They Know Not What They Do
Silent Spring. By Rachel Carson. (Hamish Hamilton, 25s.)
MISS CARSON'S disturbing book is a well- documented study of what Professor Huxley, in a foreword, calls 'the process by which man is Progressively ruining and destroying his own habitat.' In this process attempts to control— often indeed to annihilate—various pests by the Use of toxic chemicals are the most important agent; and Miss Carson makes it clear that in North America, whence she draws most of her evidence, the process is already far advanced. During the past two or three years public °Pinion in this country has been alarmed by the casualties caused to wild life, mostly birds, by chemicals which, applied as a dressing, were intended to protect seed-corn against insect pests. But this situation, which has been brought Quickly though precariously under some sort of control, reproduces only in miniature the type of catastrophe which the Americans, always with good intentions, have been inflicting on mam- mals, birds, insects, fish and plants. The balance of nature has been violently upset over wide areas; for man, his crops and his domestic animals the full consequences are unlikely to reveal themselves for many years. They are still more unlikely to be favourable, and they may Well prove very serious indeed. The pattern of these massive attempts at pest- control, generally by spraying from the air, is fairly constant. A State or Federal agency de- cides , to 'eradicate' a particular pest which is harmful in that agency's particular field. Since commercial interests are involved—the manu- facturers of the chemical, the contractor who floes the spraying and is normally paid by the g,,allon—there is a tendency to overdo the dose, A rain of poison descends upon the enormous target area. The pest it was intended to destroy never is destroyed, and often indeed develops a form of immunity. But many harmless or bene- ficial forms of wild life—the civilian victims, so heavy speak, of these bombing operations—suffer neavy losses, and these in their turn affect the ‘v, elfare of other organisms in whose existence they play a part. Thus, apart from the imme- diate consequences which are invariably distress- ing at one level or another, a chain-reaction is set in motion which is bound to alter, and may Pervert the ecology of the region. Theoretically, one supposes, these peremptory and violent interventions into nature's business may on occasions, and by accident, benefit the interven- tionists in the long run; but all the evidence suggests that they will have an opposite result. A typical operation was the attack, launched in 1959 by the Michigan Department of Agri- culture and the US Department of Agriculture, °n the Japanese beetle over 27,000 acres on the utskirts of Detroit. Pellets of aldrin, a highly toxic substance recommended by its cheapness, were discharged from low-flying, aircraft, and like snow. soon being swept from suburban doorsteps
snow. Within a few days (not very sur
,dogs the birds and squirrels were dying, s and cats were in convulsions, and human beings were vomiting and going down with fever. The Japanese beetle, a minor pest which had a ways been amenable to control by less spec tai-
cular methods, seems to have suffered negli- gible inconvenience.
to The melancholy tale goes on. Gnats breeding a Californian lake irritated the anglers fre- quenting it. In 1949 the lake was dosed with DDD, a variant of DDT. The gnats largely
vanished, but by 1954 they were back again and the lake was given a slightly heavier dose. The western grebes, handsome birds who shared the fishing rights, began to die off. The gnats thrived, a third attack on them was launched, more grebes died. Their fatty tissues, belatedly analysed, were found to be heavily impregnated with DDD. Further research revealed 'a house- that-Jack-built sequence, in which the larger carnivores had eaten the smaller carnivores that had eaten the herbivores, that had eaten the plankton, that had absorbed the poison from the water'—which thus cleared itself of poison, and reprieved the gnats, in prac- tically no time at all. The effect upon the largest carnivores--the human beings who ate the fish —was impossible to establish; but the chances are that their adrenal glands were damaged.
Man, Miss Carson suggests in a chapter called `Beyond the Dreams of the Borgias,' is busily poisoning himself by methods much less indirect. His 'birth-to-death contact with dangerous chemi- cals may in the end prove disastrous.' Insecti- cides are used in the home, herbicides in the garden, without any precautions, without even the realisation that they possess 'far greater death-dealing power than the medicinal drug for which he may be required -to sign a "poison book" in the pharmacy.' Each exposure to these handy products, 'no matter how slight, con- tributes to the progressive build-up of chemicals in our bodies and so to cumulative poisoning.' To a layman all, this sounds, rather alarmist; but only time can show whether it is alarmist, and Miss Carson, whose approach is- throughout ob- jective, does not at all give the impression of a person who is barking up the wrong tree.
My criticism of her book (perhaps an unfair one, since she writes only as a biologist) is that we never Meet the villain. It is homo sapiens who, while adventuring towards distant planets, is, breaking down or undermining the defences of his own; it is he—not his victims, even when they include human beings—who alone has some prospect of controlling the most noxious, the most potent and in the present state of know- ledge the least responsible of all the pests— himself.
As a coroner Miss Carson cannot be faulted. The causes of death, the factors contributing to them, are made admirably clear; her findings can hardly fail to reduce the incidence of self- inflicted wounds. But the follies and delin- quencies she exposes call for more than a post- mortem and an inquest. A judge, not a coroner, is needed to bring homo sapiens to book.
PETER FLEMING
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