10
Poisoning Nature
When species started to disappear, it was clear that nature wouldn’t survive without legal protection. It was all the more clear when air and water pollution intensified.
For most of human history, air and water pollution was a fact of urban life. Cities heated by wood or coal have always had a heavy layer of smog. When cities use coal to power industrial processes, the air is even dirtier. Worst of all are cities that host smelting and steelmaking plants, where tons of air pollutants are released in the process of generating the tremendous amount of heat needed to melt ore.
Extinction and pollution have long been seen as side effects of civilization. Tucked into that assumption is the concept that naked self-interest is the guiding principle of human society, and two corollaries: some people’s rights matter more than others (so the factory owner’s right to make money trumps the workers’ right to good health), and nature and animals have almost no rights at all.
Until the twentieth century, the effects of coal smoke were generally local or regional. Pittsburgh, one of whose smokestacks is shown at the start of this chapter, provides a good example. The Smoky City sits where the Allegheny River and the Monongahela River join together to form the Ohio River flowing northwest out of Pittsburgh and then southwest to the Mississippi. The city’s long flirtation with air pollution began in 1762, when a seam of bituminous coal was found on the south bank of the Monongahela River. Bituminous (soft) coal has a high sulfur content and releases sulfur oxides during combustion, while the nitrogen in coal is released as nitrogen oxide. Once coal smoke goes up the stack, these gases react with the moisture in the atmosphere and create sulfuric and nitric acids that reach the ground as acid rain, damaging crops, buildings, and waterways. In addition, nitrogen oxides combine with volatile organic compounds to form ozone or smog.
It’s handy to have a local source of fossil fuel, no matter how polluting, and by the 1840s Pittsburgh was one of the biggest cities west of the Allegheny Mountains. In the Atlantic Monthly’s January 1868 edition, journalist James Parton described the city of 230,000 as “hell with the lid taken off.” “The town lies low,” he wrote, “as at the bottom of an excavation, just visible through the mingled smoke and mist, and every object in it is black. Smoke, smoke, smoke—everywhere smoke.”
Many people saw Pittsburgh’s dark haze as a sign of productivity, health, and prosperity. In 1866, Parton wrote, “The Pittsburgher insists that the smoke of bituminous coal kills malaria and saves the eyesight. The smoke, so far from being an evil, is a blessing, and it destroys every property of the atmosphere that is hostile to life.” In the 1800s, the acids and carbon in coal smoke were believed to be powerful disinfectants. Local newspapers advertised “pure mountain air and healthy coal smoke” without a trace of irony.
When Louis Pasteur’s bacteriology killed the miasma theory, a major justification for coal smoke disappeared. In addition, anthropologists argued that coal smoke blocking the sun was creating a rickety underclass with heritable physical and mental defects, degrading the American gene pool. By the 1900s, coal smoke was no longer celebrated.
Pittsburgh was a steel town. The first steel mill opened in 1875, and by 1911 the city was producing half the country’s steel. In the 1940s, air quality was so bad that on days when the wind didn’t blow, the midday sun was blacked out by coal smoke. Photographs from that time show downtown streetlamps lit at noon, with neon signs glowing through the haze.
The city established the Bureau of Smoke Prevention in 1941, and posted its first smoke-control ordinance (with a five-year delay in implementation due to World War II). The ordinance gave two choices: smoke reduction by using “smokeless fuels including anthracite coal, natural gas, or fuel oil instead of bituminous coal” or, if bituminous coal was used, the furnace had to be fired with mechanical stokers rather than men with shovels.
When Mayor David L. Lawrence was elected in 1946, he promised to clean up the city. “I am convinced that our people want clean air. There is no other single thing which will so dramatically improve the appearance, the health, the pride, the spirit of the city.” Over the next four years, more than half of the households in Pittsburgh started heating with natural gas instead of coal, and Pittsburgh’s sky lightened. Manufacturers switched fuels as well, and coal-burning locomotives were replaced with diesel-electric trains. According to environmental historian Joel Tarr, the United States had 35,000 coal-burning locomotives in 1950, and by 1954 there were only 350. Steamboats changed from coal to diesel, too, in one of the fastest technology shifts in the nation’s history. This was a big boon to air quality.
Donora lies twenty-seven miles south of Pittsburgh, nestled in a valley backed by a steep ridge. Like Pittsburgh, it was a steel town: Union Steel built a rod mill in 1901 that became American Steel and Wire, the largest wire factory in the world. Donora Zinc Works first opened in 1915 as a subsidiary of U.S. Steel, and soon nearly all the greenery within half a mile of the plant was dead.
Both plants used soft coal and gas for fuel. Zinc Works was a modern plant designed with interrelated production processes to produce cleaner smelter smoke, and the plant’s products included zinc, sulfuric acid, cadmium, and lead. The first step Zinc Works used to extract zinc was to roast the zinc-bearing ore, releasing sulfurous fumes. These fumes were reacted with nitrogen oxide to form liquid sulfuric acid, an industrial chemical with a robust market. (Removing sulfur from the smokestack reduces the amount of sulfuric acid raining down nearby: this process was developed by smelters in California and Tennessee in response to lawsuits over air quality.) Next, the roasted ore was mixed with fuel and smelted down into molten zinc. Zinc ore often contains other metals, including cadmium and lead. Both of these metals have lower melting points than zinc and go up the smokestack in the smelting process. Some of the cadmium and lead dust was collected using electrostatic precipitation devices originally designed for Montana copper smelters, but the rest went up the smokestacks and settled out over the town.
Webster lies about two miles downstream from Donora, across the Monongahela River. In the 1920s, Webster farmers sued the smelter for lost crops, orchards, and livestock and ruined topsoil, fences, and houses (which I assume means exterior paint). After long legal battles to discredit the claims, Zinc Works lost the case and started mitigation. They gave farmers tons of crushed limestone to neutralize the acids in their newly infertile soil. The smelter furnaces were adapted to burn more cleanly, and the company carried out fifteen years of air-quality sampling.
A common strategy used by western smelters was to build smokestacks as high as 600 feet to disperse the noxious gases over a wide area. In Donora, people lived in a bowl surrounded by a 400-foot ridge, and the smokestacks were a mere 150 feet high. In certain weather conditions, the smoke settled onto the town and stayed.
Before cars were common, people had to live within walking distance of the factories they worked in, even smelters, and Zinc Works was surrounded by residential neighborhoods. Donora was home to 14,000 souls, 5,000 of whom were employed by Zinc Works and American Steel and Wire. In agricultural Webster, people had nothing to lose from suing Zinc Works. In industrial Donora, no one wanted to make trouble over the town’s air quality.
On Tuesday, October 26, 1948, a stinking fog enveloped the small industrial town and stayed on the ground for five days. The dense, yellowish, irritating smog was the result of an unusual weather inversion—a pocket of warm, stagnant air—that acted like a lid on the valley, holding in sulfuric and nitrogen dioxide, hydrofluoric acid, carbon monoxide, and other poisonous gases.
The mills were still pouring out smoke on Friday evening, although the local hospital was crowded with residents gasping for breath. The phones of the eight local physicians were ringing off the hook, and fire department volunteers went house to house and administered oxygen to those unable to breathe. Board of Health member Dr. William Rongaus led an ambulance on foot through the murky streets to transport the dead and dying to the hospital. The first floor of the Donora Hotel became a secondary medical center. The funeral homes were so full that the hotel basement was used as an overflow morgue.
Gossip columnist Walter Winchell broadcast news of Donora’s deadly air on his national Saturday night radio show, and U.S. Steel’s lawyers ordered that the plants be shut down by six a.m. Sunday. By the time a rainstorm cleared the air at noon, twenty people were dead and 600 had been hospitalized. Most of the deceased had lived in the neighborhood flanking Zinc Works.
In the end, 7,000 people in Donora were afflicted with respiratory problems, and the town had elevated mortality rates for decades. Local newspapers accused Zinc Works of killing townspeople, while others argued that the smoke came from home heating and trains as well as commercial and industrial processes. What was needed, they said, was a smoke ordinance like Pittsburgh’s.
The first response of the US Public Health Service was to announce on Tuesday morning that the disaster was just an “atmospheric freak.” When the final report on the incident was released in 1949, the Public Health Service claimed that the deaths were due to fumes from a variety of sources, bad weather, and preexisting respiratory and heart disease. The first National Air Pollution Symposium was held in Southern California that year, and Donora was presented as “not an industrial accident but the victim of uniquely severe and enduring weather.” More than a hundred residents filed lawsuits against U.S. Steel totaling $4.5 million in claims, but the company swore that the smog was an act of God. U.S. Steel settled the lawsuits filed against it for $256,000, or roughly $12,800 per corpse, and never admitted responsibility for the disaster.
In the United States, we share the air, waterways, and wildlife as a common resource. No one owns these commons, so people exploit the environment for private gain. And they go too far. Everyone enjoys the health benefits from clean air and water, while a few individuals profit from polluting our commons. Everyone benefits from robust salmon runs, while a few profit from canning factories. The powerful few are able to create private wealth by exploiting our common resources, while the powerless lose nature’s many benefits. Environmental goods, including clean air and water, are areas where government intervention can increase efficiency.
Before the mass deaths in Donora, the federal government’s response to air pollution was to support state and local health departments. The Bureau of Mines conducted federal air pollution studies for the Department of the Interior, and air-quality ordinances were passed city by city. Los Angeles’ smog reduction program started in 1947, and more than a billion dollars was spent on mitigation in the next decade. St. Louis and Pittsburgh banned the use of soft coal. The year after Donora’s accident, Allegheny County passed its first smoke-control ordinance and established the Bureau of Air Pollution Control. Oregon and its smelters became the first state with an air pollution–control agency in 1951, and New York City’s Department of Air Pollution Control was organized in 1952, when they started taking twice-a-day measurements of sulfur dioxide.
The next year, New York City experienced a temperature inversion from November 12 through 21 that put a lid on the city’s pollutants, and sulfur dioxide readings spiked. Mortality data analyzed after the incident showed that the death rate in New York City was elevated from November 15 to 24. According to statistical analyses, smog killed between 170 and 260 people.
In the midst of the smog incident of 1953, an article in the New York Times titled “What Makes Smog? Cities Do Not Agree” laid out the problem. No one knew what smog was, or how to fix it, and they didn’t know until later that people were dying from it. The air pollution–control director for Los Angeles County claimed smog was the result of “smoke, charred paper, dust, soot, grime, carbon, noxious acids, fumes, gases, odors or particular matter or any combination thereof.” Maybe so. As with gun control today, it was obvious that a city-by-city approach to air pollution was killing people.
The Air Pollution Control Act of 1955 established the federal government as the ultimate arbiter of air pollution control, a significant first step. The act provided for “research and technical assistance relating to air pollution control” and authorized the surgeon general to research air pollution and educate the public about how to prevent air pollution. The states were left in charge of prevention and control with no way for the federal government to punish polluters.
Water pollution, like air pollution, is an old problem. Rivers, lakes, and streams have been used to carry away human wastes for centuries in the United States. In addition, industrial wastes were disposed of in the waterways as well. Butchering, tanning, and dyeing were notoriously dependent on the waterways for waste removal, and as industrialization intensified, so did the volume of wastes in the rivers and streams.
Rainstorms can deposit an enormous amount of water on a city in a few hours, and cities without a drainage system will have stagnant pools and periodic flooding. To keep the streets clear of water, cities built storm drains that shunted urban rainwater into the nearest waterways. When the flush toilet was adopted in the 1880s, cities expanded their existing drainage systems to accommodate bathroom wastes as well. Rather than collecting feces in a pit in the cellar and periodically hiring someone to cart them out of town, wastes were flushed into the nearest waterway. Their lingering odor was banished from the home, and the combined sewer—so called because it combined storm and sanitation flows—became the gold standard for municipal sewer systems.
A tsunami of sewer construction took place between 1880 and 1910, and the sole purpose of a sewer at that time was to transport sewage and storm water to the nearest body of water. There was no expectation that waterways would be swimmable or drinkable, and there was no thought of wastewater treatment. Many decades later, combined sewers became a curse when wastewater treatment plants were built: whenever it rains, wastewater plants are overwhelmed by the combination of raw sewage and storm water, and dump the untreated excess into the receiving waters. But when city sewer systems were first laid, that was the point. The sewage went into the waterways, and most cities had multiple lines that led directly to the local river or lake.
At the time, Boston was the country’s leader in wastewater management. Boston’s sewage had originally drained directly into the harbor, leaving the mudflats reeking so strongly in warm weather that the affluent decamped to summer residences on the North Shore. In 1876, the state legislature approved the construction of the Boston Main Drainage System.
The city of Boston built a seven-and-a-half-foot-tall brick conduit that ran 150 feet below sea level under Dorchester Bay and out to Moon Island, a distance of a mile and a half. Four 50-million-gallon storage tanks were built out of granite blocks and a twelve-foot-diameter outflow pipe ran 600 feet into the ocean. By 1884, the sewage from eighteen cities and towns was piped to Moon Island in Boston Harbor and collected in tanks. Rather than pumping sewage into the harbor around the clock, Boston sewage was judiciously released to sea on the outgoing tide.
From the point of view of the waterways, there are two types of wastes: organic matter from plants and animals and everything else. As long as there is enough oxygen in the water to support life, then the microscopic organisms that live in running water will break down the animal or plant matter and use it as food. If the wastes are inorganic or poisonous, then the running water will dilute them. The understanding at the time was that dilution is the solution and all rivers run to the sea, so there was no need for restraint when it came to dumping wastes into the waterways.
This policy contaminated the drinking water for cities downstream, creating a public health hazard. The solution was to build water treatment plants that used sand filters to clean the water and added chlorine to create safe drinking water. We polluted the waterways and used technology to make clean water for the cities.
The only regulations on a river were related to navigability, and any river running through an industrial city was polluted to a degree that is unimaginable today. The Rivers and Harbors Appropriation Act of 1899 prohibited the disposal of solid wastes in navigable waters that might impede boats, but did not address industrial and human wastes. Those were dumped with impunity.
Pittsburgh, the Smoky City, was the poster child for air pollution, and the Cuyahoga River was the avatar of water pollution. It famously burned in 1969, leading to the passage of the Clean Water Act. But there had been fires on the Cuyahoga since the 1800s.
This slow, winding river (Cuyahoga is from the Mohawk word Cayagaga, “crooked river”) meanders about eighty-five miles through northeast Ohio to Lake Erie. Cleveland, at the mouth of the Cuyahoga River, was home to twenty oil refineries before the end of the Civil War.
Before cars, gasoline was an unusable fraction of refined crude oil that had to be disposed of. Refineries often dumped it directly into the waterways. John D. Rockefeller, who owned the largest refinery in Cleveland, wrote in 1881, “We used to burn [gasoline] for fuel in distilling the oil, and thousands and hundreds of thousands of barrels of it floated down the creeks and rivers, and the ground was saturated with it, in the constant effort to get rid of it.” There were no federal regulations against dumping petroleum products in the river, and a rarely enforced city ordinance carried a $10 fine.
In addition to oil refineries, the Cuyahoga was lined with steel mills, chemical plants, paper mills, and other industrial facilities. The Cleveland sewer system piped its wastes directly into Lake Erie, where it joined the industrial wastes dumped into the river by Akron and Cleveland factories. When city residents complained about the smell and taste of their tap water, Cleveland moved its intake pipes farther into Lake Erie, away from the pollutants carried by the Cuyahoga.
Thanks to all of the refineries spilling oil and gasoline into the Cuyahoga, it was “so flammable that if steamboat captains shoveled glowing coals overboard, the water erupted in flames.” The first big fire on the Cuyahoga may have been lit in August 1868, when sparks from a passing tugboat ignited an oil slick. In response, the Cleveland newspaper Plain Dealer called for oil refiners to stop dumping oil into the river: “Along the whole length of the river, under the wharves and even under the warehouses there are deposits of this flammable stuff, and in some places to the thickness of several inches.” The flammable river was a problem that threatened waterfront properties and shipping.
During a spring flood in 1883, a boiler house standing in high water lit an oil slick created by a leaking refinery tank. The New York Times described the enormous fire racing along a creek that joined the Cuyahoga just before it reached downtown, moving towards Standard Oil’s massive Cleveland refinery. Several tanks exploded and buildings burned, and only the valiant efforts of firefighters and Standard Oil employees saved the plant.
Fires on the Cuyahoga continued to burn in the twentieth century. In early 1912, gasoline leaking from a Standard Oil cargo ship was lit by a spark from a tugboat, igniting a sheet of fire on the river that burned five tugs and a yacht. “Without warning,” the Plain Dealer reported, “a shriveling blast of blue flame from the water beneath them wrapped the dry dock in fire.” In the end, three dry docks burned and five men were incinerated.
In 1922, there was another inferno near the same spot as the 1912 fire, and Congress passed a joint resolution for an international conference on maritime oil pollution. The “fire hazard created by the accumulation of floating oil on the piles of piers and bulkheads into harbor waters [was] a growing source of alarm.” The modest Oil Pollution Act of 1924 prohibited maritime oil discharges but did not address industrial discharges or inland waterways.
The Cuyahoga flared again in 1930. In 1936, the river burned for five days, and an article in the Cleveland Press about the river’s flammability identified the solution: fire tugs! Five years later when a river fire caused $7,500 worth of damage to an ore carrier, the problem was again defined as a lack of fire tugs. Another fire burned on the river in 1948, and the local Chamber of Commerce suggested regular river patrols to clean up oil slicks and other potential hazards.
In May of 1952, leaking oil from the Standard Oil Company facility formed a two-inch-thick oil slick, “the greatest fire hazard in Cleveland.” According to the Cleveland Press, the slick spanned the river in some places. With so much available fuel, it was only a matter of time before the next conflagration. On November 1, 1952, the Cuyahoga started burning near the Great Lakes Towing Company’s shipyard. The resulting five-alarm fire destroyed the Jefferson Avenue Bridge, the shipyard, and three tugboats. There were no deaths because the shipyard was closed on Saturday afternoon, but losses were estimated to be between $500,000 and $1.5 million.
Local officials and some captains of industry worked together to reduce the risk of river fires. Refineries tried to limit their spills and boats were commissioned to remove oil-laden debris from the river. In 1957, the Army Corps of Engineers claimed the Cuyahoga was in “exceptionally good” shape because all local docks were accessible for shipping season. No mention was made of the fact that the river was unswimmable, undrinkable, and fishless for forty miles from Akron.
The Cuyahoga was not the only burning river in the country. According to John Hartig’s Burning Rivers, fires on the Chicago River were community events, and spectators gathered on bridges to watch them. In the Rouge River, rafts of thick, oily sludge and feces regularly caught fire before they drifted into the Detroit River and then Lake Erie. The Buffalo River in upstate New York burned in the 1960s, and a tugboat on Pennsylvania’s Schuylkill River was destroyed when an oil slick on the river’s surface caught fire.
These rivers weren’t just carrying petroleum products and feces. After World War II, the types of wastes that were disposed of changed significantly. Dow, Monsanto, and DuPont were manufacturing plastics, polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs), and inorganic pesticides, such as dichlorodiphenyltrichloroethane (DDT). Thousands of new compounds and wastes from these industrial processes were discharged directly into the air and water. These new chemicals overwhelmed the rivers and streams that had previously been challenged by organic discharges.
Some of these materials were toxic, some were nonbiodegradable, and some of them bioaccumulate in the environment, moving up the food chain in ever-increasing concentrations. Humans are at the top of the food chain, so chemicals that bioaccumulate matter to all of us. Unlike earlier versions of air and water pollution, these chemicals were invisible.
In the 1960s, the American public became aware that some contaminants have global reach. Eighty-six nuclear bombs were exploded aboveground at the Nevada Test Site in the 1950s, releasing radioactive material into the atmosphere. Spread by the wind, the radioactive material blanketed the United States. A national network of radiation monitoring stations, which collected data between 1951 and 1958, measured thyroid doses of radioactivity as a function of age at exposure, region of the country, and dietary habits. They found that a person who drank milk had seven times more radioiodine in their thyroid than a person who drank no milk, and a person who drank goat milk had twenty-five to fifty times the exposure. Beware the lactating mammal.
Atom bomb tests alarmed the public in the late 1950s, when people learned that radioactive waste was falling on their backyards. Linus Pauling won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1962 for trying to stop aboveground testing of nuclear weapons, and the ban the bomb movement continued to spread. In 1963, many countries ratified the Partial Test Ban Treaty that prohibited the atmospheric testing of nuclear weapons.
DDT, like radioactive fallout, was invisible and persistent. DDT’s fatal flaw is that its breakdown product, 1,1-Dichloro-2,2-bis(p-chlorophenyl) ethylene (or DDE), interferes with calcium deposition in bird eggs, leading to thin, fragile eggshells, and fish-eating birds carried particularly high concentrations. Species including peregrine falcons, eagles, hawks, and pelicans laid eggs with shells too thin for the parents to brood without breaking them. At a time when cities used broadcast spraying of DDT to control mosquitoes, it was clear that several bird species would disappear without federal regulations. The thinned eggshells were an unexpected side effect of DDT, but pesticides and radiation were both known killers. PCBs were both invisible and unexpectedly dangerous.
PCBs are manufactured chemicals that are colorless to light yellow oily liquids or resin-like materials; they are often mixed with mineral oil. These mixtures are incredibly stable with no smell or taste. They are resistant to fire, pressure, temperature, electricity, and water. They do not change chemically, making them an ideal material to insulate big electrical transformers. PCBs have also been used in flame retardants, varnishes, waxes, sealants, glue, hydraulic fluids, lubricants, adhesives, and the inert fraction of pesticides. They were sprayed on dirt roads to keep the dust down. PCBs are useful because they do not break down.
PCBs were first manufactured in 1929 by the Swann Chemical Company, which later became part of Monsanto. As electrical networks multiplied during the first half of the twentieth century, companies that made transformers, like General Electric and Westinghouse Electric Corporation, became major purchasers of PCBs.
PCBs are fat soluble and accumulate in living organisms. Like DDT, they enter the food web and bioconcentrate (absorbed from water and accumulated in tissue to concentrations greater than those found in surrounding water) in fats. Phytoplankton absorb PCBs, and the zooplankton that eat phytoplankton store the PCBs in their lipids. The little fish eat the zooplankton, the bigger fish eat the little fish, and each step of the way the PCBs are conserved in their fat. PCBs have a long half-life, so they accumulate with age. The organism’s lifetime body burden keeps increasing year by year. In addition to bioconcentration, PCBs also biomagnify with concentrations increasing in tissue as it moves up the food chain.
Small amounts of PCBs circulate in the blood serum and are excreted through feces. The other way PCBs are cleansed from the body is through egg-laying (for fish and birds) or lactation (for mammals).
As it turns out, PCBs mimic hormones and disrupt reproduction. The problem with hormone mimics is that both estrogen and testosterone actively control our physiology at very low concentrations, and are used throughout the animal kingdom. The same molecule that controls my fertility controls a bird’s fertility, and a beetle’s. PCBs have been linked to altered sexual development and behavior in numerous animal studies. In humans, PCBs affect sperm motility, endometriosis, the length of the menstrual cycle, the duration of lactation, and the volume of breast milk (and that’s just the reproductive changes we know about).
Humans get their PCBs from eating fish, and women discharge PCBs from their bodies by nursing. When a woman begins lactating, her fat stores are mobilized to efficiently excrete lipids, and the mother transfers her burden of pollutants to her newborn. In the United States and other industrialized countries, PCBs are present in breast milk at about one part per million. According to the limits set by the World Health Organization, an American baby takes in five times the allowable daily intake for an adult. In 1981, one study showed that 93 percent of breast milk samples exceeded the US Food and Drug Administration’s limit for newborn exposure to PCBs. The levels of PCBs in the breast milk of Europeans and North Americans are generally higher than those of women in developing nations.
PCBs are a dioxin-like substance, and people who are exposed to large amounts are often afflicted with chloracne, a debilitating set of skin eruptions that include blackheads, whiteheads, cysts, and pustules. Since PCBs remain stored in fat for years, chloracne is chronic. It takes at least two or three years after exposure to recover, and sometimes as long as fifteen to thirty years. The more subtle harms caused by PCBs were not understood for decades, but the acute response for the workers was apparent by 1933, when twenty-three out of twenty-four workers had chloracne.
In 1937, seven years after the first PCB factory opened its doors, the Harvard School of Public Health hosted a one-day meeting on the problem of systemic effects of certain chlorinated hydrocarbons, including PCBs (then called chlorinated diphenyl). Representatives from Monsanto, General Electric, and the US Public Health Service were there, and from a brief report on the one-day conference, it is clear that the dangers of PCBs were understood and widely known. It “is certainly capable of doing harm in very low concentrations,” they wrote. There was “no doubt as to the possibility of systematic effects.”
Monsanto was the sole manufacturer of PCBs, producing about 1.5 billion pounds before they were banned in 1979. The first manufacturing plant was in Anniston, Alabama (the state with the greatest diversity of freshwater species); the second was in Sauget, Illinois, across the Mississippi River from St. Louis. The town of Sauget was initially named Monsanto, and it was a company town. At that time, city government (which in this case was Monsanto) set the environmental regulations, taxes, and fines. No one will be at all surprised that Monsanto dumped PCBs into the waterways for decades, and both areas became Superfund sites. A world without water quality regulations is a dangerous world to live in.
People knew that PCBs were toxic and that direct contact caused chloracne, but they did not understand how persistent PCBs were until 1966, when Swedish scientists measured PCBs in human hair, birds and their eggs, fish, and pine needles. Their research, coming after Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring on the dangers of DDT, was widely publicized.
In 1968, a scientist at UCLA Berkeley, Dr. Robert Risebrough, found PCBs in fish and birds from Puget Sound down to Baja California and Central America. Risebrough’s paper, “Polychlorinated Biphenyls in the Global Ecosystem,” was published in Nature in December 1968, the same year that PCB-contaminated rice oil sickened the residents of a Japanese town. Subsequent studies showed that in addition to affecting reproduction, very low levels of PCBs can impair the immune, endocrine, and nervous systems.
An internal document from General Electric in October 1969 titled “PCB: An Industry Problem?” details how the persistence of PCBs might affect the company. General Electric’s Industrial Power and Capacitor Department purchased about 10 million pounds of PCBs a year, probably more than half of GE’s total usage. Of that 10 million pounds, 9 million pounds went out in product. The rest? Some was returned to Monsanto, some was hauled away by a “New Jersey scavenger,” and some was sent to the town dump. That’s a million pounds a year of PCBs released into the environment from a single plant.
In total, the global production of PCBs was about 1.4 million tons. Roughly two-thirds of this is in landfills or in electrical insulators, with the other third deposited in coastal and ocean sediments. Pollutants entering the deep sea accumulate in the food chain, and deep-sea organisms regularly have higher reported concentrations of PCBs than surface-water species. PCBs have already affected the reproduction of sea lions and seals. Beluga whales are known to be contaminated with astonishingly high levels of PCBs. In the late 1980s, some researchers believed that it was entirely possible that, as more PCBs reach the oceans, all large sea mammals could disappear.
The invisible threats of DDT, radioactive fallout, and PCBs have affected people, animals, and plants around the world, in New York City as well as in remote, pristine locations like the Arctic. But there was another thoroughly modern insult to the waterways that was distressingly visible. The newfangled detergents worked better than ever, but the waterways foamed and turned green. There was nothing subtle about the change in water quality after detergents replaced soap.
Soap has been made since the Pyramids were built, from mixing alkaline ashes or lye with fats that form long hydrocarbon chains with a salt on the end. Soap traps the greasy dirt on your clothes in a little ball with oil on the inside and the water-loving part of the soap molecule on the outside, easily washed away. Procter & Gamble started making soap in Cincinnati in the 1840s, when it was the meatpacking center of the United States. Procter & Gamble used slaughterhouse by-products—tallow and lard—to make candles and soap that it shipped on steamboats down the Ohio River to the Mississippi and then on to New Orleans. The company had huge contracts during the Civil War to supply the Union troops with soap and candles. After the war, people started to switch from candles to oil lamps, and by 1876, the company’s soap production exceeded its candle production for the first time.
Their response was Ivory® soap. Instead of tallow or olive oil, this soap was made of cheap coconut and palm oils. It was white; it lathered but remained solid; it floated, thanks to the air in it; and it lasted longer than other soaps. Procter & Gamble promoted Ivory nationwide and became a multimillion-dollar company.
In 1931, Procter & Gamble started a fifteen-year research effort to develop a synthetic detergent that worked in hard water. The calcium, magnesium, and iron ions in hard water have always foiled soap by binding with it and creating soap scum that sticks to fabric. Tide®, the first heavy-duty detergent, was released in 1946 along with the automatic washing machine. Detergent is a two-part molecule, like soap, that allows water to break up oil and grease and float away the dirt. But attached to the hydrocarbon-salt chain is a sodium tripolyphosphate molecule that ties up the metals in hard water, so it all can be rinsed away. The resulting heavy-duty detergent doesn’t leave a residue on fabric. By the early 1950s, Tide had captured more than 30 percent of the laundry market, and it has been the number one selling laundry detergent every year since.
Phosphate detergents are generally nontoxic, but after your clothes are clean, most of the wastewater and its detergents are released into the waterways. The surfactant in the detergent causes foam to form, and the phosphate builder makes the foam stable.
Long-lasting, stable foam is a bad addition to the waterways. The phosphorus in detergents was even worse. Algae require phosphorus, nitrogen, and carbon to grow, and there is usually plenty of carbon and nitrogen in water. As a result, phosphorus is typically the limiting nutrient for algal growth. This means that the amount of algae in the waterways depends on the amount of phosphorus in the water, and detergents contained a lot of phosphorus.
Freshwater scientist Christopher Knud-Hansen noted that the new laundry detergents contained about 7 to 12 percent phosphorus. By 1983, over 2 million tons of phosphorus were used in US detergents. Since one pound of phosphorus can grow 700 pounds of algae, this excess phosphorus had significant effects on the health of the waterways.
Lakes went from crystalline to algal green. When algae die, they settle to the bottom of the water body and decompose. This strips oxygen from the bottom of the lake or pond and destroys deep-water fisheries. In addition, anoxic bottom waters release hydrogen sulfide, which causes the waterways to smell like rotten eggs and makes recreation less plausible. Nationwide, detergents accounted for about half of the phosphorus in the waterways. Vermont’s Lake Champlain grew underwater castles of algae in bays that had always been clear, as did lakes around the country. By the late 1960s, nearly 10,000 lakes were blighted by detergents.
Lake Erie is the shallowest Great Lake, and the smallest by volume. Through the 1960s, about 20,000 pounds of phosphorus entered Lake Erie every day, about half from cities and industries and half from fertilizer runoff. Soon algal mats covered the shoreline, and the populations of sport fish had dwindled or disappeared.
As air and water quality declined, more people were enjoying outdoor recreation. In the 1950s, automobile ownership increased and low-density suburbs sprouted across the landscape. The interstate highway system knit the country together, but consumer society led to increased solid wastes, litter, and mounting concerns over smog and corporate pollution. Billboards and pollution created urban blight, seen as both ugly and unhealthy. People could see that nature was under siege.
The Cuyahoga River burned again in 1969, and it was a turning point for environmental consciousness. This was a relatively tame fire, all considered, that damaged two railroad bridges and was extinguished in half an hour by the fire tugs. It was gone before anyone had a photograph of it. But five weeks after the fire, Time magazine ran a piece in the Friday, August 1, 1969, issue under the headline “America’s Sewage System and the Price of Optimism.”
Some river! Chocolate-brown, oily, bubbling with subsurface gases, it oozes rather than flows. “Anyone who falls into the Cuyahoga does not drown,” Cleveland’s citizens joke grimly. “He decays.” The Federal Water Pollution Control Administration dryly notes: “The lower Cuyahoga has no visible life, not even low forms such as leeches and sludge worms that usually thrive on wastes.”
Time used a photograph from the 1952 fire to illustrate the article, and people were shocked. A burning river is almost biblical. It is epically wrong.
People were becoming aware that the nation was facing an environmental crisis. Nature was literally dying. There were mounds of detergent foam ten to twelve feet high at the base of Niagara Falls, and around the country streams and creeks were foaming. Something had to be done. Citizens were going to have to save nature before it was too late.