Late this September, the state’s scientific review panel meeting drew a crowd to Sacramento for a day and a half of hearings, during which the Department of Pesticide Regulation (DPR) presented its report on the pesticide’s health effects. Although the chairman, John Froines, professor of chemical toxicology at UCLA, admonished the audience that his charter was merely to critique the science behind the DPR’s report, not to approve or reject the chemical’s use, during the public comment period farmers and others spoke passionately for or against the controversial pesticide.

About fifty people spoke, with some growers arguing that they desperately needed the pesticide to replace methyl bromide, which two decades ago was scheduled to be phased out under the Montreal Protocol as an ozone-depleting gas. “We need all the tools possible to survive today,” said Will Scott of the African-American Farmers of Calfornia.

Arysta LifeScience Corporation, the chemical’s Tokyobased manufacturer, says that adopting methyl iodide may decrease environmental damage. Methyl iodide is slightly stronger, pound for pound, than methyl bromide, and Arysta estimates that using it instead could cut the pounds of pesticide applied by thirty to fifty percent.

It’s an argument that’s extremely seductive to farmers. Many loved methyl bromide because it was the ultimate kill-all chemical for all kinds of soil pests, and strawberries and other high-value crops grow and yield quickly after chemical soil sterilization. Indeed, the soil is so devoid of life after sterilization that lettuce producers rent fumigated fields two years later, because such soil is still likely to be free of the pests that plague leafy greens.

However, a 2007 letter signed by 54 scientists, including four Nobel laureates, pointed out the health hazards of using these powerful chemicals. “Alkylating agents like methyl iodide are extraordinarily well-known cancer hazards in the chemical community because of their ability to modify the chemist’s own DNA, as well as the target molecule in the flask, leading to mutations that are potentially very harmful,” reads the letter, addressed to administrator Stephen Johnson of the US Environmental Protection Agency.

“Because of this potential toxicity, chemists who work with this material use the smallest amounts possible and take great precautions to avoid exposure,” the letter continues. “Because of methyl iodide’s high volatility and water solubility, broad use of this chemical in agriculture will guarantee substantial releases to air, surface waters and groundwater, and will result in exposures for many people. In addition to the potential for increased cancer incidence, US EPA’s own evaluation of the chemical also indicates that methyl iodide causes thyroid toxicity, permanent neurological damage, and fetal losses in experimental animals.”

At the September hearing, the panel of eight health scientists heard technical testimony from the preparers of the DPR draft report, Arysta representatives, the US EPA, the California Rural Legal Assistance Foundation, and the Pesticide Action Network of North America. A scientific meeting, which preceded public comment, included discussion of groundwater contamination, fetal defects, nervous system toxicity, thyroid damage, cancer induced by genetic damage to DNA, and how big the safety factors for methyl iodide should be. These include determining buffer zones, application rates, and other considerations, although one panelist, Dr. Paul Blanc, argued that the evidence presented was sketchy enough that the term “safe level” was misleading, since so much about the chemical is still unknown.

Thomas McKone, an expert in air modeling and exposure assessment at the University of California at Berkeley, agreed, calling the data regarding chemical leaching “rather alarming, particularly since the uncertainties are large and we don’t know what a safe dose is.”

Theodore Slotkin, professor of neurodevelopmental toxicology at Duke University, stunned many in the audience when he said that he was “worried about late developing, irreversible brain damage,” which he said was not addressed adequately in the existing reports.

The report will be used in the DPR’s decision about whether to register the chemical for use and will also factor into whether the US EPA will reconsider its own decision to allow registration across the United States. Presently, each state is allowed to make its own decision, and California, Washington, and New York are the last holdouts against its use. If the EPA reverses its decision, the chemical would be banned across the nation.

The environmental movement has long been divided over the replacement of one of the world’s worst ozone depleters. Because of exemptions that substantially weakened the Montreal Protocol and kept extending the date for final phaseout, methyl bromide is still used at the rate of about ten million pounds per year in the United States alone. Worldwide, more than 42 million pounds were used in 2008. Since substantial ozone damage can take generations to heal, the chance to permanently squelch a chemical whose final phaseout date has been a moving target since 1991 is undeniably appealing.

It was only recently that the National Resources Defense Council publicly took a position against the use of methyl iodide, a development that many activists consider significant. The organization is determined to stop the dissemination of millions of pounds of methyl bromide, which is still being used at about a fifth of pre-Montreal levels, but not by exposing the environment to enormous amounts of methyl iodide. Many activists are acutely aware that there is only one difference between the limited success they’ve had banning methyl bromide versus the many failures to stop other chemicals: The whole world hates ozone-depleters. They fear that methyl iodide, which poses no ozone threat, will be applied with abandon throughout the state’s farms and nurseries, which generate about $25 billion of California’s annual revenues.

Susan Kegley, a senior scientific consultant for the Pesticide Action Network North America (PANNA), warns, “About the only thing to like about methyl iodide is that it’s not an ozone-depleter. Methyl iodide is just as toxic as methyl bromide, maybe more so, and in the laboratory, it must be handled as a dangerous chemical. Should we be applying thousands of tons of it to California farms?” Each year, says Kegley, California agriculture already uses between 30 and 35 million pounds of pesticides.

At stake is the health of anyone who comes into contact with the chemical, particularly in the Central Valley, where subdivisions have sprung up faster than weeds. Arysta’s label specifies quarter-mile buffer zones, but a drive through these communities reveals subdivision fences bordering strawberry fields. If approved, the chemical could be applied at a rate of up to 175 pounds per acre, including in California vineyards.

During the public comment period at the September hearing, Santa Cruz organic strawberry grower Jim Cochran of Swanton Berry Farm argued for organic strawberry production. “When I started growing strawberries organically a few years ago, I was one hundred percent of the organic growers,” he told the panel. “Now I grow about one to three percent. It is possible to grow them organically.” (About 87 percent of the nation’s estimated 525 million pounds of strawberries are grown in California.)

Some farm workers also said that they worried about the health effects of working in fumigated fields, but felt compelled to do so because their jobs are dependent upon the success of California crops, such as strawberries, that are frequently grown by fumigating crops under vast acreages of plastic tarps.

Horracio Ramirez, an agricultural worker who has planted crops by slitting holes in the plastic sheeting that covers fumigated fields, said through a translator, “Tarp removers have gotten sick from the chemicals we already have, and this will be even worse. Not all of us workers get the protection we need.”

“When we plant something, we punch holes in the plastic,” he continued. “[The pesticide] comes out when you open a hole. I told my foreman, but he said it was only soap.” Ramirez said that he doesn’t believe that he was only exposed to soap.

Julian Cruz, another field worker, said that dangerous chemicals are already in the strawberry fields. “Your eyes water all day long, and you get nosebleeds,” he said. “If this is a stronger chemical than what we have already, what will it be like for us if it’s approved?” Currently, chloropicrin, metam sodium, and methyl bromide are the most commonly used strawberry pesticides.

Enrique Hernandez, another agricultural worker, spoke of his dilemma: “I know that the chemical is dangerous, but people need to work.”

When Hernandez and others said that they used the protections that Arysta specifies, several panel members questioned them about what kind of masks they wore. “Were they white, black, or brown?” the doctors asked. Most of the workers answered that they were white, indicating that they were not respirators but throwaway masks like those used in paint shops, which are ineffective against fumigants.

Perhaps most surprising was that when the panel asked for details on the chemical’s underlying mechanism, nobody at the meeting—attended by Arysta representatives, agricultural experts, chemists, and even one of the chemical’s co-inventors—could explain how methyl iodide kills pests such as nematodes.

The panel’s consensus appeared to be that DPR had done an admirable first draft, but that additions to address groundwater contamination, safety margins, neurotoxicity, birth defects, and thyroid damage were necessary before the report could be issued in final form. The licensing decision is expected in 2010 or later. A representative from Washington state also spoke at the meeting, indicating that the state is watching the California fight closely. Whether Washington will continue to join New York in holding out against methyl iodide is still an open question. If the EPA were to reverse its decision on methyl iodide, the chemical would join a very short list of pesticides whose use was first approved but later banned.

Copies of the report, as well as other information on methyl iodide, can be found on the DPR’s Web site: www.cdpr.ca.gov

It sounds abhorrent, but consider this: If nobody is allowed to study the effects of pesticide exposure in humans—especially tiny ones who are more vulnerable than adults—how can regulators decide which pesticides to allow, restrict, or ban outright? “If you don’t have the information proving a chemical is harmful and that people are being exposed, it can’t be regulated,” explains Robin Whyatt, deputy director of the Columbia Center for Children’s Environmental Health. “In this country—unlike in Europe, where manufacturers have to prove a new chemical is safe—you have to prove something is a hazard if you want to regulate or restrict it.”

Kids stand squarely at the center of the pesticide testing controversy. Since 1996, the way the Environmental Protection Agency has calculated thresholds for pesticide exposure has involved a safety “factor of ten,” taking into account children’s special vulnerability to many chemicals (see sidebar). But if manufacturers can show that their chemical has no added effects on children, they can pressure officials to lower the safety threshold. “The chemical companies would like to be able to say that, for example, maybe a factor of three is acceptable,” Whyatt says.

Testing toxins on people is an ethical dilemma that American regulators have struggled with for years. Since 1991, all research conducted by federal agencies, including the EPA, has been governed by the Common Rule, a policy designed to minimize risk to human subjects and ensure their informed consent. The Common Rule has its roots in 1947’s Nuremberg Code, developed after World War II, as a reaction to Nazi experimentation on prisoners. In 2009 the EPA accepted some modifications to the Common Rule to allow the results of experiments previously conducted on human subjects—experiments that would not be allowed under the EPA’s rules today—to be considered when assessing the toxicity of certain pesticides. These guidelines allow for case-by-case decisions, which the EPA’s critics say is too vague a standard.

EPA watchers worry that pesticide makers will try to use the ongoing confusion about human testing to get dangerous chemicals approved based on flimsy, older studies. On the flip side, other researchers worry that important research on pesticide exposure will be disallowed for ethical reasons, making it easier for companies to keep dangerous chemicals on the market. For chemical companies, a lot is at stake: Failure to be recertified by the EPA for use in agribusiness or households would mean big losses. Many common chemicals—including the insecticide aldicarb and the herbicide paraquat dichloride—are slated for review or re-review. With a new EPA administration in town, both sides will press the agency for an advantage.

Disturbing questions, little consensus

There is little consensus on many of the key issues surrounding childhood pesticide exposure: How far should the EPA allow researchers to go to better understand the chemicals that have become part of modern life? Do the EPA’s rules on the type of studies it will accept actually protect children? Are pesticide companies using loopholes in the rules to do an end-run around safety factors that provide an extra margin of protection for children, as well as for vulnerable adults, such as those with asthma or allergies?

“There’s a central tension to human studies that’s always there and won’t ever totally go away,” says Whyatt, who has done groundbreaking observational health studies that document childhood and fetal pesticide exposure. “You always have to protect the interests of the people involved, but at the same time, we need to understand exposure and the effects of exposure if we’re going to protect people’s health,” she says. “Sometimes people even have to stop a study because it becomes clear that the potential risk is too great.”

Stopping a study—two studies, actually—is exactly what the EPA did last fall, when the agency “cancelled until further notice” funding for two studies on infants and children. Most of the information regarding the studies, one to understand the pesticide exposure of infants and toddlers in Las Vegas, another involving school-age children, was wiped from the agency’s Web site. In its place was an announcement—meant to calm—that “to ensure the utmost confidence in the conduct of the [studies],” the two had been cancelled until after the EPA’s policies on pesticide testing on children could be finalized.

Some researchers, like Whyatt, say they were surprised that the studies were cancelled; rather than exposing the children to new chemicals, they would have documented the quantity and types of pesticides that they were already encountering in their everyday lives. But perhaps the EPA was being cautious because outrage over studies involving kids and pesticide had previously landed the agency in hot water. The worst testing-related dispute, hands down, was dubbed CHEERS, for Children’s Environmental Exposure Research Study. It would have provided camcorders and small monetary incentives to parents in impoverished Duval County, Florida, to spray measured amounts of pesticides into their kids’ rooms. When proposed in 2004, the CHEERS study provoked Senate hearings and an announcement by several senators that they would block the nomination of Stephen Johnson to head the EPA unless the study was canceled, which it eventually was. The incident made the agency reluctant to revisit the subject of human testing. That’s why, many observers say, the EPA’s guidelines continue to be murky, a situation likely to lead to more pesticide exposure, not less.

Two very different types of studies

Much of the current controversy focuses on how the EPA handles two different types of studies. The first category involves intentionally exposing subjects to toxins: In 2006, the EPA announced that it would no longer fund, or accept the results of, new intentional dosing research in its regulatory work. The battle over these studies now focuses on whether the EPA should accept results from studies begun before 2006.

Allowing use of that data on a case-by-case basis is too big a loophole, argues Jeff Ruch, executive director of Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility: “EPA can use any human dosing study conducted before the new rule’s effective date on a case-by-case basis, applying the ethical norms prevalent at the time. Since, prior to the rule, EPA recognized no ethical standards at all, this means that all previous human studies can come in through EPA’s wide-open door.”

Some bioethicists believe that the EPA should be cautious about dosing studies. “You can only do [these types of studies] if there is no permanent damage and you serve a really important social purpose, such as better regulation of public health,” says David Resnik, a bioethicist at the National Institutes of Health. “That’s a problem when pesticide companies do these studies. It’s hard for them to argue that they’ll be improving public health.” Still, Resnik doesn’t rule out the possibility that such research might generate positive outcomes. “You might improve public safety if you find out that the existing rules aren’t strict enough,” he says.

A second kind of testing is less controversial: observational studies document pesticides’ effects on people who are already exposed to them in their daily lives. However, even these studies can raise ethical issues. “We still have a duty to let these families know if they’re being exposed to something dangerous,” argues Robert Gould, a San Jose doctor and president of the San Francisco chapter of Physicians for Social Responsibility. “Even if we’re just watching something that is already happening, we need to protect these children.”

Furthermore, he says, there’s an efficacy question: long-term effects often turn up many years after a drug or pesticide has been approved based on short-term studies. “The problem is that a lot of effects only show up many years after a child has been exposed, sometimes even a generation later, when the child grows up and has children,” Gould says. “We just don’t know many of the long-term effects upon these children, so to allow them to be exposed seems unethical. We should do everything we can to stop their exposure.”

But in the US, where the burden of proof is on the permitting agency rather than the chemical company, some researchers say that observational studies are the best hope for protecting the millions of children—and their adult family members—who cannot get away from pesticide exposure. “The real tragedy is that if good studies don’t get done, there’s not going to be any data to stop harmful pesticides,” says Columbia University’s Whyatt.

Ironically, she says, not accepting well-designed, tightly monitored observational studies could backfire, resulting in more childhood chemical exposure. “It’s actually in Dow Chemical’s interest to have such requests for applications killed, because that would mean there would be no regulation of these chemicals at all,” says Whyatt.

Margaret Reeves, senior scientist at the Pesticide Action Network, agrees. “Lots of people live with exposure every day,” says Reeves. “That’s why we absolutely need well-designed observational studies that tell people the risks of their exposure, and the good ones are wonderful. They generate the data to make the arguments to push for better rules.”

Sometimes, Reeves says, observational data provides scientific arguments about whether to regulate or ban a pesticide—and generates an emotional response among the regulators. “Pesticide companies are really fighting tooth and nail to keep chlorpyrifos,” she says, an insecticide that has been linked to delays in children’s cognitive development, Attention-deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD), low birthweight in babies exposed to the chemical prenatally, and possibly to an increase in cancer risk. “EPA scientists have told us that what really moved them was when three women who had been pregnant talked about how much of the pesticide was in their bodies,” Reeves says. “They wouldn’t have had that information if there hadn’t been good observational studies.” As a result, she says, the EPA banned the residential use of chlorpyrifos, though it is still available for restricted use in commercial agriculture.

Breaking the Nuremberg Code?

One of the most contested “loopholes” in the EPA’s rules is the possibility of using data from old studies performed during an era of looser ethical guidelines. Almost everyone agrees that a study that, for example, fed pesticides directly to participants, would never be allowed under today’s rules. (It has happened—for example, in 1992 in Scotland, investigators for Rhone-Poulenc Agro conducted tests in which subjects were given the insecticide aldicarb mixed with orange juice.) In the US today, any such proposal would almost certainly be rejected by a research institution’s ethics board and denied EPA funding.

But what if important information was gained through such a study? Is it ethical to use the information anyway? Experts differ radically on this issue.

For example, the National Resources Defense Council opposes the use of all studies involving intentional exposure, both past and present. In early 2008, it joined forces with organizations like Farmworker Justice and Earthjustice to sue the EPA to prevent its reliance upon older dosing studies when it makes regulatory decisions, arguing that they violate the Nuremberg Code. “We think that the only rule that is scientifically sound and ethical is one that says that the EPA can’t rely on research conducted using intentional human dosage experiments,” says Aaron Colangelo, NRDC’s counsel for the suit.

The EPA counters that using information from studies already conducted could help it make crucial regulatory decisions that would protect the public. After all, the studies are finished, and the information in them is already known. EPA officials declined to be interviewed for this story, instead supplying a statement from Dr. Warren Lux, the agency’s top ethics official, arguing that “the ethical and regulatory standards that are being applied are clearly set forth, are based upon the Common Rule, and are consistent with the standards being applied across all Common Rule agencies.  As in all applied ethics, however, the rules and standards must be applied on a case-by-case basis with knowledge and consideration of the detailed particulars of each case in order to determine whether that particular case is (or is not) consistent with the standards being applied.”

Colangelo argues that there are other ways of getting such data, both through animal testing and observational studies. “They could use animal studies and build in safety factors, or they could look at exposure to, say, farm workers, without intentionally causing greater exposure,” he says. “It’s not as if they need these studies to regulate effectively.”

Decisions about which studies are acceptable often have a profound effect on the use of particular toxic chemicals; Colangelo cites the EPA’s acceptance of the safety of DVVP—or diclorvos, common in flea collars and pest strips—based on an old study in which only six adults were dosed with the toxic chemical. Experts familiar with the study agree that such research would never be allowed or accepted today—in part because of problems extrapolating results from adults to children. Yet because the EPA has been willing to accept older research that does not conform to present ethical standards, Colangelo says that the study is used to justify the continued use of diclorvos in homes where children live. “This study has let EPA keep this chemical on the market. Otherwise, it wouldn’t still be in use,” he says.

Colangelo expects that the issue of using data from older studies will remain contentious, and the fight could intensify as pesticide manufacturers are required to seek new or renewed certification. “The good news is that periodically, all pesticides are now up for review. The bad news is that the incentive is greater now for companies that make the chemicals to try to rely on bad studies,” he says.

A new sheriff in town

Many researchers have expressed hope that Lisa Jackson, President Obama’s choice for head of the EPA, will take action to reverse what they see as years of mishandling and neglect of children’s environmental issues, including human testing. Yet it’s not clear yet whether the administration will address these outstanding issues. “I have high hopes for this administration, that they will make protecting children’s health a priority,” says Whyatt.

“We’re hopeful that the new administration will take a different approach and reverse the previous administration,” agrees Colangelo, who is still awaiting a decision on the NRDC lawsuit.

Jackson will face intense pressure from both sides to set the rules of the game in their favor. With millions of dollars hanging on the nuances of unclear guidelines, the only sure bets are that political jockeying will be intense, and any victory—if there is a one—will be hard-fought.

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Lower Standards

The so-called Rules of 10, a standard routinely used in toxicity calculations, starts at the level at which animals experience toxic effects, then lowers that amount by a “safety factor” of a multiple of ten to convert to allowable human exposure levels. This is called the interspecies factor.

Next, researchers must lower by another factor of ten (called the intraspecies factor) to account for the fact that people differ in how much of a pesticide they can tolerate. For example, asthmatics are often more sensitive to inhaled chemicals than the general population.

Finally, the Food Protection Act of 1996, which only recently has begun affecting the EPA’s decision-making, requires a third safety factor of ten to account for the fact that children are often more sensitive to chemical exposures because of their size and continuing development. Says Earthjustice attorney Jan Hasselman, “When you’re basing your testing on animals, you’re talking about a safety factor of a thousand. This drives the pesticide companies nuts.”

If chemical companies are able to provide data showing that children are not impacted differently, one factor of ten disappears. Hasselman says manufacturers could argue for exposure levels up to ten times less stringent than today’s, making the standard easier to meet.

The group encountered resistance from city planners and had to negotiate over what were at the time very unusual features. The completed homes sold instantly to people seeking an alternative to traditional tract-home design. The Smart Communities Web site lists these benefits:

• A 1990 study found that Village Homes residents use 36 percent less energy for vehicular driving, 47 percent less electricity and 31 percent less natural gas per household than a conventional neighborhood control group.
• Tree-lined streets keep the temperature about 10 percent cooler than surrounding neighborhoods.
• Open space accounts for 25 percent of the development.
• Village Homes residents know 50 percent more of their neighbors than do residents in nearby developments.
• Initially, Village Homes sold for the same price as other homes in Davis. On average, they now sell for $11 per square foot more.

It seemed like a “happily ever after” story, but it turned out to be just the first act of a lifelong saga. Michael and Judith wrote a book about the development, Designing Sustainable Communities: Learning from Village Homes, and Judith still writes about innovative communities. Michael served as city councilmember and mayor of Davis. Hoping to expand upon the success of Village Homes, he designed Covell Village, a much larger development.

Corbett reasoned that Covell offered a chance to expand on the success of Village Homes. The new 1,864-unit development would include solar panels on every home, a retail center, a new fire station, an 82-acre educational organic farm, a community recreation building, an outdoor amphitheater, sites for the school district, a Rotary Hall, Yolo Hospice, Davis Parent Nursery School, a 124-acre wetland habitat, 8 miles of bike paths, and a 776-acre farmland buffer that could never be developed. In addition, 48 percent of the housing units would have had a price restriction, an effort to keep the development affordable for a range of people and occupations.

It required a vote to annex the land to the city of Davis. After a very heated campaign, the measure was voted down last November, with about 60 percent voting against the measure. “It was really hard to see it voted down,” says Corbett, “especially since I’m of an age where I probably won’t get a chance to have such an impact again.”

I caught Michael Corbett at his office in Davis, where he works as a planning consultant.

What lessons do you think planners and developers learned from Village Homes?

I have no indication that most people have learned much at all. It’s still a fight for natural drainage, edible landscaping, and narrow streets. The north-south orientation rule [which required that homes be built on a north-south orientation so that passive solar power was possible] also has been relaxed, so developers aren’t doing north-south orientation any more.

We could make a big jump with photovoltaics, and design closer to the city to minimize auto traffic. In Village Homes, we had a community center, a restaurant, a dance studio, and some offices, but many people still had to use their automobiles daily.

Even your critics acknowledged that Covell would have improved the standard of living in Davis. Why do you think it was rejected by the voters?

That development was the best possible model development. It was big enough for jobs and was designed near bus lines, schools, commercial development. It had edible landscaping, permanent agricultural set-asides—everything you could want, really. But Davis has become so anti-growth. It was really sad to work so long on something so positive and have it go down. It was just so short-sighted. A lot of people who consider themselves progressive aren’t. They’re reactive. It’s the nature of the world we live in now, and it really stops creative solutions and the people who want to try them. Society will stall unless progressives come up with real solutions.

Do you think that people’s attitudes have changed?

The world has changed a lot from the one I grew up in, in the 1940s, to the 1960s, when television started having a real impact. When I was little, we had to use our imaginations to play. We made our own toys, our own designs. We didn’t buy them at a toy store, we made them. I think that starting in the 1960s, people started to have more handed to them. The next generation grew up tuning their brains to accept or reject what’s handed to them. They label new ideas good or bad, but they don’t work out new solutions. Meanwhile, much more creativity goes into video games, computers, and entertainment, which just reinforces a corporate mentality.

What do you think the future of community design will be?

The future is probably in some kind of semi-collapsed society. We’ve spent 100 years building for the automobile. We now have urban areas that are very vulnerable to shortages, global warming, and drought. The future could be enormously different from the present. Communities such as Tucson and Palm Springs could get just warm enough or lose their access to water to be virtually unlivable. We’re going to see lots of changes just due to global warming. And as fossil fuels dry up, that will make even more disruption& We might have to live the way we did before cars, with local agriculture and business. But it won’t be so much because of political views, it will be because of the way we’ll have to use energy and resources.

That’s a pretty depressing view of the future. Do you see any promising developments that might offer some hope of a more sustainable future?

Actually, there’s a little bit of hope in the fact that Davis voted down Covell Village. It was trying to take hold of its future. It was good that they took control. But the question is whether they can still extend that control and use it wisely. Local governments can still require energy conservation, buy land, control their own development. Local control increases the diversity of solutions, and problems get solved through diversity and learning from each other. But most of the time, there is such a symbiotic relationship between money, politicians, and development that it’s really hard. Davis, Arcata, Santa Cruz, and Berkeley all want to redo the urban area. All of these cities have succumbed at one time or another to the sheer magnitude of corporate stuctures. So for every step forward, you get beaten back five.

I see some hope in what individuals choose to do with their futures. Biking, living without a car, recycling—these are all good, but the real change happens when the local governments drive change. We’re at a fork here, facing collapse, and the big question is whether society will hobble along for 15-20 years or whether it will be in four or five years. It’s kind of like living under one of the bad emperors in the Roman Empire. We’re destroying our environment, but we’re stuck with the infrastructure we’ve built, and many people can’t figure out what’s a good plan and what’s not.

“We really don’t want the fruit drop,” he said. “A lot of times, homeowners let it cover the sidewalk, and it rots and makes a mess and becomes a hazard.”

“I would never let the fruit rot,” I said. “We eat the fruit. Besides, there are already lots of plum trees on the parking strip in my neighborhood, so why can’t I have one of my own?”

He paused before deciding to let me in on the secret. “Um, in your neighborhood, we made a mistake. We thought those were flowering plums, but they’ve got fruit, and we’ve, uh, learned from our mistake. It’s a mess there every June.”

Suddenly, I had an idea. “How about a palm tree?” I offered.

“Well, you do know you can’t grow coconuts here?” he asked.

“Yes, of course,” I said. “I was thinking about a different species.”

“I suppose that’s OK then, since you won’t be dropping fruit,” he agreed, unaware that I planned to plant Butia capitata, otherwise known as “pindo palm” or “jelly palm.” Years later, it would produce hundreds of plum-sized fruit that my two little “fruit bats”—nine-year-old Evan and five-year-old Jasmine—would devour, innocently keeping from violating the rationale behind the city’s hatred of fruit-bearing trees.

That conversation took place 13 years ago, before I’d planted more than 100 trees and bushes on my 7,200-square-foot tract-home lot, producing an effect that my neighbors affectionately call “the rain forest.” Today’s edible landscaping movement has come a long way from the days when most neighbors looked askance at those who broke the one-big-ornamental-tree-and-a-lawn look.

Fueled by the “buy-local” food movement, many homeowners—and even a few brave, balcony-owning souls—are starting to grow their own fruit and vegetables. Fighting a lack of knowledge—much of the gardening wisdom that used to be passed down in families was lost in the generation between the victory garden and the organic movement—they plant fruit trees in their lawns and vegetables in their back yard. Some even complement their gardens with small livestock, such as ducks, geese, chickens, and small pigs (warning: some pot-bellied pigs become huge).

But most cities still discourage parking-strip fruit trees, out of fear of bugs, decay, and tripping injuries. “Almost nobody in city planning is encouraging edible landscaping these days,” opines Michael Corbett, an urban planner who specializes in environmentally friendly developments.

But many growers take heart that neighbors today are less likely to whisper “The Adams Family” behind your back should you forego a lawn in favor of more productive landscaping.

Typical is San Francisco resident Aline Bier, whose adventures in edible landscaping have shaped her front yard. Generally, she says, her neighbors have not only tolerated her edible garden, they celebrate it. “My garden is totally in front and close to a little kids’ park/playground,” she says. “I have had chickens and ducks for years. They, and my fruit trees, are the talk of the neighborhood—from toddlers to oldsters, and among foreign-born folk, who often know much more than [I do] about farm animals and fruit production.”

Eric Beeghly, a member of the fruit enthusiast group California Rare Fruit Growers, agrees that at least in his neighborhood, people are enthusiastic about his unconventional yard, which is nearly lawn-less. “I recently designed and installed a front yard consisting almost entirely of edibles,” he says. “The response of the neighbors has been overwhelmingly positive. For example, a neighbor came by and and asked how much a strawberry plant would cost—I included 250 strawberry plants in the design. She was excited and surprised when I told her she could get six plants for about $3.50, and she told me [that] she planned on buying some right away.”

Still, says Bier, there are limits. Most cities in the Bay Area limit or even prohibit keeping livestock. Though these rules often remain unenforced in the absence of complaints, city officials are quick to respond when neighbors report violations.

“The only problem I’ve ever had was some years ago, when somebody gave me a rooster,” says Bier. “I put him in a cage in the garage and covered the cage, for the first and only night I had him. When I got to work the next morning, the City Attorney had already been calling with complaints.”

In addition to discouraging or prohibiting fruit, many jurisdictions impose clearance and other requirements on parking strips, as avid fruit gardener Sini Falkowski recently found out. “In the parking strip, I have two avocado trees planted, along with a persimmon and an apple tree,” she says. “I know these are not legal street trees, but I keep them healthy, trimmed, and looking good. Unfortunately, I just discovered I’m breaking a rule that says street trees should be trimmed to allow a six-foot clearance from the ground for vehicle safety reasons.”

Falkowski says that she will comply if anyone complains, “but so far my neighbors have been happy when they see the baskets of apples and other fruits that come to their doors.”

This is the quandary that farmers faced—until the infamous ozone-destroying agricultural pesticide methyl bromide was banned. The phasing-out took decades, its use drastically curtailed under the 1987 Montreal Protocol in the late 1990s to the present, with increasingly stringent regulations. It is still employed in restricted quantities for fumigating quarantined crops and for “critical and emergency uses,” which include using it to kill imported organisms that might otherwise be introduced into the United States. In developed countries, farmers are allowed to apply up to 14,600 tons of the chemical in 2006, according to United Nations documents.

So what’s a farmer to do? Not go organic, apparently: earlier this year, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency considered an application by Tokyo-based Arysta LifeSciences to begin listing methyl iodide, a fumigant that could be used to sterilize the fields and storage rooms where strawberries, tomatoes, and melons are grown and stored. Listing is one of the first steps in getting a pesticide approved for use. Appalled environmentalists, who had spent years campaigning against methyl bromide, immediately mobilized to fight what some have dubbed “son of methyl bromide.”

Some say the nut doesn’t fall far from the tree. “It’s not an ozone-depleter, but that’s about the only nice thing you can say about it,” says Susan Kegley, senior staff scientist with Pesticide Action Network North America (PANNA). “It’s more acutely toxic and a stronger carcinogen, sometimes [causing cancer] with only a single application&.” Because of this, it’s not registered for use anywhere in the world—except Japan. “The European Union uses the precautionary principle, so it probably won’t be registered there,” Kegley says. “It has been approved in Japan for fumigating imported timber, the first allowed use in the world.”

The EPA and the California Department of Pesticide Regulation differ about the health impacts of methyl iodide. Citing concerns for pregnant women and fetuses, DPR disagreed with the EPA’s assessment that health effects on workers and the nearby community could be mitigated through precautionary procedures and in the case of workers, protective clothing. It also disputed the “safe” level of the pesticide, which the EPA estimates to be about five times higher than the DPR safe level. The DPR also says that it is “very concerned” about possible neurological disruption and the consequent effects on fetuses.

Most growers now lament the good old days, when one application of methyl bromide could boost productivity for several years. When used as a soil fumigant, methyl bromide left no residue, and it virtually sterilized the soil of all life, including insects, nematodes, molds, and fungi. It gave strawberries and other crops several years of pest-free growing time. Lettuce farmers often leased the land after strawberry crops had been grown in the fumigated soil because the sterilization killed off lettuce pests too. Vineyard growers often used methyl bromide as a fumigant before plants went in, so the chemical has been widely used in Northern California. Even anti-pesticide activists concede that no presently available chemical or combination of chemicals is as effective or long lasting as methyl bromide. “There’s nothing else like it,” say both growers and activists.

But interestingly, grower organizations have stopped short of adopting an official position advocating methyl iodide, which is the one chemical that seems to be as effective as methyl bromide in killing virtually everything in the soil. As Mary DeGroat, public relations director for the California Strawberry Commission, recently told the L.A. Times, “We are hoping to find something as efficient and cost-effective as methyl bromide, but we’re not proponents” of any particular chemical. “If an alternative comes up that works and is safe, then that’s great news. Whatever the [EPA and state] deem legal and appropriate, we work within those realms in compliance. If they approve methyl iodide, obviously there would be some training involved. That would be critical.”

Environmentalists point out that there is nothing that works like these chemicals because those who use chemical pest controls often refuse to consider other techniques. As methyl bromide was phased out, experimentation has flourished in alternative methods such as solar heat sterilization, intercropping, crop rotation, and other less toxic controls. “You seem to need the threat of something going away to get innovation like that,” says Kegley.

The EPA says that it is now reviewing methyl iodide as part of a larger fumigant assessment study of half a dozen pesticides. The results of the study are expected by the end of this year, when the EPA has said that it will reconsider the registration of the chemical. It denied listing this spring.

Kegley views the denial to list methyl iodide as a victory, citing citizen action and PANNA’s vigorous protests as important in the EPA’s decision. “The EPA was really pushing this through, and we slowed it down,” she says. A PANNA spokesperson says that a public awareness campaign from a coalition of environmental, health, and social justice organizations helped to generate more than 12,500 comments. Stay tuned for the next installment in the continuing saga, some time early next year, shortly after the EPA completes its long-awaited fumigant review.

The legal filings exemplify how effectively and quietly nanoparticles have inserted themselves into our lives. While we weren’t looking, sub-microscopic machines went from the stuff of science fiction to more than 200 products that you can buy today from the likes of Levi Strauss to L.L. Bean. These new products have been either enhanced or made possible by tiny particles less than a hundredth of a millimeter, so small that they can only be seen with the most powerful microscopes in the world. On the nanoscale (ten or fewer atoms), familiar materials turn strange—for instance, gold liquifies and opaque substances become transparent. They also react differently on a chemical and catalytic level than their macro counterparts.

“The growth in nanotechnology and the products that contain them has been astonishing,” says Tracy D. Hester, an attorney who heads the Houston environ-mental law group in the firm of Bracewell & Giuliani, a national law firm. He said the Friends of the Earth petitions could be the beginning of the first litigation over how nanomaterials should be regulated.

From Dockers Go Khakis to Daewoo vacuum cleaners, from sunscreen to golf clubs, nanotechnology is beginning to pervade our lives. Once the province of worried academics and starry-eyed inventors, the tiny molecules have hit the bright lights, appearing daily in your supermarket and mail order catalogs.

Indeed, it’s now possible to be in contact with this technology from the moment you arise in the morning and use your Wilkinson Sword razor to the moment your head hits the Sharper Image Contour-Foam neck-support pillow. From machine memory to environmental remediation, the chemicals are transforming old favorites and making the previously unthinkable a household necessity.

At the same time, many observers are concerned both at how little is known about the risks of these particles and how inadequate and inappropriate are many of the current laws dealing with issues ranging from human and animal health to disposal of nano-wastes. At least half a dozen agencies, including the EPA, the FDA, and the National Institute of Occupational Safety and Health, can or should play a role in overseeing the creation, use, and disposal of nanochemicals, but so far, it’s unclear what oversight the agencies might adopt.

Inadequate regulation is part of why so many consumers don’t even realize they are using nanotechnology: There is no requirement in the United States to label products that use nanoparticles. (To see which nano-products you might be using, click on the Nanotechnology Consumer Products Inventory at http://www.nanotechproject.org. The results will surprise you.)

Even researchers working on the cutting-edge of the field admit that it’s hard to know which products contain nanotechnology. “I couldn’t even say for sure which sunscreens use nano,” says Kristen Kulinowski, director for external affairs at Rice University’s Center for Biology and Environmental Nanotechnology and the director of the International Conference on Nanotechnology. “I can guess, by looking at the ingredients and at whether it is all white and goopy or mostly clear.” (You might want to steer clear of clear.)

Like any frontier, the field of nanotechnology is a place where the law is often inadequate to deal with day-to-day problems. “Unless it’s pharmacological or a radionucleotide, there are very few specific regulations that apply,” says Patricia McClellan-Green, assistant professor of environmental and molecular toxicology at North Carolina State University. She agrees that nanotechnology has been largely unregulated or underregulated. Sometimes it’s clear that nanotechnology has been used, but some chemicals have a currently regulated “macro” or traditional formulation and a new nanoformulation. The law treats the two chemicals as the same.

“So far, nanotechnology is regulated mostly under the Toxic Substances Control Act, but those laws don’t distinguish between nanotechnology and other chemicals,” says Kulinowski. “That means that, say, titanium dioxide [a chemical commonly used in sunscreens] might be covered under the Act, but a nano-formulation of titanium dioxide could conceivably have very different toxicological properties. That’s usually the very reason we’re interested in nanotechnology. “If it weren’t different in some way, we probably wouldn’t be interested in the nano form.”

She hastens to add that the general view of nano titanium dioxide is that it’s safe. But with some chemicals, the nano-formulation is so different that it should be regulated as if it’s a different chemical, and current laws don’t allow for two radically different formulations—with extremely different risks—of the same chemical.

For example, work done by Eva Oberdorster, formerly of Southern Methodist University, showed that water fleas were killed by synthetic carbon nanoparticles called “buckyballs,” and a species of fish suffered brain damage after exposure to them.

Follow-up research seems to indicate that simply formulating the outer structure of the particle a little differently can cause such drastic effects, says Kulinowski. Experts say the study underscores the need for more research and information-sharing about these technologies.

Such knowledge is hard to come by. Many firms jealously guard the specifics of their nanotechnology fabrications, so as not to clue in competitors about important differences in technique. “In particular, sometimes it’s difficult to get information about the coatings and the structure, which can be extremely limited,” says McClellan-Green.

Perhaps the scariest thing about nanotechnology is how little is known about the possible effects on wildlife and people. “We’re just starting to understand the most basic things about the risks,” says McLellan-Green, whose work includes studying the marine effects of nanoparticles. “For example, we’re just getting information on how the particles move in the environment, and how they’re taken up in different forms of life.” Until we understand the risks, she says, “We should exercise caution in how we treat these chemicals.”

“In nanotech, the first major environmental legal issue will be when a nanoparticle is truly new and should be regulated differently [from its non-nano counterpart] under the Toxic Substance Control Act. Current law is not clear at all in this area,” says Hester. “While the Toxic Substances Control Act provides a general framework, given the high stakes EPA has already proposed a voluntary pilot program to register and test certain nanomaterials. EPA also plans to provide additional guidance soon on when a chemical is considered ‘new’ under the Act.”

But don’t hold your breath; most observers don’t expect definitive action any time soon. “Some firms have taken voluntary action by setting guidelines on research,” says Douglas Kysar, a professor of law at Cornell and a member scholar of the Center for Progressive Reform. “But there are billions of dollars being spent on nanotechnology research, and 99 percent of it is dedicated to things other than risk assessment and mitigation.”

“There’s probably not going to be nano-specific regulation anytime in the near future, unless there is a consumer product scare,” says Kulinowski.

Nanotechnology might offer some of the quickest, cleanest ways on the horizon to treat contaminated water. Consider, for example, a new nanomolecule that speeds up the breakdown of TCE in groundwater by “many orders of magnitude,” according to its co-creator Michael S. Wong, assistant professor of chemistry and biomolecular engineering at Rice University.

“It breaks down into ethane and chloride salt, which are both fairly harmless,” he says. “Nature itself actually can get rid of a lot of chemicals, but very slowly. Our catalyst kick-starts the reaction and accelerates it.”

Initial trials were so surprisingly successful, he says, that work is underway to do controlled trials at actual sites. Wong and his colleagues plan to construct a larger tank with the catalysts inside, run contaminated water into it, and see how well the nanocatalyst works in breaking down TCE from real spill sites.

Wong’s is not the only research that could someday be used to clean up the mess left by previous generations of chemicals. Nanotech can also bind arsenic to iron, so magnets can draw out the iron-bound arsenic. And since arsenic in drinking water is a problem around the world, including many places in California, such technology could offer hope for communities worldwide where finding uncontaminated drinking water occupies much of residents’ time and energy.

All of which goes to show that to abandon all nanotechnology because of concerns about its safety might do more harm than good. As research by Cornell law professor Kysar and others has shown, people often overestimate the risks of new technology and underestimate its benefit. “We tend to think that anything that has a high risk has a low benefit, and that’s just not true,” Kysar says.

But consideration of such studies might soon become possible if a new rule by the EPA is allowed to stand. The change, which became law in late January, would allow the EPA to consider studies in which humans are deliberately exposed. Why? So the EPA might change its standards of how much pesticide exposure is too much for human health; the pesticide industry has long fought EPA guidelines for use and exposure, believing the agency’s figures are too conservative.

The EPA emphasizes that the new rule prohibits studies on pregnant women and children and sets up a review board to determine whether future studies meet the new guidelines. But critics say that the law has loopholes that would encourage more testing of non-pregnant adults. “The new rule explains under what circumstances [the EPA] would accept studies on humans. Previously, they didn’t accept such reports at all,” says Brian Hill, staff scientist at Pesticide Action Network North America (PANNA). “We believe this violates what Congress has told them to do, so our only recourse at the federal level is to sue, and we might also seek stronger state protections as well.”

Watchdog groups also protested. “The guidelines do not prohibit [using data from] pesticide experiments with children who are in orphanages, foster care, or have handicaps,” says Michael Susko of Citizens for Responsible Care and Research, “and [they] also appear to allow for third-party data which may be acquired from third-world studies that may not follow ethical practices. The use of such studies can make us complicit in such practices.”

At least 22 studies previously submitted to the EPA that had been barred from consideration during past administrations stand to gain acceptance under the new rule.

In one of these studies, people were instructed to take pesticides with their morning orange juice, according to a recent report by Senator Barbara Boxer (D-CA) and Congressmember Henry Waxman (D-CA), who oppose the new rule. In another such experiment, students and other healthy young adults were enclosed in a room and gassed with a chloropicrin—an active ingredient in tear gas—for an hour at a time over four consecutive days. Several environmental organizations expect to mount legal challenges this March.

Critics of the rule say that part of what’s driving the issue is the use of “the interspecies rule of ten,” which is used to translate the results of animal studies into thresholds for pesticides in humans. A standard routinely used in toxicity calculations, it starts with the level at which animals experience toxic effects then multiplies that level by a “safety factor” of ten to convert animal exposure levels to allowable human exposure levels.

Next, researchers must multiply by another factor of ten (called the “intraspecies factor”) to account for the fact that even among human beings, people differ in how much of a pesticide they can tolerate. For example, asthmatics are often more sensitive to inhaled chemicals than the general population.

Finally, the Food Protection Act of 1996, which only recently has begun affecting the EPA’s decision-making, requires another safety factor of ten to account for the fact that children are often more sensitive to chemical exposures because of their size and continuing development.

“When you’re basing your testing on animals, you’re talking about a safety factor of 1,000. This drives the pesticide companies nuts,” says Jan Hasselman, an attorney at Earthjustice. He adds that by testing pesticides in humans, pesticide manufacturers could argue for exposure levels that are up to ten times less stringent than today’s, because they wouldn’t have to use the interspecies factor in their toxicity calculations.

Critics of the new regulations also worry that chemical companies might rush to start new pesticide studies unfettered even by what they consider loophole-ridden rules, because the current EPA rule holds that any studies begun before April don’t even have to satisfy the new guidelines to be considered admissible.

“Any study started before April 7 is considered an existing study,” says Hasselman. “There’s an incentive for pesticide manufacturers to go out tomorrow and start their studies,” he adds. “And with the EPA clearing up uncertainty with a rule like this that has big loopholes, the pesticide manufacturers will increase their reliance on human testing,” says Hasselman.

The rule’s opponents are also quick to add that they are not against studies that look at incidental pesticide exposure to populations living and working near places that are sprayed, as long as the studies are carried out ethically. PANNA’s communications director Stephenie Hendricks is careful to point out that such studies, carried out properly, could help people regularly exposed to pesticides, such as farm workers and people living in rural areas. But, as Earthjustice’s Hasselman puts it, “That’s a far cry from paying someone to spray pesticide in their eyes.”
MAKING CONTACT:

http://www.epa.gov/oppfead1/guidance/human-test.htm

http://www.panna.org/resources/humanTesting.html

Earlier this summer, scientists became alarmed when they couldn’t find much of the marine life normally present on the coast, including birds, fish, and marine mammals. On the North Coast, naturalists and fishermen waited in vain for the spring salmon run to start. And wildlife watchers in the Sacramento Delta discovered that many fish counts, particularly salmon, weren’t nearly as high as expected, particularly in light of efforts to revive those populations.

Worse, the spring winds that normally generate the marine upwelling of nutrients upon which plankton feed did not appear, an alarming event which could devastate the entire marine food chain. Scientists noticed declines in common murres, Brandt’s cormorants, and Cassin’s auklets. Biologists also found unusually small numbers of juvenile salmon and rockfish.

The winds came back in mid-July, bringing the long-overdue upwelling months later than usual, leaving biologists puzzled. Perhaps most ominous, even though the upwelling has come back, the plankton still are not recovering, and scientists aren’t sure why.

“There hasn’t been a lot of response,” says Bill Peterson, an oceanographer at the National Marine Fisheries Service, based in the Hatfield Marine Science Center in Newport, Oregon. “There’s been plenty of time for recovery, but it hasn’t happened yet. The upwelling is really strong, but the plankton just aren’t there. It might be that the upwelling is too strong, and it’s pushing the nutrients away from shore, so wildlife doesn’t have a chance to grow, but we just don’t know yet.”

For some species, the nutrients didn’t come at the right time in marine life cycles, so populations might not recover this season. “The damage has already been done, and a lot of animals are dead and gone,” Peterson says. ” About the best we can hope for is that it will stay cold into the winter, which might be a good sign for next year.”

Freshwater ecologists, too, are seeing huge declines in fish and other wildlife in the Sacramento Delta. “We’re noticing big declines in smelt, bass, and others, and zooplankton have plummeted to record low levels,” says Tina Swanson, senior scientist with the Bay Institute in Novato.

Salmon stocks are much lower than expected. “Since salmon fishing was curtailed three years ago in the wake of the Klamath die-off, and we had a good count three years ago [of young salmon who are now maturing], there should have been huge numbers, maybe even too much for the rivers to support,” she says. “Instead, there are far fewer than we expected, which suggests that maybe something is going on in the oceans.” She hastens to point out that so far, research has not proven the link.

“I would say that [trouble in the Pacific marine system] is likely to have an effect on the salmon,” says Peterson. “Right now, it doesn’t look good. It’s possible the salmon went to cooler places, but that’s not likely.” And in a recurring theme, “We just don’t know yet.”

CALFED, a research organization composed of state and federal scientists, is studying the decline. It should be releasing its data over the next few years, says Swanson, but, “They’ve done an appallingly bad job of monitoring and explaining their results,” she adds.

Lack of public awareness—and the activist outrage it would engender—has handicapped efforts to restore wildlife in the Delta and all along the coast, says Swanson. “The level of interest has declined& People wonder why they should care about the Delta smelt. That kind of thinking nearly did in the bay during the last drought. That’s when I like to remind people that the Delta provides water to two-thirds of the people in California.”

Scientists looking for explanations offer a number of culprits: global climate change, toxic contamination, invasive species, and in the case of the Delta, water exports from Northern California to Southern California. Swanson speaks for many when she says that while she believes further research is needed before anyone can give a definitive answer, “It’s probably a combination of those factors.”

But the shift toward private funding of university research and the skewing of research priorities toward corporate projects with large potential rewards are threatening what many universities used to feel was their mandate: breed better food and fruit crops, varieties useful in market farms and the public’s own “back forty.” Experiments in genetically engineered crops and pesticides get the funding while research stations that focus on products consumers and small farmers can use languish or close up shop.

The cutbacks are dramatic in state-funded research. “Throughout the country, there have been huge cutbacks to the states, and the states have had to reduce or totally cut their funding for university research. So when [agriculture and horticulture] professors retire, they usually aren’t replaced, and their assistants get reassigned to other projects,” says Sam Benowitz, owner of Raintree Nursery (www.raintreenursery) in Morton, Washington. “This really hurts efforts to develop special varieties that are naturally disease-resistant or that do well in unusual climates.”

In an age where sustainability is of heightened concern, the emphasis on research geared to commercial interests is hampering the “grow local” movement, which emphasizes the importance of growing food near where it’s consumed—a step many environmentalists feel is important in reducing environmental damage and encouraging community-based agriculture. Case in point: Cornell’s Geneva Research Station, which this year celebrated its 100th anniversary, has announced that it doesn’t have the money to replace retiring plant breeder Robert L. Anderson, who is responsible for at least 17 plant introductions. Over the last century, researchers at Geneva have introduced more than 245 varieties of apples, grapes, berries, and stone fruits.

“In the Geneva New York state research station, they were doing research in growing stone fruits [fruit with pits, such as cherries] in cooler places where they don’t usually grow as well,” says Benowitz. Commercial orchardists will still be able to grow their crops in prime, concentrated locations, the way almond growers do in California’s Central Valley. “But home growers and small growers won’t get the varieties they need to grow locally, close to consumers,” Benowitz says.

Benowitz, who has gone on plant discovery trips to such places as the former Soviet republics in a search for disease-resistant fruit varieties that will do well in the Pacific Northwest, is now at the forefront of efforts led by the Western Washington Fruit Research Foundation (www.wwfrf.org) and others to collect money to save endangered fruit-breeding programs from western Washington to Geneva, New York. “It all has to do with how much money and grants you can find, and finding a big enough industry to support you is often the only way you can survive,” he says. Trendy types of research still get some funding, but less popular ones are plowed under because there are no funds to maintain them.

A dramatic change in a generation

Benowitz concedes that commercialism, rather than pure scientific research, has long been a driving force in plant breeding, going back to the earliest days of land-grant universities, many of which were funded primarily to support the driving interest of young America: agriculture.

“It has always been true that the most attractive commercial crops got most of the money, but there used to be money for other things,” he says. “Someone would have funding for a big project, but alongside they might have a few small experimental growing plots.” Often those big projects helped the smaller ones survive; professors could work on several programs at once. But now, with budgets cut to the bone, the bigger projects already run lean.

Fads also affect funding: these days, interest in apples and viticulture is paramount—look at the high-end backyards of the nouveau riche of Sonoma and Napa. “It seems like the only things that are being funded these days are wine grape and cider apple varieties,” bemoans Dewey Schurman of the Western Washington Fruit Research Foundation.

A few years from now, another trend will emerge, and funding will shift again. Longtime amateur grape grower Todd Kennedy remembers with horror hastily organized salvage parties, where volunteers worked for hours to save clippings from plots of grapes being removed from California’s agricultural research stations. “Sometimes, we barely beat the chainsaws,” he recounts. “And when these varieties are gone, it’s forever, if we don’t have another source.”

Benowitz and other growers are so passionate that they’ve banded together to fund recently cut research at Washington State University. So far, they’ve raised about $20,000 from individuals and small businesses to keep fruit research going.

The irony, says Benowitz, is that taxpayers pay for the research but don’t get a return in knowledge and products that could help their communities “The small commercial growers and the backyard gardeners are the ones that really suffer directly,” he says. “Whatever we can do to make farming profitable preserves open space for everyone, even non-gardeners. These programs—such as research into growing kiwis as a supplemental crop—were helping to make small farms profitable.”

Meanwhile, Cornell touts mega-deals such as the development of the “gene gun,” a gene delivery device developed with private funding and then licensed to DuPont for what Cornell brags was the largest sum ever for such an agreement. Patent hunting by cash-strapped universities has become big business, detracting from their primary tasks of teaching and serving the public as a resource for information and research.

Increasingly, privately funded research focuses on products that enable sponsoring companies to cash in quickly on new discoveries. “This is really a comparatively new phenomenon that acts as a detriment to society,” says Adil Shamoo, a founder of Citizens for Responsible Care and Research and co-author of the book The Responsible Conduct of Research. “As recently as 20 years ago, universities such as Princeton and Harvard refused money from industry. Now, they’re contemplating even larger facilities to do research for private companies.”

Basic research proposals are often altered to fit the aims of the private firms. “So if you want to do basic research in medicine or biology, you might dress it up as cancer or HIV drug research,” says David Resnik, Shamoo’s co-author and a bioethicist at the National Institute of Health who studied the university-industry connection while at East Carolina University.

And, say Shamoo and Resnik, private industry is not the only culprit. Government, too, is now focusing more on short-term, potentially licensable technology, especially now that government leadership favors licensing arrangements with private industry. “The funders determine the projects’ directions,” says Shamoo.

Observers say they don’t expect research priorities to change much. Some schools have experimented with conflict-of-interest committees designed to lessen conflicts, but as Resnik puts it, “I don’t think those committees have been good at dealing with institutional conflicts. They’re just not independent, and you need independence to deal with conflicts.”

Unfortunately, until independence from government and private industry again becomes a rule of thumb, researchers at universities will spend more time shaking the money tree than they will creating trees for the rest of us.