Endangered Species by Jan A. Randall

Author:Jan A. Randall
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: ABC-CLIO

Rachel Carson (1907–1964): Catalyst of an Environmental Movement

Rachel Louise Carson gave voice to an environmental movement and challenged a post–World War II society about the ethics of human domination of nature. She was born on May 27, 1907, in rural Springdale, Pennsylvania. Her degree in biology was awarded from the Pennsylvania College for Women (now Chatham College), and she did postgraduate work at the Marine Biological Laboratory in Woods Hole, Massachusetts. In 1932, she received a master’s degree in zoology from Johns Hopkins University. Carson worked at the U.S. Bureau of Fisheries during the Depression and became a scientist and editor and then editor-in-chief of all publications for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. In 1951, she published The Sea around Us, which was on the New York Times bestsellers list for 81 weeks. She ended her government career in 1952 to write full time.

When Carson wrote her classic book Silent Spring in 1962, concerns about damage to the natural world were just beginning to surface. She articulated these concerns in a series of essays in the New Yorker and then in her book. Carson challenged the establishment for the practice of the widespread use of chemicals, especially the pesticide DDT, dichloro-diphenyl-trichloroethane, and other insecticides known as organochlorines.

Discovered in 1939 by a Swiss chemist, Paul Müller, DDT was used successfully during World War II by the military to control typhus, malaria, and insect parasites such as lice. After the war, DDT was promoted as a wonder chemical and sprayed widely to control agricultural pests in broadcast sprays from airplanes and used globally to kill mosquitoes for malaria control. Users of DDT soon learned that pesticides sprayed over large areas killed a large fraction of the insect population to leave behind survivors with a resistance to the effects of the chemical and the demise of predatory insects. Insect immunity occurred in only a matter of a few years to render DDT less effective for the control of insect populations.

In Silent Spring, Rachel Carson warned about the harm of pesticides to the environment and possibly to human health. She explained how pesticides were accumulating in the food chain to cause damage to the environment and to threaten populations of predatory birds. In contrast to other pesticides that broke down quickly, DDT persisted in the environment and concentrated in the tissues of insects and other animals. At each step of the food chain, concentrations of DDT in the tissues increased until top predators consumed high amounts of it in their prey. This response was seen in predatory birds, especially fish-eating eagles and falcons. The DDT had accumulated in the fish these birds ate. The accumulated pesticide did not kill the birds but affected their reproduction to produce thin eggshells. The thin eggshells often broke before the chick was ready to leave the egg causing the chick to die.

Although the pesticide and agricultural industries attacked and ridiculed Carson, she eventually was proven correct on many of her predictions in Silent Spring. DDT was initially

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