SILENT SPRING

Notes

p.xviii

DDT is found in the livers of birds and fish on every oceanic island on the planet, and in the breast milk of every mother.

p.7

To adjust to these chemicals would require time on the scale that is nature’s; it would require not merely the years of a man’s life but the life of generations.

p.12

why should we tolerate a diet of weak poisons, a home in insipid surroundings, a circle of acquaintances who are not quite enemies, the noise of motors with just enough relief to prevent insanity? Who would want to live in a world which is just not quite fatal?

p.13

The bioligst George Wald once compared his work on an exceedingly specialized subject, the visual pigments of the eye, to “a very narrow window through which ata distance one can see only a crack of light. As one comes closer the view grows wider and wider, until finally though this same narrow window one is looking at the universe.

p.21

The fatty storage depots act as biological magnifiers so that an intake of as little as 1/10 of 1 PPM in the diet results in storage of about 10 to 15 PPM.

p.26

Pheasants fed quantities [of alrdrin] too small to kill them nevertheless laid few eggs, and the chicks that hatched soon died. The effect is not confined to birds. Rats exposed to aldrin had fewer pregnancies and their young were sickly and short-lived. Puppes born of treated mothers died within three days. By one means or another, the new generations suffer for the poisoning of the parents. No one knows whether the same effect will be seen in human beings, yet this chemical has been sprayed from airplanes over suburban areas and farmland.

p.27

A year-old child had been taken by his American parents to live in Venezuela. There were cockroaches in the house to which they moved, and after a few days a spray containing endrin was used. The baby and the small family dog were taken out of the house before the spraying was done about nine o’clock one morning. After the spraying the floors were washed. The baby and dog were returned to the house in midafternoon. An hour or so later, the dog vomited, went into convulsions, and died. At 10 P.M. on the evening of the same day, the baby also vomited, went into convulsions, and lost consciousness. After that fateful contact with endrin, this normla, halethy child became little more than a vegetable - unable to see or hear, subject to ffrequent muscular spasms, apparently completely cut off from contact with his surroundings. Several months of treatment in a New York hospital failed to change his condition or bring hope of change. “It is extremely doubtful,” reported the attending physicians, “that any useful degree of recovery will occur”

p.28

In Florida, two children found an empty bag and used it to repair a swing. Shortly thereafter both of them died and three of their playmates became ill. THe bag had once contained an insecticide called parathion, one of the organic phosphates; tests established death by parathion poisioning.

p.29

A chemist, thinking to learn by the most direct possible means the dose acutely toxic to human beings, swallowed a minute amount, equivalent to about .00424 ounce. Paralysis followed so instantaneously that he could not reach the antidotes he had prepared at hand, and so he died.

p.36

Among the herbicides are some that are classified as “mutagens,” or agents capable of modifying the genes, the materials of heredity. We are rightly appalled by the genetic effects of radiation; how then, can we be indifferent to the same effect in chemicals that we disseminate widely in our environment?

p.43

Apparently the groundwater between the arsenal and the farms had become contaiminated and it had taken 7 to 8 years for the wastes to travel underground a distance of about 3 miles from the holding ponds to the nearest farm. This seepage had continued to spread and had further contaminated an area of unknown extent. The investigators knew of no way to contain the contaminiation or halt its advance.

p.47

In 1949 1/70 PPM DDT was put into Clear Lake In 1954 1/50 PPM DDT was put into Clear Lake

Years later, although no DDT could be found in the water, dead grebes were found to have 1600 PPM DDT. This is a result of bioaccumulation through the food chain

p.49

Recent medical research has revealed that DDD does strongly suppress the function of the human adrenal cortex. Its cell-destroying capacity is now clincially utilized in the treatment of a rare type of cancer which develops in the adrenal cortex

p.50

When sportsmen of an area want to “improve” fishing ina reservoir, they prevail on authorities to dump quantities of poison into it to kill the undesired fish, which are then replaced with hatchery fish more suited to the sportsmen’s taste.

p.59

Carrots absorb more insecticide than any other crop studied

p.63

Our attitude toward plants is a singularly narrow one. If we see any immediate utility in a plant we foster it. If for any reason we find its presence undesirable or merely a matter of indifference, we may condemn it to destruction forthwith.

p.90

Housewives [in Detroit] swept the granules from porches and sidewalks, where they are said to have “looked like snow”… When the snow and rain came, every puddle became a possible death potion.

p.96

The female Tiphia, finding a beetle grub in the soil, injects a paralyzing fluid and attaches a single egg to the udnersurface of the grub. The young wasp, hatching as a larva, feeds on the paralyzed grub and destroys it.

p.100

By acquiescing in an act that can cause such suffering to a living creature, who among us is not diminished as a human being?

p.139

Reports of fish kills, some of disastrous proportions, have now become so common that the United States Public Health Service has set up an office to collect such reports from the states as an index of water pollution

p.178

It has been medically established that, as common sense would tell us, persons who lived and died before the dawn of the DDT era (about 1942) contained no trace of DDT or any similar material in their tissues. As me ntioned in Chapter 3, samples of body fat collected from the general population between 1954 and 1956 averaged from 5.3 to 7.4 parts per million of DDT. There is some evidence that the average level has risen since then to a consistently higher figure, and individuals with occupational or other special exposures to insecticides of course store even more

p.181

To the question “But doesnt the government protect us from such things [insecticides and other poisons]?” the answer is, “only to a limited extent. The activities of the FDA in the field of consumer protection against pesticides are severely limited by two facts. The first is that it has jurisdiction only over foods shipped in interstate commerce; food grown and marketed within a state are entirely outside its sphere of authority, no matter what the violation. The second and critically limiting fact is the small number of inspectors on its staff - fewer than 600 men for all its varied work.

p.183

This system… - deliverately poisoning our food, then policing the result - is too reminiscent of Lewis Carroll’s White Knight who thought of a plan to dye ones whiskers green and to always use so large a fan that they could not be seen.

p.189

A change at one point, in one molecule even, may reverberate throughout the entire system to initiate changes in seemingly unrelated organs and tissues

p.195

If the liver has been damaged by another agent, methoxychlor is stored in the body at 100 times the normal rate, and will the imitate the effects of DDT with long-lasting effects on the nervous system. Yet the liver damage that brings this about might be so slight as to pass unnoticed.

p.212

Urethane belongs to the group of chemicals called carbamates, from which an increasing number of insecticides and other agricultural chemicals are drawn

p.214

In such individuals [those with a separate chromosome] the original cause of the defect must have occurred in the generation preceding its appearance

p.221

The monthly report of the Office of Vital Statistics for July 1959 states that malignant growths, including those of the lymphatic and blood-forming tissues, accounted for 15 per cent of the deaths in 1958 compared with only 4 per cent in 1900.

p.245

The insect world is nature’s most astonishing phenomenon, nothing is impossible to it; the most improbable things commonly occur there.

p.224

When this [unnamed] chemical was introduced in 1955, the manufacturer applied for a tolerance which would sanction the presence of small residues on any crops that might be sprayed. As required by law, he had tested the chemical on laboratory animals and submitted the results with his application. However, scientists of the Food and Drug Administration interpreted the tests as showing a possible cancer-producing tendency and the Commisoner acordingly recommended a “zero tolerance”, which is a way of saying that no residues coulod legally occur on food shipped across state lines. But the manufacturer had the legal right to appeal and the case was ccordingly reviewed by a committee. The committee’s decision wa sa compromise: a tolerance of 1 part per million was to be established and the product marketed for two years, during which itme further laboratory tetsts were to determine whether the chemical was actually a carcinogen.

Although the committee did not say so, its decision meant the public was to act as guinea pigs, testing the suspected carcinogen along with the laboratory dogs and rats.

p.232

The Warburg theory also explains why repeated small doses of a carcinogen are more dangerous under som circumstances than a single large dose. The latter may kill the cells outright, whereas the small doses allow some to survivce, though in a damaged condition. These survivors may then develop into cancer cells. This is why there is no “safe” dose of a carcinogen

p.235

Another mutagen known to produce cancer is urethane

p.241

The goal of curing the victims of cancer is more exciting, more tangible, more glamorous and rewarding than prevention

p.253

Why does the spider mite appear to thrive on insecticides? Besides the obvious fact that it is relatively insensitive to them, there seem to be two other reasons. In nature it is kept in check by various predators such as ladybugs, a gall midge, predaceous mites and several pirate bugs, all of them extremely sensitive to insecticides. The third reason has to do with population pressure within the spider mite colonies. An undisturbed colony of mites is a densely settled community, huddled under a protective webbing for concealment from its enemies. When sprayed, the colonies disperse as the mites, irritated though not killed by the chemicals, scatter out in search of places where they will not be disturbed.

p.261

We must change our philosophy, abandon our attitude of human superiority and admit that in many cases in natural environments we find ways and means of limiting populations of organisms in a more economical way that we can do it ourselves