Free Poison Spring by E. G. Vallianatos

major report on childhood exposure to toxic chemicals that was released in April 2011, the American Academy of Pediatrics lambasted the country’s “non-evidence-based system for chemical management.” The academy was especially critical of the pathetic Toxic Substances Control Act (TSCA), a pro-industry law that hasn’t been updated since 1976. Using the chemical industry’s own estimate of the massive amounts of chemicals used every year in the United States, the academy raised a red flag over the implications of spreading 27 trillion pounds of petrochemicals on the United States every year. This ocean of synthetics does not even include pesticides, pharmaceuticals, fuels, or chemicals used in food production.
    “As children grow and mature, their bodies may be especially vulnerable to certain chemical exposures during critical windows of development,” the academy wrote. “Neurologic and endocrine systems have demonstrated particular sensitivity to environmental toxicants at certain stages of growth. These differences in biological susceptibility and exposures in children versus adults support the need for strong consideration of children in chemicals policies. This principle must underpin all chemical-management legislation and regulation.” 1
    It’s not just the young who are most vulnerable to our toxic legacy. Minorities and the poor have more poisons in their bodies not merely because of the food they eat, but also because of where they live. Their communities have long been the dumping grounds for America’s industrial pollution. For example, West Anniston, Alabama, had the misfortune of being a center for the manufacture of PCBs. West Anniston was also an Army depot for chemical weapons. In 2003, the military began burning its chemical weapons. The people of West Anniston, who are mostly black, pay the price for being surrounded by pollution, many of them dying young from cancer and other diseases.
    Bob Herbert, an African American columnist for The New York Times , visited West Anniston and other black communities burdened by dumping. He rightly concluded that placing garbage dumps, oil refineries, and other hazardous manufacturing operations in the midst of black communities was a continuation of the Jim Crow policies that “have existed in one form or another, legally or illegally, since slavery.
    “The evidence has been before us for decades that black people, other minorities and some poor whites have been getting sick and enduring horrible deaths from the filth that they breathe, eat, drink and otherwise ingest from the garbage dumps, landfills, incinerators, toxic waste sites, oil refineries, petrochemical plants and other world-class generators of pollution that have been deliberately and relentlessly installed in the neighborhoods where they live, work, worship and go to school,” Herbert wrote. “Government and industry alike have used black and poor neighborhoods as dumping grounds for the vilest and most dangerous of pollutants.” 2
    The latest crisis at the EPA—and one with disproportionate impact on the country’s young, its poor, and its minorities—concerns the current fever over a procedure for gas drilling known as hydraulic fracturing, or “fracking.” Once again, giant industries are disregarding or sneaking around the law and ignoring science and the public health. Once again, government regulators are looking the other way. And once again, the public health—and particularly its drinking water—hang in the balance.
    As hot as this issue is today, the struggle over fracking goes back decades. And one of its sorriest chapters began at the EPA, with a morally compromised study of drinking water contamination.
    The EPA has known since the 1980s that wastes created by drilling for oil and gas are toxic and should not be allowed to flow into rivers or groundwater. Yet to this day, the oil and gas industries have pressured their puppets in Congress to exempt drilling from most