Richard Wiles

What have you learned about pesticides in your studies?

That there are multiple pesticides all throughout the food supply, and that people are exposed to maybe 20 or 30 pesticides in any given day, depending on what you eat. So, there’s a lot of exposure, these chemicals are toxic, and we need to be concerned about them.

Well, pesticides are unique among all chemicals, in that they’re actually designed to kill something. So they are a priority concern over that matter, obviously, and we need to be concerned about infants, and babies in the womb, and-and children who we want to have-eat a lot of fruits and vegetables, but also get exposed to a lot of pesticides in the process.

So, we really need to pay attention to these chemicals, because they’re designed to be toxic, unlike industrial chemicals, which are also a problem. But, pesticides are a special concern.

Speak to what you’ve learned about residues on food.

Well, there’s a couple of things about pesticides and food. They don’t wash off. Okay, so you should wash your fruits, and vegetables, and produce, and things like that, but you can’t eliminate the exposure. Some pesticides are in the food, and most of them don’t wash off very well. So, you’re going to be exposed.

I guess the main thing we learned is that the regulatory system was set up to protect an average adult like me. But, that the real concern is children. And we’ve been approached over the last ten years to protect kids from pesticides, and we’ve made some progress, but still, there’s over 100 pesticides that you can find in the food supply on any given day when you go shopping.

And a lot of moderate exposure, and the multiple chemical exposures, being exposed to eight or ten pesticides on an apple, no one knows what kind of hazards that presents. And so we need to reduce those exposures as much as we can. And the government is not really doing a good job of that. They sort of regulate chemicals one at a time, when we really need to look at the whole mass of exposure to the most sensitive population, which would be children.

Is the EPA looking at what the impacts or hazards are of a mix of chemicals?

Not really. And this-this is a big problem. We’ve raised this for the past 15 years, that we’ve got to figure out a way to look at the accumulative exposure, the multiple pesticides, the soup of pesticides that everyone’s exposed to every day. We need to have a commitment to reduce that, to eliminate that, to grow more organic, and to give people some options.

And to be a lot more careful in the way that we use pesticides, so that we don’t have apples that have eight or ten pesticides on them, and peaches with the same. That’s just not acceptable. We could do a lot better than that, if we tried.

Have you learned anything about pesticides, as far as how it gets into water?

Yeah, there’s just lots of cases of this. There’s just numerous, numerous mistakes made over, and over, and over again, where you — the EPA will allow a pesticide to be used on a kind of soil where it’s going to get into the groundwater. This happens. This happened on Long Island, it happened in California, it’s happening all over the country.

And then those aquifers, those drinking water sources, are basically permanently contaminated. They’re basically destroyed, or people have to drink this stuff, or someone has to pay to clean it up. And that takes decades. So a lot of mistakes made, and they’re still being made.

Another problem is, surface water contamination. In the middle of this country, in the Corn Belt, especially now with the ethanol movement, more corn being grown, the sort of “corn mania,” you have millions and millions of pounds of weed killers that end up in tap water every year. They run off the farm fields into the rivers, and those rivers serve millions of people — tens of millions of people — water that has multiple weed killers in it.

The industry has been on a 15-year crusade to keep those weed killers in your tap water, basically, to argue that those weed killers don’t make any difference, anyway. The doses are low, and all that kind of stuff, which is not true. But they’ve been very effective. They’ve done a very good job, and they’ve thrown millions of dollars in science-for-hire lobbyists, and all the usual inside D.C. games that they play, to keep those weed killers on the market, which really means in the tap water of tens of millions of people.

What are the most dangerous pesticides?

Boy, that’s a tough question. There are a lot of dangerous classes of pesticides. Organophosphates, which are based on Nazi nerve gases, were widely present in the food supply ten years ago. They’re at much-reduced levels in the food supply now, although they’re not absent. They’re there. So, that’s-they’re still a problem. But, there’s the [parathyroid] class, which sort of took the place of the Nazi nerve gas chemicals.

They’re also very toxic, and not as well studied, and not well monitored in the population. And are sort of a mystery, which isn’t good. That’s not where you want to be. They’re not as well understood, but they’re the replacements. So, now everybody’s eating those. That’s a class to worry about.

The atrazine class, if you will. There are several atrazine cousins that are on the market, and in the food supply, and in the water systems. And then the problem is, as I said before, you add it all up. You have some OPs, the Nazi nerve gas derivatives, and then some of their replacements on some foods. Then, if you live in Ohio or Illinois, you’re going to drink some atrazine for lunch.

And this is not a good situation to be exposed to so many pesticides like this, when no one’s looked at the combined effects. And then, say, you mix your baby’s formula with tap water that’s got weed killers in it, and the situation just kind of spirals out of control.

What’s the Nazi nerve gas about?

The industry hates it when we say this, but it’s true, that the chemistry that is the basis for the organophosphate insecticides is derived directly from the nerve gasses developed by the Germans, the Nazis, in World War II. I mean, it’s the same companies that were doing this, Bayer, and some of those companies, that were obviously important then.

And they’re still big chemical companies today. That chemistry is just what it is. It’s very effective. What’s shocking is that it was still in the food supply in really significant amounts just 8 or 10 years ago, and it’s still in the food supply today. You’d think we’d be able to move beyond that kind of chemistry to something that’s a little bit safer, that can kill the bugs, but not expose people to those kind of chemicals.

To some extent, we have, but then we shift it to other chemistry that also is not completely understood. And so, we haven’t made a lot of progress, in terms of really reducing reliance on pesticides in general. We just sort of switch from one class to the next.

There’s a lot being used in California.

There are a lot of organophosphates still being applied, but if you looked ten years ago, it was really out of control. We estimated 600,000 children on any given day would be exposed, above what the government thought was safe, okay? To just that class of chemicals. It’s not nearly that bad anymore, but yes, they’re use widely. And they don’t have to be. I mean, that’s all there is, the farmer pressure, basically, saying, we’re going to all go out of business next Thursday if you band this chemical.

It’s what they say about everything. It’s never happened once, not ever, when a pesticide was taken off the market, has there been any measurable economic impact on the price of food, or really, and individual farmer. But, they make a compelling case, and they’ve got the lobbyists, and they have the money. So, we still see some of those uses today, which really we don’t need to really see anyone. It’s ancient chemistry.

I mean, this is chemistry from the 1930s, and these farmers are arguing that we’ve not made any advances, basically, since World War II, in our understanding of how to kill bugs. I find that pretty hard to believe.

We’ve heard that the levels set for exposure to organophosphates are not safe.

Well, there’s a related issue of the legal limit versus the safe limit, and the EPA sort of tends to set the legal limit well above what’s safe. And their argument is, it’s something along the lines of, well, most people don’t use that much, so we’ll have a legal limit that’s up here that’s pretty high.

But since 90% of the growers are at a much lower level, we’ll just say that everything’s fine. It would be like setting the speed limit at 1,000 miles an hour, and saying, well, most people drive about 70, so what’s the difference? And we’ll set it at a 1,000, and that way we won’t have to arrest the one or two guys who go 150 miles an hour, because it’s hardly anybody.

It’s that same kind of logic. To me, that’s really quite cynical, and I think that’s what the scientists were saying, is that the legal limit ought to be safe, right? It should be safe. That’s what the public expects. That’s what the Congress expects. But, it’s not what the EPA does.

What’s your sense of the volume of pesticides being used in the U.S.?

Well, I think the volume as measured in pounds has probably gone down, but that doesn’t’ really mean anything, because you switch from an atrazine maybe to a Round Up, for your Round-Up-ready corn, right? So, your Round-Up-ready soy beans, or whatever it is, your Round-Up ready crop.

That’s not really a reduction in any meaningful way. You’re still out there in the field applying the pesticide. So, there may have been some slight reduction, and I think more growers are paying attention to it, and I think there’s a lot more integration of some smarter, biologically-based techniques, into a fair amount of agricultural systems. But, it’s not big progress. It’s very slow, and very incremental, and it basically reflects the influence of the chemical industry on the federal government, on the EPA, and the USDA, making sure that we don’t spend a significant amount of money on the research that would be needed to move farmers away from these chemicals.

It’s just a very low priority, and it stays that way. All of the research money goes into things like yield per acre in corn, can we get the corn yield up to 500 million thousand bushels per acre, or whatever it is. It’s very high, completely unrealistic, totally chemically driven yield numbers. And those kind of things. So, we don’t have a lot of research going into the question of, how do we reduce pesticides?

And so, we don’t get much reduction.

Do you have any specific numbers?

No, I think that there are several billions pounds of pesticides applied per year. But I don’t know if that’s changed much. It hasn’t gone up or gone down. I think that the really significant thing is the pesticides that are applied at a low weight per acre. In fact, if the volume of pesticides went down dramatically, I’d get really worried, because that would tell me that we’re using chemicals that are incredibly potent and that can go onto a field at grams per acre, and kill all the plants. That’s the kind of weed killers you’re seeing out there today.

And some of the newer insecticides are like that, as well, going out at grams per acre. If you’re affected at grams per acre, that has got to be one very toxic material. And that makes me pretty concerned because very small amounts of that kind of chemical in the water supply, or maybe in the drinking water, or maybe even in the food supply, could present some serious health hazards.

And a lot of those chemicals are chemistry that we really don’t understand that well. That’s the tricky thing about pesticides. When you regulate on one side, and you think you do a good job, say, with organophosphates, big reductions, a little bit on atrazine, then the farmers move into new chemistry that’s of course sold to them by chemical companies — it’s not the farmer’s fault — and all of a sudden, we have all new chemistry that’s designed to do things and to be toxic in ways that really have never been studied before.

They’re very effective at killing the bugs or killing the plants, but what those things do to people is not that clear. And so, the chemistry can get way ahead of the science and way ahead of the ability of public health officials to protect the public. And that’s the biggest concern for me, with pesticides.

Some people say you need pesticides to feed America. What’s your take on that?

Well, given the current situation, we need some pesticides to feed people. But I think you always need some chemical pesticides in your pocket just to make sure if some disease or pest would show up that would threaten the real viability of the food supply. But to his point, could we reduce the use of pesticides by 50%, 80%, 90%, in the next 10 or 20 years if we wanted to? Absolutely.

Do we need to be using anywhere near the pesticides we’re using now? No. Do farmers really, really pay attention to all the options they have to control the pests in their field? No, they don’t, because they’re thinking about the bottom line, they’re thinking about the cheapest way to grow the foods that can make the most money. And right now, the way the system is set up and had been set up by agribiz and the chemical companies, that involves high-yielding seeds, synthetic fertilizer, and a fair amount of pesticides. And that’s how you make money.

And, of course, commodity subsidizes for those growers. But, that’s how you make money. If you want to switch to a less pesticide-intensive method — which is very doable — it takes a lot of work on the farmer’s part, mostly on his own. The government doesn’t offer a lot of help. The chemical companies give you no help. And sometimes the banks will also not give you any help, right? So, it takes a big commitment.

The government and the public ought to be baking that commitment. If we did, I’m not saying we could do away with all chemical pesticides, but the reductions would be phenomenal, would be very dramatic and very achievable. But, we just have no commitment to that goal, in this country.

What’s the scene with Body Burden and kids?

Well, we know that they definitely have pesticides when they’re born, pesticides circulating through their bodies. We don’t know how much, because we haven’t tested very many pesticides. But, sure, pesticides cross the placenta, pesticides get into the baby in the womb, the baby will be exposed to pesticides before it’s even born. That’s absolutely true. The effects of those pesticides on a developing fetus, when it’s most sensitive to changes that could affect the ultimate long-term health of that person are not well understood at all.

They’re not part of the regulatory process. No one is regulating to make sure that exposures are safe for a fetus. Although that is in the law, it’s not been done to any meaningful degree. So, those are very serious concerns, again, because pesticides are designed to be toxic, as opposed to the industrial chemicals that we’ve tested for at cord blood.

So, it’s definitely a concern. It’s something that needs to be addressed, and it hasn’t been.

Did I see something about you guys monitoring Body Burdens with adults?

Yeah, we’ve tested over 100 people, including 10 samples of cord blood from live births in the United States, and found over 500 different chemicals in those 100 people. So the human race is loaded with chemicals. Babies are born pre-polluted, and no one’s looked at the effect of that on health. And what you’re seeing is, increases in childhood cancer, learning disabilities, asthma, all of these long-term health effects that are on the rise, where there’s no explanation.

We know it’s not genes, because the genetic makeup of the human race doesn’t change in a decade. It’s something in the environment. And industry is doing a very good job of convincing the Congress and regulators that it couldn’t possibly be the 400 or 500 chemicals that are in all of us. It must be something else.

But that, of course, isn’t logical or supported by the science. It’s obvious that the chemicals are having some role in the increases in these diseases, and we need to take that seriously, and being to see if we can have babies born into this world with a lot fewer chemicals in their body.

How about breast milk?

We’ve tested breast milk for a number of individual chemicals, and that’s in the broad look for hundreds of chemicals in breast milk. One class we’ve looked at were the flame retardants. And we found the highest levels of flame retardants ever found in this country, in breast milk. Breast milk is a vehicle for a lot of these pollutants, for rocket fuel, which contaminates the food supply and the water supply in many places.

It turns out, it’s just about ubiquitous in breast milk in this country at levels that are a really serious concern. We just sort of stumbled across that finding this year, and it’s probably been that way for decades. So, yeah, breast milk is another source. Now, we would always urge women to breast-feed their babies, because the benefits of breast milk in our view still outweigh the contamination.

But wouldn’t it be nice if we could have babies feeding on breast milk that wasn’t contaminated with industrial chemicals and pesticides?

What’s going on with exposure limits set by the EPA?

Yeah, this is a little favor they do for the pesticide industry here, is that they set the legal limits at an unsafe level, which is a clear violation of the law. And then they just say that their risk assessments show that the majority of people aren’t exposed at that legal maximum level. So, it’s okay. Now, that’s not how the law is written, and it’s not how anyone ever intended it to be enforced, and it’s just the way that they do it.

And until somebody sues them on that particular point, they’re going to continue to do it, because it would in fact eliminate the top one, two, three, five percent of growers who produce food with those high levels of pesticides in them. Those could be imported food, a lot of the time, but it could be domestic growers as well.

And the EPA just is sort of willing to let that come out in the wash and let people eat those pesticides at levels that certainly wouldn’t be safe over the long term.

How has it come to pass that the EPA is so lax?

The EPA is so lax. There’s an ebb and flow. They’ve had their moments where they’ve done some good things, but on the whole, it’s basically the fact that you have people who go to work every day, and in their average day they’ll probably see 20 industry scientists and no environmental or consumer advocates. And this will go on day, after day, after day, after day.

Now, a lot of these people who work within the EPA chose that line of work because they actually care about the environment, but they get beaten down after just years and years of this. Layer on top of that a really cynical, bad administration like this one, where all of the political appointees are pro-agribiz and the pesticide shops, and you’ve got a recipe for a public health disaster. I mean, they’re just not going to do anything that it-really moves the ball in the direction of the public health.

The best you can hope for is a draw. I’ll give you an example. A great example of how bad this was is that this EPA was on the verge of registering the Erin Brokovitch chemical Chorme-6 as a widely used pesticide to preserve wood. So, it would have been in all the play sets, and the decks, and the patios around the school, and it would have been [hex-Chromated].

This is a human carcinogen. And this EPA just sort of marched right up to the edge of doing that, and-and thought nothing wrong that nothing was wrong, this was just the way you do business. Well, the process had been followed, so, we’ll just put this known human carcinogen directly into the children’s environment, and so what?

I mean, luckily it was stopped through some media pressure, and some shenanigans, and whatever, but I mean, that’s the kind of decision that this EPA would make. And it’s purely the result of political pressure, and money and politics, and all of the bad things that most people outside of DC think go on, and they do go on. And that’s really why the EPA doesn’t really protect the environment the way most people expect it to.

Well, the reason that the EPA is setting food standards for pesticides at such unprotected levels — why they’re so weak — to a large degree, is due to the politics of this administration and others, where agribiz and pesticide interests really control big portions of the EPA, and in this case, the pesticide division. I mean, they are the ones that call the shots. They are the ones that make sure that, even in a sympathetic administration, you’ve typically got an agribiz person at a very high level within the pesticide program. And they want to make sure that there’s no restrictions that affect them adversely. And they’re usually very good at getting that done. I mean, and there’s no equivalent favors done to the public, if you could call it a favor.

There’s no equivalent representation of the public interest that is there all the time, no matter what. But when it comes to the agribiz and pesticide industry, there’s always somebody placed very highly within the EPA that’s making sure that pesticides stay on the market, and that safety standards don’t adversely affect the industry too much. And that’s not what they’re supposed to do. They’re supposed to be concerned about the public health.

And generally they are a little bit, but it’s always a balancing act. It’s the best you can get. You never get real protection of the public health. You’ve always got to balance it against agribiz economic interests.

How does the USDA play into this?

Basically, the USDA is probably more captive of agribusiness than-in many ways, than the EPA pesticide program. Basically, the USDA promotes a style of agriculture through their research and commodity programs that is highly dependent on synthetic chemical inputs. Pesticides, and fertilizers, and on the animal side, it’s the growth hormones and all these kind of things.

The subsidy systems and the research systems and the whole — even the financing system — all sort of are built to support that high-yielding, chemical-intensive agriculture. So, that’s the most insidious, but most effective, sort of way to ensure that pesticides and chemicals get used, is to finance, and set up, and support a system of agriculture that depends on it.

And that’s what the USDA basically does. They have a very tiny little organic program that you can’t even find it, and they have a tiny little part of the research program that looks at how we can get some bugs to eat some other bugs. But it’s very, very minimal. Most of the money goes into how do we get more food off an acre? How can we make these synthetic chemicals work better? And how can we get more money to farmers to grow the commodity crops that we want them to grow, at high-yielding rates?

Here’s another way — this is just some more things, as I’m thinking about it — but this program has really been run by a lot of career people, over the past six or seven years. The people on top of the pesticide program have been where the politics come in. and where the politics really come in is, when there’s a decision that might affect agribiz or pesticide interests in a-adversely it gets kicked up to the White House for “review” by OMB, or some other part of the White House.

And that’s when you see things just stop. Reviews that are going on, they’ll just stop. We’ve got a chemical that looked like it was about to be restructured, and all of a sudden, nothing’s happening for several years. Things like that. That’s the sort of the last straw. And none of these decisions have any affect any on the public health, and the economy, in any meaningful way, are made final as they go to the White House.

So, we can’t leave that out of the equation, because even if you’ve got good civil servants running the agency, nothing happens of any significance without White House sign-off. And they pay attention to all this stuff. They don’t miss anything. So, particularly this administration. They’ve been very meticulous in blocking environmental safeguards and public health protections for the benefit of industry people who have money, basically.

So, yeah, that’s been more apparent this time around than at any time before, we’ve seen.

Do you guys track at all, money in politics?

We don’t track the kind of money. This is all sort of big-picture economic interest money. It’s like, Dick Cheney protecting the oil industry. Does he get a check? No. But does he do it? Yeah. Them, it’s the same thing.

How are we going to get out of this mess?

Well, we have a long list of things we recommend people do, from not using Teflon pans, to making sure that they don’t buy products that have been treated with flame retardants — that’s a tricky one to do, so that’s no good. To use a water filter. To buy as much organic food as you can.

There’s a number of simple steps that you can take that will actually reduce your exposures to chemicals across the board. But, it’s not enough. And unfortunately, people have to actually care about this stuff and get involved in some way politically, with the policies that are out there. I mean, we certainly need a different administration that actually cares about people and the environment and public health.

I think the science is coming around our way. We’re in sort of the front end of a wave of a real public health disaster, here, with the health affects we’re seeing in children, between asthma, and obesity, and diabetes, and autism, and cancer. And those guys, it’s just really shocking, and what’s going on with children today who appear to be healthy.

But really when you look at it, the chronic diseases that children have are stunning. And they’re related, at least to some degree, to this chemical exposure. So, I think that this problem will get addressed, but in the wrong way, which would be after we’ve sort of reached this disaster point.

We’re seeing a lot of scientists step up to the plate, though, these days. Now, for the average person, what does that mean? I mean, y have to pay attention to stuff, especially if you’re a pregnant mom, especially if you’ve got little kids. It really does make a difference, what you feed them, and the kind of environment you create in your house. You could really make a big difference. And so, people have to actually care, because the government is going to care for you.

What motivates you, personally?

Mostly, I just hate the bad guys. I mean, it’s a simple way of putting it. But the unfairness of the process, it just really drives me crazy, and motivates me. I mean, and the fact that you can’t have a fair and open discussion. I mean, I actually believe in those things, and want to think it’s worth fighting for, people to have a fair shot at the science, and the evidence, and the process of determining how their lives are run.

As opposed to these big money interests that run the show. Because it’s one thing, if they’re controlling obscure things like student loans and stuff. But when they’re actually actively poisoning you, or poisoning my kids, or poisoning all kids with this cavalier attitude that it just doesn’t’ matter — and we know best — and you shouldn’t get, look at the science, that’s what really makes me mad, and makes me want to do this job.

Well, one of the things that I think is stunning to most people, that there’s about 80,000 chemicals that are registered for use in commerce. And basically, no safety studies on any of them. Now, probably only 5 or 10,000 are widely used, but still, there’s no safety standards for virtually any of them when they end up in people. And so, we wanted to know, well, how many do end up in people?

And what about babies? So, we tested the cord blood of ten children born in this country for 413 industrial chemicals and pesticides. And we found 287 chemicals in these children’s cord blood, before they’d even been born. They were pre-polluted with an average of 200 chemicals per baby, which is just outrageous.

And we think that’s the kind of thing that maybe will motivate people to care about this issue.

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