CONGRESSIONAL RECORD -- SENATE

October 7, 1969

Page 28997

Mr. NELSON. It is clear that persistent pesticides are so polluting our rivers, lakes, streams, and oceans that fish can and have been killed; that fish reproduction can and has been inhibited; that high pesticide residues in water have affected birds and other animals; and, that now, even man is threatened.

Specifically, the amendment would permit the Secretary of the Interior, after consultation with all interested and concerned parties, to prepare and publish regulations setting forth water quality standards for pesticides that will clearly not have a deleterious effect on fish or man.

Responsibility for enforcing the standards would rest primarily with the States. Standards could be implemented by issuing orders to polluters to take remedial measures.

A particularly significant aspect of this amendment is that it permits the establishment of a system for tabulating, monitoring, and recording precisely what pesticide residues should be permitted.

As chairman of the Senate Subcommittee on Migratory Labor, I have become particularly aware of the need to establish similar procedures insofar as farm workers may be affected by pesticide use.

There is mounting evidence concerning the harmful effects of pesticides on our Nation's migrant and seasonal farm workers. Experts from the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare concede that perhaps as many as 800 farm workers are killed and 80,000 injured by pesticides each year. We know that the agricultural industry experiences one of the highest occupational disease rates in the United States. Just last week we learned that a substantial proportion of farm workers experience symptoms of chemical poisoning which include dermatitis, rashes, eye irritation, nausea, vomiting, fatigue, excess sweating, headaches, double vision, dizziness, skin irritations, difficulty in breathing, loss of fingernails, nervousness, insomnia, bleeding noses, and diarrhea.

It is clear from our hearings that proper safeguards and protections for farm workers do not exist in the use of pesticides. In fact, under present State and Federal regulations, information about how, when, and where chemicals are used is seldom available to the farm worker or to the public.

The hearing record is painfully lacking in any firm evidence that the pesticides to which farm workers are daily exposed in fact have no deleterious short or long-range effects on their health and well-being. Further, it was shocking to learn of the pitifully inadequate funding of programs devoted to research on occupational hazards to farm workers; and to discover that programs aimed at protecting the farm workers are neither adequately funded nor enforced.

We do know, however, from recent accounts in medical and scientific journals, that the wrong kinds of chemicals, in the wrong amounts, and in the wrong places are sometimes used with inadequate regard of the health and safety of their workers. Furthermore, we know that recent scientific investigations have produced evidence that DDT causes cancer in animals and provides very strong indications that DDT may produce cancer in man.

Mr. President, I support this amendment, because it establishes a mechanism for the Secretary of the Interior to determine maximum safe levels of pesticides in water that would represent the essential basis for action to deal with the pesticide pollution problem in water. Additionally, enactment of this amendment may serve as a workable model for necessary legislation to protect farm workers through establishment of a meaningful system for monitoring pesticide effects on man.

Mr. MUSKIE. Mr. President, the amendment offered by the Senator from Wisconsin (Mr. NELSON) is a constructive addition to the legislation which is pending before the Senate. I have discussed this proposal with the Senator from Wisconsin and agree with the need to provide the Secretary of the Interior with a specific directive to formulate criteria which indicate the effects of pesticides on the water environment.

There is a growing national concern regarding the use of pesticides. Conservationists, scientists, medical experts, and ecologists are speaking out against indiscriminate use of pesticides while other scientists, health officials, and agricultural experts oppose actions to limit their availability and use.

Existing information is sufficient to suggest that we have not exercised due care in either the amount or type of pesticides we use. Inadequate attention has been paid to developing less toxic more degradable pesticides and thus, today, we are confronted with the potential of banning entirely the use of some materials which have been extremely helpful in expanding the Nation's productivity and protecting the Nation's health.

I am not prepared, at this time, to suggest that all pesticides, herbicides, fungicides, and insecticides should be banned or even that some of them should be banned. I support Senator NELSON's amendment because we need to know a great deal more about the health and welfare effects of these pollutants and because existing scientific information needs to be assembled and evaluated.

The criteria to be published by the Secretary should provide useful assistance to the States in determining the extent to which the use of pesticides and water quality requirements are in conflict.

In some States it may be necessary to establish limitations on the availability of certain types of pesticides and, in other cases, it may be necessary to limit use of specific pesticides in certain watersheds. Whatever course is taken in controlling use of persistent pesticides, care should be taken to assure that public health responsibilities such as malaria control are not hindered.

Enforcement procedures must consider the differences between point source control available to municipal and industrial wastes as opposed to the general diffusion of the pollutant in this case.

The inability to effectively control this type of pollutant after application suggests the need to consider legislation which will establish uniform standards on the biodegradability and toxicity of pesticides to assure environmental protection prior to the indiscriminate introduction of pesticides into the environment.

The Senator from Wisconsin (Mr. NELSON) has indicated an intent to introduce such legislation in the near future. I will cosponsor his proposal and the Subcommittee on Air and Water Pollution will hold hearings early next year.

I would like to ask the distinguished Senator this question. First of all, I share the Senator's concern about the growing dilemma of pesticide pollution. In many ways I think it is perhaps the most serious in its potential impact upon the environment, upon wildlife, and upon human life itself. It is the most persistent and most difficult to come to grips with once pesticides are released in the environment. In that sense, it is like air pollution. Once discharged, it cannot be controlled; so, as in the case of pesticides at the dispersal point.

Since the problem of control is, for that reason, somewhat different from that of other air pollutants, the enforcement problem is different in the same way. So we have to come to grips with that problem.

The amendment offered by the distinguished Senator from Wisconsin is a major advance, I think, toward restoring and preserving the quality of our waters that are now threatened by pesticides.

In addition to leading to specific standards for safe concentrations of pesticides in interstate rivers and lakes, I believe that the amendment serves an equally important purpose of establishing a comprehensive program for research in the Department of the Interior, to study the problems of persistent pesticides and alternatives that can eliminate this contamination of our environment.

That is the point which, I think, is at the heart of resistance to the control of pesticides.

I ask the Senator from Wisconsin whether he believes that the standards that would be developed as a result of his amendment can be met without hindering efforts to control insects, weeds, fungus, and other pests that can cause damage to farmers and can pose a potential hazard to human health.

Mr. NELSON. I do not think there is any question about that. No Member of Congress is more familiar with the Water Pollution Control Act than the Senator from Maine (Mr. MUSKIE) who conducted the hearings, drafted the bill, and engineered its passage in the Senate.

As the Senator knows, under section 10(c) the Secretary can establish criteria, but he must consider the practicability and the economic feasibility of any standards that are proposed to be used. He must take these factors into consideration.

I make one other point. The Department of Agriculture prescribes an alternative pesticide for every chlorinated hydrocarbon, so far as I can ascertain, that is listed for use on virtually every crop in this country. In other words, there is another, more readily degrading pesticide that is readily available. As I review the application rates recommended by the Department and the current prices of pesticides, the cost of hard pesticides compared with readily degradable pesticides is roughly the same.

I believe that the Senator knows Michigan and Arizona have already banned the use of DDT. My own State of Wisconsin is moving to drastically improve the controls on it and has created a board to determine if it is necessary to use certain pesticides. There is integrated pest control which has been initiated successfully in California in which they do not indiscriminately spray the crop. They use whatever biological methods they can, including certain organisms which prey on insects. But whatever method they use, biological or chemical, it is limited to the area where the pest is.

In my earlier remarks, I outlined those programs and the cost per acre, which is dramatically less for a program of integrated pest control. Unfortunately, so many people just hire an airplane and go out and spray indiscriminately all over the place.

So in answer to the Senator, I believe that many practical, alternative means are available right now. But again I say, the Secretary must consider the practicability and the economic feasibility for any standards. So that is the protection against arbitrariness on anything he may propose.

Mr. MUSKIE. That is the value of the Senator's amendment. It increases the pressure to recognize the availability of other means of controlling pests than with hard pesticides. If we do not concentrate on that and enlarge the possibilities in this respect, we will be wasting, perhaps, the last chance we will have to avoid the massive dispersal of hard pesticides into the environment.

I am delighted to cosponsor the amendment. I compliment the Senator on becoming, in my judgment, the most knowledgeable expert in the Senate on this problem.

Mr. NELSON. Mr. President, incidentally, I might say to the Senate, that my staff and the staff of the Senator from Maine will get together and develop a legislative proposal establishing standards for the components of pesticides, taking into consideration their persistence, degradability, and toxicity. This is the next step that must follow so that we can determine if pesticides, like detergents, should be subject to certain standards in order to protect the environment.

Mr. MUSKIE. I thank the Senator.

Mr. TYDINGS. Mr. President, as a cosponsor of amendment No. 132, I congratulate the junior Senator from Wisconsin (Mr. NELSON) for his tireless efforts to call attention to the environmental danger stemming from the widespread and often indiscriminate use of persistent pesticides.

Toxic residues of these chemical compounds are showing up in our air and water, and, through the multiplying effect of the food chain, in human beings as well.

The effect of these poisons on fish and wildlife are well known. Our animal resources can be killed outright, as the Coho salmon were, or face gradual destruction, if not extinction, as are the brown pelican and the bald eagle.

The effect of pesticide residues on man are not yet fully known. Presently there is no evidence that the increasing amounts of pesticides in fact harm human beings. Yet common sense tells us that absorbing poisonous chemicals is not healthy.

The long-term health impact on man of persistent pesticides may well be most damaging.

Mr. President, in late July I introduced wide ranging pesticide protection legislation. The bill, S. 2747, directs the Secretary of Health, Education, and Welfare to make a complete study of the use and effects of pesticides. It transfers the pesticide regulatory functions from the Department of Agriculture to the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare. It removes the exemption from registration and labeling of those pesticides intended solely for export. Finally, the bill places a 4-year moratorium on four of the more persistent and powerful pesticides.

It is perhaps the most comprehensive legislation on pesticides yet introduced in the Senate. But it is unlikely to go anywhere and now will serve only as a point of discussion.

Yet what is required now is not just talk but action as well. Senator NELSON'S amendment is the first step toward protecting our environment from toxic pesticides. I fully support his amendment and again congratulate the Senator for alerting us to the threat.

Mr. HART. Mr. President, I am very pleased to cosponsor Senator NELSON'S amendment to S. 7 which would require the Secretary of the Interior to develop water quality criteria for pesticides. These criteria would then be used by the States as a basis for the adoption of standards to effectively control pesticide pollution of our lakes and rivers.

As with most of our clean water efforts, the need to develop standards which will help to reduce the quantity of persistent pesticides entering our water is long overdue. For many years scientists have been warning that the large-scale and indiscriminate introduction of these chemicals into our environment may be doing serious harm. But only today are people generally beginning to realize that although agricultural production has increased and disease control has been improved through the use of persistent pesticides, these short-term gains may have been purchased at the price of irreversible disruption of many ecological systems.

The so-called magnification effect of pesticides on fish and wildlife has now been well documented. Fish, feeding on microscopic organisms which contain persistent pesticides, assimilate these chemicals into their own systems. In addition, through normal gill action, a fish appears to effectively filter pesticides directly from the water. In both cases, the pesticide is stored up in the body fat of the fish where it becomes increasingly more concentrated. Then, moving upward in the food chain, each successive predator assimilates greater and greater concentrations of` these pesticides from the smaller fish on which it feeds. Fish at the end of the food chain, such as the Lake Michigan coho salmon, now contain DDT concentrations ranging up to 19 parts per million, and fish-eating birds, such as the osprey and eagle, contain even higher levels of this pesticide.

The effects of such concentrations of persistent pesticides on fish and wildlife are daily becoming better understood. For example, Prof. Howard Johnson of Michigan State University has reported upon the reproductive problems DDT has created for the Lake Michigan coho salmon.

Apparently the female salmon passes some of the DDT on to her eggs in concentrations ranging between five and seven parts per million. After the fry hatches from these eggs, they begin to absorb the yolk sac, but as they do, the DDT remaining in the yolk becomes more and more highly concentrated. At the last stages of absorption, DDT concentrations become six to 12 times higher than those in the actual body tissue of the fry and this high level of DDT has proven fatal to a high percentage of the fry.

Slightly different problems have occurred with fish-eating birds. Here the high concentrations of DDT apparently upset the bird's liver enzyme balance and as a result affect its calcium metabolism. The result has been that these birds have produced eggs which have exceptionally brittle shells. In most cases the mother is unable to hatch these eggs, because she accidentally breaks the shell. In one case reported by the Audubon Society, an embryo was born without a shell altogether; it was encased only in a membrane.

Last week the Commerce Committee's Subcommittee on Energy, Natural Resources, and the Environment, which I chair, held field hearings in Michigan to consider the effects of pesticides on sports and commercial fisheries. At these hearings Prof. Joseph Hickey of the University of Wisconsin commented on the serious disruption which DDT has caused to fish-eating bird populations. Branding DDT as the "compound of extinction," Professor Hickey stated:

In a series of closely integrated studies, British, Canadian, and American scientists have proven that similar reproductive failures (1) occurred in 1947 in peregrine falcons; (2) involve fish-eating birds like bald eagles, ospreys, brown pelicans, double crested cormorants, and herring gulls; (3) are producing regional extinctions in some species and continentally wide extinction in others; and (4) are due to DDT. There is simply no scientific doubt about these statements.

He then went on to state:

We have lost at least 95 per cent of our nesting peregrine falcons -- perhaps the supreme example of avian evolution -- in the United States south of Canada, and we may very well lose its entire subspecies in North America. We are going to lose our national bird, the bald eagle, as a nesting species on the shores of the Great Lakes, not necessarily on inland lakes. We have lost the brown pelican on the west side of the Gulf of Mexico. And we will lose it on the coast of California. These are pollution effects due to DDT. The facts are solid and the result of careful, painstaking research.

Much more speculative at the present time are questions about whether consumption of DDT or other persistent pesticides by man could seriously harm his health or well-being. Nevertheless, the evidence of its harm to birds and fish is sufficient to cause grave concern. And recent research efforts are beginning to produce additional disturbing results. For example, earlier this year I released a report of a study which had been conducted for the National Cancer Institute.

This study revealed that when a group of mice was fed a mixture containing 140 parts per million of DDT over a period of 81 weeks, 63 percent developed tumors. With a control group of mice, only 16 percent developed tumors, indicating that the mice exposed to DDT were approximately four times more likely to develop tumors than mice not so exposed. In describing the DDT induced tumors, the report states:

It seems more reasonable to conclude that the great majority had malignant potentiality.

In addition, at the Environmental Subcommittee hearings on pesticides which were held last May, we asked the Food and Drug Administration whether they could summarize some of their work on the mutagenic effects of pesticides. One of the investigations which they described involves a study of 40 volunteers who are heavy pesticide users and 20 control subjects who are examined monthly to determine what leukocyte chromosome damage can be associated with the exposure to pesticides. According to the FDA:

Preliminary results indicate that during midsummer the exposed group had something on the order of five times as many chromosome aberrations as the control group. So far this study has not been able to make comparisons between the groups at other times of the year.

The Food and Drug Administration, concerned with the results of the expanding volume of research on pesticides, has moved to set pesticide tolerances on many food products. In the case of fish, an interim tolerance level of five parts per million has been established. Although there is little question that the FDA is taking proper precautions in setting these tolerances, there is also little doubt that this action will seriously disrupt, if not destroy, the fishing industry on Lake Michigan. The coho salmon can no longer be marketed in interstate commerce because of its high DDT concentrations, and other commercially important fish which are lower down in the lake's food chain, such as the chub, now appear to be building up DDT concentrations in excess of the minimum FDA tolerances. Analyses by the Michigan field office of the Bureau of Commercial Fisheries indicate that the DDT concentration in some chubs now exceeds nine parts per million. Lake Michigan lake trout, too, also frequently contain concentrations in excess of the FDA's minimum tolerances.

To preserve many of our country's unique forms of life from extinction, to reverse the grave ecological damage which we are presently causing, and to restore the vitality of our freshwater fisheries, it is imperative that we begin now to upgrade the quality of our water. Establishing water tolerance levels for pesticides -- and then rigidly enforcing these standards -- is an essential step toward this goal. We should emphasize, however, that because very minute quantities of persistent pesticides within water -- measured in terms of parts per trillion -- cause severe harm to aquatic organisms which concentrate these pesticides within their systems, water quality standards should be based on the pesticide levels found in fish taken from the water, and not on the water itself. Only in this manner can we readily determine when the amount of pesticides in our waters is reaching dangerous levels.

Mr. President, I reiterate my great pleasure in supporting this amendment, and I earnestly hope that not only is it adopted, but that meaningful standards are forthcoming in the very near future.

The PRESIDING OFFICER. The question is on agreeing to the amendment, No. 132, of the Senator from Wisconsin.

The amendment was agreed to.

Mr. MUSKIE. Mr. President, I move that the vote by which the amendment was agreed to be reconsidered.

Mr. BYRD of West Virginia. Mr. President, I move that the motion to reconsider be laid on the table.

The motion to lay on the table was agreed to.