"Who would want to live in a world which is just not quite fatal?"-Paul Shepard

The most significant addition of Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring to environmental ethics is making the scientific and ecologic connection between bodies and the landscape. This text is truly the paver for the environmental movement of the 1970’s. Carson calls to attention the connection between man’s intervention in the landscape via a chemical medium and how through the cyclic food chain, these toxic chemicals bioaccumulated all the way up from plankton to fisherman.  As articulated by Carson in the opening of The Human Price, “Today we are concerned with a different hazard that lurks in our environment-a hazard we ourselves have introduced into our world as our modern way of life has evolved.” (Carson 188). 

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Carson explains the chemical nature and health affects of several chlorinated hydrocarbons and organic phosphorous insecticides, but focuses most on her research of DDT. DDT was initially used in a powder formula to combat lice in the military and first became available for commercial and residential use in 1945 (Carson 20). A chlorinated hydrocarbon, the most alarming attribute of DDT is its storage in the fatty-rich organs in the human and animal body, this leads to the body magnifying the amount stored in these areas particularly the thyroid,testes,adrenal glands,liver and kidneys. (Carson 21). Because of the storage capacity DDT can be easily bioaccumulated via consumers, and if stored in a pregnant female she will pass it along to her offspring (Carson 23). One of the many apocalyptic stories of applied chemicals devastating entire ecological communities that Carson includes in Silent Spring is Clear Lake in Northern California, which received three DDD(similar to DDT but thought to be less harmful to aquatic life) applications from 1948-1959. People began to take notice when the western grebes started to die, as a fish eating bird the grebe was consuming the fish, would had consumed smaller fish who had consumed the plankton. The plankton contained 5 points per million of DDD, “It was a house-that-Jack-built-sequence, in which the large carnivores had eaten the smaller carnivores, that had eaten the herbivores, that had eaten the plankton, that had absorbed the poison from the water...Here the problem was resolved in favor of those annoyed by gnats, at the expense of an unstated, and probably not even clearly understood, risk to all who took food or water from the lake” (Carson 48-50).

All of the examples Carson provides lead to severe ecological destruction resulting from man wanting to remove one species of a bothersome insect. After relaying the horrific experiments on wildlife by Illinois scientists, Carson questions the the civility of the involved parties, “The question is whether any civilization can wage relentless war on life without destroying itself, and without losing the right to be called civilized” (Carson 99).

Little needs to be said to introduce the affects of these chemicals on the human body. Ingestion of milk from a cow who’s feed was treated with DDT, homeowners’ dousing their lawns with dieldrin,accidental contamination..nothing was safe from the poison we were using on ourselves. According to medical evidence, “samples of body fat collected from the general population between 1954 and 1956 averaged 5.3 to 7.4 parts per million of DDT” (Carson 178). The government had miserably failed at any attempts to protect the American public from a toxic body. The FDA had developed a system that was inadequate in monitoring the amount of pesticide used on consumer products due to in-state regulations, minuscule staff and an entirely warped system of insecticide tolerance (Carson 181).

This was the dawn of the age of “environmental disease” and Carson was urging the government, the chemical industries and the public to realize that the price for introducing these chemicals into the environment with a vehemence was the decline of ecological and human health. As with the earthworms,the robins, the fish; the human body also accumulated an incredible amount of chemicals leading to sudden symptoms or a mysterious cancer many years after exposure.. “DDT, Carson explains, appears an an agent potentially capable of blocking the whole process of energy production and depriving the cells of utilizable oxygen” the consequences which follow: cancer cells,organs and tissues cannot grow properly,disrupted reproduction resulting in birth defects..to name a few (Carson 204). Our synthetic chemical input returned as a deadly output, essentially killing all life at a cellular level. There is no longer a boundary between sick landscape and sick body, each were suffering form the same disease.

(however) there are other options-biological control that is via other insects,bacteria,fungi..reverting to a landscape with more niches=balanced pest population
but..to remind us what is at hand

keep educated! and know where your food and water come from!