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“Man has lost the capacity to foresee and to forestall. He will end by destroying the earth.”
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 est...
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Carson questioned the moral right of government to leave its citizens unprotected from substances they could neither physically avoid nor publicly question.
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.”
the industry spent a quarter of a million dollars to discredit her
research and malign her character.
most alarming of all man’s assaults upon the environment is the contamination of air, earth, rivers, and sea with dangerous and even lethal materials.
Nature has introduced great variety into the landscape, but man has displayed
We train ecologists in our universities and even employ them in our governmental agencies but we seldom take their advice. We allow the chemical death rain to fall as though there were no alternative,
It is also an era dominated by industry, in which the right to make a dollar at whatever cost is seldom challenged.
the arsenic-sprayed cotton country of southern United States beekeeping as an industry has nearly died
Honeybees become “wildly agitated and bellicose” on contact with it, perform frantic cleaning movements, and are near death within half an hour.
The best and cheapest controls for vegetation are not chemicals but other plants.
The question is whether any civilization can wage relentless war on life without destroying itself, and without losing the right to be called civilized.
As the habit of killing grows—the resort to “eradicating” any creature that may annoy or inconvenience us—birds are more and more finding themselves a direct target of poisons
“Barely a decade after the introduction of the potent synthetic insecticides in public health programmes, the main technical problem is the development of resistance to them by the insects they formerly controlled.”
