SILENT SPRINGS

A wellread friend mentioned this book to me, as a call to awakening that is as true today as when it was written over 50 years ago. Author Rachel Carson published this book in 1962, originally from a series in the New Yorker. She starts with a fable, from a possible present, inspired as Keats writes, The sedge is wither'd from the lake, and no birds sing."

E. B. White, "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."

Albert Schweitzer, "Man can hardly even recognized the devils of his own creation."

Sometimes she sounds a little unrealistically resistant to innovation: "Radiation is no longer merely the background radiation of rocks, the bombardment of cosmic rays, the ultraviolet of the sun that have existed before there was any life on earth; radiation is now the unnatural creation of man's tampering with the atom."

Mostly, she reminds us of a horrible history of interfering and with complex systems that we only partially understand, with great natural and human cost.

Jean Ronstad, "The obligation to endure gives us the right to know".

Dr. Charles Elton The Ecology of Invasions

DDT discoverer Paul Mülle of Switzerland won the nobel prize for its use as an insecticide (synthesized in 1874 in Germany, discovered in 1939)

1. DDT is a chlorinated hydrocarbon, like dieldrin, aldrin and enduring.
2. alkyl (organic) phosphates interfere with the necessary breakdown of acetylcholine by the cholinesterase enzyme, to stop the neuronal message and allow for new messages to be sent.

In Greek mythology, the sorceress Medea, enraged at being supplanted by a rival for the affections of her husband Jason, presented the new bride with a robe possessing magic properties. The wearer immediatedly suffered a violent death. This death-by-indirection now finds its counterpart in what are kow as "systemic insecticides".

Mutagens, Carcinogens: radiation, herbicides, insecticides

Single crop farming
Dutch elm disease
Human casualties, Dr W.C. Hueper authority of environmental cancer
Ecological disasters;
insecticides 1960 Tule Lake and Lower Klamath, Colorado
insecticides 1954 Clear Lake, California
1954 dutch elm disease and robin's death East Lancing Michigan
The Lost Wood essay by Tomlinson
herbicides 1959 Bridger National Forest Wyoming - sage "brush control"
Arsenic sprays on tobacco fields have ceased, but the contamination continues. From 1932 to 1952, the arsenic content of a cigarette increased more than 300%

Water, Soil, Plants, Sky, Fauna and Mankind are affected

Pests: japanese beetle, gypsy moths, fire ant, blue tick

It is hard to understand how people still glibly live on consuming and wasting and reproducing as if there was a neverending shortage of resources, and that climate change does impact them while the island edges flood and the weather changes more rapidly then ever before. We have learnt a hard lesson with DDT, but continue to entertain strange ideas of control of our natural world at the same time bemoaning the losses we have needlessly cost. This book is a reminder to do better, and has given me pause in my idea of treating my ash tree with pesticides, and a renewed enthusiasm to plant more trees and flowers for my own precious land.