New USGS model on U.S. contamination by toxic pesticide atrazine

A new numerical model by the US Geological Survey gives near real-time distributions of the hormone disrupting crop pesticide, atrazine, in drinking water throughout the United States.

Atrazine has been banned in the European Union and several other countries as a result of research showing it disrupts endocrine and hormone levels in animals and potentially humans, affecting reproductive health and sperm count.

The USGS has created an awesome online tool that gives near real-time monitoring of America’s streams for the general public.  It’s a ‘Google maps’-type interface with a color coded legend for maximum, mean or standard deviation of atrazine use and concentrations across the country.

Atrazine has become a very intense political topic among environmentalists — for good reason.  The US public trusts the EPA to regulate the quality of our country’s natural resources, the job they were created to perform.  The problem is that this powerful governmental organization, as many powerful organizations, is influenced by politics, slowed by bureaucracy and sometimes directed by ulterior motives.

Instead of banning atrazine altogether, the EPA decided to regulate annual average levels of atrazine in drinking water.  This method of monitoring allows shorter-term peaks to reach far beyond the levels of toxicity which are dangerous to humans and animals.  It’s a clever system that many Americans would not knowingly approve of.

The results of the USGS study were presented in a recent NRDC Press Release:

Approximately 75 percent of stream water and about 40 percent of all groundwater samples from agricultural areas tested in an extensive U.S. Geological Survey study contained atrazine. NRDC found that the U.S. EPA’s inadequate monitoring systems and weak regulations have compounded the problem, allowing levels of atrazine in watersheds and drinking water to peak at extremely high concentrations.

This is not good.

The National Resources Defense Counsel is attempting to contribute.  This group of lawyers, scientists and activists was named “one of the nation’s most powerful environmental groups” by the New York Times.  Their mission is to “safeguard Earth”, and “restore the integrity of the elements that sustain life” through science and law — a highly noble set of motives.

Many (including the EPA) were probably satisfied to brush the results of the USGS study under the rug.  You see, the combination of science and activism is not very popular in the science community.  Earth scientists, perhaps influenced by tales of IPCC backlash, still feel the need to be objective, uninvolved and generally non-active.

This has to change if scientists want to ensure that our research (as the USGS’s here) is put to good use by policy makers.

Here’s the EPA page on atrazine.

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