Surfing in DDT waters

Reflections on our death cult industrial civilization.

I surfed Point Dume last Sunday. There was a big swell and the waves were perfect — almost too big and perfect for a shitty surfer like me, and I kept wiping out. While I was out in there, a sea lion kept hanging around, ducking under water around some kelp and playing in the surf. It looked just like a big wet dog. With the big bluffs ahead and an open ocean behind, it was a beautiful scene. But I kept thinking about the sea lion and another layer of reality kept imposing itself on me and ruining the moment: DDT and the Montrose Chemical Corp.

Since the Los Angeles Times started reporting on it last year, I’ve been reading about the Montrose Chemical Corporation that used to be based here in Torrence, Los Angeles County. It made DDT on contract for USAID for use overseas, even after this “miracle“ pesticide was banned in the United States and its toxic effects known. For decades, it dumped thousands of tons of this toxic stuff out into the ocean. Some of it was released into the sewage system. Some of it the company dumped in barrels: workers brought them out at night by ship, slashed them open with axes, and rolled them into to the water — just beyond the horizon from that spot I was surfing, not far the Catalina Islands.

The company dumped half a million barrels were this way. And these barrels have sat deep down on the ocean floor, oozing the deadly liquid. DDT is an extremely stable chemical. It’s pretty much indestructible. And so for decades it’s been been traveling up the food chain and poising everything that it touches: plankton, fish, sharks, dolphins, eagles — and sea lions. You hear about mercury in fish, but not DDT.

Exposure to DDT affects life in weird ways. And researchers recently discovered that massive levels of DDT in sea lions make them susceptible to a previously unknown form of a sexually transmitted herpes, and that this herpes then triggers an aggressive cancer that takes over their organs, liquifies their spines, and ultimately kills them slowly and gruesomely. Something like a quarter of all sea lions observed have this cancer — the highest rate among mammals. It’s brutal. Sitting out there in the water I wondered if the sea lion hanging just a few feet away had this herpes and the cancer. And all this is because of one company.