POISON SPRING: THE SECRET HISTORY OF POLLUTION AND EPA
E G Vallianatos and McKay Jenkins
Bloomsbury Press
Rs 399, 284 pages
This book is an insider job on the US' Environment Protection Agency and a devastating one at that. The US EPA is the apex central agency empowered to safeguard the environment and public health in the world's most powerful economy. The book's main author, E G Vallianatos, worked at the agency for 25 years. With boldness that one can only hope from the technocrats, scientists or officials working in the Indian government, he meticulously tears apart EPA's reputation as a rock-solid organisation protecting the environment for US citizens. In page after page he shows how the US EPA is compromised to the core, bends backwards to protect the interests of the industries it regulates and works to please the political class that is dependent on these industries for its survival. What he reveals, one can be sure, is alarming for the US citizens.
It should be read by Indian citizens with concern if not alarm. For Indian readers the book is both a myth-buster and an early warning signal. With a surfeit of information, stories and media coverage today about rising pollution levels in India's water, air and soil one tends to believe the rich world, such as the US, has found the resources, the political will and the independent administrative systems to protect their environment. This book details how the apex US agency to regulate environmental pollution has failed miserably to keep society safe from the cocktail of chemicals the country's industries generate and sell. More importantly, the two authors also reveal how the political class, influenced by industrial lobbies, repeatedly fails its citizens, how science is regularly tortured to say what industry needs it to say and how different US administrations have buckled under pressure on numerous occasions, favouring industries over public health. Sounds familiar? One could have said that as easily of the Indian environmental regulatory regime today.
But why should the book be an early-warning read in India? That is because successive Indian governments - United Progressive Alliance earlier and the National Democratic Alliance (NDA) now - have proposed to set up an organisation along the lines of the EPA to regulate environmental pollution in India. The idea of a new super regulator has been sold by the governments as an easy way out of the current moth-eaten, corrupt and opaque regulatory regime.
Many critiques of the Indian government's plan for a super-regulator warn that merely housing officials of the government, bunched along with industry experts and technocrats, in a separate building with a new fancy name does not create the arms-length distance required for independent regulatory systems. Transparency and answerability to society does. Real political will does. A greater role for democratic institutions and less discretion in the hands of the political, bureaucratic and technocrats does.
Mr Vallianatos and his co-author McKay Jenkins note how the revolving door between EPA and the industry has been happily used by the agency's scientific and administrative officials to cross over roles and leave the US government agency's independence dented. They could have just as well have been writing of the Indian environmental regulatory regime where it seems conflict of interest is almost systematically ignored as a non-issue. There are so many parallels in the ways the book shows EPA to have acted in the US and the Indian environmental agencies operate here that the reader could easily be left befuddled by the familiarity of the story she or he reads.
Take this example: A farmer in Wyoming, USA, with 24 fracking gas wells on his land found his drinking water was poisoned with drilling fluids, drilling muds and high levels of cancer-causing benzene. In his community he saw people with neurological problems, seizures, people losing their sense of smell and taste and people with their arms and legs going numb. He pushed the EPA to investigate and the agency found that fracking had poisoned his water. But when President Obama's administration proposed to set regulations asking for prior disclosure by oil drillers of the chemicals used to pump out shale gas, the oil industry backlash ensured the idea was dropped.
Now read this of India: The NDA government found that the critically polluted industrial sites across the country were doing little to clean up their processes and continued to threaten lives of the people in and around these zones, it decided to suspend the rules measuring and restricting pollution at these locations. Then it set about diluting them. It also found that the policy to not mine good healthy forests was troubling the coal miners, so it decided to redefine what forests to satisfy the mining lobby.
India will have to wait for a conscientious whistle-blower in the Paryavaran Bhawan (headquarters of the environment ministry in Delhi) to put together a book as revealing as Poison Spring. I have my doubts that book is coming any-day soon. Till then, read Poison Spring and be warned.
