248 The Environmental Debate
Legislators may have had high aspirations,
but they were naive to assume that the govern-
ment can control the global economic forces
driving the chemical revolution we are experi-
encing. Moreover, there has never been a master
plan for environmental law; instead Congress has
adopted statutes in a piecemeal way, responding
to compelling and often surprising stories of envi-
ronmental contamination, damage, and health
loss by adopting new laws to govern hazardous
materials. Infamous examples include the peri-
odic Cuyahoga River fires in Ohio in the 19950s
and 1960s; the discovery of a school built above
a chemical dump at Love Canal in New York in
the 1970s; the spraying of PCBs on the back roads
of Times Beach in Missouri in the mid 1980s; the
Union Carbide disaster in Bhopal [in India] in
1984; the Chernobyl nuclear plant explosion in
the Ukrainian Republic in 1987; and the Exxon
Valdez oil spill in Alaska in 1989. The result of
this reactionary, rather than preventive approach
is an odd patchwork of poorly coordinated regula-
tions rather than a comprehensive body of law to
manage chemicals we all experience in daily life.
Equally important, U.S. law has come to depend
on technical risk assessments that demand ever
more evidence to prove chemical danger, rather
than requirements that companies prove chemi-
cals’ safety prior to their production and sale.
...
One important guardian of the health of the
U.S. population, the EPA, has since 1976 been
required by the Toxic Substances Control Act
(TSCA) to maintain an inventory of poten-
tially toxic substances; but the agency cannot
demand premarket testing or regulate produc-
tion unless it has compelling evidence of sig-
nificant environmental or health risk. This
requirement places the burden on government
to conduct the testing needed to justify regu-
lation, an impossibility given the staggering
number of untested chemicals and combina-
tions. When this law went into effect, 62,000
chemicals already in commerce were listed
lose their utility, are discarded, and slowly degrade,
releasing their ingredients into the surround-
ing areas. Our global economy concentrates raw
chemicals, mixes them in millions of products that
are distributed through markets, and reconcen-
trates remaining wastes in landfills or incinerators,
where once again they are dispersed unpredictably
into the air, soil, and water. The human exposures
that occur at every step along the way are often
unrecognized or ignored by individuals, corpora-
tions, and governments. And most in society have
little comprehension of the chemical mixtures they
experience in everyday life and the dangers posed
to their health.
During the last half-century, society’s grow-
ing chemical imprint has been accompanied by
an increase in the prevalence of many illnesses.
These include respiratory diseases such as child-
hood asthma, neurological impairments, declining
sperm counts, fertility failure, immune dysfunc-
tion, breast and prostate cancer, and developmental
disorders among the young. Some of these illnesses
have been caused or exacerbated by exposure
to commercial chemicals and pollutants. There
is little doubt, for example, that tobacco, lead,
mercury, radionuclides, solvents, vehicle exhaust,
combustion by-products, dioxins, PCBs and many
pesticides have caused extensive human illness. Sig-
nificantly, these chemicals were once thought to be
safe at doses now known to be hazardous; as with
other substances, the perception of danger grew as
governments tested chemicals more thoroughly.
Three trends help to explain the grow-
ing chemical burden on the environments and
human health: population growth, longevity,
and economic expansion....
The United States arguably has the most
extensive body of environmental law and regu-
lation in the world.... Between 1970 and 1996
several dozen major federal statues and tens of
thousands of regulations were adopted. Con-
gress intended these regulation to limit emis-
sions of hazardous chemicals and their residues
in surface and ground water, food, soils, con-
sumer products, the air, and oceans.