Howard Kohn

Howard Kohn writes feature articles for Rolling Stone.

After many years of low-key debate, there is intensifying alarm in the United States and Europe about the application of chemicals to growing food. New, highly publicized studies linking farm chemicals to increased rates of cancer, birth defects and other health problems have brought the issue into public view. The Rolling Stone Environmental Reader, 1992.

The use of chemicals to ward off pests and boost production began in earnest after World War II, thanks to an advertising campaign by Dow Chemical, Monsanto and other chemical companies. This came to be known as the green revolution. Ibid.

To be certified as a farmer who grows food free of pesticides has become good for business. Ibid.

In effect, consumers have become their own test subjects. Although DDT was banned from agricultural use a decade after Rachel Carson's book Silent Spring was published in 1962, scores of other pesticides eventually took its place, most of them without extensive testing by government regulators. Ibid.

Starting in the late 1940s, when Hanford became the country's biggest bomb-manufacturing plant, its smokestacks began spewing radioactive gasses, principally plutonium and iodine-131, into the air&emdash;in amounts far greater than the leaks produced during the 1979 accident at Three Mile Island. Ibid/

The dirty secret of Hanford, unfortunately, is part of a much larger scandal. The U. S. Government, which many Americans assume is faithfully working to safeguard their environment, instead has been the nation's single worst polluter for the last forty years. Ibid.

"It's a terrible irony that during a time of world peace the U. S. government has waged what amounts to a war of pollution against its own people," says Mike Clark president of Friends of the Earth, a major environmental group. Ibid.

After four decades of research and manufacturing, the DOE is stuck with billions of gallons of radioactive and chemical by-products, principally at four locations: the Hanford facility, in Washington; the Savannah River tritium plant, in South Carolina, the Rocky Flats plutonium ,plant, in Colorado; and the Fernald uranium plant, in Ohio. Ibid.

One independent estimate of the eventual cleanup costs for the defense and energy departments together comes to a staggering $330 billion&emdash;twice the officially estimated tab for the bailout of the saving and loan industry. Ibid.