Duff Wilson is an investigative reporter for the Seattle Times who got a call one day from Patty Martin, mayor of Quincy, Washington, who told him an almost unbelievable tale of toxic waste being sold as fertilizer. The zinger was, as Wilson discovered, it was entirely legal!
Imagine this: big industrial companies, growing increasingly displeased with having to pay for the cost of disposing of their hazardous waste materials, typically with unsafe amounts of heavy metals, find through a loophole in the law that they can declare the waste a "product" and sell it as fertilizer! Instead of paying perhaps a hundred dollars a barrel to get rid of the stuff, they can sell it to firms that add a little lime or some other soil conditioner and abracadabra! peddle it as fertilizer. Sound like a Greenpeace scare story? A nightmare dreamed up by disgruntled employees? "Bad" farmers looking to blame somebody for their failed Frankenfeed crops? The fertilizer industry would like us to think so, but this story about Patty Martin and her brave and lonely crusade against the dumping of hazard waste on farmlands tells us otherwise.
The terrible thing is that, although Wilson's original story, "Fear in the Fields--How Hazardous Wastes Become Fertilizer," first appeared in July of 1997, as the book closes in 2001, the loophole in the law has not been plugged, congress has not acted, and the polluters are still turning hazardous waste infused with cadmium, lead, arsenic, etc., into stuff smeared on farmlands. It gets into the crops farmers grow and ends up in the food on our dining room tables. It blows off the fields when it's dry and into the lungs of people. The workers in these fertilizer plants have elevated levels of cancer and lung scaring disease, and the sad thing is some of them are so wedded to the company that they are blind to what is destroying their bodies.
Wilson names names and gives examples. He cites the chemical analyses and he quotes the industry apologists and the look-the-other-way bureaucrats in the oversight agencies. But clearly the real culprits are those people at the top of our state and federal governments who are doing nothing stop this dangerous pollution.
This is the kind of story that'll make you hopping mad and wonder about the morality (and sanity) of people who would, to save a few bucks on the bottom line, poison us, themselves and our children.
