Top Quotes: “Silent Spring — Rachel Carson
Introduction
“Headlines in the New York Times in July 1962 captured the national sentiment: ‘Silent Spring is now noisy summer.’ In the few months between the New Yorker’s serialization of Silent Spring in June and its publication that September, Rachel Carson’s alarm touched off a national debate on the use of chemical pesticides, the responsibility of science, and the limits of technological progress. When Carson died barely 18 months later in spring 1964, at age 56, she’d set in motion a course of events that would result in a ban on the domestic production of DDT and the creation of a grassroots movement demanding protection of the environment through state and federal regulation. Carson’s writing initiated a transformation in the relationship between humans and the natural world and stirred an awakening of public environmental consciousness.
It’s hard to remember the cultural climate that greeted Silent Spring and to understand the fury that was launched against its quietly determined author. Carson’s thesis that we were subjecting ourselves to slow poisoning by the misuse of chemical pesticides that polluted the environment may seem like common currency now, but in 1962 Silent Spring contained the kernel of social revolution. Carson wrote at a time of new affluence and intense social conformity. The cold war, with its climate of suspicion and intolerance, was at its zenith. The chemical industry, one of the chief beneficiaries of postwar tech, was also one of the chief authors of the nation’s prosperity. DDT enabled the conquest of insect pests in agriculture and of ancient insect-borne disease just as surely as the atomic bomb destroyed America’s military enemies and dramatically altered the balance of power between humans and nature. The public endowed chemists, at work in their starched white coats in remote labs, with almost divine wisdom. The results of their labors were gilded with the presumption of beneficence. In postwar America, science was god, and science was male.
Carson was an outsider who had never been part of the scientific establishment, first because she was a woman but also because her chosen field, biology, was held in low esteem in the nuclear age. Her career path was nontraditional; she had no academic affiliation, no institutional voice. She deliberately wrote for the public rather than for a narrow scientific audience. For anyone else, such independence would’ve been an enormous detriment. But by the time Silent Spring was published, Carson’s outsider status had become a distinct advantage. As the science establishment would discover, it was impossible to dismiss her.
Carson first discovered nature in the company of her mom, a devotee of the nature study movement. She wandered the banks of the Allegheny River in the pristine village of Springdale, PA, just north of Pittsburgh, observing the wildlife and plants around her and particularly curious about the habits of birds.
Her childhood, though isolated by poverty and family turmoil, wasn’t lonely. She loved to read and displayed an obvious talent for writing, publishing her first story in a children’s magazine at age 10. By the time she entered PA College for Women, she had read widely in the English Romantic tradition and had articulated a personal sense of mission, her ‘vision splendid.’ A dynamic female zoology professor expanded her intellectual horizons by urging her to take the daring step of majoring in biology rather than English. In doing so, Carson discovered that science not only engaged her but gave her ‘something to write about.’ She decided to pursue a career in science, aware that in the 1930s there were few opportunities for women.
Scholarships allowed her to study at Woods Hole Biological Lab, where she fell in love with the sea, and at Johns Hopkins, where she was isolated, one of a handful of women in marine biology. She had no mentors and no money to continue in grad school after completing an MA in zoology in 1932. Along the way she worked as a lab assistant in the school of public health, where she was lucky enough to receive some training in experimental genetics. As employment opportunities in science dwindled, she began writing articles about the natural history of Chesapeake Bay for the Baltimore Sun. Although these were years of financial and emotional struggle, Carson realized that she didn’t have to choose between science and writing, that she had the talent to do both.
From childhood on, Carson was interested in the long history of the earth, in its patterns and rhythms, its ancient seas, its evolving life forms. She was an ecologist — fascinated by intersections and connections but always aware of the whole — before that perspective was afforded scholarly legitimacy. A fossil shell she found while digging in the hills above the Allegheny as a little girl prompted questions about the creatures of the oceans that had once covered the area. At Johns Hopkins, an experiment with changes in the salinity of water in an eel tank prompted her to study the life cycle of those ancient fish that migrate from continental rivers to the Sargasso Sea. The desire to understand the sea from a nonhuman perspective led to her first book, which featured a common sea bird whose lifecycle, driven by ancestral instincts, the rhythms of the tides, and the search for food, involves an arduous journey from Patagonia to the Arctic Circle. From the outset Carson acknowledged her ‘kinship with other forms of life’ and always wrote to impress that relationship on her readers.
Carson was confronted with the problem of environmental pollution at a formative period in her life. During her adolescence the second wave of the industrial revolution was turning Pittsburgh into the iron and steel capital of the Western world. The little town of Springdale, sandwiched between 2 huge coal-fired electric plants, was transformed into a grimy wasteland, its air fouled by chemical emissions, its river polluted by industrial waste. Carson couldn’t wait to escape. She observed that the captains of industry took no notice of the defilement of her hometown and no responsibility for it. The experience made her forever suspicious of promises of ‘better living through chemistry’ and of claims that tech would create a progressively brighter future.
In 1936 Carson landed a job as a part-time writer of radio scripts on ocean life for the federal Bureau of Fisheries in Baltimore. By night she wrote freelance articles for the Sun describing the pollution of the oyster beds of the Chesapeake by industrial runoff; she urged changes in oyster seeding and pouring into the bay. She signed her articles ‘R.L. Carson,’ hoping that readers would assume that the writer was male and then take her science seriously.
A year later Carson became a junior aquatic biologist for the Bureau of Fisheries, one of only 2 professional women there, and began a slow but steady advance through the ranks of the agency, which became the US Fish and Wildlife Service in 1939. Her literary talents were quickly recognized, and she was assigned to edit other scientists’ field reports, a task she turned into an opportunity to broaden her scientific knowledge, deepen her connection with nature, and observe the making of science policy. By 1949 Carson was editor in chief of all the agency’s publications, writing her own distinguished series on the new US wildlife refuge system and participating in inter-agency conferences on the latest developments in science and tech.
Her government responsibilities slowed the pace of her own writing. It took her 10 years to synthesize the latest research on oceanography, but her perseverance paid off. She became an overnight literary celebrity when The Sea Around Us was first serialized in The New Yorker in 1951. The book won many awards, including the National Book Award for nonfiction, and Carson was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters. She was lauded not only for her scientific expertise and synthesis of wide-ranging material but also for her lyrical, poetic voice. The Sea Around Us, and its best-selling successor, made Carson the foremost science writer in America. She understood that there was a deep need for writers who could report on and interpret the natural world. Readers around the world found comfort in her clear explanations of complex science, her description of the creation of the seas, and her obvious love of the wonders of nature. Here was a trusted voice in a world riddled with uncertainty.
Whenever she spoke in public, however, she took notice of ominous new trends. ‘Intoxicated with a sense of his own power,’ she wrote, ‘[mankind] seems to be going farther and farther into more experiments for the destruction of himself and his world. Tech, she feared, was moving on a faster trajectory than mankind’s sense of moral responsibility. In 1945 she tried to interest Reader’s Digest in the alarming evidence of environmental damage from the widespread use of the new synthetic chemical DDT and other long-lasting agricultural pesticides. By 1957 Carson believed that these chemicals were potentially harmful to the long-term health of the whole biota. The pollution of the environment by the profligate use of toxic chemicals was the ultimate act of human hubris, a product of ignorance and greed that she felt compelled to bear witness against. She insisted that what science conceived and tech made possible must first be judged for its safety and benefit to the ‘whole stream of life.’ ‘There would be no peace for me,’ she wrote to a friend, ‘if I kept silent.’
Silent Spring, the product of her unrest, deliberately challenged the wisdom of a government that allowed toxic chemicals to be put into the environment before knowing the long-term consequences of their use. Writing in language that everyone could understand and cleverly using the public’s knowledge of atomic fallout as a reference point, Carson described how chlorinated hydrocarbons and organic phosphorus insecticides altered the cellular processes of plants, animals, and, by implication, humans. Science and tech, she charged, had become the handmaidens of the chemical industry’s rush for profits and control of markets. Rather than protecting the public from potential harm, the government not only gave its approval to these new products but did so without establishing any mechanism of accountability. Carson questioned the moral right of government to leave its citizens unprotected from substances they could neither physically avoid nor publicly question. Such callous arrogance could end only in the destruction of the living world. ‘Can anyone believe it’s possible to lay down such a barrage of poisons on the surface of the earth without making it unfit for all life?’ she asked. ‘They shouldn’t be called ‘insecticides’ but ‘biocides.’
In Silent Spring, and later in testimony before a congressional committee, Carson asserted that one of the most basic human rights must surely be ‘the right of the citizen to be secure in his own home against the intrusion of poisons applied by other persons.’ Through ignorance, greed, and negligence, government had allowed ‘poisonous and biologically potent chemicals’ to fall ‘indiscriminately into the hands of persons largely or wholly ignorant of their potentials for harm.’ When the public protested, it was ‘fed little tranquilizing pills of half-truth’ by a government that refused to take responsibility for or acknowledge evidence of damage. Carson challenged such moral vacuity.
In Carson’s view, the postwar culture of science that arrogantly claimed dominion over nature was the philosophic root for the problem. Human beings, she insisted, weren’t in control of nature but simply one of its parts: the survival of one part depended on the health of all. She protested the ‘contamination of man’s total environment’ with substances that accumulate in the tissues of plants, animals, and humans and have the potential to alter the genetic structure of organisms.
Carson argued that the human body was permeable and, as such, vulnerable to toxic substances in the environment. Levels of exposure could not be controlled, and scientists couldn’t accurately predict the long-term effects of bioaccumulation in the cells or the impact of such a mixture of chemicals on human health. She categorically rejected the notion proposed by industry that there were human ‘thresholds’ for such poisons, as well as its corollary, that the human body had ‘assimilative capacities’ that rendered the poisons harmless. In one of the most controversial parts of her book, Carson presented evidence that some human cancers were linked to pesticide exposure. That evidence and its subsequent elaboration by many other researchers continue to fuel one of the most challenging and acrimonious debates within the scientific and environmental communities.
Carson’s concept of the ecology of the human body was a major departure in our thinking about the relationship between humans and the natural environment. It had enormous consequences for our understanding of human health as well as our attitudes toward environmental risk. Silent Spring proved that our bodies aren’t boundaries. Chemical corruption of the globe affects us from conception to death. Like the rest of nature, we’re vulnerable to pesticides. All forms of like are more alike than different.
Carson believed that human health would ultimately reflect the environment’s ills. Inevitably this idea has changed our response to nature, to science, and to the technologies that devise and deliver contamination. Although the scientific community has been slow to acknowledge this aspect of Carson’s work, her concept of the ecology of the human body may well prove to be one of her most lasting contributions.
In 1962, however, the multimillion-dollar industrial chemical industry wasn’t about to allow a former government editor, a female scientist without a PhD or institutional affiliation, known only for her lyrical books on the sea, to undermine public confidence in its products or to question its integrity. It was clear to the industry that Carson was a hysterical woman whose alarming view of the future could be ignored or, if necessary, suppressed. She was a ‘bird and bunny lover,’ a woman who kept cats and was therefore clearly suspect. She was a romantic ‘spinster’ who was simply overwrought about genetics. In short, Carson was a woman out of control. She had overstepped the bounds of her gender and her science. But just in case her claims did gain an audience, the industry spent a quarter of a million dollars to discredit her research and malign her character. In the end, the worst they could say was that she’d only told one side of the story and had based her argument on unverifiable case studies.
There is another, private side to the controversy over Silent Spring. Unbeknown to her detractors in government and industry, Carson was fighting a far more powerful enemy than corporate outrage: a rapidly metastasizing breast cancer. The miracle is that she lived to complete the book at all, enduring a ‘catalogue of illnesses,’ as she called it. She was immune to the chemical industry’s efforts to malign her; rather, her energies were focused on the challenge of survival in order to bear witness to the truth as she saw it. She intended to disturb and disrupt, and she did so with dignity and deliberation.
After Silent Spring caught the attention of President Kennedy, federal and state investigations were launched into the validity of Carson’s claims. Communities that had been subjected to aerial spraying of pesticides against their wishes began to organize on a grassroots level against the continuation of toxic pollution. Legislation was readied at all governmental levels to defend against a new kind of invisible fallout. The scientists who had claimed a ‘holy grail’ of knowledge were forced to admit a vast ignorance. While Carson knew that one book couldn’t alter the dynamic of the capitalist system, an environmental movement grew from her challenge, led by a public that demanded that science and government be held accountable. Carson remains an example of what one committed individual can do to change the direction of society. She was a revolutionary spokesperson for the rights of all life. She dared to speak out and confront the issue of the destruction of nature and to frame it as a debate over the quality of all life.
Carson knew before she died that her work had made a difference. She was honored by medals and awards, and posthumously received the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1981. But she also knew that the issues she had raised would not be solved quickly or easily and that affluent societies are slow to sacrifice for the good of the whole. It wasn’t until 6 years after Carson’s death that concerned Americans celebrated the first Earth Day and that Congress passed the National Environmental Policy Act establishing the EPA as a buffer against our own handiwork. The domestic production of DDT was banned but not its export, ensuring that the pollution of the earth’s atmosphere, oceans, streams, and wildlife would continue unabated. DDT is found in the livers of birds and fish on every oceanic island on the planet and in the breast milk of every mother. In spite of decades of environmental protest and awareness, and in spite of Caron’s apocalyptic call alerting Americans to the problem of toxic chemicals, reduction of the use of pesticides has been one of the major policy failures of the environmental era. Global contamination is a fact of modern life.
Silent Spring compels each generation to reevaluate its relationship to the natural world. We’re a nation still debating the questions it raised, still unresolved as to how to act for the common good, how to achieve environmental justice. In arguing that public health and the environment, human and natural, are inseparable, Carson insisted that the role of the expert had to be limited by democratic access and must include public debate around the risks of hazardous tech. She knew then, as we’ve learned since, that scientific evidence by its very nature is incomplete and scientists will inevitably disagree on what constitutes certain proof of harm. It’s difficult to make public policy in such cases when the government’s obligation to protect is mitigated by the nature of science itself.
Carson left us a legacy that not only embraces the future of life, in which she believed so fervently, but sustains the human spirit. She confronted us with the chemical corruption of the globe and called on us to regulate our appetites — a truly revolutionary stance — for our self-preservation. ‘It seems reasonable to believe,’ she wrote, ‘that the more clearly we can focus our attention on the wonders and realities of the universe about us, the less taste we shall have for the destruction of our race. Wonder and humility are wholesome emotions, and they don’t exist side by side with a lust for destruction.’
Wonder and humility are just some of the gifts of Silent Spring. They remind us that we, like all other living creatures, are part of the vast ecosystems of the earth, part of the whole stream of life. This is a book to relish: not for the dark side of human nature, but for the promise of life’s possibility.”
DDT
“Along the roads, laurel, viburnum and alder, great ferns, and wildflowers delighted the traveler’s eye through much of the year. Even in winter the roadsides were places of beauty, where countless birds came to feed on the berries and on the seed heads of the dried weeds rising above the snow. The countryside was, in fact, famous for the abundance and variety of its bird life, and when the flood of migrants was pouring through in spring and fall people traveled from great distances to observe them. Others came to fish the streams, which flowed clear and cold out of the hills and contained shady pools where trout lay. So it had been from the days many years ago when the first settlers raised their houses, sank their wells, and built their barns.
Then a strange blight crept over the area and everything began to change. Some evil spell had settled on the community: mysterious maladies swept the flocks of chickens; the cattle and sheep sickened and died. Everywhere was a shadow of death. The farmers spoke of much illness among their families. In the town the doctors had become more and more puzzled by new kinds of sickness appearing among their patients. There had been several sudden and unexplained deaths, not only among adults but even among children, who would be stricken suddenly while at play and die within a few hours.
There was a strange illness. The birds, for example — where had they gone? Many people spoke of them, puzzled and disturbed. The feeding stations in the backyards were deserted. The few birds seen anywhere were moribund; they trembled violently and couldn't fly. It was a spring without voices. On the mornings that had once throbbed with the dawn chorus of robins, catbirds, doves, jays, wrens, and scores of other bird voices there was now no sound; only silence lay over the fields and woods and marsh.
On the farms the hens brooded, but no chicks hatched. The farmers complained that they were unable to raise any pigs — the litters were small and the young survived only a few days. The apple trees were coming into bloom but no bees droned among the blossoms, so there was no pollination and there would be no fruit.
The roadsides, once so attractive, were now lined with browned and withered vegetation as though swept by fire. These, too, were silent, deserted by all living things. Even the streams were now lifeless. Anglers no longer visited them, for all the fish had died.
In the gutters under the eaves and between the shingles of the roofs, a white granular powder still showed a few patches; some weeks before it had fallen like snow upon the roofs and the lawns, the fields and streams.
No witchcraft, no enemy action had silenced the rebirth of new life in this stricken world. The people had done it themselves.
This town doesn’t actually exist, but it might easily have a thousand counterparts in America or elsewhere in the world. I know of no community that has experienced all the misfortunes I describe. Yet every one of these disasters has actually happened somewhere, and many real communities have already suffered a substantial number of them. A grim specter has crept upon us almost unnoticed, and this imagined tragedy may easily become a stark reality we all shall know.”
“Since the mid-40s over 200 basic chemicals have been created for use in killing insects, weeds, rodents, and other organisms described in the modern vernacular as ‘pests’; and they’re sold under several thousand different brand names.
These sprays, dusts, and aerosols are now applied almost universally to farms, gardens, forests, and homes — nonselective chemicals that have the power to kill every insect, the ‘good’ and the ‘bad,’ to still the song of birds and the leaping of fish in the streams, to coat the leaves with a deadly film, and to linger on in soil — all this though the intended target may be only a few weeds or insects. Can anyone believe it’s possible to lay down such a barrage of poisons on the surface of the earth without making it unfit for all life? They shouldn’t be called ‘insecticides,’ but ‘biocides.’
The whole process of spraying seems caught up in an endless spiral. Since DDT was released for civilian use, a process of escalation has been going on in which ever more toxic materials must must be found. This has happened because insects, in a triumphant vindication of Darwin’s principle of the survival of the fittest, have evolved super races immune to the particular insecticide used, hence a deadlier one always has to be developed — and then a deadlier one than that. It’s happened also because destructive insects often undergo a ‘flareback,’ or resurgence, after spraying, in numbers greater than before. Thus the chemical war is never won, and all life is caught in its violent crossfire.
Along with the possibility of the extinction of mankind by nuclear war, the central problem of our age has therefore become the contamination of man’s total environment with such substances of incredible potential for harm — substances that accumulate in the tissues of plants and animals and even penetrate the germ cells to shatter or alter the very material of heredity upon which the shape of the future depends.
Some would-be architects of our future look toward a time when it will be possible to alter the human germ plasm by design. But we may easily be doing so now by inadvertence, for many chemicals, like radiation, bring about gene mutations. It is ironic to think that man might determine his own future by something so seemingly trivial as the choice of an insect spray.
All this has been risked — for what? Future historians may well be amazed by our distorted sense of proportion. How could intelligent beings seek to control a few unwanted species by a method that contaminated the entire environment and brought the threat of disease and death even to their own kind? Yet this is precisely what we’ve done. We’ve done it, moreover, for reasons that collapse the moment we examine them. We’re told that the enormous and expanding use of pesticides is necessary to maintain farm production. Yet is our real problem not one of overproduction? Our farms, despite measures to remove acreages from production and to pay farmers not to produce, have yielded such a staggering excess of crops that the American taxpayer in 1962 is paying out more than $1 billion/year as the total carrying cost of the surplus-food storage program.”
“It’s a sobering fact that the method of massive chemical control has had only limited success, and also threatens to worsen the very conditions it is intended to curb.
Under primitive agricultural conditions the farmer had few insect problems. These arose with the intensification of agriculture — the devotion of immense acreages to a single crop. Such a system set the stage for explosive increases in specific insect populations. Single-crop farming doesn’t take advantage of the principles by which nature works; it’s agriculture as an engineer might conceive it to be. Nature has introduced great variety into the landscape, but man has displayed a passion for simplifying it. Thus he undoes the built-in checks and balances by which nature holds the species within bounds. One important natural check is a limit on the amount of suitable habitat for each species. Obviously then, an insect that lives on wheat can build up its population to much higher levels on a farm devoted to wheat than on one in which wheat is intermingled with other crops to which the insect isn’t adapted.”
“The importation of plants is the primary agent in the modern spread of species, for animals have almost invariably gone along with the plants, quarantine being a comparatively recent and not completely effective innovation. The US Office of Plant Introduction alone has introduced almost 200k species and varieties of plants from all over the world. Nearly half of the ~180 major insect enemies of plants in the US are accidental imports from abroad, and most of them have come as hitchhikers on plants.
In new territory, out of reach of the restraining hand of the natural enemies that kept down its numbers in its native land, an invading plant or animal is able to become enormously abundant. Thus it’s no accident that our most troublesome insects are introduced species.”
“For the first time in the history of the world, every human being is now subjected to contact with dangerous chemicals, from the moment of conception until death. In the less than 2 decades of their use, the synthetic pesticides have been so thoroughly distributed throughout the animate and inanimate world that they occur virtually everywhere. They’ve been recovered from most of the major river systems and even from streams of groundwater flowing unseen through the earth. Residues of these chemicals linger in soil to which they may have been applied a dozen years before. They’ve entered and lodged in the bodies of fish, birds, reptiles, and domestic and wild animals so universally that scientists carrying on animal experiments find it almost impossible to locate subjects free from such contamination. They’ve been found in fish in remote mountain lakes, in earthworms burrowing in soil, in the eggs of birds — and in man himself. For these chemicals are now stored in the bodies of the vast majority of human beings, regardless of age. They occur in the mother’s milk, and probably in the tissues of the unborn child.
All this has come about because of the sudden rise and prodigious growth of an industry for the production of man-made or synthetic chemicals with insecticidal properties. This industry is a child of WWII. In the course of developing agents of chemical warfare, some of the chemicals created in the lab were found to be lethal to insects. The discovery didn’t come by chance: insects were widely used to test chemicals as agents of death for man.”
“What sets the new synthetic insecticides apart is their enormous biological potency. They have immense power not merely to poison but to enter into the most vital processes of the body and change them in sinister and often deadly ways. Thus they destroy the very enzymes whose function is to protect the body from harm, they block the oxidation processes from which the body receives its energy, they prevent the normal functioning of various organs, and they may initiate in certain cells the slow and irreversible change that leads to malignancy.
Yet new and more deadly chemicals are added to the list each year and new uses are devised so that contact with these materials has become practically worldwide. The production of synthetic pesticides in the US soared from 125 million pounds in 1947 to 638 million in 1960 — more than a fivefold increase. The wholesale value of these products was well over $250 million. But in the plans and hopes of the industry this enormous production is only a beginning.
A Who’s Who of pesticides is therefore of concern to us all. If we’re going to live so intimately with these chemicals — eating and drinking them, taking them into the very marrow of our bones — we had better know something about their nature and their power.”
“Storage in human beings has been well investigated, and we know that the average person is storing potentially harmful amounts. According to various studies, individuals with no known exposure (except the inevitable dietary one) store an average of 5.3 parts per million to 7.4 parts per million; agricultural workers 17 parts per mission; and workers in insecticide plants as high as 648 parts per million! So the range of proven storage is quite wide and, what’s even more to the point, the minimum figures are above the level at which damage to the liver and other organs or tissues may begin.
One of the most sinister features of DDT and related chemicals is the way they’re passed on from one organism to another through all the links of the food chains. For example, fields of alfalfa are dusted with DDT; meal is later prepared from the alfalfa and fed to hens; the hens lay eggs which contain DDT. Or the hay, containing residues of 7–8 parts per million, may be fed to cows. The DDT will turn up in the milk in the amount of about 3 parts per million, but in butter made from the milk the concentration may run to 65 parts per million. Through such a process of transfer, what started out as a very small amount of DDT may end as a heavy concentration. Farmers nowadays find it difficult to obtain uncontaminated fodder for their milk cows, though the FDA forbids the presence of insecticide residues in milk shipped in interstate commerce.
The poison may also be passed on from mother to offspring. Insecticide residues have been recovered from human milk in samples tested by FDA scientists. This means that the breast-fed human infant is receiving small but regular additions to the load of toxic chemicals building up in his body. It’s by no means his first exposure, however; there’s good reason to believe this begins while he’s still in the womb. In experimental animals the chlorinated hydrocarbon insecticides freely cross the barrier of the placenta, the traditional protective shield between the embryo and harmful substances in the mom’s body. While the quantities so received by human infants would normally be small, they are not unimportant because children are more susceptible to poisoning than adults. This situation also means that today the average individual almost certainly starts life with the first deposit of the growing load of chemicals his body will be required to carry thenceforth.”
“In the entire water pollution problem, there’s probably nothing more disturbing than the threat of widespread contamination of groundwater. It’s not possible to add pesticides to water anywhere without threatening the purity of water everywhere. Seldom if ever does Nature operate in closed and separate compartments, and she’s not done so in distributing the earth’s water supply. Rain, falling on the land, settles down through pores and cracks in soil and rock, penetrating deeper and deeper until eventually it reaches a zone where all the pores of the rock are filled with water, a dark, subsurface sea, rising under hills, sinking beneath valleys. This groundwater is always on the move, sometimes at a pace so slow that it travels no more than 50 feet a year, sometimes rapidly, by comparison, so that it moves nearly 1/10 of a mile a day. It travels by unseen waterways until here and there it comes to the surface as a spring, or perhaps is tapped ot feed a well. But mostly it contributes to streams and rivers. Except for what enters streams directly as rain or surface runoff, all the running water of the earth’s surface was at one time groundwater. And so, in a very real and frightening sense, pollution of the groundwater is pollution everywhere.”
“Also present in prodigious numbers are microscopic mites and primitive wingless insects called springtails. Despite their small size they play an important role in breaking down plant residues, aiding in the slow conversion of the litter of the forest floor to soil. The specialization of some of these minute creatures for their task is almost incredible. Several species of mites, for example, can begin life only within the fallen needles of a spruce tree. Sheltered here, they digest out the inner tissues of the needle. When the mites have completed their development only the outer layer of cells remains. The truly staggering task of dealing with the tremendous amount of plant material in the annual leaf fall belongs to some of the small insects of the soil and the forest floor. They macerate and digest the leaves, and aid in mixing the decomposed matter with the surface soil.”
“Earthworms play a fundamental role as geologic agents for the transport of soil — surface rocks are gradually covered by fine soil brought up from below by the worms, in annual amounts running to many tons to the acre in most favorable areas. At the same time, quantities of organic matter contained in leaves and grass (as much as 20 pounds to the square yard in 6 months) are drawn down into the burrows and incorporated in soil. Darwin’s calculations showed that the toil of earthworms might add a layer of soil an inch to 1.5 inches thick in a 10-year period. And this is by no means all they do: their burrows aerate the soil, keep it well drained, and aid the penetration of plant roots. The presence of earthworms increases the nitrifying powers of the soil bacteria and decreases purification of the soil. Organic matter is broken down as it passes through the digestive tracts of the worms and the soil is enriched by their excretory products.”
“An outstanding example in the field of controlling unwanted plants is the handling of the Klamath-weed problem in CA. Although the Klamath weed, or goatweed, is a native of Europe, it accompanied man in his westward migrations, first appearing in the US in 1793 near Lancaster, PA. By 1900 it had reached CA in the vicinity of the Klamath River, hence the name. By 1929 it had occupied about 100k acres of rangeland, and by 1952 it had invaded some 2.5 million acres.
Klamath weed, quite unlike such native plants as sagebrush, has no place in the ecology of the region, and no animals or other plants require its presence. On the contrary, wherever it appeared livestock become ‘scabby, sore-mouthed, and unthrifty’ from feeding on this toxic plant. Land values declined accordingly.
In Europe the Klamath weed has never become a problem because along with the plant there have developed various species of insects; these feed on it so extensively that its abundance is severely limited. In particular, 2 beetle species in France, pea-sized and of metallic color, have their whole beings do adapted to the presence of the weed that they feed and reproduce only upon it.
It was an event of historic importance when the first shipment of these beetles were brought to the US in 1944, for this was the first attempt in North America to control a plant with a plant-eating insect. By 1948 both species had become so well established that no further importations were needed. Their spread was accomplished by collecting beetles from the original colonies and redistributing them at the rate of millions a year. Within small areas the beetles accomplish their own dispersion, moving on as soon as the Klamath weed dies out and locating new strands with great precision. And as the beetles thin out the weed, desirable range plants that have been crowded out are able to return.
A 10-year survey completed in 1959 showed that control of the Klamath weed had been ‘more effective than hoped for even by enthusiasts,’ with the weed reduced to a mere 1% of its former abundance. This token infestation is harmless and is actually needed in order to maintain a population of beetles as protection against a future increase in the weed.
Another extraordinarily successful and economical example of weed control may be found in Australia. With the colonists’ usual taste for carrying plants or animals into a new country, a captain had brought various species of cactus into Australia about 1787, intending to use them in culturing cochineal insects for dye. Some of the cacti or prickly pears escaped from his gardens and by 1925 about 20 species could be found growing wild. Having no natural controls in this new territory, they spread prodigiously, eventually occupying about 60 million acres. At least half of this land was so densely covered as to be useless.
In 1920 Australian entomologists were sent to N & S America to study insect enemies of prickly pears in their native habitat. After trials of several species, 3 billion eggs of an Argentine moth were released in Australia in 1930. Seven years later the last dense growth of the prickly pear had been destroyed and the once uninhabitable areas reopened to settlement and grazing. The whole operation had cost less than a penny per acre. In contrast, the unsatisfactory attempts at chemical control in earlier years had cost about 10 pounds per acre.
Both of these examples suggest that extremely effective control of many kinds of unwanted vegetation might be achieved by paying more attention to the role of plant-eating insects. The science of range management has largely ignored this possibility, although these insects are perhaps the most selective of all grazers and their highly restricted diets could easily be turned to man’s advantage.”
“During fall 1959 some 27,000 acres in SE Michigan, including numerous Detroit suburbs, were heavily dusted from the air with pellets of aldrin, one of the most dangerous of all the chlorinated hydrocarbons. The program was conducted by the Michigan Department of Agriculture with the cooperation of the USDA; its announced purpose was control of the Japanese beetle.
Little need was shown for this drastic and dangerous action. on the contrary, one of the best-informed naturalists in the state declared: ‘For 30+ years, the Japanese beetle has been present in Detroit in small numbers. The numbers haven’t shown any appreciable increase in all this lapse of years. I have yet to see a single Japanese beetle [in 1959] other than the few caught in government catch traps in Detroit.”
“From its original point of entrance the Japanese beetle has spread rather widely throughout many of the states east of the Mississippi, where conditions of temperature and rainfall are suitable for it. Each year some outward movement beyond the existing boundaries of its distribution usually takes place. In the eastern areas where the beetles have been longest established, attempts have been made to set up natural controls. Where this has been done, the beetle’s populations have been kept at relatively low levels, as many records attest.
Despite the record of reasonable control in eastern areas, the Midwest states now on the fringe of the beetle’s range have launched an attack worthy of the most deadly enemy instead of only a moderately destructive insect, employing the most dangerous chemicals distributed in a manner that exposes large numbers of people, their domestic animals, and all wildlife to the poison intended for the beetle. As a result these Japanese beetle programs have caused shocking destruction of animal life and have exposed human beings to undeniable hazard. Sections of MI, KY, IA, IN, IL, & MO are all experiencing a rain of chemicals in the name of beetle control.
The MI spraying was one of the first large-scale attacks on the Japanese beetle from the air. The choice of aldrin, one of the deadliest of all chemicals, was not determined by any peculiar suitability for Japanese beetle control, but simply by the wish to save money — aldrin was the cheapest of the compounds available. While the state in its official release to the press acknowledged that aldrin is a ‘poison,’ it implied that no harm could come to human beings in the heavily populated areas to which the chemical was applied. (The official answer to the query ‘What precautions should I take?’ was ‘For you, none.’) A Federal Aviation Agency official was later quoted to the effect that ‘this is a safe operation’ and rep of Detroit Parks & Rec added his assurance that ‘the dust is harmless to humans and will not hurt plants or pets.’ One must assume that none of these officials had consulted the published and readily available reports of the US Public Health Service, the Fish and Wildlife Service, and other evidence of the extremely poisonous nature of aldrin.
Acting under the MI pest control law which allows the state to spray indiscriminately without notifying or gaining permission of individual landowners, the low-lying planes began to fly over Detroit. City authorities and the FAA were immediately besieged by calls from worried citizens. After receiving nearly 800 calls in a single hour, the police begged radio and TV stations and papers to ‘tell the watchers what they were seeing and advise them it was safe.’ The FAA’s safety officer assured the public that ‘the planes are carefully supervised’ and ‘are authorized to fly low.’ In a somewhat mistaken attempt to allay fears, he added that the planes had emergency valves that would allow them to dump their entire load instantaneously. This, fortunately, was not done, but as the planes went about their work the pellets of insecticide fell on beetles and humans alike, showers of ‘harmless’ poison descending on people shopping or going to work and on children out from school for lunch hour. Housewives swept the granules from porches and sidewalks, where they are said to have ‘looked like snow.’”
“Within a few days after the dusting operation, the Detroit Audubon Society began receiving calls about the birds. According to the society’s secretary, ‘The first indication that the people were concerned about the spray was a call from a woman who reported that coming home from church she saw an alarming number of dead and dying birds. She said there were no birds at all flying in the area, that she’d found at least a dozen [dead] in her backyard and that the neighbors had found dead squirrels.’ All other calls they received that day reported ‘a great many dead birds and no live ones…People who had maintained bird feeders said there were no birds at all in their feeders.’ Birds picked up in a dying condition showed the typical symptoms of insecticide poisoning — tremoring, loss of ability of fly, paralysis, convulsions.
Nor were birds the only forms of life immediately affected. A local vet reported that his office was full of clients with dogs and cats that had suddenly sickened. Cats, who so meticulously groom their coats and lick their paws, seemed to be most affected. Their illness took the form of severe diarrhea, vomiting, and convulsions. The only advice the vet could give his clients was not to let the animals out unnecessarily, or to wash the paws promptly if they did so. (But the chlorinated hydrocarbons cannot be washed even from fruits or veggies, so little protection could be expected from this measure.)
Despite the insistence of the City-County Health Commissioner that the birds must have been killed by ‘some other kind of spraying’ and that the outbreak of throat and chest irritations that followed the exposure to aldrin must’ve been due to ‘something else,’ the local Health Department received a constant stream of complaints. A prominent Detroit internist was called upon to treat 4 of his patients within an hour after they’d all been exposed while watching the planes at work. All had similar symptoms: nausea, vomiting, chills, fever, extreme fatigue, and coughing.’
The Detroit experience has been repeated in many other communities as pressure has mounted to combat the Japanese beetle with chemicals. At Blue Island, IL, hundreds of dead and dying birds were picked up. Data collected by birdbanders here suggest that 80% of the songbirds were sacrificed. In Joliet, IL, some 3,000 acres were treated with heptachlor in 1959. According to local reports, the bird population within the treated area was ‘virtually wiped out.’ Dead rabbits, muskrats, opossums, and fish were also found in numbers, and one of the local schools made the collection of insecticide-poisoned birds a science project.”
“The Long Island area included with the gypsy moth spraying in 1957 consisted chiefly of heavily populated towns and suburbs and of some coastal areas with bordering salt marsh. Nassau County is the most densely settled county in NY apart from NYC itself. In what seems the height of absurdity, the ‘threat of infestation of the NYC metro area’ has been cited as an important justification of the program. The gypsy moth is a forest insect, certainly not an inhabitant of cities. Nor does it live in meadows, cultivated fields, gardens, or marshes. Nevertheless, the planes hired by the USDA and the NY Department of Agricutlure and Markets in 1957 showered down the prescribed DDT-in-fuel-oil with impartiality. They sprayed truck gardens and dairy farms, fish ponds and salt marshes. They sprayed the 1/4-acre lots of suburbia, drenching a housewife making a desperate attempt to cover her garden before the roaring plane reached her, and showering insecticide over children at play and commuters at railway stations. At Setauket a fine quarter horse drank from a trough in a field which the planes had sprayed; 10 hours later it was dead. Autos were spotted with the oily mixture; flowers and shrubs were ruined. Birds, fish, crabs, and useful insects were killed.”
“The gypsy moth programs were marked by many acts of irresponsibility. Because the spray planes were paid by the gallon rather than by the acre there was no effort to be conservative, and many properties were sprayed not once but several times.”
“With the development of chemicals of broad lethal powers, there came a sudden change in the official attitude toward the fire ant. In 1957 the USDA launched one of the most remarkable publicity campaigns in its history. The fire ant suddenly became the target of a barrage of government releases, motion pictures, and government-inspired stories portraying it as a despoiler of southern agriculture and a killer of birds, livestock, and man. A mighty campaign was announced, in which the federal government would ultimately treat some 20 million acres in 9 southern states.
‘US pesticide makers appear to have tapped a sales bonanza in the increasing numbers of broad-scale pest elimination programs conducted by the USDA,’ cheerfully reported one trade journal in 1958, as the fire ant program got under way.
Never has any pesticide program been so thoroughly and deservedly damaged by practically everyone except the beneficiaries of this ‘sales bonanza.’ It’s an outstanding example of an ill-conceived, badly executed, and thoroughly detrimental experiment in the mass control of insects, an experiment so expensive in dollars, in destruction of animal life, and in loss of public confidence in the Agriculture Department that it’s incomprehensible that any funds should still be devoted to it.
Congressional support of the project was initially won by representations that were later discredited. The fire ant was pictured as a serious threat to southern agriculture through destruction of crops and to wildlife because of attacks on the young of ground-nesting birds. Its sting was said to make it a serious menace to human health.
Just how sound were these claims? The statements made by Department witnesses seeking appropriations were not in accord with those contained in key publications of the Agriculture Department. The 1957 bulletin Insecticide Recommendations…for the Control of Insects Attacking Crops and Livestock did not so much as mention the fire ant — an extraordinary omission if the Department believes its own propaganda. Moreover, its encyclopedic Yearbook for 1952, which was devoted to insects, contained only 1 short paragraph on the fire ant out of its half-million words of text.
Against the Department’s undocumented claim that the fire ant destroys crops and attacks livestock is the careful study of the Agricultural Experiment Station in the state that has the most intimate experience with this insect, AL. According to AL scientists, ‘damage to plants in general is rare.’ Dr. FS Arant, an entomologist at the AL Polytechnic Institute and in 1961 president of the Entomological Society of America, states that his department ‘has not received a single report of damage to plants by ants in the past 5 years…No damage to livestock has been observed.’ These men, who’ve actually observed the ants in the field and the lab, say that the fire ants feed chiefly on a variety of other insects, many of them considered harmful to man’s interests. Fire ants have been observed picking larvae of the boll weevil off cotton. Their mound-building activities serve a useful purpose in serating and draining the soil. The AL studies have been substantiated by investigations at the MS State University, and are far more impressive than the USDA’s evidence, apparently based either on conversations with farmers, who may easily mistake one ant for another, or on old research. Some entomologists believe that the ant’s food habits have changed as it had become more abundant, so that observations made several decades ago have little value now.
The claim that the ant is a menace to health and life also bears considerable modification. The Agriculture Department sponsored a propaganda movie (to gain support for its program) in which horror scenes were built around the fire ant’s sting. Admittedly this is painful and one is well-advised to avoid being stung, just as one ordinarily avoids a bee sting. Severe reactions may occasionally occur in sensitive individuals, and medical records one death possibly, though not definitely, attributable to fire ant venom. In contrast to this, the Office of Vital Stats records 33 deaths in 1959 alone from the sting of bees and wasps. Yet no one seems to have proposed ‘eradicating’ these insects. Again, local evidence is most convincing. Although the fire ant has inhabited Alabama for 40 years and is most heavily concentrated there, the AL State Health Officer declares that ‘there has never been recorded in AL a human death resulting from the bites of imported fire ants,’ and considers the medical cases resulting from the bites of fire ants ‘incidental.’ Ant mounds on lawns or playgrounds may create a situation where children are likely to be stung, but this is hardly an excuse for drenching millions of acres with poisons. These situations can easily be handled by individual treatment of the mounds.”
