Toxic terror.

Toxic Terror

THE ANTI-ENVIRONMENTAL movement is still looking for its Rachel Carson. Elizabeth Whelan is not going to fill that role just yet. But she may do until someone more lyrical comes along.

Mrs. Whelan holds a doctorate in public health from Harvard Medical School, and she is executive director of the American Council on Health and Science. In Toxic Terror she has taken on the formidable task of trying to undo almost two decades of public hysteria over a broad spectrum of environmental issues.

For the most part she is successful. Some of her arguments are a little less than convicing, and she often feels compelled to assure us that nothing ever happened at Love Canal, Three Mile Island, or anywhere else, except "media hysteria.' She also tends to get bogged down in paragrahs like this:

The recommended definition of inhalable particulate matter encompasses most particles less than 15 m. in diameter . . . A second cutoff point of 2.5 m. separates the fraction of fine inhalable particulates, which penetrate to the deepest regions of the lung. An advantage of the 2.5- m. cutoff is the separation of particles according to chemical composition.

But for the most part her message is hard and true. Americans are being frightened--terrorized, in fact--by the misperception that "chemicals are killing us' and that we are living in an "age of cancer.'

In truth, Americans have never been healthier. The average person now lives close to the lifetime built into our genetic makeup. New technology is constantly conserving old resources. One of our most Faustian accomplishments has been an ever-increasing ability to identify vanishingly small traces of chemicals that have been labeled "potential carcinogens.'

As Edith Efron has documented even more ambitiously in her book The Apocalyptics, however, we have always lived in a "sea of carcinogens.' Our bodies have long since learned to deal with whatever damage these trace chemicals--both natural and artificial --may do. In the light of this, the pursuit of an environment free of "potential carcinogens' is really a form of madness.

Like Miss Efron, Mrs. Whelan traces the practice of scaring people out of their wits to a hybrid discipline called "regulatory science.' As perfected by a small but highly audible group of activists, regulatory science usually consists of grabbing incomplete information or vague one-shot test results and running to the media. A remarkable number of the "chemical panics' in recent years have been set off by the "leaking' of highly dubious information by a single crusading scientist or environmentalist.

One notable example is the 1978 announcement by Joseph Califano, then Secretary of HEW, that at least 20 per cent--and possibly 40 per cent-- of all cancers in America were "occupational.' Mr. Califano's observations seemed to be part of a general suggestion that HEW take over the supervision of American industry in order to "protect workers' health.'

No one has ever figured out how Califano came up with that 20 to 40 per cent figure. The source seems to have been a report prepared by nine distinguished scientists from the several major health institutes, and someone apparently made a highly questionable extrapolation from the statistics. Eight years later, the consensus among cancer specialists is what it was in 1978 --that about 5 per cent of cancers are occupational. Yet Califano's brief remarks had enormous impact, and are still repeated regularly in environmental literature.

So it is with a whole list of other issues. The tarring and feathering of DDT is a classic public panic that could probably be compared to the Salem witch trials--except that DDT was not witchcraft but the most beneficial chemical ever invented, the saver of millions and millions of lives.

Trace exposures to dioxin--"the most toxic substance ever made by man'-- produce nothing more than a bad skin rash that disappears in a few months. Yet the Environmental Protection Agency, fearing an "epidemic of birth defects,' purchased the entire town of Times Beach, Missouri, after one family suffered critical illnesses when a large quantity of dioxin was accidentally sprayed on their horse track. In Seveso, Italy, where an entire population was doused with dioxin in 1976, no birth defects, reproductive failures, or other long-term health effects have yet appeared.

Nuclear power, of course, is a story all by itself. Here the environmentalists have essentially won the war, panicking the public and bringing the nuclear-power industry to a standstill.

What is remarkable is how lightly environmentalists escape when their own technological programs go awry. The supposed alternative to nuclear power --Amory Lovins's "soft path'--has been racked with unexpected difficulties. The urea-formaldehyde used to retrofit homes with insulation has already produced a major panic (which Mrs. Whelan says is exaggerated). Tightened indoor air circulation has increased everyone's exposure to air pollutants. Wood-burning stoves have become the major source of air pollution in many rural areas. And Friends of the Earth --Lovins's home organization--is fighting the construction of small hydroelectric dams on the grounds that they endanger fish.

Yet no one ever puts the pieces together. "Alternative energy' is still regarded as the model of benign technology, while nuclear power--which has an essentially perfect safety record--is considered the nation's number-one technological enemy.

In many ways, though, the toxic-terror syndrome has exhausted itself. The public obviously reached its limit in 1979 when the FDA tried to ban saccharin. There have been occasional public hangings since then--the pesticide EDB is the notable example--but the days when Ralph Nader could announce the "carcinogen of the week' are essentially over.

What I distrust about Elizabeth Whelan's book is her absolute faith that science and scientists hold all the answers. Although they are certainly closer to reality than environmental crusaders and reporters, scientists also have their problems. They are maddeningly cautions, often absolutely refusing to generalize or to state the obvious because of peer pressure, or for fear of the charge that they are "out of their field.' "Peer review,' in which Mrs. Whelan places so much faith, often reduces itself to backbiting in which scientists cavalierly dismiss each other's work on the basis of small technical errors. (Mrs. Whelan engages in quite a bit of this herself.)

It is obvious that there are some risks in an industrial society. As Mrs. Whelan points out, the incidence of cancer--even apart from smoking-related lung cancers--has risen fairly steadily over the last two decades. This has been offset, however, by improved detection and medical treatment, which have driven cancer mortality steadily downward. Thus, there are risks to technological change, but there are offsetting advantages. The question is which risks are worth taking.

Environmentalists have flourished by providing the public with the myth that the state of nature is risk-free, and that problems arise only as the fruits of technology.

Elizabeth Whelan has done a heroic job of showing us the absurdity of this premise. But the notion that science can resolve all our difficulties is also a delusion. Ultimately, our willingness to face risks will depend not on the abilities of our scientists, but on the character of our culture.