Industry Attacks on Dissent

[Guest guest]

Industry Attacks on Dissent: From Rachel Carson to Oprah

Laura Orlando, Dollars and Sense

April 19, 2002

 

In March 1996, the British government announced that 10 people had died after

eating beef from cattle sick with " mad cow disease. " A month later, talk-show

host Oprah Winfrey discussed the topic on national television.

 

 

While interviewing guest Howard Lyman of the Humane Society about his belief

that American cattle might be at risk for the disease, Winfrey told her

audience, " It has just stopped me cold from eating another burger. " A group of

Texas cattle ranchers sued Winfrey and Lyman for libeling cattle. Four years and

over $1 million later, the two were vindicated in court.

 

 

Winfrey and Lyman were sued under the Texas False Disparagement of Perishable

Food Products Act. Food disparagement laws are a new tool in an old bag of

tricks used by corporations to protect their own economic interests at the

expense of public discussion. Silencing public debate with frivolous,

time-consuming and costly lawsuits has become so commonplace that the technique

has its own name: strategic lawsuits against public participation, or SLAPP

suits.

 

 

Winfrey and Lyman won in lower federal court because the judge ruled that cattle

were not " perishable food products. " The cattlemen pursued the matter in

appellate court. A three-judge panel eventually ruled against the Texas

ranchers. But the SLAPP suit achieved its objective by forcing Winfrey and Lyman

to spend an enormous amount of time and money defending themselves-and by

serving as a warning to the rest of us that saying what we believe to be true

may cost us more than we can bear.

 

 

Lawsuits, and the threat of lawsuits, are not the only means industry uses to

stifle dissent. Industry routinely buys the science that suits its needs

(tobacco is a good example) and according to Sheldon Rampton, editor of the

newsletter PR Watch, spends at least $10 billion every year on " public

relations. "

 

 

Industry's use of half-truths and intimidation to defend its toxic assault on

life is nothing new. But until 40 years ago, when Rachel Carson's book " Silent

Spring " was published, one could argue that we -- the people -- didn't know what

was going on. " Silent Spring " woke up the nation, creating a national

consciousness about the health and environmental consequences of pesticide use.

Industry woke up too. Bruce Johnson, a Seattle lawyer, told the New York Times

in 1999, " If [food disparagement laws] had been in place in the 1960s, Rachel

Carson might not have found a publisher willing to print 'Silent Spring'. "

 

 

Trying to Silence Silent Spring

 

 

Before World War I, about half of the industrial products in the U.S. were made

from renewable resources, such as plant-, wood- and animal-based materials. In

the 1920s and 1930s, oil and chemical companies like Union Carbide, Shell and

Dow expanded their interest in petrochemical manufacturing. The petrochemical

industry, strengthened immensely by World War II, replaced renewable materials

with synthetic organic compounds made from the byproducts of oil and natural

gas: for instance, synthetic rubber replaced natural rubber, chemical detergents

replaced animal-based soaps and polyester replaced cotton. In the 1950s and

1960s, the thriving plastics industry accelerated the shift even more. Today, 92

percent of the materials used for U.S. products and production processes are

nonrenewable.

 

 

In many cases, the processes used to manufacture synthetic products created

toxic wastes, and often the products themselves -- either intact or when

dissipated into the environment -- were harmful to life. Among the most lethal

of these products were synthetic pesticides. Before 1940, most pesticides were

made from plants; a few were made from toxic metals like arsenic and mercury.

But the synthetic chemicals created for chemical warfare during World War II

were found to be highly effective weed and insect killers. So in 1945, with

strong government backing, these poisons entered commercial markets. Within 10

years, synthetic pesticides had captured 90 percent of the agricultural

pest-control market.

 

 

Pesticides such as dichloro diphenyl trichloroethane (DDT), dieldrin and aldrin

were dropped from planes. State and federal government agencies blanketed

neighborhoods with poisons in an attempt to eradicate pests like gypsy moths and

Japanese beetles. Farmers used DDT and other synthetic insecticides on a variety

of crops, including cotton, peanuts and soybeans. Suburbanites embraced the new

chemicals in their war against perceived nuisances like crab grass and

dandelions.

 

 

Few people understood the dangers to life that these new chemicals presented.

Sickness and death among chemical manufacturing workers were sometimes the first

indication that the materials they worked with were toxic. But most people

believed that you had to be an industrial worker to get sick. Rachel Carson's

" Silent Spring " was the first widely read publication to say that everybody was

being poisoned.

 

 

" Silent Spring " was serialized by The New Yorker in June 1962 and came out in

book form that same year. The book was -- and still is -- a devastating

testament to the mortal dangers of synthetic chemical poisons. Carson, a

wildlife biologist with two bestsellers and a National Book Award under her

belt, wrote, " We allow the chemical death rain to fall as though there were no

alternative, whereas in fact there are many, and our ingenuity could soon

discover many more if given opportunity. "

 

 

" Silent Spring " was written before big business politics and sophistry were so

well versed at setting the terms of discourse about environmental issues. Still,

during the four years that Carson spent writing the book, she was well aware

that it would unleash the wrath of the chemical industry. Deeply concerned about

potential industry attacks and lawsuits, she did what she could to protect

herself.

 

 

Carson and her literary agent Marie Rodell asked lawyers from Houghton Mifflin,

her publisher, to review the manuscript. Carson made sure Houghton Mifflin had

libel insurance and she renegotiated a contract with them that put a monetary

limit on her personal liability. And building the best defense of all, she

meticulously checked her facts and diligently worked on a list of principal

sources to document her conclusions.

 

 

Carson's concerns were well founded. After The New Yorker serialized parts of

the book, the New York Times ran an article with the headline, " Silent Spring Is

Now Noisy Summer: Pesticide Industry Up In Arms Over a New Book. "

 

 

The story began, " The $300,000,000 pesticides industry has been highly irritated

by a quiet woman author whose previous works on science have been praised for

the beauty and precision of the writing. " It quoted the president of the

Montrose Chemical Corporation -- a major manufacturer of DDT, a pesticide that

Carson discussed at length -- as saying that Carson wrote not " as a scientist

but rather as a fanatic defender of the cult of the balance of nature. "

 

 

Some of the criticism seems laughable now. After the second installment from

" Silent Spring " appeared in The New Yorker, a California man wrote to the

magazine:

 

 

" Miss Rachel Carson's reference to the selfishness of insecticide manufacturers

probably reflects her Communist sympathies, like a lot of our writers these

days. We can live without birds and animals, but, as the current market slump

shows, we cannot live without business. As for insects, isn't it just like a

woman to be scared to death of a few little bugs! As long as we have the H-bomb

everything will be O.K. P.S. She's probably a peace-nut too. "

 

 

But industry's attack on Rachel Carson was swift and vicious. The chemical

companies banded together and hired a public relations firm to malign the book

and attack Carson's credibility. The pesticide industry trade group, the

National Agricultural Chemicals Association, spent over $250,000 (equivalent to

$1.4 million today) to denigrate the book and its author. The company that

manufactured and sold the pesticides chlordane and heptachlor, the Velsicol

Chemical Company of Chicago, threatened to sue Houghton Mifflin.

 

 

Milton Greenstein, legal counsel and vice president of The New Yorker, was

called by at least one chemical company and told that the magazine would be sued

if it didn't pull the last installment it planned to run of Carson's book.

Greenstein responded, " Everything in those articles has been checked and is

true. Go ahead and sue. "

 

 

John Vosburgh, editor of Audubon Magazine, which published excerpts from " Silent

Spring, " said pretty much the same thing when Audubon was threatened. According

to Carson biographer Linda Lear, Velsicol's lawyers suggested to Vosburgh that

printing " a muckraking article containing unwarranted assertions about Velsicol

pesticides " might " jeopardize [the] financial security " of magazine employees

and their families. Vosburgh was so incensed that he wrote an editorial that

appeared with the book excerpts, criticizing the chemical industry's response.

 

 

Industry threats did not stop the publication of " Silent Spring, " nor did the

attacks prevent the book from becoming wildly successful. Carson was a popular

writer who had the support of her editors, her publisher and even President

Kennedy, who cited " Silent Spring " as a reason to examine the health effects of

pesticides. After the book was published, Carson was interviewed by Eric

Severeid on national television and she testified before Congress about chemical

poisons. She was profiled in Life magazine and featured in the New York Times

and the Washington Post. In a review for the Book-of-the-Month Club, Supreme

Court Justice William O. Douglas wrote that " Silent Spring " " is a call for

immediate action and for effective control of all merchants of poison, " and

called the book " the most important chronicle of this century for the human

race. "

 

 

Carson effectively got her message across in part because what she had to say

was radically new to the public, because her facts were unassailable, and

because industry, though quite capable of attacking her and the publications

that featured her work, had not yet learned how to overload the media-and by

extension the people-with its own point of view.

 

 

Today's Targets

 

 

Rachel Carson understood the forces at work in government and industry. Having

served on the staff of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service for 16 years, she was

well aware of government's role in promoting and defending chemical poisons.

" The crusade to create a chemically sterile, insect-free world, " Carson wrote,

" seems to have engendered a fanatic zeal on the part of many specialists and

most of the so-called control agencies. "

 

 

We were living, she said, in an era " dominated by industry, in which the right

to make a dollar at whatever cost is seldom challenged. When the public

protests, confronted with some obvious evidence of damaging results of pesticide

applications, it is fed little tranquilizing pills of half truth. We urgently

need an end to these false assurances, to the sugar-coating of unpalatable

facts. "

 

 

This language is too mild to describe what is happening today. Not only has the

production of chemical poisons continued, but the chemical industry has become

much more skillful at manipulating the media for its own ends. Now we are fed

big pills of outright lies, prevarication, and deception. We do not need to see

industry's press releases; we hear the corporate viewpoint every day, all the

time. Forty years after Rachel Carson tripped the alarm bell, we have been

largely conditioned by industry to accept that which is harmful to us and to

reject the warning signs of environmental devastation. We have been made ready

to believe that a conservation ethic is incompatible with prosperity and that

with creature comforts come sacrifices. Many of us want the sugar coating

because, to a great extent, we are consumer junkies who believe that, if we

demand that industry change its behavior, we will have to change our own.

 

 

But of course not everyone wants the sugar-coating, and some people are writing

and talking about environmental issues in ways that are as compelling as " Silent

Spring. " It is just harder to hear them now, harder to unpeel the layers of

deception created by corporations and regulators. And when dissenting voices are

heard, industry is quick to strike back.

 

 

For example, two recent books, " Living Downstream " and " Our Stolen Future, " are

filled with the kind of critical thinking and meticulous research found in

Carson's " Silent Spring. " Both deal with the chemical causes and consequences of

health and environmental degradation. Both take industry to task. Both were

attacked.

 

 

Sandra Steingraber's 1997 book, " Living Downstream: An Ecologist Looks at Cancer

and the Environment, " is the " Silent Spring " of the post-Baby Boom generation.

Viewing cancer through several lenses -- as biologist, cancer survivor, poet,

and activist -- Steingraber shows the links between cancer and environmental

degradation. The book is beautifully written and powerfully frank. Reviewer

Nancy Evans wrote: " The author describes the many kinds of silence that surround

cancer issues, personal and political, individual and collective. The silence of

scientists who fear loss of funding, the silence that fear imposes on people

with cancer and those at risk. She suggests that 'Silent Spring' shows us 'how

one kind of silence breeds another, how the secrecies of government beget a

weirdly quiet and lifeless world.' "

 

 

" Living Downstream " was also reviewed in the New England Journal of Medicine in

November 1998. The negative review was signed " Jerry H. Berke, M.D., M.P.H. "

Trouble is, the journal failed to note Berke's affiliation with the W.R. Grace

Company, a notorious environmental polluter.

 

 

Berke, director of toxicology for W.R. Grace, began his review with an attack on

all environmentalists: " An older colleague of mine once suggested that the work

product of an environmentalist is controversy. Fear and the threat of unseen,

unchosen hazards enhance fund-raising for environmental political organizations

and fund environmental research, he suggested. "

 

 

Berke called Steingraber's book " biased " and " obsessed with environmental

pollution. " And like a loyal industry toxicologist, he wrote, " The focus on

environmental pollution and agricultural chemicals to explain human cancer has

simply not been fruitful nor given rise to useful preventive strategies. "

 

 

The mainstream media essentially ignored " Living Downstream. " No one can say

exactly why, but one can guess that the book didn't win any points in the

corporate-controlled media by eloquently pressing for prevention and suggesting

that people change the way they think about chemicals. The book calls for a

" human rights approach, " which would recognize that the " current system of

regulating the use, release, and disposal of known and suspected carcinogens

--rather than preventing their generation in the first place -- is intolerable. "

 

 

Like " Living Downstream, " " Our Stolen Future " -- book about endocrine disrupters

(synthetic chemicals that disrupt hormones) -- has also come under fire. When it

was published in 1996, " Our Stolen Future " caused an immediate stir. Using a new

way to examine the effects of chemical contamination, authors Theo Colborn,

Dianne Dumanoski and John Peterson Myers provide evidence that endocrine

disruptors are widespread in the environment and are making people sick.

 

 

A staggering list of synthetic chemicals, they tell us, interferes with hormones

in humans and wildlife. These chemicals are common in the manufacture of

pesticides, herbicides, and petrochemicals: they are found in soaps and

detergents, flame retardants, and the dioxins produced in pulp and paper mills.

In humans, the presence of endocrine disruptors can result in, among other

things, severe reproductive tract deformities, declines in sperm count, elevated

risk of cancer, and even behavioral changes. " Our Stolen Future " makes a

powerful case for caution when using these chemicals.

 

 

But industry was having none of it. As Sheldon Rampton and John Stauber point

out in " Trust Us, We're Experts! " industry's attack on the book was " instant and

vicious. " The industry-funded Advancement of Sound Science Coalition held a

press conference at which no fewer than ten scientists labeled the book as

" fiction. " And another industry-financed group, the American Council on Science

and Health, " obtained a copy of the book in galley form months before

publication and prepared an 11-page attack on it before it even hit the

bookstores. " Not surprisingly, the Wall Street Journal referred to " Our Stolen

Future " as an " environmental hype machine. "

 

 

One chemical industry leader, the Monsanto Company, has a long record of going

after its critics. Monsanto manufactured DDT and polychlorinated biphenyls

(PCBs) before they were banned by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency in

the 1970s. It still makes a long list of synthetic chemicals and aggressively

markets genetically engineered products like bovine growth hormone (Posilac) and

genetically modified seeds. A billion-dollar company when " Silent Spring " first

appeared, Monsanto published a parody of Carson's work, called " The Desolate

Year, " in the October 1962 issue of Monsanto Magazine. Since then, Monsanto has

become a corporate role model in sugar-coating unpalatable facts and silencing

dissent.

 

 

For example, " Against the Grain: Biotechnology and the Corporate Takeover of

Your Food, " a book by Dr. Marc Lappé and Britt Bailey, was originally supposed

to be published by Vital Health. But the company cancelled publication after

receiving a threatening letter from a Monsanto lawyer, who said he believed the

manuscript contained false statements about Monsanto's biggest money maker, the

herbicide RoundUp. Common Courage Press picked up the book and published it in

1998.

 

 

That same year, The Ecologist magazine published a special issue, " The Monsanto

Files, " which took a critical look at the chemical/biotechnology giant. But The

Ecologist's printer, Penwells of Saltash Cornwall (with whom The Ecologist had

worked for 29 years), destroyed the 14,000 copy print run without even notifying

the magazine. Penwells refused to comment on its decision and Monsanto denied

any responsibility for the action, prompting The Ecologist's editor, Zac

Goldsmith, to say, " The fact that Monsanto had nothing to do with the decision

to pulp is, if anything, more scary than if they had made some kind of legal

threat. It goes to show what a powerful force a reputation can be. " The magazine

was able to line up another printer for the Monsanto issue.

 

 

In both cases, Monsanto's critics managed to find other venues for getting their

information out to the public. But, like the SLAPP suit waged against Oprah

Winfrey and Howard Lyman, the chemical company's actions -- or maybe only its

reputation for doing damage -- caused serious disruption along the way. It's all

part of a sophisticated set of techniques that industry uses to take the legs

out from under dissent.

 

 

The Obligation to Act

 

 

Forty years ago, Rachel Carson wrote, " We have fallen into a mesmerized state

that makes us accept as inevitable that which is inferior or detrimental, as

though having lost the will or the vision to demand that which is good? "

(Perhaps the question mark expresses Carson's wish to be hopeful.)

 

 

Today, we are up against an immensely more organized, coordinated and powerful

corporate PR machine than Carson or the early environmentalists faced. Although

some people have woken up, it is hard not to feel numb when faced with yet

another story about environmental degradation and chemical poisoning.

 

 

The facts about chemical production today are sobering. The world uses five

billion pounds of pesticides every year, with almost half used in the United

States. According to the Federal Emergency Management Agency, as many as 500,000

U.S. products pose physical or health hazards and can be defined as " hazardous

chemicals. "

 

 

U.S. industry uses 70,000 different chemical substances, but there is little or

no attempt to assess their health or environmental impacts. Each year, over

1,000 new synthetic chemicals are introduced in the United States. But only a

small fraction of these are tested for carcinogenity or endocrine disruption,

and there is little understanding of how they interact with each other. The list

of known poisons is long and troubling. It is as if we have forgotten, or have

never known, " that which is good. "

 

 

It is hard to be hopeful. In a chapter entitled " To the Ends of the Earth, " " Our

Stolen Future " follows a PCB molecule from its creation in a Monsanto chemical

plant near Anniston, Alabama, to its entry into a polar bear in the Arctic. That

chemical has now made its way to court, in the blood of thousands of Anniston

residents who are suing Monsanto for knowingly dumping PCBs in their community.

In January 2002, during opening arguments, a Monsanto lawyer carried on the

company's long tradition of denial and deceit: " We would all rather live in a

pristine world. We are all going to be exposed to things on a daily basis. Our

bodies can deal with it. "

 

 

We can't address the environmental crisis without going right to industry's

door. A good first step is to hold industries accountable for the pollution they

generate and the harm they cause. In places like Anniston, people are trying.

But the greatest impact will come from fundamentally changing what corporations

produce and how. This could be done by making laws based on, for example, the

Precautionary Principle, which says that if there is reasonable suspicion that a

technology, process or chemical could be harmful, its application should be

altered or it should be stopped altogether -- even if some cause-and-effect

relationships have not been fully established scientifically.

 

 

Moreover, the burden of proof lies with the activity's proponents and not with

the general public. This is not a " fringe " idea. The European Commission (the

executive body of the European Union responsible for implementing and managing

policy) and some nations, such as Sweden and Germany, have adopted the

Precautionary Principle as part of a structured approach to risk analysis. In

1997, the state of Massachusetts enacted a law that uses the Precautionary

Principle as a guide for preventing toxic pollution.

 

 

Carson wrote, " The obligation to endure gives us the right to know. " We know

much more now than we did 40 years ago. If we are to endure, then we are also

obligated to act. Human ingenuity has in it immense resources for good: by

making good choices, we can live well without destroying life.