You think that's bad?

Here's an article from Dr. Clark's subscription-only eBook, which I include here in completeness, since the article is from elsewhere.

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Dirty Secret

www.SafeFoodAndFertilizer.com

"It's really unbelievable what's happening, but it's true. They just call dangerous waste a product, and it's no longer a dangerous waste. It's a fertilizer." -- Patty Martin The Seattle Times, July 3, 1997

Book review from the Magazine Mother Jones by SUSAN Q. STRANAHAN

Book: Fateful Harvest

By Duff Wilson. Harper Collins Publishers. 336 pages. $26.

THIS IS A BOOK WE SHOULD NOT BE READING. Or one we've read too often. A local woman grows increasingly suspicious about the activities of a powerful corporation. As environmental problems mount, she persists and becomes a pariah. Enter a big-city journalist who joins her search for the truth. Together, they uncover a widespread, but heretofore secret, practice that may place tens of thousands of Americans at risk. But, once the headlines disappear, so does the outcry.

Duff Wilson, a reporter for the Seattle Times, met Patty Martin of Quincy, Washington, in 1996. Like all good reporters, he listened to her story with skepticism. Toxic waste was routinely being applied as fertilizer, she said. The soil in her farm town was being poisoned.

Martin's evidence was sketchy and decidedly circumstantial failed crops, sick horses, tainted groundwater, all of which could have been caused by many things, as she was constantly reminded by her neighbors and the "experts." She would not be appeased. In Martin's eyes, the prime suspect was the agribusiness that dominated her small farming community, and she now directed the same boundless energy and civic-mindedness that had once earned her the mayor's job toward unearthing a villain and sounding an alarm.

Wilson began digging too. Over the ensuing months, he documented, in a series of articles later nominated for a Pulitzer, that many industries have found the ideal use for their hazardous waste: They simply rename fertilizer. In an era of cradle-to-grave tracking of dangerous chemicals, Wilson was amazed to discover that soil supplements are tested only for the presence of growth enhancing chemicals; there are no restrictions on what else can be in there. Commingled with the zinc, for example, can be dioxin, lead, mercury, chromium, and arsenic. Instead of winding up in
hazardous-waste disposal facilities, these industrial by-products can be sold to farmers without so much as a warning label. It's all perfectly legal, writes Wilson. It's called recycling.

"What they're doing is using agriculture as part of this waste stream," Duke Giraud, a local farmer and Martin ally, told Wilson on one of his early visits to Quincy. "Instead of paying $200 a ton to get rid of it, you could sell it."

At first,Wilson and Martin believed that the local agribusiness, Cenex, was a 'renegade,' dumping to save money. But Wilson soon concluded, "Almost everybody in the industry was doing it in one way or another." And this wasn't a problem just in the state of Washington.

Regulators in the nation's major farming states all told Wilson the same thing he heard from an agriculture official in Florida: "There's a lot of materials out there that have plant nutrient values, but nobody knows what else is in them." When it comes to determining what can and cannot be included, Wilson reports, the ag-chemical industry is regulating itself. As a result, coal ash, mill tailings, asbestos, nuclear materials, and acids are routinely being spread on the nations farmland.

How can this be, in a nation where 275,000 people wrote to the Department of Agriculture to oppose an "organic' listing for genetically modified foodstuffs? The only explanation Wilson can find is less than satisfactory: In their haste to promote recycling of industrial wastes, and to win the crucial support of the agricultural and chemical industries, state and federal governments have turned a blind eye to this problem. The few efforts to impose controls, or even put the issue on the national agenda, have foundered.

Wilson concludes Fateful Harvest with an all-too-familiar question: "Do toxic-laced fertilizers make my food unsafe?" His answer: Nobody knows. But nobody's bothered to find out. In the meantime, the lack of proof and the convenience of industry keep the practice very much alive. How many times have we heard all this before?

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Susan Q. Stranahan is a former staff writer for the Philadelphia Inquirer and author of Susquehanna, River of Dreams.
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