Pesticides Rachel Carson

Muller s invention launched both the synthetic pesticide industry that exploited his discovery and the environmental movement that opposed its use. Yet Paul Muller, a shy and determined nature lover, shared many of the same reservations about using DDT in the environment that Rachel Carson popularized in her best seller, Silent Spring, 14 years later. In the 1990s, three decades after DDT was banned in most of the industrialized world, international health workers revived the debate over its use. DDT is a cheap and effective insecticide against malaria, which kills nearly three million people annually, most of them young children and pregnant women in sub-Saharan Africa. 

Pesticides were massively used, especially in the first decades after WWII, thus becoming one of the largest risk factors to human life and health, as well as to the entire natural environment. In 1962, Rachel Carson [2] described the terrible consequences of using pesticides in a way that the general public could understand for the first time. She also showed the most important difference between pesticides and other pollutants pesticides are not production waste, but are introduced into the environment deliberately. For the first time, the well-founded hypothesis was stated that, with time, poisonous and foreign chemical substances could make the Earth uninhabitable. 

Mankind has known of the dangers of food products being contaminated by pesticides for several decades. It is possible that this fact was stated earliest and most frankly in Rachel Carson s famous book [2]. As early as 1963, the World Health Organization (WHO) published a report called Principles of the Safe Use of Food Products Containing Residual Pesticides. ... 

Rachel Carson s book Silent Spring that was published in 1962, was the first popular work to bring the uncontrolled environmental contamination by pesticides to public attention. Well-publicized and well-organized campaigns were mounted in several countries to prohibit the use of DDT and other persistent chlorinated insecticides such as Aldrin and heptachlor. Governments in many developed countries like USA,... 

The publication of Silent Spring (authored by Rachel Carson), which outlined many environmental problems associated with chlorinated pesticides, caused a ban on the use of DDT in 1972. 

The Rachel Carson Council follows in the footsteps of its namesake to inform the general public about the effects of pesticides not only on human beings-especially children-but also on other living organisms and biological systems. 

Briggs, Shirley A., and Rachel Carson Council Staff (1992). Basic guide to pesticides Their characteristics and hazards. Boca Raton, FL CRC Press. 

Americans are often awakened to new environmental problems as a result of articles written or speeches given by prominent scientists or politicians who have become interested in the problem. Such was the case when Rachel Carson wrote about the dangers of pesticide pollution in her now-famous bookSilentSpring (1962). 

Rachel Carson was a pioneer in the fight against excessive use of pesticides. 

Others may have concerns that are more scientific. There has been much concern about the spread of pollen from GE plants and how this movement could affect non-GE crops and native plants. If organic crops cross-pollinate with GE crops, it is possible that consumers would reject the crops. There is also the concern that GE traits could be transferred and persist in wild plants in such a way as to disrupt the natural ecology. I can imagine that Rachel Carson would have been concerned about the potential disruptive effects of pollen flow. At the same time, she may have thought GE plants could be beneficial if they could help reduce pesticide use. 

Die Rachel Carson Syndrome. In June 1962 in the middle of one of the world s great cities and far from the farm, there appeared in one of the world s sophisticated journals (The New Yorker), an article that set the agricultural segment of the world on fire. It was written by a lady missionary named Rachel Carson. Later in 1962 it was expanded into a book, Silent Spring (6). She said that the world was suffocating in a poisonous rain of pesticides and she accused the farmers of poisoning her food. The scare she set in motion has spread around... 

Rachel Carson called attention to the abuse and overuse of pesticides in her 1963 book Silent Spring. Decreases in the populations of some wildlife species, especially birds, were attributed to the relatively large concentrations of DDT that were found in them. In 1973 the Environmental Protection Agency banned the use of DDT in the United States. The appropriateness of this action has been hotly debated. 

Effects have also been observed on the environment. Rachel Carson s Silent Spring in the 1960s drew attention to effects on wildlife. Our Stolen Future (Colbom et al. 1996) created an interest in disruption of the endocrine system by chemicals, even in animals. Many cases of effects on natural animal populations can now be inferred from laboratory experiments, although confirmation in the environment is extremely difficult. For instance, organochlorinc concentrations in adult male bottlenose dolphins are approaching the levels associated with adverse effects found in marine mammals (Carballo et al. 2008), and exposures of tadpoles to a mixture of nine pesticides at environmentally occurring levels lead to developmental effects in most frogs, while none were observed when the pesticides were applied one at a time (Hayes et al. 2006). 

One of the first substances to set off the alarm for this phenomenon was the pesticide DDT in 1962, when Rachel Carson exposed its long range hazards in her book, Silent Spring. DDT has a fish BCF of 54,000 L/kg. 

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