USGS superscientist David Love issues warning in 1949 regarding Selenium in the West.

In February of 1949, famed U.S. Geological Survey superscientist David Love issued a warning that selenium in shale soils throughout the American West could pose a serious toxicity problem for wildlife, livestock and humans if those tainted lands were brought into production for farming or mining.
Love, who joined the Geological Survey in 1942, was a staunch advocate for the application of geology to human health beginning in the mid 1940s. In 1949, Love and other geologists were snowed in for nine days during a Salt Lake City international conference. The conference addressed the documented effects of poisonous trace elements - selenium, molybdenum and tellurium, for example - on people and animals, and what geology could contribute to understanding it.
He gave many talks on the subject, the first one in 1978 at the University of Washington. "Human environment, good and bad, starts with the rock, coupled with the other two major necessities, water and air," Love said in a 1984 Edison Foundation Distinguished Lecture, a talk he gave again several times at many universities. "Ruin one of these three basic essentials and humanity is in deep trouble."
Love was known to get particularly upset about how selenium could enter and poison food chains. Selenium is toxic in amounts slightly above nutritional necessity, causing health problems similar to those caused by arsenic, including lung and liver damage.
Love's 1949 memo was later suppressed by officials of the U.S. Department of Agriculture who worried about its effect on land values in the West. I interviewed Love in the late 1980s, in the aftermath of the selenium-poisoning of the Kesterson National Wildlife Refuge, and he told me that political appointees in the federal departments of Interior and Agriculture simply ignored his warnings and now his prediction was coming true. Love told me he thought selenium or other toxic trace elements might be contributory to the high miscarriage rate among women in certain parts of Wyoming.
Although he retired from government service in 1987, Love, dubbed the Grand Old Man of Rocky Mountain Geology, continued to speak out on the public health threats posed by selenium. He is profiled in John McPhee's book "Rising from the Plains." Love, a much honored and celebrated geologist, died in 2002 at the age of 89. Two of his four children are geologists.
To read his 1949 memo CLICK HERE