of his cows that had been killed by the poison...
...Two years ago, Gordon Gribble, professor of chemistry at Damtmmmouth, published"Chlorine-Element from Hell or Gift from God...
...Nor has any convincing evidence been found for the association of TCDD with other bod ily disorders and defects in humans, including genetic mutations...
...Pumped storage was a new technology designed to deal with two mounting problems: peak loads and large-area blackouts...
...After the headline-making spill at the herbicide plant in Serveso, Italy, other than an outbreak of chloracne, there were few, if any, long-term effects...
...Raquerte River which empties into the St Lawrence...
...56 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR , JANUARY/FEBRUARY 2002 they are the synthetic creations of man's inventive mind, brewed in his laboratories, and having no counterparts in nature...
...Extrapolation to humans is sheer speculation...
...Using 30-foot seines, a good commercial fisherman could pull in 3,000 pounds of fish a day...
...True, an underground highway and riverfront park would destroy the unique quality of Lower Manhattan traffic jams...
...But in 1987 DEC petitioned the legislature for power to override local zoning...
...We think the FDA should be the one to lower its standard...
...Spreading their nets around the Tappan Zee and Haverstraw Bay, amidst encroaching suburban development, these rough-and-ready outdoorsmen carried on a trade that had often been passed through four or five generations...
...In the process, they helped give birth to what is known as the "environmental nnovement...
...Rather than stonewall, Welch decided to tackle the problem headon.Within weeks of the DEC announcement, he sat down with NewYork state environment conunissioner Peter Berle-later president of the Audubon Society-to try to deal with the problem...
...When I unscrewed the lid...
...The story beings with the river itself, a magnificent, 305-mile watercourse stretching from the broad reaches of New York Harbor to tiny Lake Tear of the Clouds high in the Adirondacks.The river and its Mohawk tributary are the only major east-west breaches in the Appalachian Mountains, which kept early settlers pinned on the Atlantic coast...
...They] are found in ancient soil, water, peat, coal, and other organic samples dating back 100, 1,000 4,000, 35,000,15 million, and 300 million years...
...There are two lines of demagoguery that have always been popular in history...
...What were these chemicals that were being sprayed...
...In 1959, 50-year-old Rachel Carson found herself headed along the rugged Maine coastline to witness the presentation of an island nature preserve to the National Audubon Society...
...This kind of exposure would require a pregnant wotrnan to JANUARY/FEBRUARY 2002 • TItF AMERICAN SPECTATOR 53 eat a contaminated fish per day, every day...
...One day in summer of 1972 the Clearwater docked at Beacon with Seeger aboard for an afternoon's entertainment...
...Yet another effort was the Hudson River Fishermen's Association, founded by Sports Illustrated editor Robert Boyle.A former U.S...
...The conference crystallized concerns that had been building in Carson's mind since she first encountered chemical pesticide spraying in 1945...
...730 aces affected...
...New Bedford Harbor Mass...
...Plying schooners north to Albany and west along the Mohawk River, early NewYorkers realized they nearly had a route to the Great Lakes...
...By wiping out malaria and other diseases, Ehrlich argued, the death controllers had lifted the natural restraints on population growth...
...We said, `Let's dredge there first, and see if there's any resuspension...
...Working undercover, often at night, Cronin and Kennedy hiked and scuba-dived the Quassaic, often in freezing weather, collecting samples and trying to find hidden outflow pipes...
...Sinai Hospital, was a hero in the scientific world for being the first to link exposure to asbestos with lung cancer...
...We were frightened...
...Scenic Hudson went on to pick up funding from major foundations, notably the Wallace Funds, created by the founders of Readers Digest...
...And even this, were it by some miracle possible, would be futile, for the new chemicals come from our laboratories in an endless stream...
Vol. 35 • January 2002 • No. 1
