monique ❀’s Reviews > Silent Spring > Status Update

- “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.

- 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."