# 2026-05-01 - Silent Spring by Rachel Carson
In 2011 i enjoyed reading The Sea Around Us by Rachel Carson [1].
Many times i've heard of Silent Spring and seen it referenced. So i
was excited to find it recently in a little free library. Reading
this book felt stimulating because of its clarity, brisk pace, and
the large amount of information. Even though it was published in
1962 and some of the details have changed, much of it still feels
relevant.
The author spent some time frankly discussing man-made carcinogens.
I thought it was interesting that she died of cancer 2 years after
this book was published. She was writing about damage to the planet
Earth, but she may as well have been writing about damage to her own
body. For good or ill we as a species share the fate of our planet.
What follows are quotes that i found interesting, plus comments
within square brackets.
# Acknowledgments
Every writer of a book on many diverse facts owes much to the skill
and helpfulness of librarians.
# Chapter 1: A Fable For Tomorrow
I am pessimistic about the human race because it is too ingenious
for its own good. Our approach to nature is to beat it into
submission. We would stand a better chance of survival if we
accommodated ourselves to this planet and viewed it
appreciatively instead of skeptically and dictatorially.
--E. B. White
[
In chapter 1, the author gives a fable to represent environmental
destruction, depicting a "before and after" contrast between a lush,
fertile environment and a desolate, polluted one. At some point the
popular consensus (in the USA) shifted and decided that outdoor house
cats were a bad idea. Later, the popular consensus shifted and
decided that outdoor children are also a bad idea. This shift to
indoor living can only heighten our disconnect from nature.
Once i drove with a friend and her daughter through a clear cut. My
friend thought it was a shame. Her daughter replied:
"What's the big deal? It will just grow back."
On a hike in northern California, i went through an old-growth
preserve, bordered by a monoculture that grew back after a clear cut.
When i walked across the border of the preserve, the contrast was as
stark as going from Earth to Mars. Yes, both forests contained
trees, but the similarity ended there. The monoculture was thick
like weeds, and the trees looked crowded, skinny, and ill-favored.
It was dry and looked like a fire hazard, in contrast to the cool,
moist fairyland that i had just traveled through.
It takes centuries for a forest to progress through its stages and
become old-growth. I've read that never in human history have we
"grown back" an old-growth forest. Our attention doesn't span
centuries. No, it won't "just grow back"!
]
# Chapter 2: The Obligation To Endure
Certain rocks gave out dangerous radiation; even within the light of
the sun, from which all life draws its energy, there were short-wave
radiations with power to injure. Given time--time not in years but
in millennia--life adjusts, and a balance has been reached. For time
is the essential ingredient; but in the modern world there is no
time.
The rapidity of change and speed with which new situations are
created follow the impetuous and heedless pace of man rather than the
deliberate pace of nature.
Some would-be architects of our future look toward a time when it
will be possible to alter the human germ plasm [DNA] by design. But
we may already 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 his choice of insect spray.
All this is not to say there is no insect problem and no need of
control. I am saying, rather, that control must be geared to
reality, not to mythical situations, and that the methods employed
must be such that they do not destroy us along with the insects.
* * *
The problem whose attempted solution has brought such a train of
disaster in its wake is an accompaniment of our modern way of life.
Under primitive agricultural conditions the farmer had few insect
problems. Those arose with the intensification of agriculture...
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.
In new territory, out of reach of the restraining hand of natural
enemies that kept down its numbers in its native land, an invading
plant or animals is able to become enormously abundant. Thus it is
no accident that our most troublesome insects are introduced
species.
[This is] an era dominated by industry, in which the right to make a
dollar at whatever cost is seldom challenged. When the public
protests, confronted with some obvious evidence of damaging results
of pesticide applications, it is fed little tranquilizing pills of
half-truth. It is the public that is being asked to assume the risks
that the insect controllers calculate. The public must decide
whether it wishes to continue on the present road, and it can do so
only when in full possession of the facts.
[No consent without informed consent.]
# Chapter 3: Elixirs Of Death
This industry is a child of the Second World War. In the course of
developing agents of chemical warfare, some of the chemicals created
in the laboratory were found to be lethal to insects. The discovery
did not come by chance: insects were widely used to test chemicals as
agents of death for man.
Epidemics of arsenic poisoning involving whole populations over long
periods are on record. Arsenic contaminated environments have also
caused sickness and death among horses, cows, goats, pigs, deer,
fishes, and bees; despite this record arsenical sprays and dusts are
widely used. In the arsenic-sprayed cotton country of southern
United States beekeeping as an industry has nearly died out.
[See also my notes at the end of the section on Chapter 5, which are
highly relevant to arsenic poisoning.]
* * *
Modern insecticides are still more deadly. The vast majority fall
into one of two large groups of chemicals. One, represented by DDT,
is known as the "chlorinated hydrocarbons." The other group consists
of the organic phosphorus insecticides, and is represented by the
reasonably familiar malathion and parathion.
The fact that the suburbanite is not instantly stricken has little
meaning, for the toxins may sleep long in his body, to become
manifest months or years later in an obscure disorder almost
impossible to trace to its origins.
There are vast gaps in our knowledge of how dieldrin is stored or
distributed in the body, or excreted, for the chemists ingenuity in
devising insecticides has long ago outrun biological knowledge of the
way these poisons affect the living organism. However there is
every indication of long storage in the human body, where deposits
may lie dormant like a slumbering volcano, only to flare up in
periods of physiological stress when the body draws upon its fat
reserves.
Parathion is one of the most widely used of the organic phosphates.
It is also on of the most powerful and dangerous. A chemist,
thinking to learn by the most direct possible means the dose acutely
toxic to human beings, swallowed a minute amount, equivalent to about
.00424 ounces. Paralysis followed so instantaneously that he could
not reach the antidotes he had prepared at hand, and so he died.
Yet some 7,000,000 pounds of parathion are now applied to fields and
orchards of the United States... The amount used on California farms
alone could, according to one medical authority, "provide a lethal
dose for 5 to 10 times the whole world's population."
The common salad bowl may easily present a combination of organic
phosphate insecticides. Residues well within the legally permissible
limits may interact [with each other in dangerous ways.]
While the results of weed killers such as sodium arsenite or the
phenols are grossly obvious, some other herbicides are more insidious
in their effects. For example, the now famous cranberry-weed-killer
aminotriazole, or amitrol, is rated as having relatively low
toxicity. But in the long run its tendency to cause malignant tumors
in the thyroid may be far more significant for wildlife and perhaps
also for man.
# Chapter 4: Surface Waters And Underground Seas
A disturbing example of [surface water contamination] seems to be
building up on the national wildlife refuges at Tule Lake and Lower
Klamath, both in California. These refuges are part of a chain
including also the refuge on Upper Klamath Lake just over the border
in Oregon. All are linked, perhaps fatefully, by a shared water
supply, and all are affected by the fact that they lie like small
islands in a great sea of surrounding farmlands--land reclaimed by
drainage and stream diversion from an original waterfowl paradise of
marshland and open water.
These farmlands around the refuges are now irrigated by water from
Upper Klamath Lake. The irrigation waters, recollected from the
fields they have served, are then pumped into Tule Lake and from
there to Lower Klamath. All of the waters of the wildlife refuges
established on these two bodies of water therefore represent the
drainage of agricultural lands. It is important to remember this in
connection with recent happenings.
In the summer of 1960 the refuge staff picked up hundreds of dead and
dying birds at Tule Lake and Lower Klamath. Most of these were
fish-eating species--herons, pelicans, grebes, gulls. Upon analysis
they were found to contain insecticide residues identified as
toxaphene, DDD, and DDE. Fish from the lakes were also found to
contain insecticides; so did samples of plankton. The refuge manager
believes that pesticide residues are now building up in the waters of
these refuges being conveyed there by return irrigation flow form
heavily sprayed agricultural lands.
Although the California Department of Public Health professed to see
no hazard, nevertheless in 1959 it required that the use of DDD in
the lake be stopped.
[See the introduction in Myths of the Modocs [2] for a sympathetic
view of the indigenous people of this area.]
It is an extraordinary fact that the deliberate introduction of
poisons into a reservoir is becoming a fairly common practice. The
purpose is usually to promote recreational uses... When sportsmen of
an area want to "improve" fishing in a reservoir, they prevail on
authorities to dump quantities of poison into it to kill the
undesired fish, which are then replaced with hatchery fish more
suited to the sportsmen's taste. The procedure has a strange,
Alice-in-Wonderland quality.
[Still doing it. In 2014 i camped at Diamond Lake just a few days
after the USFS poisoned the lake. There were warning signs all over
the place.]
... a study made in Holland in the early 1950's provides support for
the view that polluted waterways may carry a cancer hazard. Cities
receiving their drinking water from rivers had a higher death rate
from cancer than did those whose water came from sources presumed to
be less susceptible to pollution, such as wells.
# Chapter 5: Realms of the Soil
The thin layer of soil that forms a patchy covering over the
continents controls our own existence and that of every other animal
on the land. Without soil, land plants as we know them could not
grow, and without plants no animals could survive.
The problem that concerns us here is one that has received little
consideration: What happens to these incredibly numerous and
necessary inhabitants of the soil when poisonous chemicals are
carried down into their world, either introduced directly as soil
"sterilants" or borne on the rain that has picked up a lethal
contamination as it filters through the leafy canopy of forest and
orchard and cropland? Is it reasonable to suppose that we can apply
a broad-spectrum insecticide to kill the burrowing larval stages of a
crop-destroying insect, for example, without also killing the "good"
insects whose function may be the essential one of breaking down
organic matter? Or can we use a non-specific fungicide without also
killing the fungi that inhabit the roots of many trees in a
beneficial association that aids the tree in extracting nutrients
from the soil?
Seemingly moderate applications of insecticide over a period of years
may build up fantastic quantities in soil.
Arsenic provides a classic case of the virtually permanent poisoning
of the soil. Although arsenic as a spray on growing tobacco has been
largely replaced by the synthetic organic insecticides since the
mid-40's, the arsenic content of cigarettes made from American-grown
tobacco increased more than 300 per cent between the years 1932 and
1952. Later studies have revealed increases as much as 600 per cent.
Dr. Henry S. Satterlee, an authority on arsenic toxicology, says
that although organic insecticides have largely been substituted for
arsenic, the tobacco plants continue to pick up the old poison. For
the soils of tobacco plantations are now thoroughly impregnated with
residues of a heavy and relatively insoluble poison, arsenate of
lead. This will continue to release arsenic in a soluble form. The
soil of a large portion of the land planted with tobacco has been
subjected to "cumulative and well-nigh permanent poisoning,"
according to Dr. Satterlee. Tobacco grown in the eastern
Mediterranean countries where arsenical insecticides are not used has
shown no such increase in arsenic content.
[Cotton was another southern crop heavily dosed with arsenic.
I read about repeated arsenic scares in baby food, caused by
USA-grown rice [3]. Rice is used in many baby foods because it is
inexpensive and easy to digest. I read that rice is often grown in
former cotton-growing parts of the south. I read that federal rules
require 7 years without using conventional pesticides before land can
qualify for organic farming. This begs several questions.
"Although the of lead arsenic-containing pesticides has long been
stopped, large areas land remain contaminated." --Wikipedia [4]
I read that in the USA, rice is mainly grown in Arkansas, California,
Louisiana, Mississippi, Missouri, and Texas. All of these states
have a history of growing cotton, with the last 3 being the largest
producers. Rice from these states has twice as much arsenic compared
to rice grown in California [5]. I read that the USA has some of the
most relaxed rice regulations in the world, and India has some of the
most stringent. So i was not surprised to read that rice grown in
India and Pakistan has the least arsenic.
Arsenic is mostly deposited in the outer layers, so brown rice has
much more arsenic than white rice does.
]
# Chapter 6: Earth's Green Mantle
A practical example was provided recently by the parks in a city in
Holland. The roses were doing badly. Soil samples showed heavy
infestations by tiny nematode worms. Scientist of the Dutch Plant
Protection Service did not recommend chemical sprays or soil
treatments; instead, they suggested that marigolds be planted among
the roses. This plant, which the purist would doubtless consider a
weed in any rosebed, releases an excretion from its roots that kills
the soil nematodes. The advice was taken; some beds were planted
with marigolds, some left without as controls. The results were
striking. With the aid of the marigolds the roses flourished; in the
control beds they were sickly and drooping. Marigolds are now used
in many places for combating nematodes.
In the same way, and perhaps quite unknown to us, other plants that
we ruthlessly eradicate may be performing a function that is
necessary to the health of the soil.
An outstanding example in the field of controlling unwanted plants is
the handling of the Klamath weed problem in California. Although
the Klamath weed, or goatweed is a native of Europe (where it is
called St. Johnswort), it accompanied man in his westward migrations,
first appearing in the United States in 1793 near Lancaster,
Pennsylvania. By 1900 it had reached California in the vicinity of
the Klamath River, hence the name locally given to it. By 1929 it
had invaded some two and one half 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 became "scabby, sore-mouthed, and unthrifty" from feeding
on this toxic plant. Land values declined accordingly, for the
Klamath weed was considered to hold the first mortgage.
In Europe the Klamath weed, or St. Johnswort, 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, two species of beetles
in southern France, pea-sized and of metallic color, have their whole
beings so 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 shipments of
these beetles were brought to the United States 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 accomplished their own dispersion, moving on as
soon as the Klamath weed dies out and locating new stands with great
precision. And as the beetles thin out the weed, desirable range
plants that have been crowded out are able to return.
A ten-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 per cent 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.
# Chapter 7: Needless Havoc
The citizen who wishes to make a fair judgment of the question of
wildlife loss today is confronted with a dilemma. On the one hand
conservationists and many wildlife biologists assert that the losses
have been severe and in some cases catastrophic. On the other hand
the control agencies tend to deny flatly and categorically that such
losses have occurred, or that they are of any importance if they
have. Which view are we to accept?
# Chapter 8: And No Birds Sing
In Toledo, Ohio, a similar experience caused the Superintendent of
Forestry, Joseph A. Sweeney, to take a realistic look at the results
of spraying. Spraying was begun there in 1953 and continued through
1959. Meanwhile, however, Mr. Sweeney had noticed that a city-wide
infestation of the cottony maple scale was worse after the spraying
recommended by "the books and the authorities" than it had been
before. He decided to review the results of spraying for Dutch elm
disease for himself. His findings shocked him. In the city of
Toledo, he found, "the only areas with any control were the areas
where we used some promptness in removing the diseased or brood
trees. Where we depended on spraying the disease was out of control.
In the country where nothing has been done the disease has not
spread as fast as it has in the city. This indicates that spraying
destroys any natural enemies."
"We are abandoning spraying for the Dutch elm disease. This has
brought me into conflict with the people who back any recommendations
by the United States Department of Agriculture but I have the facts
and will stick with them."
And New York state today has a most impressive record of containing
and suppressing the disease. Yet it has not relied on spraying. In
fact, its agricultural extension service does not recommend spraying
as a community method of control.
The key to a healthy plant or animal community lies in what the
British ecologist Charles Elton calls "the conservation of variety."
What is happening now is in a large part a result of the biological
unsophistication of past generations. Even a generation ago no one
knew that to fill large areas with a single species of tree was to
invite disaster.
# Chapter 11: Beyond the Dreams of the Borgias
Each of the recurrent exposures, no matter how slight, contributes to
the progressive buildup of chemicals in our bodies and so to
cumulative poisoning. Lulled by the soft sell and the hidden
persuader, the average citizen is seldom aware of the deadly
materials with which he is surrounding himself; indeed, he may not
realize he is using them at all.
So thoroughly has the age of poisons become established that anyone
may walk into a store and, without questions being asked, buy
substances of far greater death-dealing power than the medicinal drug
for which he may be required to sign a "poison book" in the pharmacy
next door.
The mores of suburbia now dictate that crabgrass must go at whatever
cost. Sacks containing chemicals designed to rid the lawn of such
despised vegetation have become almost a status symbol. These
weed-killing chemicals are sold with brand names that never suggest
their identity or nature. To learn that they contain chlordane or
dieldrin one must read exceedingly fine print placed on the least
conspicuous part of the sack. The descriptive literature that may be
picked up in any hardware or garden-supply store seldom if ever
reveals the true hazard involved in handling or applying the
material. Instead, the typical illustration portrays a happy family
scene, father and son smilingly preparing to apply the chemical to
the lawn, small children tumbling over the grass with a dog.
The ultimate answer is to use less toxic chemicals so that the public
hazard from their misuse is greatly reduced. Such chemicals already
exist: pyrethrins, rotenone, ryania, and others derived from plant
substances.
[A family member overheard a disturbing conversation at a garden
supply store during the "cannabis boom" in Oregon. A new grower was
talking with a store employee about about a spider mite infestation.
The employee recommended using earwig perimeter treatments. Common
perimeter treatments are bifenthrin, cyhalothrin, deltamethrin, and
permethrin. These are pyrethrins, one of the "less toxic" pesticides
listed in Silent Spring. However, several of them are neurotoxic and
carcinogenic. They aren't safe to inhale. For example, cyhalothrin
is a restricted use pesticide and it is a violation of federal law to
use it in a manner inconsistent with its labelling.]
In addition to making this change to less dangerous agricultural
pesticides, we should diligently explore the possibilities of
nonchemical methods. Agricultural use of insect diseases, caused by
a bacterium highly specific for certain types of insects, is already
being tried in California, and more extended tests of this method are
underway. A great many other possibilities exist for effective
insect control by methods that will leave no residue on foods. Until
a large-scale conversion to these methods has been made, we shall
have little relief from a situation that, by any common-sense
standards, is intolerable.
# Chapter 12: The Human Price
We are accustomed to look for the gross and immediate effect and to
ignore all else. Unless this appears promptly and in such obvious
form that it cannot be ignored, we tend to deny the existence of a
hazard.
Storage of the chlorinated hydrocarbons, as we have seen, is
cumulative, beginning with the smallest intake. The toxic materials
become lodged in all the fatty tissues of the body. When these
reserves of fat are drawn upon the poison may then strike quickly.
[This can happen with the loss of weight during an illness, making
illness that much more dangerous.]
The adipose tissue, we are warned, is not merely a place for the
deposition of fat, but has many important functions with which the
stored poisons may interfere. Furthermore, fats are widely
distributed in the organs and tissues of the whole body, even being
constituents of cell membranes. It is important to remember,
therefore, that the fat-soluble insecticides are in a position to
interfere with the most vital and necessary functions of oxidation
and energy production.
One of the most significant facts about the chlorinated hydrocarbon
insecticides is their effect on the liver.
The whole problem of pesticide poisoning is enormously complicated by
the fact that a human being, unlike a laboratory animal living under
rigidly controlled conditions, is never exposed to one chemical
alone. Between the major groups of insecticides, and between them
and other chemicals, there are interactions that have serious
potentials.
The power of the organic phosphates, these poisons of the
nerve-protecting enzyme cholinesterase, may become greater if the
body has first been exposed to a chlorinated hydrocarbon which
injures the liver. This is because, when liver function is
disturbed, the cholinesterase level drops below normal. The added
depressive effect of the organic phosphate may then be enough to
precipitate acute symptoms.
During [the prohibition] some medicinal substances were pressed into
service as substitutes for liquor. One of these was Jamaica ginger.
But the /United States Pharmacopeia/ product was expensive, and
bootleggers conceived the idea of making a substitute Jamaica ginger.
They succeeded so well that their spurious product responded to the
appropriate chemical tests and deceived the government chemists. To
give the false ginger the necessary tang they had introduced a
chemical known as triorthocresyl phosphate. This chemical, like
parathion and its relatives, destroys the protective enzyme
cholinesterase. As a consequence of drinking the bootleggers'
produce some 15,000 people developed a permanently crippling type of
paralysis of the leg muscles, a condition now called "ginger
paralysis." The paralysis was accompanied by destruction of the
nerve sheaths and by degeneration of the cells of the anterior horns
of the spinal cord.
About two decades later various other organic phosphates came into
use as insecticides, as we have seen, and soon cases reminiscent of
the ginger paralysis episode began to occur.
The insecticide responsible for these cases has been withdrawn from
the market, but some of those now in use may be capable of like harm.
Malathion (beloved of gardeners), has induced severe muscular
weakness in experiments on chickens. This was attended (as in ginger
paralysis) by destruction of the sheaths of the sciatic and spinal
nerves.
All these consequences of organic phosphate poisoning, if survived,
may be a prelude to worse. In view of the severe damage they inflict
upon the nervous system, it was perhaps inevitable that these
insecticides would eventually be linked with mental disease.
Echoes of this sort of thing are to be found, as we have seen,
widely scattered throughout medical literature, sometimes involving
the chlorinated hydrocarbons, sometimes the organic phosphates.
Confusion, delusions, loss of memory, mania--a heavy price to pay for
the temporary destruction of a few insects, but a price that will
continue to be exacted as long as we insist upon using chemicals that
strike directly at the nervous system.
# Chapter 13: Through A Narrow Window
The biologist George Wald once compared his work on an exceedingly
specialized subject, the visual pigments of the eye, to "a very
narrow window through which at a distance one can see only a crack of
light. As one comes closer the view grows wider and wider, until
finally through this same narrow window one is looking at the
universe."
So it is that only when we bring our focus to bear, first on the
individual cells of the body, then on the minute structures within
the cells, and finally on the ultimate reductions of molecules within
these structures--only when we do this can we comprehend the most
serious and far-reaching effects of the haphazard introduction of
foreign chemicals into our internal environment. Medical research
has only rather recently turned to the functioning of the individual
cell in producing the energy that is the indispensable quality of
life. The extraordinary energy-producing mechanism of the body is
basic not only to health but to life; it transcends in importance
even the most vital organs, for without the smooth and effective
functioning of the energy-yielding oxidation none of the body's
functions can be performed. Yet the nature of many of the chemicals
used against insects, rodents, and weeds is such that they may strike
directly at this system, disrupting its beautifully functioning
mechanism.
ATP is the universal currency of energy--found in all organisms from
microbes to man.
The charging of the battery, in which ADP and a free phosphate group
are combined to restore ATP, is coupled to the oxidative process; the
close linking is known as coupled phosphorylation. If the
combination becomes uncoupled, the means is lost for providing usable
energy. The consequences of uncoupling could indeed be disastrous
for any organism from embryo to adult: in time it could lead to the
death of the tissue or even of the organism.
How can uncoupling come about? Radiation is an uncoupler, and the
death of cells exposed to radiation is thought by some to be brought
about in this way. Unfortunately, a good many chemicals also have
the power to separate oxidation from energy production, and the
insecticides and weed killers are well represented on the list.
But uncoupling is not the only way to extinguish the little fires in
some or all of the body's billions of cells. We have seen that each
step in oxidation is directed and expedited by a single enzyme. When
any of these enzymes--even a single one of them--is destroyed or
weakened, the cycle of oxidation within the cell comes to a halt. It
makes no difference which enzyme is affected. Oxidation progresses
in a cycle like a turning wheel. If we thrust a crowbar between the
spokes of a wheel it makes no difference where we do it, the wheel
stops turning. In the same way, if we destroy an enzyme that
functions at any point in the cycle, oxidation ceases. There is then
no further energy production, so the end effect is very similar to
uncoupling.
The crowbar to wreck the wheels of oxidation can be supplied by any
number of chemicals commonly used as pesticides.
Merely by systematically withholding oxygen, experimenters have
caused normal cells to turn into cancer cells...
Two of the carbamates are actually used to prevent sprouting of
potatoes in storage--precisely because of their proven effect in
stopping cell division. Another anti-sprouting agent, maleic
hydrazide, is rated a powerful mutagen.
# Chapter 14: One In Every Four
In 1775 Sir Percival Pott declared that the scrotal cancer so common
among chimney sweeps must be caused by the soot that accumulated on
their bodies. He could not furnish the "proof" we would demand
today, but modern research methods have now isolated the deadly
chemical in soot and proved the correctness of his perception.
A quarter of a century ago, cancer in children was considered a
medical rarity. /Today, more American school children die of cancer
than from any other disease./
The late C. P. Rhoads, onetime director of the Sloan-Kettering
Institute for Cancer Research, found that test animals exposed to a
very potent chemical carcinogen developed no cancer if they had been
fed yeast, a rich source of natural B vitamins. A deficiency of
these vitamins has been found to accompany mouth cancer and perhaps
cancer of other sites in the digestive tract.
Despite the prominence that "magic bullets" and "wonder drugs" hold
in the layman's mind, most of the really decisive battles in the war
against infectious disease consisted of measures to eliminate disease
organisms from the environment. [Such as water sanitation.
Prevention is better than cure.]
The chemical agents of cancer have become entrenched in our world in
two ways: first, and ironically, through man's search for a better
and easier way of life; second, because the manufacture and sale of
such chemicals has become an accepted part of our economy and our way
of life.
# Chapter 15: Nature Fights Back
To have risked so much in our efforts to mold nature to our
satisfaction and yet to have failed in achieving our goal would
indeed be the final irony. Yet this, it seems, is our situation.
The truth, seldom mentioned but there for anyone to see, is that
nature is not so easily molded and that the insects are finding ways
to circumvent our chemical attacks on them.
By a process of genetic selection, the insects are developing strains
resistant to chemicals. But the broader problem, which we shall look
at now, is the fact that our chemical attack is weakening the
defenses in the environment itself, defenses designed to keep the
various species in check. Each time we breach those defenses a horde
of insects pours through.
The stockman's zeal for eliminating the coyote has resulted in
plagues of field mice.
The predatory insects of field and forests play the same role as the
wolves and coyotes of the Kaibab. Kill them off and the population
of the prey insect surges upward.
The trouble is that we are seldom aware of the protection afforded by
natural enemies until it fails. Most of us walk unseeing through the
world, unaware alike of its beauties, its wonders, and the strange
and sometimes terrible intensity of the lives that are being lived
around us. So it is that the activities of the insect predators and
parasites are known to few.
Thus, through the circumstances of their lives, and the nature of
our own wants, all of these have been our allies in keeping the
balance of nature tilted in our favor. Yet we have turned our
artillery against our friends. The terrible danger is that we have
grossly underestimated their value in keeping at bay a dark tide of
enemies that, without their help, can overrun us.
If this seems absurd, consider the situation in the citrus groves of
California, where the world's most famous and successful experiment
in biological control was carried out in the 1880's. In 1872 a scale
insect that feeds on the sap of citrus trees appeared in California
and within the next 15 years developed into a pest so destructive
that the fruit crop in many orchards was a complete loss. Many
farmers gave up and pulled out their trees. Then a parasite of the
scale insect was imported from Australia, a small lady beetle called
the vedalia. Within only two years after the first shipment of the
beetles, the scale was under complete control throughout the
citrus-growing sections of California. From that time on one could
search for days among the orange groves without finding a single
scale insect.
Then in the 1940's the citrus growers began to experiment with
glamorous new chemicals against other insects. With the advent of
DDT and even more toxic chemicals to follow, the populations of the
vedalia in many sections of California were wiped out. Its
importation had cost the government a mere $5000. Its activities had
saved the fruit growers several millions of dollars a year, but in a
moment of heedlessness the benefit was canceled out. Infestations of
the scale insect quickly reappeared and damage exceeded anything that
had been seen for fifty years.
"This possibly marked the end of an era," said Dr. Paul Debach of the
Citrus Experiment Station in Riverside. Now control of the scale
has become enormously complicated. The vedalia can be maintained
only be repeated releases and by the most careful attention to spray
schedules, to minimize their contact with insecticides. And
regardless of what the citrus growers do, they are more or less at
the mercy of the owners of adjacent acreages....
# Chapter 16: The Rumblings of an Avalanche
The list of resistant species now includes practically all of the
insect groups of medical importance.
Agencies concerned with vector-borne disease are at present coping
with their problems by switching from one insecticide to another as
resistance develops. But this cannot go on indefinitely, despite the
ingenuity of the chemists in supplying new materials. Dr. Brown has
pointed out that we are traveling "a one-way street." No one knows
how long the street is. If the dead end is reached before control of
disease-carrying insects is achieved, our situation will indeed be
critical.
With insects that infect crops the story is the same.
Ordinarily resistance takes two or three years to develop... The
number of generations produced by an insect population in a year is
important.
The hopeful question is sometimes asked, "If insects can become
resistant to chemicals, could human beings do the same?"
Theoretically they could; but since this would take hundreds or even
thousands of years [at our rate of reproduction], the comfort to
those living now is slight.
# Chapter 17: The Other Road
We stand now where two roads diverge. But unlike the roads in
Robert Frost's familiar poem, they are not equally fair. The road we
have long been traveling is deceptively easy, a smooth superhighway
on which we progress with great speed, but at its end lies disaster.
The other fork of the road--the one "less traveled by"--offers our
last, our only chance to reach a destination that assures the
preservation of our earth. [And the preservation of ourselves.]
A truly extraordinary variety of alternatives to the chemical control
of insects is available. All have this in common: they are
/biological/ solutions, based on understanding of the living
organisms they seek to control, and of the whole fabric of life to
which these organisms belong.
The "control of nature" is a phrase conceived in arrogance, born of
the Neanderthal age of biology and philosophy, when it was supposed
that nature exists for the convenience of man. The concepts and
practices of applied entomology for the most part date from that
Stone Age of science. It is our alarming misfortune that so
primitive a science has armed itself with the most modern and
terrible weapons, and that in turning them against the insects it has
also turned them against the earth. [And against ourselves.]
author: Carson, Rachel, 1907-1964
TEXT detail: gopher://gopherpedia.com/0/Silent_Spring
tags: book,health,non-fiction,science
title: Silent Spring
# Footnotes
DIR [1] The Sea Around Us by Rachel Carson
HTML [2] Myths of the Modocs
HTML [3] Arsenic In USA Grown Rice
TEXT [4] Arsenic poisoning (Wikipedia)
HTML [5] Lower arsenic in California rice
# Tags
DIR book
DIR health
DIR non-fiction
DIR science