From The Jersey Sierran, July - September 2022
By Tony Hagen, editor@newjersey.sierraclub.org
It was a relief to see swarms of midges, dung flies, and slugs in my local park this spring. Ordinarily there would be no reason for such a reaction, but I had just finished Rachel Carson’s “Silent Spring.” This landmark book about the challenges that pesticides represent to all life on the planet will have its 60th anniversary of publication in September of this year.
Carson was a biologist and highly gifted writer whose book provided a sobering picture of how gross misuse of pesticides was upsetting the balance of nature, destroying wildlife populations, and causing people to fall terribly ill.
Not enough consideration was given to the domino-like effect that intensive use of pesticides would have on the whole bio chain. At the time, hydrocarbons, such as DDT, and organophosphates were being sprayed on crops, water systems, and residential areas with the sensitivity of “a cave man’s club,” she wrote.
“Can anyone believe it is possible to lay down a barrage of poisons on the surface of the Earth without making it unfit for all life?” she asked.
Carson was not the first to raise the alarm. There were numerous reports of large-scale ecological poisonings from Florida to the Pacific Northwest. Fish and bird populations were wiped out, and pesticide residue was turning up in human tissue everywhere except in Innuit communities. Carson’s contribution was to stitch all these events together in a reader-friendly book that jolted the public out of its love affair with chemical pest control.
In an account of its founding, the Environmental Protection Agency says it was created “in the shadow” of Carson.
Carson taught us many important lessons about the dangers of these contaminants. For example, pesticides will eventually find their way everywhere, including groundwater. A bird may survive one spraying only to be felled by subsisting on a diet of sprayed insects. And pesticides can destroy whatever defenses the human body initially has against these agents.
In her day, Carson counted 60 insect species that had become resistant to one or more pesticides (there are currently >500). Often, spraying would destroy most wildlife except the target insect, which would rebound strongly, having no further predators to worry about.
She argued that introducing predators or parasites that go after problem insects had in some cases achieved wondrous results. Dutch elm disease, spread by beetles, was eventually controlled not by spraying but by trimming and destroying diseased trees and tree limbs. These alternatives deserve further investigation, Carson wrote.
In 1962, more was being done to find a cure for cancer than to solve a root of the problem—pesticides in our food, water, and air. “A very determined effort should be made to eliminate these carcinogens,” she wrote.
Reading Carson’s book, it is astounding to realize we’re still fighting many of these issues on virtually the same scrimmage line. The American Bird Conservancy and other authorities estimate we’ve lost a quarter of our bird population since 1970.
Malathion was a common pesticide in Carson’s day and still is a household name. Neonicotinoids, first used in 1990, are among the dominant pesticides currently in use. These are disastrous for birds and pollinators. “In New Jersey, beekeepers have lost more than 40 percent of their bee colonies nearly every year for the last decade,” according to the Natural Resources Defense Council.
There is a ray of hope in the Garden State. In January, New Jersey passed a law prohibiting most outdoor non-agricultural uses of neonicotinoids. If she were alive today, Carson would likely tell us to get more of these products off the store shelves and enlist more of the combatants that nature has already given us.
In my town at least, it has not been a silent spring. I am grateful for the songbirds that hop along the fence or sit on the branches outside my windows, and I am somewhat pleased to see insects, too (although don’t get me started about mosquito season).
We should all read “Silent Spring” to re-sensitize ourselves to these wondrous creatures.