Poisoned Spring

(Image: Bloomsbury Press)Poison Spring: The Secret History of Pollution and the EPA

Poison Spring follows on the tracks of a massive story of deceit, corruption, lies, fear, cover-ups, fascism, i.e., the collusion of corporations with the government, and falsehoods that started to be told over 60 years ago in 1962 by Rachel Carson, a chemist, in Silent Spring, which warned of an impending collapse and death of our country’s and planet’s bio-systems due to the gratuitous use of chemicals, pesticides, insecticides and herbicides in our agriculture. Rachel Carson described a world without the excited celebration of spring, voided of birdsong and the rustling of animals anxiously preparing for another season of new life and renewal.

Sixty years later, we are no better off. In fact, as shown in this remarkable new book, Poison Spring, we are worse off. Silent Spring has turned into Poison Spring.

This work shows the path that has been taken by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), year after year, director after director, US president after US president, Republican or Democrat, from Reagan to Obama, to relinquish enforcement of all regulations and forego all oversight. It demonstrates the agency’s obligation to protect the American people and the environment, as mandated by the US Congress and signed into law by President Nixon, but its opting instead to let corporations and the chemical-industrial complex (CIC) perform their own tests, pronounce their own decisions, regulate themselves and deploy an ungodly cocktail of chemicals, biocides, pesticides, insecticides, herbicides, fungicides, chlorinated hydrocarbons, neonicotinoids, neurotoxins, carcinogens, hormone mimickers and disruptors, mutagens, bee, pollinator, developmental and reproductive toxins, and otherwise poison in unimaginable quantities – about 1.2 billion pounds per year in the United States alone. That’s about 4 pouns per per person per year in the United States on average, and 5 billion pounds each year worldwide, close to 1 pound of biocides per person on the planet each year, year after year round the clock. It’s an amount that has risen a depraved 50-fold since 1950, going straight into our food, environment, agriculture, air, water, land, rivers, oceans,plants and animals.

Data published by the US Department of Agriculture (USDA) show that up to an incredible 86 pesticide residues can be detected in a single food item (cucumbers) that has been grown by the agricultural-industrial complex (AIC) using any or all the chemicals above.

A bizarre new assault wave that seems to have come straight from a Hollywood horror hell nightmare, is headed by a new type of perfidious chemical being deployed in combination with genetically modified organisms (GMOs) and their associated weed killers, glyphosates, growth inhibitors that work by blocking the uptake of nutrients by weed roots, thus stunting plant growth and ultimately killing them, leaving behind the GMO plants only that were genetically modified with DNA from anything such as viruses, bacteria, insects, plants or animals and are resistant to the biocides.

However, this genetically engineered plant resistance is rapidly waning, and an old chemical, 2-4-D dioxin, a defoliant component of the infamous Agent Orange concoction used in Vietnam, is in the initial stages of being approved by the EPA. Dioxins are a class of chlorinated hydrocarbons that are the most poisonous chemical known to mankind, causing birth defects with 500,000 reported cases in Vietnam alone, reproductive problems, cancer, leukemia, and immuno-suppression. Even the remotest idea of approving one of the most toxic chemicals for use in food is complete madness, regarded by many as a criminal act against people, life and the planet.

With close to 400 references, Poison Spring is an extraordinary account that required courage to relay. Some battles have been won; many more urgently need to be won against a relentless chemical/agro-industrial complex. Our nation must come to terms with the rampant dishonesty and deceit in industry and government, hold both accountable, and chart a new, clean, poison free future for the world, for all of us.