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| Rachel Carson |
Rachel Carson was born to a family farm in Springdale, Pennsylvania in 1907. Being exposed to farm life, later in her life, she worked for the U.S. Bureau of Fisheries to write radio scripts and quickly became the Editor-in-Chief for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. Before she wrote Silent Spring, she wrote many articles in magazines and books that advocated in conservation. She was known as a naturalist and wrote The Sea Around Us which was awarded the National Book Award for Nonfiction in 1951.
However, chemicals and pesticides used in World War II changed the contents of her writing. She turned to warning Americans about the negative effects of chemicals and most infamously, the insecticide: DDT. The government was aerial spraying this insecticide, mixed with other pesticides and oil, for a fire ant eradication program.
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| Questionable ads used to promote the safety of DDT |
Unlike her past writings, in Silent Spring, she targeted the problems with using DDT and wrote about long-term effects on the environment, along with the effects on human pesticide poisoning. Carson writes,
“As crude a weapon as the cave man's club, the chemical barrage has been hurled against the fabric of life - a fabric on the one hand delicate and destructible, on the other miraculously tough and resilient, and capable of striking back in unexpected ways. These extraordinary capacities of life have been ignored by the practitioners of chemical control who have brought to their task no "high-minded orientation," no humility before the vast forces with which they tamper.” (Silent Spring)
Her book received heavy criticism by chemical industries and many governments, saying that Carson was promoting elimination of pesticides. Furthermore, when policies were being added to DDT use, many blamed Carson for advocating limited use. Meanwhile, DDT's were slowly becoming less powerful and wasn't killing many insects by the 1970's. Insects became more resistant to the chemical.
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| News headline when DDT ban was announced |
Although it is allowed to be used in small portions in countries that need it today, the Stockholm Convention on Persistent Organic Pollutants agreed to limit the use of DDT used for malaria control.
Thanks to Rachel Carson and many other environmentalists that supported this cause, there was a new rise in environmentalism in the world. We should appreciate their hard work, despite the criticism, for the clean(er) environments we have now.
http://www.rachelcarson.org/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rachel_Carson
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silent_Spring
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stockholm_Convention_on_Persistent_Organic_Pollutants
Natsumi, awesome post! The reason why her book is called "Silent Spring" is because hypothetically, when all the birds died out from DDT, there would not be even a single bird singing at any river or spring bed. The reason DDT was so harmful to bird species was because it was notorious for altering the calcium in their eggs. As a result, they were much thinner and killed the embryos. Not only did Rachel Carson advocate for the future of bird species and the banning of DDT, but she also helped to be a primary factor behind the legislation of the Clean Air Act and the Clean Water Act- both which are essential to the current status quo for environmental policy. I also came across an article which highlighted that DDT is still killing bird populations in Michigan. There is an old chemical plant in the area, and birds are dying off by ingesting worms from near the region, as the plant manufactured pesticides till 1963. Because DDT is a POP, or persistent organic pollutant, it remains in the environment- bioaccumulating for years and years. To see Michigan songbirds being impacted by the pesticides almost 50 years later is pretty sad.
ReplyDeleteSource: AP Environmental Science Notes
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/ddt-still-killing-birds-in-michigan/
Before the Stockholm Convention, the International Programme on Chemical Safety (IPCS) was also aware of the hazards of chemical pesticides. They put together a list of 12 dangerous chemicals (called the "Dirty Dozen"), which included DDT and also dioxin. Dioxin was a chemical used in the Vietnam War as part of the US's chemical warfare strategy: they dumped the stuff on villages in an attempt to kill the agricultural economy. However, there are serious health effects for this chemical, including skin diseases, developmental disorders, and causing cancer. Vietnam veterans exposed to this chemical suffered all sorts of health issues, and there were nearly 3 million Vietnamese people exposed to it too. Because of the US and Vietnam's shaky relations, not much has been done to clean up this mess, so Vietnamese children are still born today with dioxin-related birth defects.
ReplyDeleteSources: https://siteresources.worldbank.org/INTPOPS/214574-1115813449181/20486510/PersistentOrganicPollutantsAResourceGuide2001.pdf
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stockholm_Convention_on_Persistent_Organic_Pollutants
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rainbow_Herbicides#cite_note-Ornitz-1
https://www.healthline.com/health-news/lingering-health-effects-of-agent-orange#1
It is quite interesting to compare environmental policies over the course of history. The environmental movement was just as present as the other social movements in the 1960s like those relating to women's rights and so forth. To react historically and to connect with what I wrote in response to the "Times are A-Changin" documentary we watched in class, there were definite social conditions that allowed for such movements to occur. There was definitely this feeling of being fed up and impatient with how the way things were. Such an attitude allowed for the pressing of progression in environmental and other social issues. The power of activism, as exemplified by Rachel Carson, is extraordinary. Without such activism by Rachel Carson, or other significant figures like Cesar Chavez, who knows how this decade could've been different.
ReplyDeletehttp://www.pollutionissues.com/Ec-Fi/Environmental-Movement.html