Molly Ivins May 22

AUSTIN — Froggy alert! Kermit concern! As Aristophanes, the Neil Simon of his day, put it in his play "The Frogs," "Brekekekex, koax, koax."

The freak frogs of Le Sueur County, Minn., discovered by a group of school kids on a nature hike in 1995, were first considered an anomaly. A pond brimming with mutant frogs — no one knew what to make of it. But extraordinary numbers of deformed frogs were confirmed again last year throughout Minnesota and other states, concentrated largely in the Midwest.

Frogs have a permeable skin and no hair or scales as shields, so they are ultrasensitive to changes in the environment. Marla Cone, the Los Angeles Times' environmental writer, said: "When nature sends out such powerful messages as seven-legged frogs, biologists say people should listen because it signals that the environment is so out of whack that it cannot support normal life."

Now, this is the kind of story one is apt to stumble across in a supermarket tabloid. "Mysterious Frog Epidemic," "Freak Frogs Advancing," "Normal Life Threatened." And then, because we all have enough to worry about already, we sigh and turn to the latest Elvis sighting. According to communications experts, we are so battered by unconnected bits of apparently threatening information that there's a sort of generalized paranoia loose in the country.

I don't want to raise the paranoia level, but I think it's important to start connecting some of the "unconnected" stories because we need the information to make important political and environmental decisions.

— CNN's special investigative unit recently discovered that several of the corporations accused in the outbreak of deformed babies in Brownsville (1988-92) had, in fact, been dumping toxic material along the border. The companies paid $17 million to the families of the deformed babies but denied that they had caused the epidemic of birth defects. The companies claimed they had followed U.S. environmental laws, even while operating across the Mexican border.

Said CNN: "That may be true now since many companies cleaned up their worst environmental excesses after the outbreak of fetal abnormalities, which ended as suddenly as it began. But internal corporate documents and previously unreported pretrial testimony obtained by CNN suggest that these corporations were using Mexico's border region as a private dumping ground."

— "Traces of long-lasting pesticides and industrial chemicals that didn't exist before the 1920s can now be found virtually everywhere.

Scientists have detected the man-made compounds in the meat of Arctic seals, in fish from New England's rivers, in drinking water, in far fields in almost every nation — even in mother's milk. Everyone carries measurable traces of chemicals in their bodies, having ingested the likes of PCBs in fish or DDT and dioxin in other foods. But do those traces, some of which build up in the body and remain, pose a threat to humans?

"Some biologists say yes, pointing to what they consider ominous clues among the offsprings of dozens of animal species exhibiting weird physical, behavioral and reproductive problems." — The Hartford Courant, Dec. 3, 1996.

— "New evidence connects environmental toxins with birth defects, researchers reported at the annual meeting of the American Public Health Association last week." — Los Angeles Daily News, Dec. 2, 1996.

— "Wildlife in Georgia's Okefenokee Swamp may be accumulating harmful levels of mercury spewed from industrial smokestacks, researchers said Monday." — The Atlanta Journal, Nov. 19, 1996.

— "Silt on the bottom of the Quinnipiac River in Plantsville is contaminated with massive levels of a cancer-causing compound, state Department of Environmental Protection officials said Thursday." — The Hartford Courant, May 15, 1997.

— "A U.S. district judge has found that Unocal Corp. repeatedly violated federal environmental laws by dumping a toxic chemical from a refinery into San Francisco Bay." — The New York Times, April 20, 1997.

— "Some common commercial cleaners used to clean clothes and household surfaces contain chemicals that may cause cancer and birth defects, a leading environmental groups says." — Calgary Herald (Canada), Feb. 12, 1997.

And so on. Hundreds of individual stories, often on local situations, all of them indicating that as we pump more and more chemicals and toxins into the environment, normal life is in fact threatened.

OK, so it is paranoia-inducing. Help! We're surrounded by invisible poisons. And we certainly feel helpless to do anything about it.

I bring this up because it seems to me that as the evidence mounts that this stuff will kill us, the political environment is increasingly callous. With the sole exception of tobacco (and look how long that took), which is now on the legislative run, there's a kind of we-don't-want-to-hear-it mentality in both Congress and the Texas Lege.

One of our best legislators said the other day: "Don't shut down my aluminum plant. I've got 1,200 jobs out there." What one almost never hears from a pol is: "Clean it up or shut it down." Their worst nightmare is that any attempt to control toxic emissions will cause the local plant to pull up and move to Borneo.

Are we going have to wait as long as we did on tobacco? And will it cost as many lives?

***

Molly Ivins is a columnist for the Fort Worth Star-Telegram.

COPYRIGHT 1997 CREATORS SYNDICATE, INC.