By Royanni Miel M. Hontucan
Featured image from cinemablend.com and hrexach.wordpress.com
“There would be no peace for me,” she wrote to a friend, “if I kept silent.” Carson wrote the evolutionary book, which presented the sharpest realities of chemical domination over the distortion of nature’s balance: the Silent Spring.
She was described as “ignorant and hysterical woman [mind the sexism] who wanted to turn the earth to the insects” by chemical companies because of her “religious dedication” to exposing the threatening effects of DDT (A synthetic chemical compound that must be made in a laboratory) and other long-lasting poisons in so-called agricultural control programs or casually usage of pesticides. She had been attacked but she was persistent, even gaining government and media attention than any other scientific writer in her time
Humans: Altering Time and Nature
Carson wrote a tragic fable about our tomorrow through relating the beauty of an unpolluted town in a picturesque manner: The town lay in the midst of a checkerboard of prosperous farms, with fields of grain and hillsides of orchards where, in spring, white clouds of bloom drifted above the green fields….Then a strange blight crept over the area and everything began to change. Some evil spell had settled on the community: mysterious maladies swept the flocks of chickens; the cattle and sheep sickened and died. Everywhere was a shadow of death.
She just wanted to relay us the message that this fictional sequence of events may also be the reality we would soon watch.
According to Carson, only man has acquired the significant manner of altering nature. From industrial wastes to cutting down trees: man had become nature’s worst enemy but Carson quoted Albert Schweitzer, ‘Man can hardly even recognize the devils of his own creation.’
We would never understand until it happens when our own money couldn’t even save us from nature’s revenge. She mentioned how ‘natural time’ reached the balance in life but the value of time in the modern world was replaced by man’s speed: speed of ambition in a deliberate pace.
Genetically-Modified Foods for Us
Humans complain about pollution and blame each other but in a nutshell: we created our own pollution in our planet. According to Carson, the central problem today is the contamination of chemicals in our food that our bodies couldn’t cope up with its destructive and alien compositions.
Carson stated that there are 500 new chemicals that are being injected in our agricultural products. That’s why cancer and other non-existent diseases are born. Because we, humans, got to endure these changes out of our ignorance to nature.
Stated in the book, the insects’ roles are competitors of food supply and carriers of disease that’s why pesticides are invented to kill them but with this invention also comes with a trade-off: altering our natural food. According to Carson, we allowed ourselves to use these chemicals without prior knowledge of its effects to the environment.
Carson, in contrast of the attacks of the chemical industry who might not have understood the book fully, wasn’t campaigning for the boycott of producing pesticides. What she was aiming was for the chemical industry to produce “biological solutions”, based on understanding of the living organisms they seek to control, and of the whole fabric of life to which these organisms [insects] belong.
One biological solution, which Carson mentioned was the ‘male sterilization’ technique developed by the chief of the United States Department of Agriculture’s Entomology Research Branch, Dr. Edward Knipling, and his associates when screw-worm fly threatened the agricultural industry in the South of USA in 1954. According to Carson, The females of this species lay their eggs in any open wound of a warm-blooded animal. The hatching larvae are parasitic, feeding on the flesh of the host. The project involved the weekly production of about 50 million screw-worms at a specially constructed ‘fly factory’, the use of 20 light airplanes to fly prearranged flight patterns, five to six hours daily, each plane carrying a thousand paper cartons, each carton containing 200 to 400 irradiated flies.
Dr. Knipling’s objective was to eradicate the species of screw-worms through radiating the males and sending them to produce infertile eggs, therefore slowly depleting the process of reproduction.
Another biological solution regarding insects was the formulation of attractants. The experiment involved gypsy moths wherein scientists were able to copy and produce the scent of the female that will confuse the male’s direction to the female so that when the official mating season happens, the male will get confused of his directions.
There were other biological solutions stated by Carson that were presented and tested by scientists but these were the two solutions the author was able to comprehend. To avoid losing the other technical solutions in translation, the author recommends the interested reader to grab a copy of the book and consult a scientist or experts regarding the information.
As what Carson concluded, The ‘control of nature’ is a phrase conceived in arrogance, born of the Neanderthal age of biology and philosophy, when it was supposed that nature exists for the convenience of man. Nature, then, will always find balance and it has its own trade-offs; which of course involves sacrificing lives to find its way back to its old self.
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Royanni Miel M. Hontucan is a senior mass communication student from Silliman University Dumaguete. She loves tinkering with her brain’s wordbank and claims that Instagram is her playground.
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