Silent Spring by Rachel Carson.

4/5 rating. 318 pages.

Book #72 of 2020. Read October 12, 2020.

This is arguably the most important and impactful nonfiction book of all time.

Rachel does an amazing job of explaining the poisonous effects that wide-spread, blanket pesticide use was having on humans and our surrounding environment. As she says:

“No witchcraft, no enemy action had silenced the rebirth of new life in this stricken world. The people had done it themselves.”

“These sprays, dusts, and aerosols are now applied almost universally to farms, gardens, forests, and homes – nonselective chemicals that have the power to kill every insect, the ‘good’ and the ‘bad,’ to still the songs of birds and the leaping of fish in the streams, to coat the leaves with a deadly film, and to linger on in soil – all this though the intended target may be only a few weeds or insects.”

“I contend, furthermore, that we have allowed these chemicals to be used with little or no advance investigation of their effect on soil, water, wildlife, and man himself. Future generations are unlikely to condone our lack of prudent concern for the integrity of the natural world that supports all life.”

The amount of changes in laws, protocols, and general knowledge about pesticide, and other chemical use because of Silent Spring is gigantic. It was at least partially responsible for the EPA and Endangered Species Act. We all have a deep debt to Rachel for her saving us from the ubiquitous sprayings of deadly chemicals. I think E. O. Wilson said it best:

“Rachel Carson, in recounting such horror stories in Silent Spring did not call for an end to pest control. Rather, she asked for an end to reckless endangerment by the use of broad-spectrum pesticides. These substances, she argued, should never be spread across the nation’s fruited plains without adequate and public knowledge of their impact on the environment and human health. Instead, she insisted, we must switch to clean, precise solutions based on science and broad environmental knowledge.”

This is a deeply powerful book, as Rachel brings science to the front in how the flippant use of these chemicals was putting us all at risk. If you care at all about the environment I definitely recommend this book!

Quotes:

“I am pessimistic about the human race because it is too ingenious for its own good. Our approach to nature is to beat it into submission. We would stand a better chance of survival if we accommodated ourselves to this planet and viewed it appreciatively instead of skeptically and dictatorially.” – E. B. White

“Man can hardly even recognize the devils of his own creation.” – Albert Schweitzer

“Can anyone believe it is possible to lay down such a barrage of poisons on the surface of the earth without making it unfit for all life? They should not be called ‘insecticides,’ but ‘biocides.’”

“We are told that the enormous and expanding use of pesticides is necessary to maintain farm production. Yet is our real problem not one of overproduction? Our farms, despite measures to remove acreages from production and to pay farmers not to produce, have yielded such a staggering excess of crops that the American taxpayer in 1962 is paying out more than one billion dollars a year as the total carrying cost of the surplus-food storage program. And is the situation helped when one branch of the Agriculture Department tries to reduce production while another states, as it did in 1958, ‘It is believed generally that reduction of crop acreages under provision of the Soil Bank will stimulate interest in use of chemicals to obtain maximum production on the land retained in crops.’

“All this is not to say that there is no insect problem, and no need of control. I am saying, rather, that control must be geared to realities, not to mythical situations, and that the methods employed must be such that they do not destroy us along with the insects.”

“It is also an era dominated by industry, in which the right to make a dollar at whatever cost is seldom challenged.”

“The full scope of the dangerous interaction of chemicals is as yet little known, but disturbing findings now come regularly from scientific laboratories.”

“No trace of DDD could be found in the water shortly after the last application of the chemical. But the poison had not really left the lake; it had merely gone into the fabric of the life the lake supports. Twenty-three months after the chemical treatment had ceased, the plankton still contained as much as 5.3 parts per million.”

“Yet Clear Lake is typical of a large and growing number of situations where solution of an obvious and often trivial problem creates a far more serious but conveniently less tangible one. Here the problem was resolved in favor of those annoyed by gnats, and at the expense of an unstated, and probably not even clearly understood, risk to all who took food or water from the lake.”

“Here again we are reminded that in nature nothing exists alone.”

“One of the most important things to remember about insecticides in soil is their long persistence, measured not in months but in years. Aldrin has been recovered after four years, both as traces and more abundantly as converted to dieldrin. Enough toxaphene remains in sandy soil ten years after its application to kill termites. Benzene hexachloride persists at least eleven years; heptachlor or a more toxic derived chemical, at least nine. Chlordane has been recovered twelve years after its application, in the amount of 15 per cent of the original quantity.”

“Ragweed, the bane of hay fever sufferers, offers an interesting example of the way efforts to control nature sometimes boomerang. Many thousands of gallons of chemicals have been discharged along roadsides in the name of ragweed control. But the unfortunate truth is that blanket spraying is resulting in more ragweed, not less. Ragweed is an annual; its seedlings require open soil to become established each year. Our best protection against this plant is therefore the maintenance of dense shrubs, ferns, and other perennial vegetation. Spraying frequently destroys this protective vegetation and creates open, barren areas which the ragweed hastens to fill.”

“By acquiescing in an act that can cause such suffering to a living creature, who among us is not diminished as a human being?”

“The insecticide tolerance of young commercial shrimp just past larval life was found to be exceedingly low – measured in parts per billion instead of the more commonly used standard of parts per million. For example, half the shrimp in one experiment were killed by dieldrin at a concentration of only 15 parts per billion. Other chemicals were even more toxic. Endrin, always one of the most deadly of the pesticides, killed half the shrimp at a concentration of only half of one part per billion.”

“Although the sudden death of thousands of fish or crustaceans in some stream or pond as the direct and visible effect of insect control is dramatic and alarming, these unseen and as yet largely unknown and unmeasurable effects of pesticides reaching estuaries indirectly in streams and rivers may in the end be more disastrous.”

“Although the county Health Department was notified, no instructions were given that the milk should not be marketed. This situation is unfortunately typical of the lack of consumer protection that is all too common. Although the Food and Drug Administration permits no residues of pesticides in milk, its restrictions are not only inadequately policed but they apply solely to interstate shipments. State and county officials are under no compulsion to follow the federal pesticides tolerances unless local laws happen to conform – and they seldom do.”

“To test this assumption a scientific team from the United States Public Health Service sampled restaurant and institutional meals. Every meal sampled contained DDT. From this the investigators concluded, reasonably enough, that ‘few if any foods can be relied upon to be entirely free of DDT.’”

“A quarter century ago, cancer in children was considered a medical rarity. Today, more American school children die of cancer than from any other disease.”

“By their very nature chemical controls are self-defeating, for they have been devised and applied without taking into account the complex biological systems against which they have been blindly hurled. The chemicals may have been prestested against a few individual species, but not against living communities.”

“This means that in terms of the number of species, 70 to 80 per cent of the earth’s creatures are insects. The vast majority of these insects are held in check by natural forces, without any intervention by man. If this were not so, it is doubtful that any conceivable volume of chemicals – or any other methods – could possibly keep down their populations.”

“‘Economic entomologists must realize,’ wrote A. D. Pickett of Nova Scotia, ‘that they are dealing with living things…their work must be more than simply insecticide testing or a quest for highly destructive chemicals.’”

“We must change our philosophy, abandon our attitude of human superiority and admit that in many cases in natural environments we find ways and means of limiting populations of organisms in a more economical way than we can do it ourselves.” – G. C. Ullyet, entomologist

“The world has heard much of the triumphant war against disease through the control of insect vectors of infection, but it has heard little of the other side of the story – the defeats, the short-lived triumphs that now strongly support the alarming view that the insect enemy has been made actually stronger by our efforts. Even worse, we may have destroyed our very means of fighting.”

“In 1948 a new chemical, chlordane was tried as a supplement to DDT. This time good control was obtained for two years, but by August of 1950 chlordane-resistant flies appeared, and by the end of that year all of the houseflies as well as the Culex mosquitoes seemed to be resistant to chlordane. As rapidly as new chemicals were brought into use, resistance developed. 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 ‘fantastically abundant.’”

“We are going to have to do some very energetic research on other control measures, measures that will have to be biological, not chemical. Our aim should be to guide natural processes as cautiously as possible in the desired direction rather than to use brute force….” – Dr. Breijér, Director of Plant Protection Service

“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.” – Dr. Breijér, Director of Plant Protection Service

“We stand now where two roads diverge. But unlike the road in Robert Frost’s familiar poem, they are not equally fair. The road we have long been traveling is deceptively easy, a smooth superhighway on which we progress with great speed, but at its end lies disaster. The other fork of the road – the one ‘less traveled by’ – offers our last, our only chance to reach a destination that assures the preservation of our earth.”

“Through all 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 all their pressures and counterpressures, 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.”

“The concepts and practices of applied entomology for the most part date from that Stone Age of science. It is our alarming misfortune that so primitive a science has armed itself with the most modern and terrible weapons, and that in turning them against the insects it has also turned them against the earth.”

“Although developers and policymakers come up with fewer spectacularly bad large projects, they continue to chip, saw, and drill away at the remains of the American natural environment.”

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