Harmless Poison
So, basically, I've been offered a chance to write a column for the school paper. Student readership is low, but the teachers seem to follow it.
We have a teacher teaching ID as a viable alternative to the theory of evolution by natural selection. That, however, won't take place until sometime during second semester, so ranting about it *now* wouldn't be very effective. My job, then, is to fill inches until it is time for my rant.
Does this suffice as an opening for the various soapbox lectures that I could give? Please keep in mind that it is only a first draft. :$
In her book Silent Spring, Rachel Carson writes that “During the fall of 1959 some 27,000 acres in southeastern Michigan, including numerous suburbs of Detroit, were heavily dusted from the air with pellets of aldrin, one of the most dangerous of all the chlorinated hydrocarbons. The program was conducted by the Michigan Department of Agriculture with the cooperation of the United States Department of Agriculture; its announced purpose was control of the Japanese beetle.”The ‘Japanese beetle’ was a pest imported, clearly, from Japan. It was found in New Jersey in 1916. It went unrecognized for some time, until at last it was identified as a native of the main island of Japan. Brought to the United States on trees destined for nurseries before restrictions were imposed, it spread through the states east of the Mississippi and established a stable, if low, population.
Carson goes on to describe the results of this aerial blitz: “[…]As the planes went about their work the pellets of insecticide fell on beetles and humans alike, showers of “harmless” poison descending on people shopping or going to work and on children out from school for the lunch hour. Housewives swept the granules from porches and sidewalks, where they are said to have ‘looked like snow.’” The poison, chosen because of its low cost and apparent inability to affect humans blanketed the city. Despite the official acknowledgment that aldrin is ‘poison’ they assured the public that this was “a safe operation.” No precautions were advised, and the Detroit Department of Parks and Recreation asserted that “the dust is harmless to humans and will not hurt plants or pets.”
Sadly, this confidence was unfounded. Within three days the Detroit Audubon Society began receiving calls about birds: alarming numbers were seen dead or dying. One woman reported “at least a dozen” birds dead in her yard alone. Those birds still alive were seen to suffer symptoms of insecticide poisoning- “tremoring, loss of ability to flay, paralysis and convulsions.”
The plight of birds is not the only unfortunate aftereffect of this treatment. Cats and dogs kept as pets also showed symptoms. Cats were more severely affected than dogs, possibly because of their tendency to groom themselves more thoroughly. No help could be offered to these animals; poisons like aldrin cannot be washed from fruit, let alone an animal’s paw.
Carson’s book goes on to spotlight other such environmental catastrophes caused by the indiscriminate use of the poisons of her day. It has seen even seen success; DDT and other “chlorinated hydrocarbons” shown to be so incredibly destructive to wildlife have been largely abandoned. The information that she presented in Silent Spring was not esoteric, mystical revelation open only to her. Everything she tells us was readily available to anyone that cared to look, even at the time it was written. Yet no one did. Why? It was a problem of focus. Only Carson was in a position to look across a broad spectrum of scientific specialties and see the pattern of destruction emerging.
There is a similar problem today. I do not claim to have Carson’s vision or her ability, but I cannot help but look at the world around me and see things that must have been missed. There are issues racing up to greet us and many look away, if they even look at all. Too often we accept the assurances that the poison is “harmless” and go about our lives. It took an outsider’s magnum opus and the creation of a global movement to draw attention to this one problem of chemical poison. Without a firebrand like Carson we would have been content to live among “harmless” deadly poisons, content in our own invincibility. With any luck we’ve been awakened to the peril of unthinking inertia.