In this episode, I speak with journalist Carrie Gillum about the devastating decline of the honeybee population, and the role of pesticides like neonicotinoids in the problem. We talk about the dangers of these pesticides, and how they affect not only the bees, but the other insects that depend on these insects for life, such as butterflies and moths, but also the birds and other creatures that rely on these creatures for their food. We also talk about how these pesticides are getting into the mouths of humans and other animals, and what we can do to protect ourselves from them. This episode was produced and edited by Annie-Rose Strasser and Sarah Abdurrahman. It was edited and produced by Bobby Lord. Our theme music was made by Micah Vellian and our ad music was written and performed by Mark Phillips. Additional music was produced by Haley Shaw and Matthew Boll. The show was mixed by Matthew Boll and Alex Blumberg. Special thanks to Rachel Carson and Bobby Lord for their contributions to this episode and to our sponsor, The Pollinator Project. Thanks to Bobby Lord and Caitlin Durante for the use of our logo and logo design by Mark Boll, and our theme music by Ian Dorsch, and Mark Bolland for his mixing and mastering skills, and thanks to our editor, Matthew Bolland, for our mixing engineer, for the sound design, and mastering and mastering, and additional editing, and for his excellent mixing skills, which were provided by Mark's excellent mixing, and his excellent editing and mixing skills and editing assistance, and background music, and mixing, which was provided by our thanks to the help from our excellent sound engineer, Sean McCarthy, and Rachel Carson, for all of his excellent sound design and editing, which we did by our excellent mixing and mixing and editing and mastering assistance, by Rachel Carson. Thank you to our amazing engineering, and a very special thanks to a very good sound engineer and our good friend, Rachel Carson for his amazing sound effects, and so much more. Thank you for all the feedback from our amazing crew at the excellent sound effects and our excellent editing, Matthew McElroye, and all of our amazing mixing and processing, and we hope you all of your feedback, and your support and support, and we really hope you enjoy the feedback we get a chance to help us make it all out of this podcasting, we really really do so much of this is great listening experience.
00:00:01.000I'm really happy today to have one of my great friends, the long-term comrade in arms, Carrie Gillum, who is a veteran investigative journalist, one of the few left in the world, with more than 30 years of experience covering corporate news, including 17 years as a senior correspondent with Reuters.
00:00:20.000She is the author of Whitewash, the story of a weed killer, cancer, and corruption of scientists about Monsanto.
00:00:27.000The book won the coveted Rachel Carson Award for the Society of Environmental Journalists in 2018.
00:00:33.000Her second book, a narrative legal thriller titled The Monsanto Papers, was released March 2nd, 2021.
00:00:42.000She has also contributed chapters for a textbook about environmental journalism and a book about pesticide use in Africa.
00:00:50.000And she has a ton of other incredible qualifications.
00:00:53.000She writes regularly for The Guardian.
00:00:56.000Her work has additionally been published in the New York Times, The Huff Post, and many, many other outfits.
00:01:07.000You and I always have a million things to talk about, but I really wanted to drill down today on neonicotinoids and the disappearance of bees, which is the insect This devastating collapse of the insect population, which is now saying 80% of winged insects have disappeared in the past 10 years.
00:01:28.000It's not a crisis that is covered on the front pages as it ought to be, but I find it so extraordinarily alarming.
00:01:38.000And it seems like the neonicotinoids are a primary culprit.
00:01:45.000And I appreciate you, you know, wanting to talk about this topic.
00:01:49.000I've just come back in the last week or two from the Midwest, a story I'm researching actually in Nebraska that centers on a very large contamination event with neonicotinoids.
00:02:03.000This is important because it's really what's happening here.
00:02:07.000It's focusing the attention of regulators and consumers and a number of researchers from universities because they're very worried not only about pollinators, but about the human health impacts as well, something that has really not gotten a lot of attention.
00:02:22.000But yeah, these neonicotinoids and their neurotoxins, you know, they're essentially insecticides that are used in a whole variety of ways.
00:02:31.000But in large part is seed coatings, coatings on the seed that gets planted in the soil and gets absorbed in all aspects of the plant.
00:02:41.000And researchers have found that this is affecting pollinators, but it's also getting into drinking water supplies.
00:02:49.000And as it's used, it doesn't break down in the soil very easily.
00:02:54.000And so this is just accumulating and accumulating, and it is being found to harm pollinators, honeybees, but also other forms of wildlife.
00:03:03.000And unfortunately, we don't have really good regulation around this, around The treatment of this around the disposal of the seeds, which is what became the very large contamination event in Nebraska that we can talk about if you want to do that.
00:03:20.000And you're seeing, even as the science builds about the problems that this is bringing to our environment, you're seeing the EPA poised to announce, you know, an extension of the approvals for several of these neonicotinoids.
00:03:35.000The European Union has banned several of them.
00:03:37.000Canada is looking to restrict But our U.S. EPA just keeps these things out in the marketplace.
00:03:42.000Are there any countries in the world that just ban them outright?
00:03:47.000Yeah, I mean, several countries in, as I said, in the European Union have put in place bans on several of these types of chemicals, these neonicotinoids.
00:03:58.000Despite the bans, we've seen several emergency use authorizations, you know, if you will, in these countries that continue to allow them to be used despite the fact that they're legally banned.
00:04:10.000So the chemical companies that are involved, Syngenta, Bayer, ChemWars, you know, the former DuPont, Dow, are really pressuring regulators around the world because these are profitable products for them.
00:04:25.000So they're used in agriculture quite a bit.
00:04:27.000On farmers, they coat seed corn, for instance.
00:04:30.000Almost 100% of the seed corn in the U.S. now planted comes with these neonicotinoids right on the seed.
00:04:37.000And you know, and what farmers say, what they tell me, and what they were saying again up in Nebraska when I was there just two weeks ago, they don't really have a choice.
00:04:45.000They can't hardly find seed anymore that isn't coated with these chemicals.
00:04:51.000Because the big chemical companies now are also the big seed companies, and they control the market to such a degree that farmers can't really escape these chemicals when they're planting conventional crops.
00:05:04.000So, you know, and that power and control of the marketplace certainly feeds into, I think, the reason we don't have a lot of good regulation around these neonicotinoids.
00:05:15.000And as you know, as you've written about it extensively, and I know, the The USDA and the agricultural regulators are captive agencies that are essentially just subsidiaries for these big chemical companies in the same way that the pharmaceutical companies run the public health regulatory agencies.
00:05:35.000Yeah, I mean, again, this is probably just another example, but we've seen that play out with a whole array of different chemicals, not just these neonicotinoids, but Yeah, I mean,
00:05:57.000these big companies spend a lot of money in Washington, D.C. lobbying officials, and they hold sway with the regulatory agencies.
00:06:06.000The pesticide chlorpyrifos is probably a really good example of Where you have this chemical, this is not a neonicotinoid, but it is an insecticide, chlorpyrifos, which was found to be so detrimental to children's brains, babies' brains, when they were exposed either through pregnancy of the mother or early in their childhood development.
00:06:30.000And it was found to be so dangerous that the EPA's own scientists internally said, we can't support this.
00:06:38.000There's no safe level in food or water.
00:06:40.000And other countries were looking to ban it.
00:06:43.000Federal courts were instructing the EPA to move on this.
00:06:46.000The Obama administration said, OK, we're going to ban this from agricultural use.
00:06:51.000It had already been banned from household use since the year 2000.
00:06:59.000Dow Chemical gave a million dollars to the inaugural fund for Trump and sat down with the Trump EPA. And that ban vanished.
00:07:09.000So that is such a good example of what we see over and over and over again about how powerful companies with money and influence really control the regulatory agencies that are supposed to be protecting the public.
00:07:21.000The same thing happened to me with the Vaccine Safety Commission.
00:07:25.000President Trump asked me to run a Vaccine Safety Commission.
00:07:30.000I would make sure that we had proper science to make sure that vaccines were actually safe and effective, meaning placebo-controlled studies.
00:07:38.000And the word got out that I had been appointed, and Pfizer gave President Trump a million dollars, the same as Dow did, for his inaugural fund.
00:07:49.000And he brought in two people who were handpicked by Pfizer to run HHS, Scott Copley, and Alex Azar.
00:08:00.000Insiders from the industry report of directors of Pfizer and these other companies, and they immediately killed the Vaccine Safety Commission.
00:08:24.000Tell us about what happened in Nebraska.
00:08:27.000Yeah, I mean, this is just such a Tragic, just terrible situation, but it really is emblematic of the, you know, destructive things that can happen when you have such a lack of regulation.
00:08:39.000So you had this ethanol plant up in this little community outside Omaha in eastern Nebraska, rural part of the state, this ethanol plant, and they were making, of course, biofuel, but they came up with this really, you know, interesting, unusual strategy That they would use these neonic-treated, these pesticide-treated seeds in their production process for their biofuel.
00:09:05.000And they could get these very cheaply by inviting companies like Bayer and Syngenta and others to dump their unsold, unwanted excess stocks of seed, take them over to the ethanol plant.
00:09:19.000The ethanol plant will use them Bayer and Syngenta no longer have to worry about what to do with these toxic pesticide-laden seeds.
00:09:27.000They don't have to figure out how to dispose of them in an environmentally safe way.
00:09:31.000It's legally toxic waste under red crime and make us a thousand dollars a drum.
00:09:37.000Disposing them in a controlled landfill and if they can dump them into a, we see this all the time, where these dirty industries are disposing of their worst products.
00:09:52.000Fluoride is a highly toxic byproduct of the oil refining process, and the oil refiners didn't want to pay to dispose of it, so they persuaded the regulatory agencies to put it in America's water.
00:10:09.000So what happened here is, yeah, so this generated millions of Gallons of wastewater that was containing levels of neonicotinoids that were many thousands of times higher than what the EPA said was safe.
00:10:27.000And wet cake, another byproduct of this waste, which again had these insanely high levels of these toxic chemicals in it.
00:10:36.000And this company Then they have all this wastewater and these waste piles and they're trying to figure out what to do with it and they start trying to spread some of it on farm fields in the area.
00:10:48.000Meanwhile, people are getting sick, animals are getting sick, honeybee colonies are dying, there's this terrible stench in the area.
00:10:56.000So it took actually years of regulators ignoring consumer complaints really and And really allowing this company to violate all sorts of environmental laws.
00:11:08.000But finally, a year ago, they couldn't go on any longer and they cracked down.
00:11:14.000And now you have this massive cleanup that's going on or trying to get underway.
00:11:21.000And the companies, Bayer and Syngenta and others, are in there trying to mount a cleanup, but not really sure what to do and how to do it.
00:11:30.000They've capped the 16 acres of toxic wet cake with what they call a posi shell, which is used at Superfund sites.
00:11:37.000It's like a mixture of fiber and clay and cement that they drop from helicopters over this huge landscape to try to contain the toxic waste.
00:11:47.000But what's happening is the water, the wastewater is already into the water table.
00:11:52.000It's already killed off, you know, they have fish that have died and And the frogs are gone and the toads and the bees have died.
00:12:00.000And researchers are now trying to launch a big epidemiology study to monitor people and gather blood and urine and see what levels of contaminants they have in them and then track them to see if they have health impacts down the road.
00:12:17.000And they're running into problems getting funding.
00:12:20.000The legislature doesn't seem to want to fund that kind of work, but this is a really important story.
00:12:26.000About what happens when you Pay attention and you don't properly regulate these harmful chemicals.
00:12:32.000It requires this kind of cognitive dissonance that I always marvel at.
00:12:38.000The hypnotic ability that these companies have to convince us that it's okay to put neurotoxins on our food.
00:12:45.000Because the way that these chemicals kill insects is by destroying their nervous system.
00:12:51.000Their nerve cells, their neuronal cells, are the same material as ours are.
00:12:57.000And so why do they think that these are going to be so lethal to insects and frogs and bees, and yet they're safe for human beings?
00:13:07.000Of course, there's no testing that shows they're safe.
00:13:10.000And we've seen this steady decline in neurological health among Americans.
00:13:17.000We've seen IQ loss after steadily gaining IQ every decade since 1900.
00:13:23.000We know in the last We've seen an explosion of neurodevelopmental disorders, ADD, ADHD, speech delay, language delay, tics, sleeping disorders, narcolepsy, ASD, autism, and nobody's connecting the dots.
00:13:47.000And one of the points that's been made to me repeatedly and was again in the situation with Nebraska by the scientists there was Is that our regulator, we talk about one chemical or one class of chemical and what does this do, you know,
00:14:02.000in this particular situation, but we often fail to consider the big picture that we're exposed not to just this particular neonicotinoid or this particular herbicide, but we're exposed now on a regular basis through our diet and the air and Occupational exposures, the food we eat, everything.
00:14:22.000We're exposed to a whole array of these chemicals.
00:14:25.000And what is the synergistic impact on our health on the long term?
00:14:31.000Not only our neurological health, but our reproductive health, right?
00:14:35.000And cancer and other forms of disease and illness.
00:14:38.000You know, we really are just living in this pervasive, toxic soup of chemical exposure.
00:14:46.000And our regulators don't seem to want to try to look at that bigger picture.
00:14:51.000And I know you do that a lot in your work, but it is something that scientists are wrestling with and trying to get the funding for.
00:15:00.000You know, for the situation in Nebraska, in the Midwest, they're finding not only the chemicals themselves, the actual neonicotinoids, but they're finding the breakdown products of those.
00:15:13.000And so where is the research on Those exposures, right?
00:15:17.000So they really hope to learn a lot from this situation.
00:15:20.000But as I said, they are stymied for funding.
00:15:23.000They've been turned down by many foundations.
00:15:25.000They're being told this work is really sort of anti-business.
00:15:29.000Why do they want to look so deeply into the impacts of these agricultural chemicals?
00:15:36.000Meanwhile, NIH has a $42 billion annual budget that is supposed to use funding exactly this kind of science, the science that tells us what is causing the chronic disease epidemic.
00:15:52.000NIAID, Tony Fauci's agency has a $7.6 billion annual budget.
00:15:59.000And they will not spend any money funding these scientists.
00:16:02.000They only fund science that pushes the corporate paradigm, corporate profit-taking, And they will not do science that threatens corporate hegemony over American democracy, over American health, the commoditization of our children, our landscapes, and every living thing.
00:16:22.000I want to ask you something that people, I think, will be really curious about.
00:17:25.000So I've been covering the agrochemical industry since 1998.
00:17:29.000And early on, I worked for Reuters, you know, and did get offered...
00:17:34.000Several years into that, positions in much bigger cities and promotions and to move into bigger roles, as you said.
00:17:42.000But I really was committed, became very committed to staying here in the Midwest and covering Monsanto and Dow and DuPont and Syngenta and the chemical industry and the impacts on human and environmental health.
00:17:58.000It did become very difficult because as I became more knowledgeable and dug deeper into the industry and did investigative work, wrote my book, they did come after me.
00:18:12.000I mean, Monsanto, it's been documented, papers that came out for litigation you were involved in and others, internal issues.
00:18:20.000Memos and emails and communications about, you know, how to discredit me, funding secret third parties and groups to attack my character and my credibility and to try to smear my book, my first book, Whitewash.
00:19:09.000My father was an environmentalist after he retired as an engineer.
00:19:13.000He became an advocate for the environment through his church and he formed a group called the Sustainable Sanctuary and feels that it is all of us.
00:19:25.000To try to make the world better for the next generation.
00:19:29.000And so this is, you know, we all have to do it in different ways, but this is how I do it.
00:19:33.000I just want to bring facts to light and help people understand and maybe help people, you know, make better choices and maybe reform regulatory policy so we're all healthier at some point.
00:19:49.000You are luminous inside and out, and you're just a beautiful, beautiful soul, and I admire you so much, Gary, for the way that you've lived your life.
00:19:59.000The choices you made, you're an incredible mother and wife, but you're doing a public service that takes a tremendous amount of courage, and I want to thank you for that.
00:20:10.000And for all the support you've given our work over the many, many years, you're really an incredible ally.