Silent Spring: The Death of Nature

In her magnum opus Silent Spring, Rachel Carson explains how humans themselves had rendered earth and life on it so rabidly endangered and hazardous due to the unprecedented scientific and industrial breakthroughs that the U. S. A had known during late 1940s and early 1950s.
Strontium 90 is released during a nuclear explosion into the atmosphere, yet returns to earth in rain´-or-as fallout. It remains in air, soil, and penetrates the very fiber of grass, corn, and wheat. In most occasions, it dwells the bones of human beings until death. Radiation has become the creation of man s meddling with the structure of the atom. Chemical evolution on earth is no longer attributed to natural elements, but to man s creative mind and his scientific discoveries.
The use of pesticides, insecticides, and herbicides was proportionate to Darwin s principle of the survival of the fittest. Insects are continuously developing super races immune to the insecticide used, therefore, a stronger and deadlier one has to be incessantly devised. Furthermore, some insects experience a state of flareback ,´-or-resurgence, after spraying, in greater numbers than before. One could only wonder" how could intelligent beings seek to control a few unwanted species by a method that contaminated the entire environment and brought the threat of disease and death to their own kind (Carson 4).
Every human being now is inevitably subject to fatal chemicals, from egg fertilization until death. The relation of synthetic chemicals to insecticides has commenced in the second world war. In the course of creating elements of chemical weaponry, some agents engineered in the laboratory were found to be effective against insects. However, insects at that time were widely used to test chemical proficiency:
The result has been a seemingly endless stream of synthetic insecticides. In being man-made—by ingenious laboratory manipulation of the molecules, substituting atoms, altering their arrangement—they differ sharply from the simpler insecticides of prewar days. These were derived from naturally occurring minerals and plant products—compounds of arsenic, copper, , manganese, zinc, and other minerals, pyrethrum from the dried flowers of chrysanthemums, nicotine sulphate from some of the relatives of tobacco, and rotenone from leguminous plants of the East Indies. (8)
As Carson opines, the production of synthetic pesticides in the U. S raised from124.259.000 pounds in 1947 to 637.666.000 pounds in 1960 (8). This gigantic upward of production and intelligent modification have paved the way for poisons of incredible effect.
Another lethal agent, dichloro-diphenyl-trichloro-ethane,´-or-simply DDT is mainly used agriculture and impacts agricultural workers and workers in insecticide plants as high as 648 parts per million, whereas individuals with no exposure hold an average of 5.3 parts per million. What s interesting to note about the DDT is that it could be passed on from a generation to its posterity. "Insecticide residues have been recovered from human milk in samples tested by Food and Drug Administration scientists. This means that the breast-fed human infant is receiving small but regular additions to the load of toxic chemicals building up in his body" (12). All animals and fish analyzed, alive´-or-dead, had stored DDT in their tissues´-or-bones. Other chemical agents include dieldrin, aldrin, endrin, heptachlor, arsenic, and toxaphene. Dieldrin is 5 more dangerous than DDT when swallowed, and 40 times when contacts the skin as solution. Other categories include alkyl and parathion. Some of them became the notorious nerve gas, and others engineered to become insecticide.
As far as water is concerned, the problem of pollution is disturbed primarily by the ongoing contamination of groundwater. This means that pollution of groundwater somewhere is pollution of water globally. "Indeed one of the most alarming aspects of the chemical pollution of water is the fact that here—in river´-or-lake´-or-reservoir,´-or-for that matter in the glass of water served at your dinner table—are mingled chemicals that no responsible chemist would think of combining in his laboratory" (22). Food, like water, comes from the land. Without soil, without the thin layer of soil to be precise, organic plants as we know could not have grown, and without plants no beings could survive. Bacteria, fungi, and algae are the central components of decay, turning plant and animal residues into minerals. Without these microplants, the cyclic movements of carbon and nitrogen through soil cannot occur. "This soil community, then, consists of a web of interwoven lives, each in some way related to the others—the living creatures depending on the soil, but the soil in turn a vital element of the earth only so long as this community within it flourishes" (28). Water and soil make up the earth s green stratum of plants, and these latter govern organic life on earth. Plants operate in a larger and intricate web of life in which primal relations gather plants and the earth, plants and animals, and intra plants themselves. Insects that man is trying to eliminate are irreplaceably important to our agriculture and to our biodiversity. But as man still inclined to intervene, he remarkably succeeded in effectuating changes and irrecoverable damage to the entire biosphere.
The most widely used herbicides are 2,4-D, 2,4,5-T, and related compounds. Whether´-or-not these are actually toxic is a matter of controversy. People spraying their lawns with 2,4-D and becoming wet with spray have occasionally developed severe neuritis and even paralysis. Although such incidents are apparently uncommon, medical authorities advise caution in use of such compounds. Other hazards, more obscure, may also attend the rise of 2,4-D. It has been shown experimentally to disturb the basic physiological process of respiration in the cell, and to imitate X-rays in damaging the chromosomes. (36)
As mankind carries off its peculiar control of the natural world, he has overtly embarked on a rampant and alarming course of demolition. He has waged a war against not only other habitats, but also against the very structure of living that sustains him. Man is -dir-ectly contributing to the annihilation of birds, animals, fishes, and every living organism by chemical insecticides:
Brown thrashers, starlings, meadowlarks, grackles, and pheasants were virtually wiped out. Robins were ‘almost annihilated’, according to the biologists’ report. Dead earthworms had been seen in numbers after a gentle rain-;- probably the robins had fed on the poisoned worms. For other birds, too, the once beneficial rain had been changed, through the evil power of the poison introduced into their world, into an agent of destruction. Birds seen drinking and bathing in puddles left by rain a few days after the spraying were inevitably doomed. (47)
The existence of these innocuous creatures endows man s life with equilibrium and harmony. He, nevertheless, treats them with such horrid callousness. Here Carson describes a meadowlark found near death:
The back was bowed, and the forelegs with the toes of the feet tightly clenched were drawn close to the thorax...The head and neck were outstretched and the mouth often contained -dir-t, suggesting that the dying animal had been biting at the ground. (50)
These chemical agents kill indefinitely and indiscriminately. This reveals that man has failed to enshrine the balance of the natural world with keeping it intact. What is occurring now is widely due to insuperably biological and scientific precipitousness of past generations. It must be invoked that chemical spraying of forests and landscapes is neither the only nor the most effective method:
The minimum immediate overall kill throughout the marshes, exclusive of the Indian River shoreline, was 20-30 tons of fishes,´-or-about 1,175,000 fishes, of at least 30 species [reported R. W. Harrington, Jr. and W.L. Bidlingmayer of the survey team cloud]. (73)
Under the end-justifies-the-means principle, and in this quandary, what are the palpable facts? It has been medically proven that persons who lived and died before the creation of the DDT era contained no trace of DDT´-or-any similar agent in their tissues. Samples of body fat collected from the general population between 1954 and 1956 showed an average of 5.3 to 7.4 parts per million of DDT. The average level has indeed raised since then to a higher figure, and individuals with vocational´-or-other -dir-ect exposures to insecticides store even more. Among the general population with no known marked exposures to insecticides it may be assumed that much of the DDT stored in fat deposits has entered the body in food. "To test this assumption, a scientific team from the United States Public Health Service sampled restaurant and institutional meals. Every meal sampled contained DDT" (87). In other words, every meal we eat contains its fair share of chlorinated hydrocarbons. This is the concomitant of the global spraying of agricultural fields with these toxics. Ultimately, an ostensibly civilized human being pays their taxes and gets his poisons. The remedy lies in using less toxic chemicals so that the public danger from their misuse could be pruned. Public education as to the danger and nature of the chemicals offered for sale is dearly needed. The average buyer is completely astounded by the great number of available insecticides, pesticides, and herbicides, and cannot identify which are the lethal ones, which proportionately safe. Furthermore, and most importantly, we must immediately consider the possibilities of nonchemical ways.
As humanity has managed to quell the most urgent public health diseases, now it is concerned with problems that hide in the depth of the environment, problems that we ourselves created in the course of organic evolution. The new environmental crisis is new. It is centrally exacerbated by radiation in all its forms, and born of the omnipresent influx of chemicals of which pesticides are a part. Chemical agents are now suffusing the world in which we live, affecting us in every possible manner.
Chemicals are unpredictable, vague, and their injuries are symptomless. They now make up the picture of environmental crisis. There had been manifested that they now contaminate soil, water, and food, that they have the capacity to make our seas and lakes fishless and our forests silent and lifeless. Man, however much he may like to assume the opposite, is part of nature. Can he escape a pollution that is now contaminating the entire world?
One of the most apparent facts about these chemicals is their effect on the liver, the nervous system, the pituitary gland, cellular oxidation, and latent cancer.
Man has put the vast majority of carcinogens into the environment, and he can, if he wishes, eliminate many of them. The chemical agents of cancer have become entrenched in our world in two ways: first, and ironically, through man’s search for a better and easier way of life-;- second, because the manufacture and sale of such chemicals has become an accepted part of our economy and our way of life. It would be unrealistic to suppose that all chemical carcinogens can´-or-will be eliminated from the modern world. (117-118)
In the light of this, prevention seems the instantaneous imperative. The resistance of the environment, as ecologists call it, indicates that all living organisms are constantly in check by natural forces, through natural selection, without perforce any interference by man. Since insects can become impervious to chemicals, a new and deadlier insecticide has always to be developed. Insects have learnt to adapt to these chemicals, they have evolved in such a velocity and sufficiency that to humans seem incredible.
Carson postulates the male sterilization technique developed by Dr. Edward Knipling. In order to control insects, the approach states, it is possible to sterilize and release large numbers of insects. In the process, the sterilized males would compete with the sound wild males so effectively that, after recurrent releases, only infertile eggs would be produced and the population would be extirped.
Only by taking into consideration the different life forces through which we interact with the biosphere can we hope to attain a reasonable affinity between the natural world and ourselves. The ongoing drive for chemicals and poisons has failed to inculcate these most essential precepts. The chemical war has been marshalled against the gossamer fabric of life. These peculiar capacities of life have been ignored by the partisans of chemical widespread who firmly believe in the control of nature, a conception fermented in anthropocentrism, a doctrine that indulges nature s existence for the sole interests of man. A concept that dates back to olden times. It is a striking reality that a nomadic philosophy has shielded itself with the gargantuan and sophisticated arms, and that in turning them against living organisms it has also turned them against the earth.
"We need a more high-minded orientation and a deeper insight, which I miss in many researchers. Life is a miracle beyond our comprehension, and we should reverence it even where we have to struggle against it...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." (134)

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