Skip to content

Latest commit

 

History

History
38 lines (26 loc) · 2.52 KB

carson-silent-spring.md

File metadata and controls

38 lines (26 loc) · 2.52 KB

Silent Spring by Rachel Carson

Contents

  1. A Fable for Tomorrow
  2. The Obligation to Endure
  3. Elixirs of Death
  4. Surface Waters and Underground Seas
  5. Realms of the Soil

A Fable for Tomorrow

  1. This book is an attempt to explain what has already silenced the voices of spring in countless towns in America?

The Obligation to Endure

  1. The rapidity of change and the speed with which new situations are created follow the impetuous and heedless pace of man rather than the deliberate pace of nature.
  2. "Insecticides" should be called "biocides".
  3. The total environment may be contaminated by substances that accumulate in bodies of plants and animals and even penetrate the germ cells to shatter or alter genes.
  4. Intelligent beings seek to control a few unwanted species by a method that contaminated the entire environment and brought the threat of disease and death even to their own kind.
  5. Under primitive agricultural conditions the farmer had few insect problems. For instance, an insect that lives on wheat can build up its population to much higher levels on a farm devoted to wheat than on one in which wheat is intermingled with other crops to which the insect is not adapted.

Elixirs of Death

  1. Methane, or marsh gas, formed in nature by the bacterial decomposition of organic matter under water.
  2. There are two major groups of insecticides: chlorinated hydrocarbons (DDT and co), and alkyl or organic phosphates. Both types are extremely poisonous.
  3. The properties of DDT as insectide was discovered by Paul Müller (who won Nobel for the same) and was almost immediately was hailed as a means of stamping out insect-borne disease and winning the farmers’ war against crop destroyers overnight.
  4. DDT and related chemicals are passed on from one organism to another through all the links of the food chains.
  5. Chlordane and Dieldrin are more toxic than DDT. As soon as dieldrin was substituted for DDT in malaria-control work (because the malaria mosquitoes had become resis-tant to DDT), cases of poisoning among the spraymen began to occur. The seizures were severe.
  6. Endrin is extremely toxic that it makes progenitor of all this group of insecticides, DDT, seem by comparison almost harmless.

Surface Waters and Underground Seas

  1. It is impossible to add pesticides to water anywhere without threatening the purity of water everywhere.

Realms of the Soil