In an effort to capitalize on the upcoming release of the NAS report on pesticides and children's health, environmental activism was on display at the National Press Club in Washington, DC. The Natural Resources Defense Council — joined by a dozen other environmental activist organizations as well as the AFL-CIO — reprised its toxic terrorist refrain from the Alar scare: It asserted that 38 percent of the food supply is laced with significant levels of cancer-causing pesticides and therefore, by implication, is unfit to eat. But the activists said, they didn't want to unduly alarm anyone.

Nonsense. Alarm is precisely what the NRDC and other "retrogressives" want to do. The NRDC and company, most of them lawyers, invoked the environmentally holy names of Rachel Carson and Cesar Chavez as they mapped out an agenda to eliminate pesticides — and along the way maximize the likelihood of lucrative anti-pesticide litigation to fill their treasuries.

Activism and ideology, not science, have always been the driving force behind these groups. The NRDC has long opposed the use of pesticides. "Only four years ago," New York Times environmental correspondent Keith Schneider wrote in ECO magazine, "the NRDC and 60 Minutes teamed up to cause a food scare by attacking Alar, a chemical growth regulator used on apples, as the single greatest cancer threat to children in the food supply. That conclusion has since been described as completely specious by university, federal and state health experts across the country." Science, the prestigious journal of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, declared in a recent editorial: "Synthetic pesticides in marketed foods constitute no appreciable threat to human health." In fact, the editorial continued, "Pesticides are beneficial to health by controlling disease and damage to foods caused by bacteria, fungi and insects."

But scientific evidence is irrelevant to groups like the NRDC, which oppose even the prudent use of DDT to prevent thousands upon thousands of deaths from malaria in the Third World. The NRDC's is "a campaign designed to attract donations, not to improve public health," Dr. Michael Gough, a risk-assessment specialist for the congressional Office of Technology Assessment, has said.

The NRDC has sought to obstruct efforts to replace the Delaney Clause, a 1950s era law which requires the EPA to ban even the tiniest traces of supposedly cancer-causing pesticides in food, with a scientifically-sound allowance for "negligible risks." Delaney's authors could not have anticipated today's technology, which allows us to detect quantities roughly equivalent to a teaspoon mixed with all the water of the Great Lakes. This has been a profitable course for the NRDC. In 1991 alone, it reaped $826,000 in legal fees under citizen lawsuit provisions of environmental laws its staffers helped write. Its Alar scare cost U.S. apple growers an estimated $200 million.

The NRDC claims its latest press campaign is different from the discredited anti-Alar effort. Yet all the ingredients are there: anti-chemical ideology posing as science, parents as targets of a manipulative public relations campaign and a masterful orchestration of allied groups and the press. The NRDC apparently has not learned any lessons about crying "fire" in a crowded theater. Or perhaps it has.

During another press conference occurring just down the hall from the NRDC fiasco, Food and Drug Administration (FDA) Commissioner, Dr. David Kessler was asked to comment on the NRDC's preposterous assertion that 38 percent of American food is unfit to eat. As is typical of respectable scientists, who prefer to see evidence before giving such assessments, he ducked the question. Perhaps the NRDC's outrageous assertions should not be dignified by a scientific response.

Unfortunately, within a few days the NRDC's campaign elicited a political response: Kessler's FDA, the Environmental Protection Agency and the Department of Agriculture announced a joint regulatory effort to reduce the use of some pesticides and to eliminate others. The food supply is safe, the agencies say, but they want to make it safer, especially for children. If it is safe, why are pseudo-scientific claims by the perpetrators of one of the most expensive scientific frauds in history taken seriously by anyone, least of all regulators? Are slick public relations campaigns to triumph over sound scientific method?

Scientists must recognize they are losing this battle with the lawyers who populate the NRDC and similar activist groups. The activists are motivated less by scientific evidence than by near-religious opposition to things manmade. These environmental lawyer/activists are leading the country backward faster than environmental scientists can lead it forward. That's not just bad for science. It's also bad for public health.

Thomas W. Orme, Ph.D., is the Washington, DC representative of the American Council on Science and Health.

(From Priorities, Vol 5, No. 3)