Silent Spring

by Rachel Carson

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 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.”

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 could not accurately predict the long-term effects of bioaccumulation in the cells or the impact of such a mixture of chemicals on human health.

As Albert Schweitzer has said, “Man can hardly even recognize the devils of his own creation.”

The rapidity of change and the speed with which new situations are created follow the impetuous and heedless pace of man rather than the deliberate pace of nature. Radiation is no longer merely the background radiation of rocks, the bombardment of cosmic rays, the ultraviolet of the sun that have existed before there was any life on earth; radiation is now the unnatural creation of man’s tampering with the atom.

they are the synthetic creations of man’s inventive mind, brewed in his laboratories, and having no counterparts in nature.

They should not be called “insecticides,” but “biocides.”

It has happened also because, for reasons to be described later, 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.

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 have done.

In the words of Jean Rostand, “The obligation to endure gives us the right to know.”

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.

In the entire water-pollution problem, there is probably nothing more disturbing than the threat of widespread contamination of groundwater.

Seldom if ever does Nature operate in closed and separate compartments, and she has not done so in distributing the earth’s water supply.

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.

Of all the larger inhabitants of the soil, probably none is more important than the earthworm. Over three quarters of a century ago, Charles Darwin published a book titled The Formation of Vegetable Mould, through the Action of Worms, with Observations on Their Habits.

Darwin’s calculations showed that the toil of earthworms might add a layer of soil an inch to an inch and a half thick in a ten-year period.

This soil community, then, consists of a web of interwoven lives, each in some way related to the others—the living creatures depending on the soil, but the soil in turn a vital element of the earth only so long as this community within it flourishes.

“A few false moves on the part of man may result in destruction of soil productivity and the arthropods may well take over.”

The best and cheapest controls for vegetation are not chemicals but other plants.

Incidents like the eastern Illinois spraying raise a question that is not only scientific but moral. The question is whether any civilization can wage relentless war on life without destroying itself, and without losing the right to be called civilized.

“The greatest enemy of insect life is other predatory insects, birds, and some small mammals, but DDT kills indiscriminately, including nature’s own safeguards or policemen . . . In the name of progress are we to become victims of our own diabolical means of insect control to provide temporary comfort,

What is happening now is in 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.

Today we are concerned with a different kind of hazard that lurks in our environment—a hazard we ourselves have introduced into our world as our modern way of life has evolved.

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.

Merely by systematically withholding oxygen, experimenters have caused normal cells to turn into cancer cells, as we shall see in the following chapter. Some hint of other drastic consequences of depriving a cell of oxygen can be seen in animal experiments on developing embryos. With insufficient oxygen the orderly processes by which the tissues unfold and the organs develop are disrupted; malformations and other abnormalities then occur. Presumably the human embryo deprived of oxygen may also develop congenital deformities.

There is no reason to suppose these disastrous events are confined to birds. ATP is the universal currency of energy, and the metabolic cycles that produce it turn to the same purpose in birds and bacteria, in men and mice. The fact of insecticide storage in the germ cells of any species should therefore disturb us, suggesting comparable effects in human beings.

Working with mustard gas, they found that this chemical produces permanent chromosome abnormalities that cannot be distinguished from those induced by radiation.

Mosquitoes exposed to DDT for several generations turned into strange creatures called gynandromorphs—part male and part female.

A quarter century ago, cancer in children was considered a medical rarity. Today, more American school children die of cancer than from any other disease.

Dr. W. C. Hueper of the National Cancer Institute, a foremost authority on environmental cancer, has suggested that congenital cancers and cancers in infants may be related to the action of cancer-producing agents to which the mother has been exposed during pregnancy and which penetrate the placenta to act on the rapidly developing fetal tissues.

In the early 1920’s women who painted luminous figures on watch dials swallowed minute amounts of radium by touching the brushes to their lips; in some of these women bone cancers developed after a lapse of 15 or more years. A period of 15 to 30 years or even more has been demonstrated for some cancers caused by occupational exposures to chemical carcinogens.

From extensive clinical experience he believes that “the vast majority of patients suffering from the blood dyscrasias and lymphoid diseases have a significant history of exposure to the various hydrocarbons which in turn includes most of the pesticides of today.

Where pesticides are involved, the chemicals that figure most prominently in the case histories are DDT, lindane, benzene hexachloride, the nitrophenols, the common moth crystal paradichlorobenzene, chlordane, and, of course, the solvents in which they are carried.

Certain chemicals, again reminding us of radiation products like Strontium 90, have a peculiar affinity for the bone marrow. Benzene, a frequent constituent of insecticidal solvents, lodges in the marrow and remains deposited there for periods known to be as long as 20 months. Benzene itself has been recognized in medical literature for many years as a cause of leukemia.

No one knows how many species of insects inhabit the earth because so many are yet to be identified. But more than 700,000 have already been described. This means that in terms of the number of species, 70 to 80 per cent of the earth’s creatures are insects.

If Darwin were alive today the insect world would delight and astound him with its impressive verification of his theories of the survival of the fittest.

Resistance, therefore, is something that develops in a population after time measured in several or many generations. Human populations reproduce at the rate of roughly three generations per century, but new insect generations arise in a matter of days or weeks.

In the laboratory, male gypsy moths have attempted copulation with chips of wood, vermiculite, and other small, inanimate objects, so long as they were suitably impregnated with gyplure.