Silent Spring Pesticides Quotes

A Who's Who of pesticides is therefore of concern to us all. If we are going to live so intimately with these chemicals eating and drinking them, taking them into the very marrow of our bones - we had better know something about their nature and their power.

When the public protests. confronted with some obvious evidence of damaging results of pesticide applications, it is fed little tranquilizers pills of half truth.

Carson’s thesis that we were subjecting ourselves to slow poisoning by the misuse of chemical pesticides that polluted the environment may seem like common currency now, but in 1962 Silent Spring contained the kernel of social revolution.

The first of these toxic chemicals to achieve wide notice were insecticides, pesticides, and herbicides, whose effects on birds, fish, and other animals were publicized by Rachel Carson’s 1962 book Silent Spring.

Carson was persuaded that many experts either failed to recognize or chose to ignore the potential hazards of pesticides. She was convinced that the weight of her scientific evidence would defeat the skeptics among them. And once the public had the necessary information, citizens could make informed decisions about what Carson believed was a matter of life and death.

Desrochers and Shimizu (Chapter 5) identify several shortcomings in Carson’s Silent Spring that stem from major omissions. These include her silence on the benefits of chemical pesticides, such as higher agricultural production—which reduced hunger in a world of chronic starvation and limited the loss of wildlife habitat. Another flaw is her reliance on anecdotes rather than systematic analysis of available information. But perhaps the book’s biggest failing is its discussion of cancer.

DISTURBED BY THE INDISCRIMINATE USE of synthetic chemical pesticides after the Second World War, aquatic biologist Rachel Carson reluctantly turned her focus from nature writing to warning the public about the long-term effects of misusing pesticides. In Silent Spring (1962), she challenged the practices of agricultural scientists and the government and called for a change in the way humankind viewed the natural world. Carson was attacked by the chemical industry and some in government as alarmist, but she continued to courageously speak out, stressing that we are a vulnerable part of the natural world, subject to the same damage as the rest of the ecosystem. Testifying before Congress in 1963, Carson called for new policies to protect

The same year saw the publication of Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring, which warned of systemic pollution from pesticides, and their health dangers to animals and humans.

Environmentalists were right to be inspired by marine biologist Rachel Carson’s book on pesticides, Silent Spring, but wrong to place DDT in the category of Absolute Evil (which she did not). Most of her scientific assessments proved right, some didn’t—such as her view that DDT causes cancer. In an excess of zeal that Carson did not live to moderate, DDT was banned worldwide, and malaria took off in Africa.

Ino 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.

One wonders whether Rachel Carson would have been as adamant against the use of genetically modified Bt crops as many environmentalists have been in more recent times. Moreover, given the book’s ambivalence over the use of chemical pesticides, it raises the question of how far she would have traveled on this branch of the Other Road that she herself pointed out.

In Alabama, the Olin Corporation became embroiled over its production of DDT. Rachel Carson, in her book Silent Spring, had identified the pesticide as a deadly contaminant to the biological food chain.

Since 1972, when the Environmental Protection Agency banned DDT from the United States, about 50 million people have died from malaria: Most have been children less than five years old. Examples of the impact of Silent Spring abound: In India, between 1952 and 1962, DDT spraying caused a decrease in annual malaria cases from 100 million to 60,000. By the late 1970s, no longer able to use the pesticide, the number of cases increased to 6 million. In Sri Lanka, before the use of DDT, 2.8 million people suffered from malaria. When the spraying stopped in 1964, only 17 people suffered from the disease. Then, between 1968 and 1970, no longer able to use DDT, Sri Lanka suffered a massive malaria epidemic—1.5 million people were infected by the parasite.

Despite Carson’s warnings in Silent Spring, studies in Europe, Canada, and the United States showed that DDT didn’t cause liver disease, premature births, congenital defects, leukemia, or any of the other diseases she had claimed. Indeed, the only type of cancer that had increased in the United States during the DDT era was lung cancer, which was caused by cigarette smoking. DDT was arguably the safest insect repellent ever invented—far safer than many of the other pesticides that have since taken its place.

Many residents had written letters, sickened by the aftermath of the spraying. Health officials were unbowed. But Olga Huckins refused to be ignored. She sent a copy of her Boston Herald letter to her friend, Rachel Carson. Four years later, Carson published a book about it. Called Silent Spring, it became an international best seller, alerting the world to the dangers of pesticides, landing Carson on national television programs and in front of congressional hearings, winning praise from people as diverse as President John F. Kennedy, Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas, and singer-songwriter Joni Mitchell, and making Carson one of the most famous and most influential women in the United States. Unfortunately,