Replay: Future Farming of America

20.05.30 Future of Farming

SM Sarah McConnell

AS Audio Sample

EH Eric Hallerman

KL Kelley Libby

CH Charles Henry

RH Ryan Huish

MT Michael Timko

CM Camellia Moses Okpodu

GW Greg Wilson

SX Sara Maxwell

00:00:00

[old-timey music]

SM This is a U.S. propaganda video from 1942 about hemp

AS Long ago when these ancient Grecian temples were new, hemp was already old in the service of mankind.

SM Just to be clear, this is a pro-hemp video. Early in the U.S. involvement in World War Two, the American Navy placed an order for the very best rope - rope that was made from hemp.

AS As for the United States Navy, every battleship requires 34,000 feet of rope and other craft accordingly.

SM Unfortunately, thanks to the War on Drugs and an influx of cheap alternatives, hemp production in America slowed down considerably.

AS But now, with Philippine and East Indian sources of hemp in the hands of the Japanese and shipment of jute from India curtailed, American hemp must meet the needs of our Army and Navy as well as of our industries.

SM So the U.S. Department of Agriculture issued permits to allow farmers to grow hemp legally.

AS Thus, plans are afoot for a great expansion of the hemp industry as a part of the war program.

[upbeat music]

SM After the war, growing hemp was discouraged. But the legal tides are shifting once again. And today, the hemp market is on the rise in places like Appalachia.

AS When I see the green, I still see green. You know, that's two different kinds of greens. I'm talking about green on the hemp and then green in the money. I want to see people go back to work to see a processing plant. And I'm not going to stop until it would get that.

SM I'm Sarah McConnell. And today on With Good Reason, the future of American Agriculture. Later in the show, the special relationship coastal residents have with their environment.

AS I watch water come in in the underpass and I saw a car float away in front of me. And I realize this is just not normal. But what got me is - mentally, how do you deal with this? Because people were like, oh, this happens all the time.

SM But first, in 2015, the Food and Drug Administration approved the production and sale of genetically modified salmon. Some consumers were alarmed by the prospect of so-called Franken-fish.

[music fades]

SM Eric Hellerman is a professor of fish and wildlife conservation at Virginia Tech, and he believes there's no reason to fear genetically modified animals. Eric, when did GMOs, genetically modified organisms become a part of our diet?

EH That goes back to 1996 when the USDA approved the production of Roundup Ready Soybeans that were originally produced by Monsanto.

SM So have Americans for years been eating GMO soybean products?

EH Well, corn and soybeans, over 90 percent of each of those crops is genetically modified now, if youíve had processed food, you've eaten GMOs. If you had corn flakes for breakfast, it was GM. Most of the feeds consumed by the animals produced in America, they eat GM feeds. So it's pervasive in our food supply.

SM What about non-plants? What about animals?

EH Well, the United States government has approved only one GM animal for consumption by Americans, though it hasn't yet been marketed in the United States. That's the AquaBounty Atlantic salmon that's been modified by an additional growth hormone gene, such that it grows much faster than the usual Atlantic salmon. The regular, selectively bred salmon takes about three years to go from egg to harvest size. Now, the AquaBounty salmon, because it has greatly accelerated growth rate early in life, can be produced in about 18 months. So it's not surprising that a lot of growers are interested in producing the AquaBounty salmon.

SM I saw a picture of two salmon side-by-side. One was huge compared to the other.

EH They were full siblings. They were from the same parents. But one had the new gene and one did not.

SM Is there anything dangerous to us in the genetically modified zone?

EH Well, I was part of a National Research Council study that looked at a wide range of potential food products that might come from genetically modified animals. And we concluded that there weren't any real issues in this. In the case of the salmon, that growth hormone gene is not active in humans. It will not make your children grow faster. Allergenicity may be an issue, but in this case, they're taking a gene from one particular species of salmon and putting it in another species of salmon. If you're allergic to fish, you wouldn't buy the product anyway, so allergenicity is not an issue. And so you have to look at a case by case.

SM How afraid are you personally of the concept of unintended consequences? Sort of Jurassic Park style?

EH Well, I'm not particularly scared of this. There is a rigorous regulatory review process. It goes out for scientific peer review. I have more faith in FDA than I do in any other food safety agency on the planet. If they say it's safe to eat, I believe it. Now, in terms of the ecological sorts of risks. Well, that's what my colleagues and I like to consider. And so far, the sorts of organisms we're talking about are safe, to me. The one possible exception that we might be concerned about is this new effort to produce what we call gene drives, which are usually introduced into populations to try to drive them down. For example, you might have a mosquito that transmits a human disease. And we might want to put a gene drive in to the same species of mosquito to try and drive it to extinction. That's not fully understood. And so we need to do experimentation in isolated places to get a better understanding of that.

SM Tell me how a GMO is made. Are they born in a petri dish?

EH Well, sort of. I was a postdoc at the University of Minnesota many years ago and we produced genetically modified fish. There were two things about that, one was that that was very encouraging, that our technical approach worked. On the other hand, I was very alarmed that some people really wanted to stock those out in the waters of Minnesota very quickly, which in my mind posed risk and we needed to research that more. So this research was funded by the state of Minnesota. And as I presented a poster about it in the state house in St. Paul, a state congressman came up and asked me, young man, how quickly can we get these fish out in the waters of the state of Minnesota? Well, sir, we need regulatory approval. And he said, I don't care about that. I want to be able to advertise in the Chicago Tribune that really large walleye grow in the waters of the state of Minnesota so that people will come up and spend their tourist dollars here in the state. That scared me and I wrote up my qualms about that. And to my surprise, a leading journal published it. And this risk assessment research has been a part of what I've done now for 30 years.

SM You can understand the unbridled glee at the prospect of making so easily what seems like an improved product.

EH Well, indeed. And some of these genetically modified animals can produce phenotypes, in other words they can look different than anything we could breed by selective breeding. They can have traits that we can't get any other way. And so I understand the fear of that. I also see the promise of that.

SM Give me examples of the fear of it and examples of the promise of it.

EH Alright well - the fear of it, if we had walleye that grew twice as large, they could perhaps consume the entire prey population of the lakes in Minnesota. And so the ecological impacts are something that's foremost in our mind. Some of the benefits, though, that might be realized for agricultural animals are pretty reasonable. We have goats that might express an enzyme in their milk, that retard spoilage. We can control pest populations of insects. We can reduce the incidence of disease in animals. We can control the sex of chickens, perhaps, or for the layer chickens, we don't have to destroy all the males. We can produce cattle that don't have horns. So there's a lot of different ways in which GM technology can be applied to improve the lives of animals and of humans.

SM Is almost all the genetic modification of animals going toward controlling reproduction?

EH Actually no, a lot more of it has to do with agricultural production traits, the reduction of losses to disease, the production of only the sex that you want, the production of animal products that have qualities that you couldn't get any other way. A lot of it has to do with that. In insects, however, you have an awful lot of attempts to try and control pest populations. For example, there's been a lot of work done with mosquitoes to produce males that are sterile, they don't know that, they would go out and reproduce with others in their - their species. And because the young are doomed, that population would crash. So this has been applied, for example, to the mosquitoes that transmit Zika and dengue and chikungunya viruses to screw worms, which are pests of cattle production. And to Mediterranean fruit flies that are agricultural pests.

SM What is waiting in the wings in America now before the FDA and before the USDA?

EH There's genetically modified plums, they're called the Honey Sweet Line that are resistant to plum pox virus. There's the Innate Potato, it has less of a certain amino acid in it, asparagine, so than what you fried at high temperature, it doesn't produce acrylamide, which is not good for human health. The Arctic Apple, which if you cut it, the slices won't turn brown anytime soon.

SM And there's a group at UC Davis that is looking into goat's milk to prevent the goat milk from spoiling. You mentioned that earlier.

EH Sure. Lysozyme is an enzyme that lysis - that breaks the cell wall of bacteria. And in so doing, it retards spoilage. The notion here is that in large parts of the developing world, people milk goats and sell the milk, there's no cold chain of - of possession from the producer to the consumer. So the possibility that this milk might spoil in the half day or day until human children drink it, it would lessen the amount of E. coli poisoning or any other sorts of bacterial spoilage in milk. That would be a real benefit for those populations.

SM You mentioned the time when you were a postdoc and you had to stand up to this idea that we give early release into the wild from genetically modified organisms we hadn't really studied. At the time, did you get a lot of pushback from GMO companies who later came to appreciate your approach?

EH Yeah, what happened is a lot of the people that are proponents for animal biotechnology basically said, ëno, Eric, you're a turncoat, you're a traitor. You've turned upon usí. And what I said is, folks, unless we utilize these animals sustainably. The pushback will be much greater, later. It's well that we take control of the risk assessment right away and promote only those products that are sustainable. And in the end, we'll all be better off. Well, some of my colleagues in the field set out to do experiments to prove that my colleague and I were wrong. And lo and behold, we weren't entirely wrong and that many of the sorts of mechanisms we were hypothesizing were true. And so some of them turned around and said, well, Eric and Ann have a point and really we need to research this carefully. And so people that had been shunning me for five or even ten years suddenly started being friendly to me again. And that's great.

SM So what if we have the tsunami situation in Japan and we swamp the confinement? Or we have people who were unregulated elsewhere, who are releasing them into the wild?

EH Sure. Well, I mean, all of this depends on the regulation that's put on these different operations by the respective governments and by enforcement by them. And so we have to at some level, trust government to do it. Now if we have a tsunami the size of the one that struck Japan, the least of our worries is that some GM salmon might have gotten out.

SM What do you think is the best use for genetically modified foods?

EH I think perhaps the most promising area has to do with foods that are modified to present benefits to the consumer. For example, there's cattle and pigs that have been modified such that they'll have a heightened concentration of omega three fatty acids in their meat or milk. Many people have holdup heard of golden rice, that is a strain of rice that has a heightened amount of the vitamin A precursors in it. Thereís tomatoes and rice that have been modified to have heightened concentrations of vitamin B precursors in them. Thereís banana, cassava and sorghum that are fortified with other provitamins. So these sorts of things pose real benefits, especially for the developing world where vitamin supplements are not routinely taken, itís beyond the means of the people.

SM What about people who prefer natural organisms in their diet to modified? Is there any basis, in your opinion, to fears that people have that actually ingesting this food could be bad for us, let alone whether it escapes into the wild?

EH Well, these are the most tested foods that have ever been had on the planet. We know more about the composition of salmon today because of the AquaBounty Salmon than we did about salmon before. What I would tell the listeners is this food is safe.

[music]

SM Well, Eric Hellerman, thank you for sharing your insights on this on With Good Reason.

EH Thank you for having me.

SM Eric Hellerman is a professor of fish and wildlife conservation at Virginia Tech. Coming up next, how the hemp industry is making inroads in rural Virginia.

00:11:20

[music fades]

SM In early America, a lot of things were made from hemp; clothing, rope, even the paper for Thomas Jefferson's Declaration of Independence. But for much of the last century, hemp has been outlawed in the U.S. and labeled a schedule one drug along with heroin, LSD and hemp cousin, marijuana. But there's about to be a hemp revival. Kelley Libby recently spoke with people in coal country who are at the frontline of hemp.

[ambient noise of shop]

KL You could say the front line of the hemp industry in southwest Virginia starts here, at a corner shop on Main Street in downtown Norton, Virginia. It's a town that's experienced tremendous economic decline.

CH Here just recently as - as early as last summer, I could literally watch the people moving out of here by truckload.

KL This is Charles Henry, owner of the Vapor Shop, which sells vapor products, glass pipes and used musical instruments. He says the decline of coal and tobacco here means people are leaving in droves.

CH Like U-Hauls and budget trucks. I mean, I'm right here on Main Street, so you'd see six, eight, 10 trucks a day because, you know, these are people that they have families, house payments, car payments, children that they have to feed and clothe and send to school. And, you know, and if you can't do it here, you got to go wherever the money is. Everybody just wants to get out of here as fast as I can.

KL But Henry isn't going anywhere. Instead, he's staking his claim as a sort of pioneer in the new and promising hemp industry. The vapor shop, says Henry, is the only one around that sells a medicinal compound derived from hemp called cannabidiol, or CBD.

CH We have the frogs, what they call little gummy frogs. We've got CBD, coffee and CBD chamomile infused tea.

KL Even though CBD products can legally be sold here. Farmers can't just grow their own fields of hemp. That's because the plant is federally classified as a schedule one drug, even though it has no psychoactive properties. But in Virginia, farmers will soon be putting their first hemp seeds in the ground, thanks to a new study that aims to make Virginia once again a leading producer of hemp.

MT Hemp has been grown for 5000 years.

KL This is Michael Timko, a biologist at the University of Virginia. Timko is the lead researcher on a three-year study to investigate hemp potential in Virginia. He's hoping to learn what varieties grow best in places like southwest Virginia. So the project is partnering with a select group of farmers in the region, as they grow their first crops of hemp.

MT You've lost several generations of experience. And so now you have to relearn things that were known.

KL Things like the best time to plant, the best time to harvest, and what works best in certain soil types. In the southwest part of the state, former coal mining sites offer specific kind of soil condition. Ryan Huish is a biologist at the University of Virginia's College at Wise and one of the investigators working with Timko. He says they're looking into using hemp as a way to reclaim contaminated mined lands because of hemp special qualities.

RH Often with reclaimed mined land, this was very compacted. And so the industrial hemp has a deep tap root. And so as it penetrates the hard soil, it introduces more organic material into the soil and aerates the soil, and does a good job with sequestering heavy metals and other toxins that might be in in the soil.

KL To find out which strains of hemp grow best here, the study relies on farmers, people like Adam Burke, a tobacco farmer who's also a millennial.

AB My dad, my Powerball - I mean, it's three generations and that's all I've done. You know, they've - they've been full-time farmers all their lives. And I just stepped right in and I guess I'm stupid enough to enjoy it.

KL I met Burke at UVA Wise, at a community forum about industrial hemp. Burke is one of the farmers who submitted an application to take part in the study.

AB Personally, I like being able to step in, just like growing a crop of corn.

KL Burke lives in Lee County, which borders Kentucky and Tennessee. Kentucky's hemp industry is ahead of Virginia's, and Burke says he's seeing hemp farmers there finding success.

AB I actually heard on the radio a month ago that Kentucky's will have 12,000 acres of hemp this year. I mean, people would be done if it wasn't good. I know farmers and they're not going to ñ theyíll try to year too, but they're not going to keep doing it if it's not making no money or not working out.

KL So one of the major hurdles for hemp is its association with recreational marijuana, even though hemp is not a drug. But laws are changing. In 2017, 38 states and Puerto Rico considered legislation related to industrial hemp. And it was, in fact, the 2014 farm bill signed by President Obama that allowed for university research of hemp. Public perception is changing, too.

AB The whole stigma of cannabis being attached to the CBD is starting to melt away a little bit more now

KL At the vapor shop in Norton, Charles Henry tells me that's largely because of word of mouth about CBD benefits.

CH When you have mothers that are, you know, say, 60, 80, 100 miles away from here and their kids are having epileptic seizures 2 - 300 a day, and they don't even know that child is going to make it to the next seizure, and they come in your shop every day after you've sold on some CBD, or sometimes I gave it to him just to see how the child's going to react. And - and they come up and they - they praise you and say thank you, thank you, thank you. You know, I'm like, look, all I did was provide the medicine.

KL Henry says an economy centered on industrial hemp is something his community desperately needs.

CH If we can get people back to work and not just one farmer I want to see - I want to see fields and fields and fields of industrial land. See, because when I see the green, I still see great, you know. And that's two different kinds of greens. I'm talking about green on the hemp and then green in the money. I want to see people go back to work. I want to see a processing plant, you know, and I'm not going to stop until we get that. I am going to see this place come back to the place it used to be.

[music]

KL This summer, farmers in southwest Virginia will harvest their first crops of hemp. For With Good Reason, I'm Kelley Libby.

00:18:25

SM Camellia Okpodu is a biologist at Xavier University in New Orleans. One day a colleague in New England told her that according to survey results, African Americans aren't as interested in the environment as white Americans. That just didn't seem right to Okpodu. Now she's working closely with African American communities in coastal Virginia to look at their relationship with nature.

[music fades]

Camellia, you recently worked with a team combating sea rise, and you became very interested in the comment by a colleague, assuming that African Americans are less interested in nature in the outdoors than the rest of the population. What had he been basing that on?

CO So he had a survey that he had created. And he was looking at part of the Eastern Shore of Virginia, Maryland. There was a number of things that have confounded his response. You know, he was an outsider and I kept reminding him that, you know, people may not open up to you the same way they may open up to someone who's from the south. They may be a little suspicious. You start asking them how they use resources and land. There's been a historic relationship that may not be so nice and so they may not be giving you full disclosure, because I'm not sure what you're going to do with the information. But the other thing I was curious, maybe it may be a difference in population. Where I live in Norfolk, Virginia, we have a different relationship with the environment just by where we live, below sea level or at sea level - some people will say some areas. And so we're - we're constantly interested in what happens in our local environment.

SM You get flooded all the time.

CO Exactly. A normal rainfall for us is an event that we have to deal with. When I moved to Norfolk in 2009, I had never seen rain come in - water come in so fast. And I began to wonder, how do you psychologically deal with this?

SM What did you see? Where were you when that started happening?

CO So I was on the right around Norfolk State University where I work and I was leaving, and there's a street called Park Avenue. And I watched water come in in the underpass and I saw a car float away in front of me. And I realized this is just not normal. A deluge was coming down so fast and you really this had moments to respond. I had water up to my windows. And I thought, I can't swim, Iím gonna die. But what got me is mentally, how do you deal with this? Because people were like, oh - this happens all the time and almost like it happens all the time. How do - you know how do you recover when you lose - there were houses near where we work, that people lost all their belongings, every time there was a major rainfall. And these were people who were not of economics means where they could start all over every time we had these events.

SM So when you had a grant from Homeland Security to investigate how people perceive the environment and sea rise, it surprises me that Homeland Security would care.

CO Well, you have to think about giving out. And one of the things that was under Homeland Security is FEMA. So actually, my grant is actually to understand how people respond to the environment, because if I'm telling you to evacuate and you don't think I'm really talking to you because you might use a word like coastal Virginia - well, I might not see myself as coastal Virginia. If I describe myself as Hampton Roads or a 757 or the seven cities and I may not leave. So they're interested for emergency preparedness reasons, how we're going to make sure that these people know that we're really interested in what's happening to them.

SM Were you investigating primarily the African American community?

CO By virtue of where I'm looking at my sample large presented, those people will be African American.

SM You have taught at several historically black colleges and universities. Now you're at Norfolk State University. What do you perceive on the part of your own students, these young people who have yet to necessarily be political or environmental activists?

CO They came to me, when I was really just freaked out about this 2009 flooding. The students came to me and said, well, you think Norfolk is something you should see Portsmouth. They felt as if they didn't matter. And I said, well, you have a voice. If you want to see change, then you need to become the change you want to see.

SM Where they interested?

CO Yes, I have 53 students that are part of my ecological group that we started in 2008 at Norfolk State. We're part of the Ecological Society of America. We call ourselves Seeds, which stands for Strategies for Environment, Education and Diversity.

SM Do you think that that misconception on the part of your colleague about whether people in minority communities are less interested in environmental issues, do you think that perception is more widespread than just him?

CO That is really interesting. I never would assume that it was, but as more and more I talk to people, I'm learning that people make the assumption that we're not. For example, I heard a national program talk about African Americans are learning to swim. And historically, they thought we didnít learn to swim because we weren't interested in maybe women and grooming issues. But that wasn't a reason we weren't allowed to go to swimming pools, you know, so it may not have anything to do with the fact that we don't wanna get a hair wet, we didn't have opportunity. Because I remember growing up, I grew up at the beach. To be in the water was a natural thing that you did. So that's why to me is kind of foreign, I guess, because my limited experience, everybody that I know, we live outside. So it is just a natural part of what we do. But I think perhaps if you have limited experience, it may be an unintended consequences of limiting resources to people. You may come with this concept that we're not interested. It may just be that we were not given opportunity.

SM Why do you think the minority community is underrepresented in environmental activist groups?

CO I don't know about activist groups, but I know in disciplines such as, you know, ecology or environmental science or environmental and civil engineering, we may be underrepresented, but it's because in high school we get told you're very good at science. You go into medicine. And our families also see medicine as a high thing, you know, as a - my last name is Nigerian. And one of the jokes my children and I have is that, you know, in Nigeria you can be a doctor, a lawyer or an engineer. That's what your parents tell you. If you do anything - or business, perhaps - if you do anything less, do that or other than that, people look upon that, they have failed. And it's not unlike in any founding population or immigrant population, you want your children to go into things that will help them to be successful. But they don't see that getting a PhD necessarily or studying the environment as an option, because classically we've been told you be a doctor or lawyer. I feel very blessed that I decided to major in - I had parents who said major in what it is that you are interested in. And my undergrad degrees in biochemistry. I decided to get my PhD in plant physiology and biochemistry. When I did that, I remember one of my cousins telling somebody I was becoming a plant psychologist, which I thought was really funny. Right, because they had not heard of physiologists - plant physiology. Like every year I teach botany, every year I have a class of about 45 students. They come in saying I'm going to medical school, but every year I'm able to show them how plant biology is relevant to them. And there's more to do than just farming, because when people think of environment, they think only of farming. Although I think farmers are - are neat people because he or she who controls the food supply, controls everything are much more powerful than a doctor, if I control what you eat or if you have anything to eat. And we weren't always farmers by choice, we were farmers - we had the farm because somebody made us farm without, you know, compensation, which is what happened in slavery. So that maybe historically Black people do not look at environment. But I think as we are ñ as younger people are coming along, they're seeing more options, I think.

SM You grew up on a farm in North Carolina. Where was that?

CO I grew up outside of Wilmington, North Carolina, and southeastern North Carolina - a place called Brunswick County, North Carolina. My little town was called Charlotte, North Carolina.

SM What kind of farm?

CO So my grandfather was not a very large farm, but he farmed hogs, which, you know, if you from North Carolina hogs, so swine. And we also did tobacco. That was pretty much the two main things from that farm. There's this old thing, and I guess in the old community, in particular African-American communities, if you don't have a child, and one of your relatives have more than one child, you go get one of those. So that was the unofficial adoption. I was raised with my aunt and uncle, who were both schoolteachers, by the way. But from May to September, they used to run a restaurant. And what he used to do, was use his own boat to go out and capture his seafood, that they would then dress and clean and put away in the freezer to use during the - during the time we will have the restaurant open. So it was really a sustainability strategy that I don't know if anybody ñ it was hard work, so you taught in a day, then in May youíd open your restaurants, who were seasonal, and it was a very interesting life. It was very interesting. But we grew up on the water and water is part of what we had to do in order to survive.

SM Camellia, thank you for sharing your insights on this on With Good Reason.

CO Thank you for having me.

[music]

SM Camellia Okpodu is a professor of biology and dean of the College of Arts and Sciences at Xavier University in New Orleans.

00:28:00

SM Welcome back, this is With Good Reason. In the mid-1970s, workers at a chemical factory in Hopewell, Virginia, started reporting strange symptoms.

AS I'm sterile, and I have an increased chance of cancer. And I had some damage to my liver, my eyes, my brain damage with all my medications to try to help the tremor - the tremor, my voice and the tremor on my hands, limbs and things like this. But this is the only thing they can treat is the system - symptomatic treatment.

SM The news spread that the workers were being slowly poisoned by Kepone, the insecticide manufactured on site.

AS It was just virtually impossible for anybody to walk in the plant and go straight through, come back out without getting Kepone all over them, Kepone was very thick in the air. You couldn't see through it, it was more like a fog. The Kepone was all over the working area, all over the break area.

SM Gregory Wilson is writing a book about the Kepone disaster, tentatively titled Toxic Dust. He's a Virginia Humanities fellow and a historian and talked with me about what he's learned.

[music fades]

SM Greg, why was Kepone being manufactured in Hopewell? Who was making it and what was it used for?

GW Kepone was patented by Allied Chemical Corporation in the 1950s and Keponeís main use was as an insecticide. The story is that Dr. Chao, who was a Taiwanese immigrant, a new doctor in town - and into his office, came one of the workers from life science products named Dale Gilbert. His body was shaking, he was having chest pains, headaches. He hadn't been able to work. And Gilbert had seen his family physician who gave him tranquilizers and told him to rest, and he was probably just suffering from nervous tension. Dr. Chao suspected something else. And when he found out that Gilbert worked at a factory that was making a pesticide called Kepone, Chao immediately suspected that that was the cause of Gilbert's illnesses. Chao took samples from Gilbert - blood and urine, sent them to the Center for Disease Control in Atlanta for testing for Kepone poisoning. Chao put Gilbert in the hospital, Medical College of Virginia in Richmond, and informed them that it was likely that he was suffering from this type of poisoning.

SM What was the initial reaction on the part of the CDC workers?

GQ The story is that they had trouble believing that this much Kepone had been taken out of the body of one worker. They suspected that the sample was contaminated, that someone possibly had poured Kepone into it, and therefore it was a bad sample. So they initially questioned Chao, who assured them that indeed this was drawn directly out of the blood of this worker. In terms of parts per million, it was more Kepone that they - they had ever seen at the CDC.

SM So this one worker was hospitalized - eventually 28 went to the hospital?

GW Yes, that's correct. 28 workers were hospitalized and one wife of one of the workers. The way it came into their system was being directly exposed while working at Life Science. In making Kepone, it is initially quenched in a tank combined with various chemicals. And then you have to essentially settle the water out and the parts that come out have to be dried and they are dried into a cake. And when drying them, it creates a large amount of dust. And the workers who were most exposed to it, were exposed to the Kepone dust by breathing it in. It got on their skin. And in some cases, the workers were essentially eating their lunch, their sandwiches, while they put Kepone into barrels. So they eat the dust as well. Whenever a new worker would come into Life Science, the workers who are already there would joke with them and say, just wait. Pretty soon you're gonna get the Kepone shakes. And the new workers didn't know what that meant. They didn't believe it. And sure enough, though, after being there for it could depend - anywhere from days to weeks, it might be a little longer. But eventually, most of the workers who worked directly with the Kepone dust would develop tremors in their hands. Sometimes it would be worse, their bodies would shake, they would get headaches and chest pains and things of this sort. Trying to hold, let's say, of a screwdriver or even a cup of coffee became more and more difficult because your hands would shake so much.

SM Kepone has been said by scientists and researchers to cause cancer. Did Allied Chemical know that about this chemical?

GW Yeah, the testing done by Allied was on animals in the 1950s and 60s. And when they did those tests, they discovered a number of things that would later come out with the workers: tremors, reproductive problems. And they also discovered on these animals that Kepone would indeed cause cancer eventually. Once the investigation on the workers began, it became clear that it went beyond the bodies of the workers, that Kepone had been dumped into the waterways around Hopewell and then those waterways and turn fed into the James River. And then the investigation in the James River, they realized that there were many marine organisms in the river that had taken up Kepone in various amounts.

SM Some of it major, or all pretty scant?

GW The way it works is small organisms who feed on sediment in - along the river. They have it in small amounts. But as the larger predators begin to eat those, then the Kepone begins to accumulate more and more in those bodies. So as you move up the food chain, eventually you get high level predator fish like bluefish and others - or oysters even, who have more - higher amounts of Kepone in their systems. And then eventually what became a public health issue was when those very commercially viable and valuable sources of food like oysters or bluefish, when human beings were eating them, that's when it became even more of a national emergency at that point. Once it enters the James River and then potentially the bay, that then becomes a federal issue. And it's also a federal issue because those fish and those shellfish are sold across state borders. And that is what prompted federal investigations, in addition to what had happened to the workers.

SM And what was the result of all that?

GW Well, the result for the fishing industry, again, it had been shut down. That didn't reopen in the James until in the 1980s. There were Senate hearings, there were House of Representative hearings on all of this because this was an environmental decade emerging in the 70s. We had already had knowledge about DDT and other toxins in the environment, and Kepone was another one to be added to a list that was growing at this point. So that federal interest then prompted new legislation to regulate toxic substances, and Virginia also passed its own state law to provide information and additional regulation on toxic substances.

SM In your research, did you see a moment at which it had first slowly dawned on Virginians, officials and the public that we had a big disaster on our hands?

GW Yeah, I think once it became clear that Kepone was not only a problem of 29 or 30 workers, but rather a much broader problem that affected the rivers and potentially even the Chesapeake Bay, that the officials in Virginia really began to respond in a much more aggressive, wide ranging way that they did.

SM And what did happen?
GW Well, what happened is that in the winter of 1975, in December, then Governor Mills Godwin shut down the James River to commercial fishing and harvesting of oysters because the Kepone had been found to be in those. And that had a devastating effect on those marine industries who relied on it for their livelihood, the watermen, especially.

SM In the end, the court settlement against Allied Chemical was the largest of its type for that era.

GW That's right. The amount was 13.24 million. And it turned out that eight million dollars out of that settlement went to create the Virginia Environmental Endowment, which still exists today, doing all kinds of environmental education and other kinds of projects across the state to make the settlement go back to the people. The other five million was left as a direct fine to Allied.

SM So after this large settlement, did Allied Chemical ceased to produce this chemical or pesticide?

GW Yes. What happened is once the federal investigations became wider, Kepone was eventually banned in the United States, but it was not banned elsewhere around the world. So the Kepone stocks that had been shipped during its production were still being used in other places. A lot of Kepone was shipped on to banana plantations in the Caribbean. And what we have seen in very recent years is a very massive public health crisis on the islands of Guadeloupe and Martinique, where a lot of Kepone was used in a wide way throughout the 19th ñ through, at least through the 1990s. On those islands, and particularly in Guadalupe, the key pone was used to kill the banana weevil, the banana root boar, and it was used in wide amounts such that it got into the soil, it got into the local waters, and that in turn went into the waters around the islands. And what happened there, is a lot of people who rely on fish for their daily, you know, daily living, began to be exposed to Kepone by eating that fish. And so a lot of workers who also worked on the banana plantations were exposed to this Kepone in a very similar way to what happened in Hopewell. So it went beyond just the people who used it, it went to the broader population because they were eating the contaminated marine life that they had relied on for their day to day life.

SM How much Kepone ended up going into the soil and into the James River?

GW Yeah, we - we know that Kepone is still in the James River. There's estimates anywhere from 20 to 40 thousand pounds that made it to there. A lot of decisions were - or tests were done to figure out how to remove the Kepone, whether it should be removed or could be removed. And in the end, the result was the decision to leave it and let the sediments from the James cover it. And that's what has been done. So it's still in the river. And recent testing done by the Virginia Institute for Marine Science showed that there are still levels of Kepone in fish. Now, those levels have been determined to be below the action levels, which would prompt further advisories or closing of the river. But it's still there because it is a persistent organic pollutant, or a POP, which is why it was banned, like other POPs around the world.

SM Would you eat a James River Oyster?

GW I would eat at James River Oyster and I would - I would probably eat fish. The question is, how much of that would one want to do? And that's why the advisories are out there, to caution us against overexposure, because it's not just Kepone. There's still a lot of chemicals in the James River from various other industrial sources that go up and down the river.

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SM Gregory Wilson is a Virginia Humanities fellow and a professor of history at the University of Akron. Coming up next, what if we had Google Maps that showed whale, fish and turtle traffic in the ocean?

00:40:05

SM Fishing technology has advanced significantly over the years, but fishers still catch an enormous amount of what they call bycatch. Sara Maxwell is helping reduce it. She's a professor of biological science at Old Dominion University and specializes in finding ways to keep whales, turtles and other large marine animals out of the way of the fishers. Sara, we understand if a turtle is caught up in a fishing net, but how could a whale be accidentally caught?

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SX So often, it tends to be from nets. So, for example, a gillnet is set in the water, it's usually very long, in some instances it can be over a mile long. And so if a whale is swimming along and - and runs into that net very easily, it can get tangled. And depending on where the net is set, it might be too far below the surface. That whale can't come up to breathe and it potentially could die or be injured.

SM I've heard a staggering number of turtles, dolphins and other animals are killed in this way. Is that true?

SX Around the world, yes, it's a significant problem. It's a significant problem in the U.S. as well. However, the U.S. is arguably one of the best managed countries in terms of fisheries. Some of the numbers that I've seen globally are that around 50,000 turtles a year are caught in fishery bycatch or at least observed in fishery bycatch.

SM Do they live?

SX In some cases they do, and in some cases they don't. So some turtles will be released alive, some might be released with injuries and we don't know whether or not they'll survive in the long term, or some might be released dead.

SM How can sea birds, birds who fly be part of a accidental fishing catch?

SX Well, anyone who's ever been fishing knows that birds love fish. So often when you are on a pier somewhere and you're fishing, you'll see a lot of, for example, seagulls in the area. Seabirds in particular, are often attracted to fishing vessels for the same reason that they're attracted to fishing piers. So, for example, in long line fisheries, it's a very long line and there are hooks coming off of that long line, sometimes for miles on end as those hooks go over the side of the boat, they have some sort of bait on it and birds try and capture that bait before the line goes underwater. And so they can grab the bait as well as the hook and then be drowned or injured in that process.

SM How many birds do we estimate get killed in this way?

SX That's a tough number to come up with, but it's on the order of hundreds of thousands a year globally. Seabird bycatch has had some phenomenal successes. In one of the, quote, technological advances that has reduced bycatch in that fishery are known as streamer lines. And I say, quote, technological, because in reality, it's actually very simple. So, for example, what they do is as that line goes out, they basically just use these plastic streamers that come off the line and it's enough to scare the birds away from the hooks so that the hooks can get far enough underwater that the birds can't dive to get them. And that's reduced bycatch by over 90 percent in a lot of fisheries.

SM Some of the American fisheries have government employees embedded to report how many of certain kinds of animals they're catching in the bycatch. What's a good example of such a fishing industry in America?

SX Well, the fishery that's the most observed is the Hawaii Long - Long Line Fishery. And that fishery has observers on every single boat all the time because sea turtle bycatch has been a huge issue in that fishery. They've had that fishery ñ has been shut down as a result of catching too many turtles or an amount that has been deemed to potentially have an impact on the population.

SM You've been helping the swordfish industry work on this problem.

SX Yes. So, for example, in California, there's a fishery targeting swordfish using drift gillnets. It's put out in the water over a mile long and it tends to just kind of drift with the currents. Usually they're set in the evening and then brought back in, in the morning. The swordfish population in California is actually very healthy. Yet the bycatch in gillnets in general tends to be rather high. And so there've been movements to try and shut this fishery down. But one thing that is of concern is that in shutting this fishery down, we would end up importing swordfish from other countries where they're not as well managed and where the bycatch of some of these species, like whales and turtles, might actually be higher. So there's been movement to try and keep this fishery open. And we've been working with the fishery to try and find ways to reduce their bycatch. And one way we've been doing this is by looking at the movements of some of these animals, like whales and sea turtles. And if we can figure out what combination of - of environmental factors determine where they're likely to go, we can then predict into the future where they might be. And we can suggest to fishermen where not to go.

SM So you're using satellites to keep track of the large mammals in real time. So fisher people who are heading out over the ocean know which quadrants to avoid at a given time?

SX More or less, yes. So we in a lot of instances, what we've done is we've put satellite transmitter, which you can just imagine we more or less glued an iPhone to an animal. And then that tells us where in space and time that animal is. And then we can use imagery that comes from satellites, so this is a lot of this comes from NASA, and that gives us imagery of the oceanographic conditions in the area we can relate where the animals to the oceanographic conditions. And then we can basically predict in real time where those animals are likely to be in the future. I've been working with a master's student and some colleagues in the U.K. and also in Gabon. And what we've done there is we've attached transmitters to sea turtles to determine where they're likely to go because Gabon is a huge nesting beach for a number of different sea turtle species. So by determining what areas they're likely to use off the coast when they're hanging out in those waters coming up to lay their nest throughout the nesting season, we've been able to say, OK, these are the areas where we should keep fishing from being during the nesting season. And that's been really successful in helping to reduce bycatch in that area. And they've also just - the country of Gabon has created a system of national parks in the ocean, in part designed to protect sea turtles and using the information that we gathered using the satellite transmitters.

SM Is your satellite work with the tracking devices a new way of looking at this?

SX You know, it is. So, this has been a technology that's been advancing so rapidly in the last 20 years. It really has given us new insight into where animals are going and helped us to understand the threats that they're facing. And then also, more importantly, how to mitigate those threats in ways that we just - I mean, 30 years ago we could have never fathomed. So being able to know where animals are going, specifically what areas they're using, very specifically what habitats, weíre - they're using, has really made it possible to understand how they might overlap with humans such as fishermen.

SM It seems worrisome that the fisheries who have so much financial stake in this might also use the satellite tracking technique to just simply empty the oceans faster and maybe bycatch along with them. Is that a thought you have sometimes?

SX Not for the species that I work on. In most cases, these species are very highly protected. And so there's not the threat of fishermen using this data to try and catch, for example, turtles or whales. And while fishermen are definitely trying to make a profit, it's been my experience that no one appreciates the ocean as much as they do. And so their desire to reduce bycatch is usually as great, if not greater than, for example, mine, because they have a respect for the ocean, both because they spend so much time there and also because it is their livelihood, there - everything comes from that, for - for them.

SM Can you imagine a future where we're basically mapping the oceans the way we map our streets? Or is that just too hard, do you think?

SX I think we're - we're getting there. We already know so much about where animals are going. And as this technology, in particular, is getting smaller and cheaper, we're able to do more and more. So, for example, I put transmitters on a turn that weighs a little over a couple of pounds and the transmitter was one point four grams. This species had never been tracked before simply because this is a flying animal and you can't put something on it that's too heavy and might impede its - its ability to fly. And as these transmitters have gotten smaller and smaller and smaller, we've been able to see where animals are going that we couldn't even know where they were going, even just a year ago. So it's really exciting and I think that we're getting to an incredibly strong level of understanding of the ocean and how it works. And hopefully we can use that information to help continue to protect animals.

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SM Sarah Maxwell is a professor of biological science at Old Dominion University. Major support for With Good Reason is provided by the law firm of McGuire Woods. Support also comes from the University of Virginia Health System, connecting doctors and patients through telemedicine to deliver high quality care throughout Virginia, the U.S. and the world, UVAhealth.com. With Good Reason is produced in Charlottesville by Virginia Humanities. Our production team is Allison Quantz, Matt Darroch, Alison Byrne, Lauren Francis and Jamal Millner. Some of the music is by Blue Dot Sessions. For the podcast go to iTunes or to WithGoodReasonRadio.com. I'm Sarah McConnell, thanks for listening.