monique ❀ > Recent Status Updates

forgot when i started this book but welp

- “systemic insecticides”: death by indirection
-- extend effects to following generations or consumers

- the war on weeds via herbicides - general poisons, stimulants of metablism, induce malignant tumors, etc
mentioned: dinitro compounds, pentachlorophenol
- some have obvious effects, others more insidious
- among herbicides are some classificied as "mutagens" - can modify genes

"“What of other chemicals in the normal human environment? What, in particular, of drugs? A bare beginning has been made on this subject, but already it is known that some organic phosphates (parathion and malathion) increase the toxicity of some drugs used as muscle relaxants, and that several others (again including malathion) markedly increase the sleeping time of barbiturates."

- chlorinated hydrocarbons mentioned: chlordane, heptachlor, among the most violently poisonous: dieldrien, aldrin, endrin

- (2) organic phosphates, among the most poisonous chemicals, with the ability to destroy enzymes with necessary functions
mentioned: parathion, malathion
-- combining chemicals increases or potentiates toxicity (does not need to be given simultaneously)
-- can be increased by a non-insecticide

- modern insecticides are deadlier, falling into 2 groups of chemicals: DDT (chlorinated hydrocarbons) and organic phosphorous insecticides (ex: malathion and parathion) - "although linked with the basic chemistry of all life, they lend themselves to the modifications which make them agents of death."
- DDT: passes on from one organism to another through the food chain; mother to offspring

3. elixirs of death
- "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.” - they are found virtually everywhere all due to the rise of the industry for man-made chemicals (WWII)
- the result is an endless stream of synthetic insecticides with the power to poison and alter the body in sinister ways

“Such thinking..“idealizes life with only its head out of water, inches above the limits of toleration of the corruption of its own environment..Why should we tolerate a diet of weak poisons, a home in insipid surroundings, a circle of acquaintances...not quite our enemies, the noise of motors with just enough relief to prevent insanity? Who would want to live in a world which is just not quite fatal?”

To adjust to these chemicals would require time on the scale that is nature’s; it would require not merely the years of a man’s life but the life of generations. ”

The chemicals to which life is asked to make its adjustment are no longer merely....the minerals washed out of the rocks and carried in rivers to the sea; they are the synthetic creations of man’s inventive mind, brewed in his laboratories, and having no counterparts in nature.

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....; radiation is now the unnatural creation
of man’s tampering with the atom.

“It took hundreds of millions of years to produce the life
that now inhabits the earth—eons of time in which that developing
and evolving and diversifying life reached a state of
adjustment and balance with its surroundings....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.

- carson argues that:
(1) control must be prudent
(2) insectides have been placed indiscriminately into the hands of people ignorant of their potential for harm
(3) we have allowed these chemicals to be used with little investigation of their impacts on wildlife & humans

- there is limited awareness. of the threat; public needs the facts to make decisions. "the obligation to endure gives us the right to know."

2. the obligation to endure
- man has acquired significant power to alter the nature of his world with its most alarming abuse of power being the contamination of the earth
- man is altering nature at a heedless pace rather than the deliberate pace of nature
- insects became more of a problem due to monocropping and migration, aided by humans
- need to look to alternatives, ex: understanding nature to create balance

virginia woolf the WOMAN YOU ARE

ch 3:
- no account of women during the elizabethan era, literature dominated by men
- the paradox of women being seen as powerful, competent, and present in fiction, but absent and deemed useless in reality (!!!!)
- indifference plagues all writers, but female writers have to deal with discouragement
- ingenuity “is not born among labouring, uneducated, servile people," like women - judith vs shakespeare
-

ch 2:
- narrator goes to library to satiate questions about women and fiction
- lack of works written by women, but so many women in fiction written by men
- professor’s statement about the inferiority of women - men’s desire to preserve male superiority at the expense of women
- difficult of owning wealth as a woman, mostly from inheritance
- ends with vision of no gender-based division of labour for the future

chapter 1 main points:
- narratively describes the author’s day of wandering around campus & attending a luncheon and dinner
- author gets told by security on campus to walk on the proper path/ can’t enter library
- contrast in atmosphere at gatherings before vs after the war - ex: romance and poetry expressed differently
- ends with author discussing and thinking about how women are unable to own their wealth

in fact she was the slave of any boy whose parents forced a ring upon her finger. Some of the most inspired words, some of the most profound thoughts in literature fall from her lips; in real life she could hardly read, could scarcely spell, and was the property of her husband.”

literally GASPED and said "DAMN" out loud. VIRGINIA.

A very queer composite being thus emerges. Imaginatively she is of the highest importance; practically she is completely insignificant. She pervades poetry from cover to cover; she is all but absent from history. She dominates the lives of kings and conquerors in fiction;

"Indeed, if woman had no existence save in the fiction written by men, one would imagine her a person of the utmost importance; very various, heroic and mean; splendid and sordid; infinitely beautiful and hideous in the extreme; as great as a man, some think even greater. But this is woman in fiction. In fact…she was locked up, beaten and flung around the room....

she actually went OFF

rip virginia woolf u would have loved to see women in STEM

OH SHE’S GAGGING THE MALE SPECIES SOOOOOO GOOD RNNNN SHE DIDNT HAVE TO GO THAT HARD BUT SHE DID THAT FOR US

loving the stream of consciousness style of her writing

do u guys like goodreads of fable more???!?!??