Silent Spring

by Rachel Carson

It is not possible to add pesticides to water anywhere without threatening the purity of water everywhere.

in nature nothing exists alone.

Chemical control of insects seems to have proceeded on the assumption that the soil could and would sustain any amount of insult via the introduction of poisons without striking back. The very nature of the world of the soil has been largely ignored.

In the future it may become necessary to analyze soils for insecticides before planting certain food crops.

“The esthetic values of the wilderness are as much our inheritance as the veins of copper and gold in our hil s and the forests in our mountains.”

In the economy of nature the natural vegetation has its essential place.

“Once again we are walking in nature like an elephant in the china cabinet.” So C. J. Briejèr, a Dutch scientist of rare understanding, sums up our use of weed kil ers.

Michigan, Kentucky, Iowa, Indiana, Il inois, and Missouri are al experiencing a rain of chemicals in the name of beetle control.

80 per cent of the songbirds were sacrificed.

Sheldon,

heavy losses were occurring among wildlife and domestic animals.

In Sheldon it was not only the wild creatures and the domestic companions that were sacrificed in the campaign against an insect. Observations on several flocks of sheep and a herd of beef cattle are indicative of the poisoning and death that threatened livestock as wel.

The amount spent for research was therefore a smal fraction of 1 per cent of the outlay for the chemical program.

The question is whether any civilization can wage relentless war on life without destroying itself, and without losing the right to be caled civilized.

“I am dreading the days to come soon now when many beautiful birds wil be dying in our back yard,”

Isn’t it possible to help the balance of nature without destroying it?”

The key to a healthy plant or animal community lies in what the British ecologist Charles Elton cals “the conservation of variety.”

Manufacturers’ tests on the common laboratory animals—rats, dogs, guinea pigs— include no wild species, no birds as a rule, no fishes, and are conducted under controled and artificial conditions. Their application to wildlife in the field is anything but precise.

But such rabbits or raccoons or opossums as may have roamed those bottomlands and perhaps never visited the farmers’ cornfields were doomed by a judge and jury who neither knew of their existence nor cared.

Does Indiana stil raise any boys who roam through woods or fields and might even explore the margins of a river? If so, who guarded the poisoned area to keep out any who might wander in, in misguided search for unspoiled nature? Who kept vigilant watch to tel the innocent stroler that the fields he was about to enter were deadly—al their vegetation coated with a lethal film? Yet at so fearful a risk the farmers, with none to hinder them, waged their needless war on blackbirds. In

Who has decided—who has the right to decide—for the countless legions of people who were not consulted that the supreme value is a world without insects, even though it be also a sterile world ungraced by the curving wing of a bird in flight?

The decision is that of the authoritarian temporarily entrusted with power; he has made it during a moment of inattention by mil ions to whom beauty and the ordered world of nature stil have a meaning that is deep and imperative.

The inshore waters—the bays, the sounds, the river estuaries, the tidal marshes—form an ecological unit of the utmost importance. They are linked so intimately and indispensably with the lives of many fishes, mol usks, and crustaceans that were they no longer habitable these seafoods would disappear from our tables.

Oysters and clams may concentrate these poisons in their digestive organs and other tissues.

16 cases of mental disease. Al had a history of prolonged exposure to organic phosphorus insecticides.

Confusion, delusions, loss of memory, mania—a heavy price to pay for the temporary destruction of a few insects, but a price that wil continue to be exacted as long as we insist upon using chemicals that strike directly at the nervous system.

Large residues of DDT and other hydrocarbons have been found whenever looked for in the eggs of birds subjected to these chemicals, either experimental y or in the wild. And the concentrations have been heavy.

it is possible to assemble specific information on a number of these pesticides, showing that they disturb the cel’s vital processes in ways ranging from slight chromosome damage to gene mutation, and with consequences extending to the ultimate disaster of malignancy.

By the end of the 19th century a half-dozen sources of industrial carcinogens were known; the 20th century was to create countless new cancer-causing chemicals and to bring the general population into intimate contact with them.

Today, more American school children die of cancer than from any other disease.

One of the earliest pesticides associated with cancer is arsenic, occurring in sodium arsenite as a weed kil er, and in calcium arsenate and various other compounds as insecticides.

By a process of genetic selection, the insects are developing strains resistant to chemicals.

our chemical attack is weakening the defenses inherent in the environment itself, defenses designed to keep the various species in check.

“The greatest single factor in preventing insects from overwhelming the rest of the world is the internecine warfare which they carry out among themselves,”

The predators—insects that kil and consume other insects—are of many kinds.

parasitic insects.

Yet we have turned our artil ery 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.

In America, farmers have repeatedly traded one insect enemy for a worse one as spraying upsets the population dynamics of the insect world.

The major chemical companies are pouring money into the universities to support research on insecticides.

Ultimately only the biologist wil provide the answers to the basic problems of pest control.”

By the end of 1951, DDT, methoxychlor, chlordane, heptachlor, and benzene hexachloride had joined the list of chemicals no longer effective. The flies, meanwhile, had become “fantastical y abundant.”

The ordinary house mosquito is here and there developing resistance,

switching from one insecticide to another as resistance develops. But this cannot go on indefinitely,

With insects that infest crops the story is the same.

The resort to weapons such as insecticides to control it is a proof of insufficient knowledge and of an incapacity so to guide the processes of nature that brute force becomes unnecessary. Humbleness is in order; there is no excuse for scientific conceit here.

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.

Birds, ants, forest spiders, and soil bacteria are as much a part of a forest as the trees,

“Where you can obtain in your forest a combination of birds’ and ants’ protection together with some bats and owls, the biological equilibrium has already been essential y improved,”

A single spider may destroy in her life of 18 months an average of 2000 insects.

Through al these new, imaginative, and creative approaches to the problem of sharing our earth with other creatures there runs a constant theme, the awareness that we are dealing with life—with living populations and al their pressures and counter-pressures, their surges and recessions. Only by taking account of such life forces and by cautiously seeking to guide them into channels favorable to ourselves can we hope to achieve a reasonable accommodation between the insect hordes and ourselves.