[.ca] Fateful Harvest: The True Story of a Small Town, a ... (ISBN 0060931833)

From Amazon.co.uk:
The basis for Duff Wilson's Fateful Harvest was formed from his Pulitzer Prize nominated series "Fear in the Fields--How Hazardous Wastes Become Fertilizer". Arsenic, cadmium, lead and beryllium are industrial by-products so toxic it is illegal to dump them into the air or water. Yet, through a loophole in "the crazy semantics of waste disposal", these same hazardous wastes are being applied to the food we eat. And until a small-town mayor from a farming community in Washington state became suspicious, nobody knew. Mayor Patty Martin is a whistle blower as extraordinary as Karen Silkwood and Erin Brockovich--smart, persistent and courageous and overwhelmingly dedicated to her cause even when the town that elected her turned against her. Martin's obsession with hazardous waste in fertilizer began when she met Dennis DeYoung, a local farmer whose land was rendered infertile after the Cenex/Land o' Lakes company paid him to spread the residue from their fertiliser rinse pond on his land. But there was more than fertiliser residue there--it was a witch's brew of hazardous metals, cancer-causing chemicals and even radioactive materials that hadn't been produced by the company itself. DeYoung and Martin wanted to know how they got there and why. While the articles prompted a modicum of action in Washington state and elsewhere, complacency allows the practice to continue even now. Expanded into book form, this impassioned expose about an alarming trend takes on even more power as Wilson and Martin ask questions the Environmental Protection Agency has been unwilling to answer: Why should there be a limit on the amount of lead in paint and dioxin in cement but not in the fertiliser spread over farmlands and gardens? And is there a correlation between the widespread use of toxins in fertilisers and the phenomenal rise in childhood illnesses and cancers since the early 1980s? --Lesley Reed

POWERFUL!:
It is simple. Read the book. Decide if you want to eat your food with some toxic fertilizer sprinkled on by corporate-terrorists. Do your research and then decide what you are going to do about this horrendous insult to all life and the land around the world. This issue leaves me mourning for our world. Thankfully there are still dedicated people like Duff Wilson that uncover the scoundrels that have no conscience except for the dollar. Rachael Carson blew the whistle on DDT and now Mr. Wilson is blowing the whistle on toxic waste fertilizers unwittingly being used by farmers and gardeners everywhere. Wake up EPA!

Nowhere to turn.:
"Fateful Harvest" was easy to read but the facts presented left me outraged and saddened. Read the book and learn of the magic trick of turning toxic waste with costly disposal fees into a product to sell, fertilizer. Fertilizer which is laced with heavy metals that will end up in our food in increasing amounts as the accumulation in the soil increases. Learn how the average citizen, small town mayor and farmer have zero ability to impact business practices which are supported by the government despite years of heroic effort and the expose of this book. Despite minimal cosmetic changes, the practice goes on, and is apparently unstoppable, leaving nowhere to turn.

How hazardous waste is turned into fertilizer:
Duff Wilson is an investigative reporter for the Seattle Times who got a call one day from Patty Martin, mayor of Quincy, Washington, who told him an almost unbelievable tale of toxic waste being sold as fertilizer. The zinger was, as Wilson discovered, it was entirely legal! Imagine this: big industrial companies, growing increasingly displeased with having to pay for the cost of disposing of their hazardous waste materials, typically with unsafe amounts of heavy metals, find through a loophole in the law that they can declare the waste a "product" and sell it as fertilizer! Instead of paying perhaps a hundred dollars a barrel to get rid of the stuff, they can sell it to firms that add a little lime or some other soil conditioner and abracadabra! peddle it as fertilizer. Sound like a Greenpeace scare story? A nightmare dreamed up by disgruntled employees? "Bad" farmers looking to blame somebody for their failed Frankenfeed crops? The fertilizer industry would like us to think so, but this story about Patty Martin and her brave and lonely crusade against the dumping of hazard waste on farmlands tells us otherwise. The terrible thing is that, although Wilson's original story, "Fear in the Fields--How Hazardous Wastes Become Fertilizer," first appeared in July of 1997, as the book closes in 2001, the loophole in the law has not been plugged, congress has not acted, and the polluters are still turning hazardous waste infused with cadmium, lead, arsenic, etc., into stuff smeared on farmlands. It gets into the crops farmers grow and ends up in the food on our dining room tables. It blows off the fields when it's dry and into the lungs of people. The workers in these fertilizer plants have elevated levels of cancer and lung scaring disease, and the sad thing is some of them are so wedded to the company that they are blind to what is destroying their bodies. Wilson names names and gives examples. He cites the chemical analyses and he quotes the industry apologists and the look-the-other-way bureaucrats in the oversight agencies. But clearly the real culprits are those people at the top of our state and federal governments who are doing nothing stop this dangerous pollution. This is the kind of story that'll make you hopping mad and wonder about the morality (and sanity) of people who would, to save a few bucks on the bottom line, poison us, themselves and our children.

Excellent:
This book is excellent. Everyone should read it and find out what is in our food.

Excellent book and about time:
When this book talks about how the effects of heavy metals are not seen right away, I know this to be very true. Look at the autism epidemic and look at the amount of heavy metals that are in these autistic children. They don't just have too much mercury, they also are showing excessive levels of lead, arsenic, antimony, aluminum, etc. So is this how the effects of hazardous waste in fertilizer are showing up?