It is a common error in Europe, to look on all natives not reduced to a state of subjection, as wanderers and hunters. Agriculture was practised on the American continent long before the arrival of Europeans. It is still practised between the Orinoco and the river Amazon, in lands cleared amidst the forests, places to which the missionaries have never penetrated. It would be to imbibe false ideas respecting the actual condition of the nations of South America, to consider as synonymous the denominations of ‘Christian,’ ‘reduced’ [meaning living at a mission], and ‘civilized;’ and those of ‘pagan,’ ‘savage,’ and ‘independent’ [meaning not living at a mission]. The reduced Indian is often as little of a Christian as the independent Indian is of an idolater. Both, alike occupied by the wants of the moment, betray a marked indifference for religious sentiments, and a secret tendency to the worship of nature and her powers. This worship belongs to the earliest infancy of nations; it excludes idols, and recognizes no other sacred places than grottoes, valleys, and woods.1
—Alexander von Humboldt (1769–1859)
How did we get here? How did we get to this place that leaves our lives and our children's futures at such grave risk? How did we create this world where man-made chemicals have invaded every aspect of our lives and threaten our climate, our health, and our futures? How did we come to believe that we cannot survive without the help of artificial, toxic, and harmful products on and in our food? Are we destined to become an abandoned planet by committing “ecocide”?2
In part the answer to this question lies in our passionate but damaging love affair with chemicals.
Most people think that our dependence on synthetic chemicals (which I define as toxic substances that are manufactured for a specific purpose) to grow food began in the 1940s or 1950s, or perhaps in 1842 with John Bennet Lawes's discovery of the first synthetic superphosphate fertilizers. But our dangerous liaison with chemicals started even earlier than that.
The Chinese were using arsenic sulfides in agriculture as early as the year 900.3 By the 1300s, arsenic, lead, and mercury were being used in Europe for all sorts of things, including medicines.4
The work of a German chemist named Justus von Liebig (1803–1873) created the great divide between “book” chemical farming and experiential “biological” farming. In the early 1800s, chemistry was still viewed as a “pseudoscience.”
“Chemists and alchemists were still the laughing stock of scientific societies throughout the 1700s,” writes author Will Allen in his book The War on Bugs. “Scientists and other intellectuals frequently referred to them as quacks.”5
Liebig believed that man and science could replicate the most valuable resources of nature—sugar, salt, and nutrients—so that man would never again feel vulnerable to the whims of nature. He asserted that the stuff soil is made of—humus or organic matter—was not necessary as long as we could replicate its mineral and nutrient content and that man-made minerals and nutrients would be superior to nature's6 because after all, they were made by man, who was superior to nature in every way. The study of chemistry had started as curiosity about the nature of the stuff of life and then developed mechanical arrogance—the “life is just a machine” paradigm that we still often live by today.
“It is the greatest possible mistake to suppose that the temporary diminution of fertility in a soil is owning to the loss of humus; it is the mere consequence of the exhaustion of the alkalies,” Liebig proclaimed in his seminal book Organic Chemistry in Its Applications to Agriculture and Physiology, first published in 1840.7
He was the originator of the idea (although not the slogan) “better living through chemistry,” and he initiated the trend of trusting academic scientific research on agriculture over the experience of farmers. His laboratory and “scientific” methods inspired many Ivy League and land-grant university agricultural programs and are still used today, even though many of his original theories were long ago debunked.8
A German, Liebig accused England of “robbing all other countries of their fertility” by stealing the bones of the dead from the battlefields of Waterloo in Belgium and the Crimea in a craze for fertilizer: “Like a vampire she hangs from the neck of Europe.”9 And it's true: England did harvest bones from whatever sources it could. Ground-up and buried bones had long been considered important sources of soil nutrients.
In the 1800s, the idea of staying on one's land was highly appealing. Great Britain was in its heyday as an empire. Americans had established vast plantations and estates. The ruling classes had invested lots of money in big homes and big cities, and the desire to control nature by improving the production of natural resources was strong. Better yet, creating essential resources through chemistry and making money from it seemed like a great idea. The stigma among the upper classes against engaging in trade was falling away, and educated young bucks were looking for ways to make their fortunes.
Liebig and his set truly adhered to the evolutionary vision promoted by the anthropologist Lewis Henry Morgan. Morgan believed that people could be categorized into three evolutionary groups: the savage, who subsist on hunting and gathering; the barbaric, who use primitive agriculture and domesticate animals; and finally the civilized, who have the ability to write and are at the peak of the social hierarchy.10 Liebig and friends placed themselves at the top of the civilized world.
These men believed that it was their God-given right to control nature, and they had no respect or appreciation for anything beneath them in the evolutionary hierarchy, whether it was the lower classes, other races, women, or nature.
Ironically, it was a totally natural and “organic” material that began our reliance on external agricultural inputs and paved the way for our chemical addiction.
In 1804, the German botanist and explorer Alexander von Humboldt brought back a sample of guano from his ambitious adventures in South America. Off the coast of what is now Peru, von Humbolt encountered islands on which thousands of years of seabird feces had made giant cliffs of concentrated and powerful nitrogen-rich powder, or guano. The indigenous people had used it for generations to fertilize their crops—as a traditional proverb says, “Guano, though no saint, works many miracles.”11
The Incas ranked huanu “right alongside gold as gifts of the gods and forbade anyone on penalty of death to molest nesting birds.”12
The sample von Humboldt brought back from his travels was analyzed by a few different chemists and found to be high in nitrogen, an element prized by farmers for its ability to improve the fertility of their soils.
Until then, farmers had relied on recycled urban and farm waste (manure from livestock and people, wood ash, and bones—including bones from the battlefield at Waterloo) to fertilize their fields. In 1840, W. J. Myers and Company imported 20 casks of guano for experiments. After a few farmers in Great Britain achieved near-astounding results from applying guano, demand grew quickly.13
In 1850, 80 percent of Americans lived on farms, which accounted for 75 percent of the nation's economic output. Farmers who had gotten fat and lazy off the fertile virgin lands (often on the backs of slave labor) started seeing the inevitable decline of fertility that went along with their “primitive agricultural techniques,”14 such as growing the same crops on the same land for more than a hundred years without rotation and without adding back sufficient organic material. Competition from other farmers who were farming fresh land made East Coast farmers even more determined to find ways to improve their yields. Guano fit the bill and, influenced by strategic advertising and editorials in farm magazines of the time (many of which were affiliated with farm stores that benefited greatly from guano sales), farmers started buying the fertilizer.15 Suddenly, in addition to the smell of bird droppings, people started to smell profits, and the “Great Guano Rush” was on.
Thus begins one of the more unusual forgotten episodes of our past. By 1851, 66,000 tons of guano had been imported to the United States.16 Prices fluctuated wildly, but mostly rose higher and higher, and opportunists began marketing inferior guano from other islands and making fortunes. (One of the companies that first made a fortune from guano was W. R. Grace and Company, which much later went on to make profit from manufacturing asbestos.) In 1850, President Millard Fillmore, in his first State of the Union address, stated that “Peruvian guano has become so desirable an article to the agricultural interests in the United States that it is the duty of the Government to employ all the means properly in its power for the purpose of causing that article to be imported into the country at a reasonable price.”17
In 1856, the US government passed the Guano Island Act, which stated:
Whenever any citizen of the United States discovers a deposit of guano on any island, rock, or key, not within the lawful jurisdiction of any other Government, and not occupied by the citizens of any other Government, and takes peaceable possession thereof, and occupies the same, such island, rock, or key may, at the discretion of the President, be considered as appertaining to the United States.18
As a result of that act, the US government seized 94 islands off the coast of Peru just to harvest bird shit.19
Few Americans wanted to harvest guano, so Chinese slaves were imported and Peruvian Indians were imprisoned to get them to do the work. Many workers were kidnapped into slavery and forced to work “twenty or more hours a day, six days a week, to fill quotas of four to five tons each, for which they were paid three reales (about a third of a peso), two of which were withheld for meals,” according to one historical account.20 The only escape was death, and many workers, if they weren't buried alive in collapsed guano trenches, threw themselves into the sea.
Despite the tragedy of how guano was acquired, it did replenish the soil depleted by a century of nonstop cultivation. Better farming practices, such as crop rotation, and applying compost and free sources of fertilizer such as livestock manure would have worked just as well as if not better than guano. But, as is often true today, farmers of that era believed that a solution they had to pay for must be better than the one that required their own hard work. In contrast to the slow and steady hard work of soil management, guano was a quick fix that prepared farmers for the chemicals to come.
By the 1870s, all natural sources of guano were exhausted. But the economic infrastructure and the expectation that fertilizer needed to be bought from some external source remained.
“The most important changes were in the thinking of farmers,” observes Richard A. Wines in Fertilizer in America.
In the areas where guano was first introduced, farmers were already purchasing urban manures and soil supplements, but guano greatly reinforced and extended this commercial mentality. Thus, farmers became accustomed to purchasing large amounts of relatively expensive, concentrated fertilizers. Farmers also learned to accept fertilizers that acted rapidly and whose strength was used up in a year or two, as contrasted to lime, ashes, bones, or stable manure, whose effects were visible for much longer periods. Most importantly, as a result of the use of guano, they came to expect that any other fertilizer they tried should be as highly concentrated.21
As the demand for commercial fertilizers continued to grow, John Bennet Lawes was developing superphosphates—artificial, concentrated nutrients that delivered both nitrates and phosphates, both of which are critical to plant growth. In contrast to Liebig, Lawes considered himself a scientist (rather than a chemist) and was committed to improving and understanding farming as it actually occurred in nature, not in a laboratory. His test plots and scientific experiments continue to this day at Rothamsted Research in England.
Though Lawes made a fortune selling his chemical fertilizers, he continued to believe that manure was essential for farmers. “The repeated declaration of chemists that farmers will be able to grow as fine crops by the aid of a few pounds of some chemical substances as by the same number of tons of farm-yard dung, is never likely to be realized,” Lawes stated in a leaflet published in 1846.22
Lawes sold his business in 187223 but continued his agricultural experiments at Rothamsted. And at the end of his life, long after he had sold his business, he took a stand against manufactured fertilizer. “I do not consider that artificial manures are very suitable for the growth of garden produce,” he wrote. “If I were going to establish myself as a market gardener I should select a locality where I could obtain a large supply of yard manure at a cheap rate.”24 Even the inventor of artificial fertilizers recognized that they were inferior to good old-fashioned manure.
But by then too many new businesses were making too much money selling artificial fertilizers to farmers. And farmers were becoming increasingly desperate to find easy ways to increase their production—they were hooked on the fast results achieved with guano.
New miracle products for farmers were introduced and marketed aggressively. Until the 1880s, the fertilizer industry was rife with fraud and inconsistent and ineffective products. Most were still primarily made from naturally occurring and organic materials such as fish scraps, mined phosphate deposits, and bones. By the end of the century, fertilizer manufacturing had become an important source of revenue for the nation's largest meatpacking companies, Wines reports.25
Sodium nitrate, a by-product of salt mining (and also a powerful explosive), potash and sulfur, and waste from coal, coke, and oil processing were the main ingredients of the growing global fertilizer industry, which took root at a time when there were few government regulations, no testing for health problems, and no consequences for selling toxic poisons.
“As the Industrial Revolution progressed, even more enormous quantities of waste chemicals accumulated,” says Will Allen in The War on Bugs. “Finally, after creating mountains and filling valleys with toxic waste, the industrialists were forced by state and national regulators to dispose of it or face serous fines and disposal fees. When the state and national regulators began imposing fines, most of the mining and manufacturing corporations followed the lead of the German potash syndicate and turned to agriculture as the major dumping ground.”26 Rather than bear the expense of disposing of their own toxic garbage, these companies charged farmers to do it for them, and in the process they turned our agricultural lands into the primary dumping ground for industrial waste.
This is still happening today. The EPA, in partnership with the American Coal Ash Association and the Electric Power Research Institute, has approved an effort to increase the use of coal ash in agriculture. Already more than 180,000 tons of coal ash, which is loaded with mercury and arsenic, are used on agricultural fields every year.27
Germany, meanwhile, was building a chemical industry that still is the world's strongest. With Liebig as their inspiration, the Germans invested heavily in the education of chemists and were flush with minds focused on how to replicate artificially all the natural materials that they couldn't get easily from within their own borders, including and especially fertilizers.
In 1909, chemist Fritz Haber figured out how to “fix” nitrogen from the air. The air we breathe is 78 percent nitrogen. Pulling it out of the air to put it directly on crops became a national obsession for Germany. Haber's work was funded by BASF (a chemical company that still operates today). In partnership with Carl Bosch, he was able to commercialize the process of creating artificial nitrogen fertilizer (which was called the Haber-Bosch process) and start earning money from it.
But nitrogen has purposes other than just fertilizing plants. Nitric oxide also is a key ingredient in explosives; a quaint 1950s promotional brochure for the DuPont company notes, “Oddly enough, nitrogen, the element which sustains life in the human population, is just as vital for military explosives.”28
Until the introduction of the Haber-Bosch process, explosives came from saltpeter, a naturally occurring form of potassium and sodium nitrate found mainly in Chile. During World War I, Germany's adversaries blocked it from getting saltpeter from Chile. The German government subsidized factories to build a chemical substitute using the Haber-Bosch process of producing ammonia, which was then oxidized to make the nitrates essential to synthetic fertilizers . . . and explosives.29
After the war, the victorious Allies briefly considered bringing Haber to trial as a war criminal because of his development and oversight of the first military use of poison gas. But he “grew a beard and hid in Switzerland for a few months until the fuss died down,” says Diarmuid Jeffreys in his book Hell's Cartel. Haber later returned to Germany to rebuild the chemical industry and won a Nobel Prize for his discovery of synthetic ammonia in 1918.
American companies such as DuPont also made both explosives and artificial fertilizers. But the Germans still reigned supreme, thanks to their government's strategy of funding chemistry departments at universities. DuPont invested both money and time in appropriating trade secrets from the German chemical companies.30
Very few government regulations limited the chemical companies’ damaging practices. In fact, World War I had added an element of patriotism to the development of new chemicals and the products made with them. The great industrialists were all making fortunes, and they controlled the fate of the world with their economic might. They weren't about to let a few bugs get in their way.
Though the chemical pesticide industry had existed for some time, it didn't truly come into its own until chemical fertilizers took off. Then, however, it began spreading like a plague of locusts. Arsenic, lead, and cyanide were sold as bug and rodent killers, which were often developed and sold by the same companies that marketed these ingredients as “medicines.”31 For instance, Bayer, the German company that first marketed aspirin, was integral in the development of chemical pesticides.
Note that farmers didn't just roll over and accept easily these new pesticides. Farmers were rightfully skeptical and reluctant to use them—they were quite familiar with the toxicity of many of these chemicals. But they gradually achieved widespread acceptance with clever marketing and aggressive business tactics.
The German chemical companies Bayer, BASF, Hoechst, Agfa, and Weiler-ter-Meer joined together in 1925 to form the cartel IG Farben to protect and control their companies’ businesses and trade secrets. The cartel made competition exceedingly difficult and its member companies highly profitable and operated many subsidiaries both covertly and openly in the United States and other countries. The German business leaders based their cartel model on the Rockefellers’ Standard Oil monopoly. (Standard Oil also sold pesticides as well as oil and actually partnered with IG Farben on a number of projects, including the production of leaded gasoline.)
Both IG Farben and the American chemical giants used their profits to advertise their products, focusing on the “war” on bugs and likening farmers to a patriotic soldiers who must protect their farms and families from evil threats, tapping into a primal social fear of not being patriotic or manly enough to protect one's family.32 (Today, many agricultural chemical products still have brand names such as Warrior, Prowl, Pounce, and Bullet that reflect this marketing approach.33) Meanwhile, the high prices of chemicals put a lot of small farmers out of business.
The chemical companies also employed the humor and style of Theodor Geisel, later renowned as the children's book author Dr. Seuss. In the late 1920s, before he published his first book, he designed advertisements for Flit, an insecticide produced by Standard Oil. His lighthearted approach led to greater acceptance by consumers, persuading them that using chemicals to grow their food was both safe and necessary.34
Later, as Americans marched proudly into World War II to defend our freedom and save the world from Hitler, we were using many of the same chemicals in America that the Nazis were using to exterminate the Jews—and we had been buying the chemicals from Germany.
Zyklon B (or Cyclone B), the infamous poison gas that the Nazis used to execute millions of people, was a cyanide-based pesticide35 used for “delousing” that was developed by Fritz Haber. The ethnically Jewish chemist had converted to Christianity in 1892 and was a German patriot, but he left Germany for England in 1933, having been isolated from the scientific community for his role in developing agents of chemical warfare. His conversion and service to his country were not enough to save him from the rising tide of anti-Semitism. Fortunately for him, Haber did not live long enough to see the extent of the destruction his inventions caused. (Haber's first wife, also a chemist, so strongly disagreed with his work on poison gases, which he tried to hide from her until an explosion killed her dearest friend, that after an argument following a dinner party she took a gun, went out into the garden, and killed herself.)
Zyklon B was manufactured and distributed by Degesch, a subsidiary of IG Farben, who supplied the necessary materials and apparatus to two licensed producers.36 The German chemical companies that were part of IG Farben planned to build a synthetic rubber “factory” next to the concentration camp at Auschwitz, and one of its subsidiaries was to supply gas for the camp's mass executions. The brutality of the overseers at the factory was horrific, often exceeding the brutality of the SS at the concentration camps. “No mercy was shown. Thrashings, ill treatment of the worst kind, even outright killings were the norm,” one of the very few surviving inmates said. “The murderous working speed was responsible for the fact that, while working, many prisoners suddenly stretched out flat, gasped for breath, and died like beasts.”37
IG Farben also funded the infamous Dr. Josef Mengele, who was conducting “research” on many of the pharmaceutical drugs that IG Farben and especially Bayer and its own doctor, Helmuth Vetter, were developing. Vetter, the camp physician at Auschwitz, enjoyed his work (to put it mildly). “The experiments were performed. All test persons died,” Vetter wrote to colleagues at Bayer headquarters [in Leverkusen then and still today]. “I have thrown myself into my work wholeheartedly. . . . I feel like I am in paradise.”38
More than 1.5 million people were killed at Auschwitz by IG Farben poison gas and the torture of slave labor. No rubber was ever produced at the factory because the forced labor never finished building it. And only a handful of the thousands of Jews sent to work in the factory survived.
After the war, many IG Farben executives were tried for war crimes. Only three were convicted of slavery and mass murder, but they were released from prison after a few months. All three went back to work leading their businesses, which experienced unprecedented growth after the war. The Allies eventually broke IG Farben into three companies: Bayer, BASF, and Hoechst, now known as Sanofi-aventis.
Today the pharmaceutical industry remains entwined with agrichemical businesses, an association perhaps best illustrated by Bayer CropScience, the world's second-largest agricultural chemical company, about which they say, “If people turn to Bayer for what ails them, why can't plants?”
BASF calls itself the world's leading chemical company and it is the largest producer of chemicals in the world today, Sanofi-aventis is a global pharmaceutical company.
After World War II, American companies acquired the German companies’ trade secrets and began selling those same products to American farmers by using patriotic advertising. Companies such as DuPont, Monsanto, Dow, American Cyanamid, Eli Lilly, and various cigarette manufacturers all were involved in the highly profitable poison business. Most of these companies knew that their products were causing cancer, especially in their employees, says Devra Davis, PhD, in The Secret History of the War on Cancer. Yet the companies’ leaders actively, intentionally, and repeatedly denied, covered up, and used doubt and ridicule to prevent closer scrutiny or government regulation of their products. They even set up academic and research institutes to disseminate information giving a favorable view of their businesses to the public. After all, a great deal of money was at stake.
Americans were not fearful or suspicious of chemicals in the aftermath of the war. Rather, they transferred their pride in our military might to chemical agriculture. Ironically, what was artificial came to seem “normal,” safe, and conventional. To a large degree, this thinking remains unchanged today.
Walk into many supermarkets today and you'll see labels above the food that is not organic—that is, food that has been grown with chemicals, often from GMO seeds—calling it “conventional.” Conventional cherries, conventional corn, conventional whatever. To most people, the word “conventional” is a nonthreatening term that implies safety and adherence to traditional standards. How has a term that means time-tested, true, and safe come to be used in association with a method of farming that is anything but? (That's why I refuse to use it when referring to chemically grown food.)
I have not been able to trace the origin of the use of “conventional” to denote chemically farmed food, although my friend George Bird, PhD, of Michigan State University, claims responsibility. He was concerned by synthetic chemical agriculture being called “traditional” agriculture, so he started substituting “conventional.” What I do know for certain is that how we label things is extremely important to how they are perceived. The new buzz phrase that Syngenta, Bayer, Dow, DuPont, Cargill, Archer Daniels Midland, and Monsanto use to describe their chemicals and biotech product lines is “crop protection.” Like conventional, “crop protection” sounds so safe, like you have a security force out there guarding your food from invaders. These companies pervert our language to mislead us. We fall for it all the time.
We organic food activists love to pick on Monsanto. But until we address the problem of agricultural chemicals, picking on one company alone will just be a distraction. However, Monsanto is a good example of how a company—indeed, a whole industry—morphs and changes over time to continue to reap profits from very destructive products. Like Hydra, the mythical beast that sprouts new heads to replace those that Hercules cuts off, the chemical companies come back stronger and more dangerous each time. Even more discouraging, you can see over the years how they keep trying to correct themselves by getting out of bad businesses and into new ones. Unfortunately, almost all of their businesses are just as bad, if not worse. (Where is Hercules when you need him?)
Monsanto started producing saccharin in 1901, followed by polychlorinated biphenyls (commonly referred to as PCBs) and Agent Orange (both are primary producers of dioxins—which are extremely carcinogenic and also powerful hormone and endocrine disrupters). Then the company developed Roundup in the 1970s,39 and by the early 1980s it had focused on the development of genetically modified organisms. In the next decade, it actively promoted its newest biotech invention—bovine growth hormone. Every single one of the company's lines of business have wrought disaster, and yet it still survives and thrives.
Acceptance of these new chemical products has not been automatic or unanimous. Farmers resisted them. Scientists and doctors challenged them. In the 1980s, the nonprofit Natural Resources Defense Council and a group of activists raised awareness that a chemical commonly used on apples, daminozide (Alar) could cause cancer in children because they consume large amounts of apple juice and applesauce relative to their body weight.
Long before the Alar scare, many children died from eating apples contaminated with arsenic. In 1933, 100,000,000 Guinea Pigs: Dangers in Everday Foods, Drugs, and Cosmetics was a best-selling book. The authors alleged that from the late 1800s to the 1920s, more than 100 million Americans suffered from symptoms of lead and arsenic poisoning. Lead and arsenic (lead arsenate) were used as pesticides in orchards.40
Believe it or not, arsenic is still used today—even in chicken feed! It's used to promote growth, kill parasites, and ”improve pigmentation of chicken meat,” even though arsenic is strongly linked to many types of cancer and diabetes.41 In 1999, 318,000 pounds of arsenic were used in California alone.42
The US Congress responded to concerns about the food supply by establishing the Federal Trade Commission in 1912 and the Food and Drug Administration in 1927. But then as now, the industry fought standards with lobbying money and lots of advertising. The government usually sided with the groups who were making the most money—industry. Meanwhile, a host of new chemicals hit the market. Methyl bromide, a soil fumigant, was introduced in 1936, and DDT reached the market in 1945 and was widely viewed as a less-toxic substitute for lead arsenate. These are just a few notable examples among thousands. You probably have seen the pictures of trucks with hoses spraying children at play and eating sandwiches to “prove” just how safe DDT really was.
We now know it wasn't safe at all.
As the freight train of the Industrial Revolution barreled at full speed through America's farm country, few small family farmers were able to survive. Artificial fertilizers did increase yields from worn-out soil, but they also increased the need for other chemicals and radically increased costs for farmers. Many went bankrupt. Large companies bought and consolidated the farms that went under, changing the landscape of America from a patchwork of smaller, independent farms to corporate farms in a process that continues to this day.43
Cargill, for instance, started as a single grain storage facility in 1865. Still family owned and privately held, it is now one of the largest agricultural companies in the world.44 While farms grew, however, the number of farmers plummeted. In the early 1900s, half of all Americans worked on farms or ranches. Today, fewer than 1 percent of Americans work on farms.45
It's important to realize that large-scale agriculture—which is often denounced by environmental leaders (even when the industrial-scale farms are organic)—is not a recent phenomenon. From the feudal system of the Middle Ages, when peasants farmed land in exchange for protection, to the tenant farm system, to plantations that “required” slave labor to function, our history is filled with industrial farming. America was settled by many indentured servants who had come from England to harvest the abundant resources of the new land. George Washington, through his work with the Ohio Company, was one of the many who made their fortunes by acquiring large tracts of land through “Royal Charter,” clearing it and sending the timber and furs back to England, then selling it off as farmland.46
We believe that the past is the past and that our government is protecting us and keeping us safe. The truth is, however, that the government is a lagging indicator of safety, not a leading indicator. It responds after problems are discovered rather than acting as a shield against them. And we will be living with the impacts of our chemical hubris for centuries to come. Even today, we see our government responding to crises by setting up additional agencies, creating new overseeing roles, and throwing billions of dollars at a problem that needs to be addressed in a much deeper, more thoughtful way.
Time, however, is running out.