SILENT SPRING, Schemes and Mind Maps of History

Download SILENT SPRING and more Schemes and Mind Maps History in PDF only on Docsity! SILENT SPRING RACHEL CARSON (ONE SINGLE BOOK WHICH BROUGHT THE ISSUE OF PESTICIDES CENTERSTAGE. WITH MASS SCALE POISONING OF THE LAND WITH PESTICIDES AND WITH THOUSANDS OF FARMERS COMMITTING SUICIDE THIS BOOK IS ESSENTIAL FOR PUBLIC RESEARCH IN INDIA.) Contents Acknowledgments ix Foreword xi 1 A Fable for Tomorrow 1 2 The Obligation to Endure 5 3 Elixirs of Death 15 4 Surface Waters and Underground Seas 39 5 Realms of the Soil 53 6 Earth’s Green Mantle 63 7 Needless Havoc 85 8 And No Birds Sing 103 9 Rivers of Death 129 10 Indiscriminately from the Skies 154 11 Beyond the Dreams of the Borgias 173 12 The Human Price 187 13 Through a Narrow Window 199 14 One in Every Four 219 15 Nature Fights Back 245 16 The Rumblings of an Avalanche 262 17 The Other Road 277 List of Principal Sources 301 Index 357 Acknowledgments IN A LETTER written in January 1958, Olga Owens Huckins told me of her own bitter experience of a small world made lifeless, and so brought my attention sharply back to a problem with which I had long been concerned. I then realized I must write this book. During the years since then I have received help and encouragement from so many people that it is not possible to name them all here. Those who have freely shared with me the fruits of many years’ experience and study represent a wide variety of government agencies in this and other countries, many universities and research institutions, and many professions. To all of them I express my deepest thanks for time and thought so generously given. In addition my special gratitude goes to those who took time to read portions of the manuscript and to offer comment and criticism based on their own expert knowledge. Although the final responsibility for the accuracy and validity of the text is mine, I could not have completed the book without the generous help of these specialists: L. G. Bartholomew, M.D., of the Mayo Clinic, John J. Biesele of the University of Texas, A. W. A. Brown of the University of Western Ontario, Morton S. Biskind, M.D., of Westport, Connecticut, C. J. Briejer of the Plant Protection Service in Holland, Clarence Cottam of the Rob and Bessie Welder Wildlife Foundation, George Crile, Jr., M.D., of the Cleveland Clinic, Frank Egler of Norfolk, Connecticut, Malcolm M. Hargraves, M.D., of the Mayo Clinic, W. C. Hueper, M.D., of the National Cancer Institute, C. J. Kerswill of the Fisheries Research Board of Canada, Olaus Murie of the Wilderness panel’s report, when it appeared some months later, was a complete vindication of her thesis. Rachel Carson was very modest about her accomplishment. As she wrote to a close friend when the manuscript was nearing completion: “The beauty of the living world I was trying to save has always been uppermost in my mind—that, and anger at the senseless, brutish things that were being done.... Now l can believe I have at least helped a little.” In fact, her book helped to make ecology, which was an unfamiliar word in those days, one of the great popular causes of our time. It led to environmental legislation at every level of government. Twenty-five years after its original publication, Silent Spring has more than a historical interest. Such a book bridges the gulf between what C. P. Snow called “the two cultures.” Rachel Carson was a realistic, well-trained scientist who possessed the insight and sensitivity of a poet. She had an emotional response to nature for which she did not apologize. The more she learned, the greater grew what she termed “the sense of wonder.” So she succeeded in making a book about death a celebration of life. Rereading her book today, one is aware that its implications are far broader than the immediate crisis with which it dealt. By awaking us to a specific danger—the poisoning of the earth with chemicals—she has helped us to recognize many other ways (some little known in her time) in which mankind is degrading the quality of life on our planet. And Silent Spring will continue to remind us that in our overorganized and overmechanized age, individual initiative and courage still count: change can be brought about, not through incitement to war or violent revolution, but rather by altering the direction of our thinking about the world we live in. 1. A Fable for Tomorrow THERE WAS ONCE a town in the heart of America where all life seemed to live in harmony with its surroundings. 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. In autumn, oak and maple and birch set up a blaze of color that flamed and flickered across a backdrop of pines. Then foxes barked in the hills and deer silently crossed the fields, half hidden in the mists of the fall mornings. Along the roads, laurel, viburnum and alder, great ferns and wildflowers delighted the traveler’s eye through much of the year. Even in winter the roadsides were places of beauty, where countless birds came to feed on the berries and on the seed heads of the dried weeds rising above the snow. The countryside was, in fact, famous for the abundance and variety of its bird life, and when the flood of migrants was pouring through in spring and fall people traveled from great distances to observe them. Others came to fish the streams, which flowed clear and cold out of the hills and contained shady pools where trout lay. So it had been from the days many years ago when the first settlers raised their houses, sank their wells, and built their barns. 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. The farmers spoke of much illness among their families. In the town the doctors had become more and more puzzled by new kinds of sickness appearing among their patients. There had been several sudden and unexplained deaths, not only among adults but even among children, who would be stricken suddenly while at play and die within a few hours. There was a strange stillness. The birds, for example—where had they gone? Many people spoke of them, puzzled and disturbed. The feeding stations in the backyards were deserted. The few birds seen anywhere were moribund; they trembled violently and could not fly. It was a spring without voices. On the mornings that had once throbbed with the dawn chorus of robins, catbirds, doves, jays, wrens, and scores of other bird voices there was now no sound; only silence lay over the fields and woods and marsh. On the farms the hens brooded, but no chicks hatched. The farmers complained that they were unable to raise any pigs—the litters were small and the young survived only a few days. The apple trees were coming into bloom but no bees droned among the blossoms, so there was no pollination and there would be no fruit. The roadsides, once so attractive, were now lined with browned and withered vegetation as though swept by fire. These, too, were silent, deserted by all living things. Even the streams were now lifeless. Anglers no longer visited them, for all the fish had died. In the gutters under the eaves and between the shingles of the roofs, a white granular powder still showed a few patches; some weeks before it had fallen like snow upon the roofs and the lawns, the fields and streams. No witchcraft, no enemy action had silenced the rebirth of new life in this stricken world. The people had done it themselves. . . . This town does not actually exist, but it might easily have a thousand counterparts in America or elsewhere in the world. I know of no community that has experienced all the misfortunes I describe. Yet every one of these disasters has actually happened somewhere, and many real communities have already suffered a substantial number of them. A grim specter has crept upon us almost unnoticed, and this imagined tragedy may easily become a stark reality we all shall know. What has already silenced the voices of spring in countless towns in America? This book is an attempt to explain. 2. The Obligation to Endure THE HISTORY OF LIFE on earth has been a history of interaction between living things and their surroundings. To a large extent, the physical form and the habits of the earth’s vegetation and its animal life have been molded by the environment. Considering the whole span of earthly time, the opposite effect, in which life actually modifies its surroundings, has been relatively slight. Only within the moment of time represented by the present century has one species—man—acquired significant power to alter the nature of his world. During the past quarter century this power has not only increased to one of disturbing magnitude but it has changed in character. The most alarming of all man’s assaults upon the environment is the contamination of air, earth, rivers, and sea with dangerous and even lethal materials. This pollution is for the most part irrecoverable; the chain of evil it initiates not only in the world that must support life but in living tissues is for the most part irreversible. In this now universal contamination of the environment, chemicals are the sinister and little-recognized partners of radiation in changing the very nature of the world—the very nature of its life. Strontium 90, released through nuclear explosions into the air, comes to earth in rain or drifts down as fallout, lodges in soil, enters into the grass or corn or wheat grown there, and in time takes up its abode in the bones of a human being, there to remain until his death. Similarly, chemicals sprayed on croplands or forests or gardens lie long in soil, entering into living organisms, passing from one to another in a chain of poisoning and death. Or they pass mysteriously by underground streams until they emerge and, through the alchemy of air and sunlight, combine into new forms that kill vegetation, sicken cattle, and work unknown harm on those who drink from once pure wells. As Albert Schweitzer has said, ‘Man can hardly even recognize the devils of his own creation.’ It took hundreds of millions of years to produce the life that now inhabits the earth—eons of time in which that developing and evolving and diversifying life reached a state of adjustment and balance with its surroundings. The environment, rigorously shaping and directing the life it supported, contained elements that were hostile as well as supporting. Certain rocks gave out dangerous radiation; even within the light of the sun, from which all life draws its energy, there were short-wave radiations with power to injure. Given time—time not in years but in millennia—life adjusts, and a balance has been reached. For time is the essential ingredient; but in the modern world there is no time. The rapidity of change and the speed with which new situations are created follow the impetuous and heedless pace of man rather than the deliberate pace of nature. Radiation is no longer merely the background radiation of rocks, the Under primitive agricultural conditions the farmer had few insect problems. These arose with the intensification of agriculture—the devotion of immense acreages to a single crop. Such a system set the stage for explosive increases in specific insect populations. Single-crop farming does not take advantage of the principles by which nature works; it is agriculture as an engineer might conceive it to be. Nature has introduced great variety into the landscape, but man has displayed a passion for simplifying it. Thus he undoes the built-in checks and balances by which nature holds the species within bounds. One important natural check is a limit on the amount of suitable habitat for each species. Obviously then, an insect that lives on wheat can build up its population to much higher levels on a farm devoted to wheat than on one in which wheat is intermingled with other crops to which the insect is not adapted. The same thing happens in other situations. A generation or more ago, the towns of large areas of the United States lined their streets with the noble elm tree. Now the beauty they hopefully created is threatened with complete destruction as disease sweeps through the elms, carried by a beetle that would have only limited chance to build up large populations and to spread from tree to tree if the elms were only occasional trees in a richly diversified planting. Another factor in the modern insect problem is one that must be viewed against a background of geologic and human history: the spreading of thousands of different kinds of organisms from their native homes to invade new territories. This worldwide migration has been studied and graphically described by the British ecologist Charles Elton in his recent book The Ecology of Invasions. During the Cretaceous Period, some hundred million years ago, flooding seas cut many land bridges between continents and living things found themselves confined in what Elton calls ‘colossal separate nature reserves’. There, isolated from others of their kind, they developed many new species. When some of the land masses were joined again, about 15 million years ago, these species began to move out into new territories—a movement that is not only still in progress but is now receiving considerable assistance from man. The importation of plants is the primary agent in the modern spread of species, for animals have almost invariably gone along with the plants, quarantine being a comparatively recent and not completely effective innovation. The United States Office of Plant Introduction alone has introduced almost 200,000 species and varieties of plants from all over the world. Nearly half of the 180 or so major insect enemies of plants in the United States are accidental imports from abroad, and most of them have come as hitchhikers on plants. In new territory, out of reach of the restraining hand of the natural enemies that kept down its numbers in its native land, an invading plant or animal is able to become enormously abundant. Thus it is no accident that our most troublesome insects are introduced species. These invasions, both the naturally occurring and those dependent on human assistance, are likely to continue indefinitely. Quarantine and massive chemical campaigns are only extremely expensive ways of buying time. We are faced, according to Dr. Elton, ‘with a life-and-death need not just to find new technological means of suppressing this plant or that animal’; instead we need the basic knowledge of animal populations and their relations to their surroundings that will ‘promote an even balance and damp down the explosive power of outbreaks and new invasions.’ Much of the necessary knowledge is now available but we do not use it. We train ecologists in our universities and even employ them in our governmental agencies but we seldom take their advice. We allow the chemical death rain to fall as though there were no alternative, whereas in fact there are many, and our ingenuity could soon discover many more if given opportunity. Have we fallen into a mesmerized state that makes us accept as inevitable that which is inferior or detrimental, as though having lost the will or the vision to demand that which is good? Such thinking, in the words of the ecologist Paul Shepard, ‘idealizes life with only its head out of water, inches above the limits of toleration of the corruption of its own environment...Why should we tolerate a diet of weak poisons, a home in insipid surroundings, a circle of acquaintances who are not quite our 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?’ Yet such a world is pressed upon us. The crusade to create a chemically sterile, insect-free world seems to have engendered a fanatic zeal on the part of many specialists and most of the so-called control agencies. On every hand there is evidence that those engaged in spraying operations exercise a ruthless power. ‘The regulatory entomologists...function as prosecutor, judge and jury, tax assessor and collector and sheriff to enforce their own orders,’ said Connecticut entomologist Neely Turner. The most flagrant abuses go unchecked in both state and federal agencies. It is not my contention that chemical insecticides must never be used. I do contend that we have put poisonous and biologically potent chemicals indiscriminately into the hands of persons largely or wholly ignorant of their potentials for harm. We have subjected enormous numbers of people to contact with these poisons, without their consent and often without their knowledge. If the Bill of Rights contains no guarantee that a citizen shall be secure against lethal poisons distributed either by private individuals or by public officials, it is surely only because our forefathers, despite their considerable wisdom and foresight, could conceive of no such problem. I contend, furthermore, that we have allowed these chemicals to be used with little or no advance investigation of their effect on soil, water, wildlife, and man himself. Future generations are unlikely to condone our lack of prudent concern for the integrity of the natural world that supports all life. There is still very limited awareness of the nature of the threat. This is an era of specialists, each of whom sees his own problem and is unaware of or intolerant of the larger frame into which it fits. It is also an era dominated by industry, in which the right to make a dollar at whatever cost is seldom challenged. When the public protests, confronted with some obvious evidence of damaging results of pesticide applications, it is fed little tranquilizing pills of half truth. We urgently need an end to these false assurances, to the sugar coating of unpalatable facts. It is the public that is being asked to assume the risks that the insect controllers calculate. The public must decide whether it wishes to continue on the present road, and it can do so only when in full possession of the facts. In the words of Jean Rostand, ‘The obligation to endure gives us the right to know.’ 3. Elixirs of Death FOR THE FIRST TIME in the history of the world, every human being is now subjected to contact with dangerous chemicals, from the moment of conception until death. In the less than two decades of their use, the synthetic pesticides have been so thoroughly distributed throughout the animate and inanimate world that they occur virtually everywhere. They have been recovered from most of the major river systems and even from streams of groundwater flowing unseen through the earth. Residues of these chemicals linger in soil to which they may have been applied a dozen years before. They have entered and lodged in the bodies of fish, birds, reptiles, and domestic and wild animals so universally that scientists carrying on animal experiments find it almost impossible to locate subjects free from such contamination. They have been found in fish in remote mountain lakes, in earthworms burrowing in soil, in the eggs of birds—and in man himself. For these chemicals are now stored in the bodies of the vast majority of human beings, regardless of age. They occur in the mother’s milk, and probably in the tissues of the unborn child. All this has come about because of the sudden rise and prodigious growth of an industry for the production of man- made or synthetic chemicals with insecticidal properties. This industry is a child of the Second World War. In the course of developing agents of chemical warfare, some of the chemicals created in the laboratory were found to be lethal to insects. The discovery did not come by chance: insects were widely used to test chemicals as agents of death for man. The result has been a seemingly endless stream of synthetic insecticides. In being man-made—by ingenious laboratory manipulation of the molecules, substituting atoms, altering their arrangement—they differ sharply from the simpler insecticides of prewar days. These were derived from naturally occurring minerals and plant products—compounds of arsenic, copper, , manganese, zinc, and other minerals, pyrethrum from the dried flowers of chrysanthemums, nicotine sulphate from some of the relatives of tobacco, and rotenone from leguminous plants of the East Indies. What sets the new synthetic insecticides apart is their enormous biological potency. They have immense power not . . . DDT (short for dichloro-diphenyl-trichloro-ethane) was first synthesized by a German chemist in 1874, but its properties as an insecticide were not discovered until 1939. Almost immediately DDT was hailed as a means of stamping out insect- borne disease and winning the farmers’ war against crop destroyers overnight. The discoverer, Paul Müller of Switzerland, won the Nobel Prize. DDT is now so universally used that in most minds the product takes on the harmless aspect of the familiar. Perhaps the myth of the harmlessness of DDT rests on the fact that one of its first uses was the wartime dusting of many thousands of soldiers, refugees, and prisoners, to combat lice. It is widely believed that since so many people came into extremely intimate contact with DDT and suffered no immediate ill effects the chemical must certainly be innocent of harm. This understandable misconception arises from the fact that—unlike other chlorinated hydrocarbons—DDT in powder form is not readily absorbed through the skin. Dissolved in oil, as it usually is, DDT is definitely toxic. If swallowed, it is absorbed slowly through the digestive tract; it may also be absorbed through the lungs. Once it has entered the body it is stored largely in organs rich in fatty substances (because DDT itself is fat-soluble) such as the adrenals, testes, or thyroid. Relatively large amounts are deposited in the liver, kidneys, and the fat of the large, protective mesenteries that enfold the intestines. This storage of DDT begins with the smallest conceivable intake of the chemical (which is present as residues on most foodstuffs) and continues until quite high levels are reached. The fatty storage depots act as biological magnifiers, so that an intake of as little as of 1 part per million in the diet results in storage of about 10 to 15 parts per million, an increase of one hundredfold or more. These terms of reference, so commonplace to the chemist or the pharmacologist, are unfamiliar to most of us. One part in a million sounds like a very small amount—and so it is. But such substances are so potent that a minute quantity can bring about vast changes in the body. In animal experiments, 3 parts per million has been found to inhibit an essential enzyme in heart muscle; only 5 parts per million has brought about necrosis or disintegration of liver cells; only 2.5 parts per million of the closely related chemicals dieldrin and chlordane did the same. This is really not surprising. In the normal chemistry of the human body there is just such a disparity between cause and effect. For example, a quantity of iodine as small as two ten-thousandths of a gram spells the difference between health and disease. Because these small amounts of pesticides are cumulatively stored and only slowly excreted, the threat of chronic poisoning and degenerative changes of the liver and other organs is very real. Scientists do not agree upon how much DDT can be stored in the human body. Dr. Arnold Lehman, who is the chief pharmacologist of the Food and Drug Administration, says there is neither a floor below which DDT is not absorbed nor a ceiling beyond which absorption and storage ceases. On the other hand, Dr. Wayland Hayes of the United States Public Health Service contends that in every individual a point of equilibrium is reached, and that DDT in excess of this amount is excreted. For practical purposes it is not particularly important which of these men is right. Storage in human beings has been well investigated, and we know that the average person is storing potentially harmful amounts. According to various studies, individuals with no known exposure (except the inevitable dietary one) store an average of 5.3 parts per million to 7.4 parts per million; agricultural workers 17.1 parts per million; and workers in insecticide plants as high as 648 parts per million! So the range of proven storage is quite wide and, what is even more to the point, the minimum figures are above the level at which damage to the liver and other organs or tissues may begin. One of the most sinister features of DDT and related chemicals is the way they are passed on from one organism to another through all the links of the food chains. For example, fields of alfalfa are dusted with DDT; meal is later prepared from the alfalfa and fed to hens; the hens lay eggs which contain DDT. Or the hay, containing residues of 7 to 8 parts per million, may be fed to cows. The DDT will turn up in the milk in the amount of about 3 parts per million, but in butter made from this milk the concentration may run to 65 parts per million. Through such a process of transfer, what started out as a very small amount of DDT may end as a heavy concentration. Farmers nowadays find it difficult to obtain uncontaminated fodder for their milk cows, though the Food and Drug Administration forbids the presence of insecticide residues in milk shipped in interstate commerce. The poison may also be passed on from mother to offspring. Insecticide residues have been recovered from human milk in samples tested by Food and Drug Administration scientists. This means that the breast-fed human infant is receiving small but regular additions to the load of toxic chemicals building up in his body. It is by no means his first exposure, however: there is good reason to believe this begins while he is still in the womb. In experimental animals the chlorinated hydrocarbon insecticides freely cross the barrier of the placenta, the traditional protective shield between the embryo and harmful substances in the mother’s body. While the quantities so received by human infants would normally be small, they are not unimportant because children are more susceptible to poisoning than adults. This situation also means that today the average individual almost certainly starts life with the first deposit of the growing load of chemicals his body will be required to carry thenceforth. All these facts—storage at even low levels, subsequent accumulation, and occurrence of liver damage at levels that may easily occur in normal diets, caused Food and Drug Administration scientists to declare as early as 1950 that it is ‘extremely likely the potential hazard of DDT has been underestimated.’ There has been no such parallel situation in medical history. No one yet knows what the ultimate consequences may be. . . . Chlordane, another chlorinated hydrocarbon, has all these unpleasant attributes of DDT plus a few that are peculiarly its own. Its residues are long persistent in soil, on foodstuffs, or on surfaces to which it may be applied. Chlordane makes use of all available portals to enter the body. It may be absorbed through the skin, may be breathed in as a spray or dust, and of course is absorbed from the digestive tract if residues are swallowed. Like all other chlorinated hydrocarbons, its deposits build up in the body in cumulative fashion. A diet containing such a small amount of chlordane as 2.5 parts per million may eventually lead to storage of 75 parts per million in the fat of experimental animals. So experienced a pharmacologist as Dr. Lehman has described chlordane in 1950 as ‘one of the most toxic of insecticides—anyone handling it could be poisoned.’ Judging by the carefree liberality with which dusts for lawn treatments by suburbanites are laced with chlordane, this warning has not been taken to heart. The fact that the suburbanite is not instantly stricken has little meaning, for the toxins may sleep long in his body, to become manifest months or years later in an obscure disorder almost impossible to trace to its origins. On the other hand, death may strike quickly. One victim who accidentally spilled a 25 per cent industrial solution on the skin developed symptoms of poisoning within 40 minutes and died before medical help could be obtained. No reliance can be placed on receiving advance warning which might allow treatment to be had in time. Heptachlor, one of the constituents of chlordane, is marketed as a separate formulation. It has a particularly high capacity for storage in fat. If the diet contains as little as of 1 part per million there will be measurable amounts of heptachlor in the body. It also has the curious ability to undergo change into a chemically distinct substance known as heptachlor epoxide. It does this in soil and in the tissues of both plants and animals. Tests on birds indicate that the epoxide that results from this change is more toxic than the original chemical, which in turn is four times as toxic as chlordane. As long ago as the mid-1930s a special group of hydrocarbons, the chlorinated naphthalenes, was found to cause hepatitis, and also a rare and almost invariably fatal liver disease in persons subjected to occupational exposure. They have led to illness and death of workers in electrical industries; and more recently, in agriculture, they have been considered a cause of a mysterious and usually fatal disease of cattle. In view of these antecedents, it is not surprising that three of the insecticides that are related to this group are among the most violently poisonous of all the hydrocarbons. These are dieldrin, aldrin, and endrin. Dieldrin, named for a German chemist, Diels, is about 5 times as toxic as DDT when swallowed but 40 times as toxic when absorbed through the skin in solution. It is notorious for striking quickly and with terrible effect at the nervous system, sending the victims into convulsions. Persons thus poisoned recover so slowly as to indicate chronic effects. As with other chlorinated hydrocarbons, these long-term effects include severe damage to the liver. The long duration of its residues and the effective insecticidal action make dieldrin one of the most used insecticides today, despite the appalling destruction of wildlife that has followed its use. As tested on quail and pheasants, it has proved to be about 40 to 50 times has destroyed it. This transient nature of the transmitting chemical is necessary to the normal functioning of the body. If the acetylcholine is not destroyed as soon as a nerve impulse has passed, impulses continue to flash across the bridge from nerve to nerve, as the chemical exerts its effects in an ever more intensified manner. The movements of the whole body become uncoordinated: tremors, muscular spasms, convulsions, and death quickly result. This contingency has been provided for by the body. A protective enzyme called cholinesterase is at hand to destroy the transmitting chemical once it is no longer needed. By this means a precise balance is struck and the body never builds up a dangerous amount of acetylcholine. But on contact with the organic phosphorus insecticides, the protective enzyme is destroyed, and as the quantity of the enzyme is reduced that of the transmitting chemical builds up. In this effect, the organic phosphorus compounds resemble the alkaloid poison muscarine, found in a poisonous mushroom, the fly amanita. Repeated exposures may lower the cholinesterase level until an individual reaches the brink of acute poisoning, a brink over which he may be pushed by a very small additional exposure. For this reason it is considered important to make periodic examinations of the blood of spray operators and others regularly exposed. Parathion is one of the most widely used of the organic phosphates. It is also one of the most powerful and dangerous. Honeybees become ‘wildly agitated and bellicose’ on contact with it, perform frantic cleaning movements, and are near death within half an hour. 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. Parathion is now said to be a favorite instrument of suicide in Finland. In recent years the State of California has reported an average of more than 200 cases of accidental parathion poisoning annually. In many parts of the world the fatality rate from parathion is startling: 100 fatal cases in India and 67 in Syria in 1958, and an average of 336 deaths per year in Japan. Yet some 7,000,000 pounds of parathion are now applied to fields and orchards of the United States—by hand sprayers, motorized blowers and dusters, and by airplane. The amount used on California farms alone could, according to one medical authority, ‘provide a lethal dose for 5 to 10 times the whole world’s population.’ One of the few circumstances that save us from extinction by this means is the fact that parathion and other chemicals of this group are decomposed rather rapidly. Their residues on the crops to which they are applied are therefore relatively shortlived compared with the chlorinated hydrocarbons. However, they last long enough to create hazards and produce consequences that range from the merely serious to the fatal. In Riverside, California, eleven out of thirty men picking oranges became violently ill and all but one had to be hospitalized. Their symptoms were typical of parathion poisoning. The grove had been sprayed with parathion some two and a half weeks earlier; the residues that reduced them to retching, half-blind, semiconscious misery were sixteen to nineteen days old. And this is not by any means a record for persistence. Similar mishaps have occurred in groves sprayed a month earlier, and residues have been found in the peel of oranges six months after treatment with standard dosages. The danger to all workers applying the organic phosphorus insecticides in fields, orchards, and vineyards, is so extreme that some states using these chemicals have established laboratories where physicians may obtain aid in diagnosis and treatment. Even the physicians themselves may be in some danger, unless they wear rubber gloves in handling the victims of poisoning. So may a laundress washing the clothing of such victims, which may have absorbed enough parathion to affect her. Malathion, another of the organic phosphates, is almost as familiar to the public as DDT, being widely used by gardeners, in household insecticides, in mosquito spraying, and in such blanket attacks on insects as the spraying of nearly a million acres of Florida communities for the Mediterranean fruit fly. It is considered the least toxic of this group of chemicals and many people assume they may use it freely and without fear of harm. Commercial advertising encourages this comfortable attitude. The alleged ‘safety’ of malathion rests on rather precarious ground, although—as often happens—this was not discovered until the chemical had been in use for several years. Malathion is ‘safe’ only because the mammalian liver, an organ with extraordinary protective powers, renders it relatively harmless. The detoxification is accomplished by one of the enzymes of the liver. If, however, something destroys this enzyme or interferes with its action, the person exposed to malathion receives the full force of the poison. Unfortunately for all of us, opportunities for this sort of thing to happen are legion. A few years ago a team of Food and Drug Administration scientists discovered that when malathion and certain other organic phosphates are administered simultaneously a massive poisoning results—up to 50 times as severe as would be predicted on the basis of adding together the toxicities of the two. In other words, of the lethal dose of each compound may be fatal when the two are combined. This discovery led to the testing of other combinations. It is now known that many pairs of organic phosphate insecticides are highly dangerous, the toxicity being stepped up or ‘potentiated’ through the combined action. Potentiation seems to take place when one compound destroys the liver enzyme responsible for detoxifying the other. The two need not be given simultaneously. The hazard exists not only for the man who may spray this week with one insecticide and next week with another; it exists also for the consumer of sprayed products. The common salad bowl may easily present a combination of organic phosphate insecticides. Residues well within the legally permissible limits may interact. The full scope of the dangerous interaction of chemicals is as yet little known, but disturbing findings now come regularly from scientific laboratories. Among these is the discovery that the toxicity of an organic phosphate can be increased by a second agent that is not necessarily an insecticide. For example, one of the plasticizing agents may act even more strongly than another insecticide to make malathion more dangerous. Again, this is because it inhibits the liver enzyme that normally would ‘draw the teeth’ of the poisonous insecticide. What of other chemicals in the normal human environment? What, in particular, of drugs? A bare beginning has been made on this subject, but already it is known that some organic phosphates (parathion and malathion) increase the toxicity of some drugs used as muscle relaxants, and that several others (again including malathion) markedly increase the sleeping time of barbiturates. . . . In Greek mythology the sorceress Medea, enraged at being supplanted by a rival for the affections of her husband Jason, presented the new bride with a robe possessing magic properties. The wearer of the robe immediately suffered a violent death. This death-by-indirection now finds its counterpart in what are known as ‘systemic insecticides’. These are chemicals with extraordinary properties which are used to convert plants or animals into a sort of Medea’s robe by making them actually poisonous. This is done with the purpose of killing insects that may come in contact with them, especially by sucking their juices or blood. The world of systemic insecticides is a weird world, surpassing the imaginings of the brothers Grimm—perhaps most closely akin to the cartoon world of Charles Addams. It is a world where the enchanted forest of the fairy tales has become the poisonous forest in which an insect that chews a leaf or sucks the sap of a plant is doomed. It is a world where a flea bites a dog, and dies because the dog’s blood has been made poisonous, where an insect may die from vapors emanating from a plant it has never touched, where a bee may carry poisonous nectar back to its hive and presently produce poisonous honey. The entomologists’ dream of the built-in insecticide was born when workers in the field of applied entomology realized they could take a hint from nature: they found that wheat growing in soil containing sodium selenate was immune to attack by aphids or spider mites. Selenium, a naturally occurring element found sparingly in rocks and soils of many parts of the world, thus became the first systemic insecticide. What makes an insecticide a systemic is the ability to permeate all the tissues of a plant or animal and make them toxic. This quality is possessed by some chemicals of the chlorinated hydrocarbon group and by others of the organophosphorus group, all synthetically produced, as well as by certain naturally occurring substances. In practice, however, most systemics are drawn from the organophosphorus group because the problem of residues is somewhat less acute. While the results of weed killers such as sodium arsenite or the phenols are grossly obvious, some other herbicides are more insidious in their effects. For example, the now famous cranberry-weed killer aminotriazole, or amitrol, is rated as having relatively low toxicity. But in the long run its tendency to cause malignant tumors of the thyroid may be far more significant for wildlife and perhaps also for man. 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? 4. Surface Waters and Underground Seas OF ALL our natural resources water has become the most precious. By far the greater part of the earth’s surface is covered by its enveloping seas, yet in the midst of this plenty we are in want. By a strange paradox, most of the earth’s abundant water is not usable for agriculture, industry, or human consumption because of its heavy load of sea salts, and so most of the world’s population is either experiencing or is threatened with critical shortages. In an age when man has forgotten his origins and is blind even to his most essential needs for survival, water along with other resources has become the victim of his indifference. The problem of water pollution by pesticides can be understood only in context, as part of the whole to which it belongs—the pollution of the total environment of mankind. The pollution entering our waterways comes from many sources: radioactive wastes from reactors, laboratories, and hospitals; fallout from nuclear explosions; domestic wastes from cities and towns; chemical wastes from factories. To these is added a new kind of fallout—the chemical sprays applied to croplands and gardens, forests and fields. Many of the chemical agents in this alarming mélange imitate and augment the harmful effects of radiation, and within the groups of chemicals themselves there are sinister and little- understood interactions, transformations, and summations of effect. Ever since chemists began to manufacture substances that nature never invented, the problems of water purification have become complex and the danger to users of water has increased. As we have seen, the production of these synthetic chemicals in large volume began in the 1940s. It has now reached such proportions that an appalling deluge of chemical pollution is daily poured into the nation’s waterways. When inextricably mixed with domestic and other wastes discharged into the same water, these chemicals sometimes defy detection by the methods in ordinary use by purification plants. Most of them are so stable that they cannot be broken down by ordinary processes. Often they cannot even be identified. In rivers, a really incredible variety of pollutants combine to produce deposits that the sanitary engineers can only despairingly refer to as ‘gunk’. Professor Rolf Eliassen of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology testified before a congressional committee to the impossibility of predicting the composite effect of these chemicals, or of identifying the organic matter resulting from the mixture. ‘We don’t begin to know what that is,’ said Professor Eliassen. ‘What is the effect on the people? We don’t know.’ To an ever-increasing degree, chemicals used for the control of insects, rodents, or unwanted vegetation contribute to these organic pollutants. Some are deliberately applied to bodies of water to destroy plants, insect larvae, or undesired fishes. Some come from forest spraying that may blanket two or three million acres of a single state with spray directed against a single insect pest—spray that falls directly into streams or that drips down through the leafy canopy to the forest floor, there to become part of the slow movement of seeping moisture beginning its long journey to the sea. Probably the bulk of such contaminants are the waterborne residues of the millions of pounds of agricultural chemicals that have been applied to farmlands for insect or rodent control and have been leached out of the ground by rains to become part of the universal seaward movement of water. Here and there we have dramatic evidence of the presence of these chemicals in our streams and even in public water supplies. For example, a sample of drinking water from an orchard area in Pennsylvania, when tested on fish in a laboratory, contained enough insecticide to kill all of the test fish in only four hours. Water from a stream draining sprayed cotton fields remained lethal to fishes even after it had passed through a purifying plant, and in fifteen streams tributary to the Tennessee River in Alabama the runoff from fields treated with toxaphene, a chlorinated hydrocarbon, killed all the fish inhabiting the streams. Two of these streams were sources of municipal water supply. Yet for a week after the application of the insecticide the water remained poisonous, a fact attested by the daily deaths of goldfish suspended in cages downstream. For the most part this pollution is unseen and invisible, making its presence known when hundreds or thousands of fish die, but more often never detected at all. The chemist who guards water purity has no routine tests for these organic pollutants and no way to remove them. But whether detected or not, the pesticides are there, and as might be expected with any materials applied to land surfaces on so vast a scale, they have now found their way into many and perhaps all of the major river systems of the country. If anyone doubts that our waters have become almost universally contaminated with insecticides he should study a small report issued by the United States Fish and Wildlife Service in 1960. The Service had carried out studies to discover whether fish, like warm-blooded animals, store insecticides in their tissues. The first samples were taken from forest areas in the West where there had been mass spraying of DDT for the control of the spruce budworm. As might have been expected, all of these fish contained DDT. The really significant findings were made when the investigators turned for comparison to a creek in a remote area about 30 miles from the nearest spraying for budworm control. This creek was upstream from the first and separated from it by a high waterfall. No local spraying was known to have occurred. Yet these fish, too, contained DDT. Had the chemical reached this remote creek by hidden underground streams? Or had it been airborne, drifting down as fallout on the surface of the creek? In still another comparative study, DDT was found in the tissues of fish from a hatchery where the water supply originated in a deep well. Again there was no record of local spraying. The only possible means of contamination seemed to be by means of groundwater. In the entire water-pollution problem, there is probably nothing more disturbing than the threat of widespread contamination of groundwater. It is not possible to add pesticides to water anywhere without threatening the purity of water everywhere. Seldom if ever does Nature operate in closed and separate compartments, and she has not done so in distributing the earth’s water supply. Rain, falling on the land, settles down through pores and cracks in soil and rock, penetrating deeper and deeper until eventually it reaches a zone where all the pores of the rock are filled with water, a dark, subsurface sea, rising under hills, sinking beneath valleys. This groundwater is always on the move, sometimes at a pace so slow that it travels no more than 50 feet a year, sometimes rapidly, by comparison, so that it moves nearly a tenth of a mile in a day. It travels by unseen waterways until here and there it comes to the surface as a spring, or perhaps it is tapped to feed a well. But mostly it contributes to streams and so to rivers. Except for what enters streams directly as rain or surface runoff, all the running water of the earth’s surface was at one time groundwater. And so, in a very real and frightening sense, pollution of the groundwater is pollution of water everywhere. . . . It must have been by such a dark, underground sea that poisonous chemicals traveled from a manufacturing plant in Colorado to a farming district several miles away, there to poison wells, sicken humans and livestock, and damage crops—an extraordinary episode that may easily be only the first of many like it. Its history, in brief, is this. In 1943, the Rocky Mountain Arsenal of the Army Chemical Corps, located near Denver, began to manufacture war materials. Eight years later the facilities of the arsenal were leased to a private oil company for the production of insecticides. Even before the change of operations, however, mysterious reports had begun to come in. Farmers several miles from the plant began to report unexplained sickness among livestock; they complained of extensive crop damage. Foliage turned yellow, plants failed to mature, and many crops were killed outright. There were reports of human illness, thought by some to be related. The irrigation waters on these farms were derived from shallow wells. When the well waters were examined (in a study in 1959, in which several state and federal agencies participated) they were found to contain an assortment of chemicals. Chlorides, chlorates, salts of phosphoric acid, fluorides, and arsenic had been discharged from the Rocky Mountain chemical chosen for a fresh attack was DDD, a close relative of DDT but apparently offering fewer threats to fish life. The new control measures undertaken in 1949 were carefully planned and few people would have supposed any harm could result. The lake was surveyed, its volume determined, and the insecticide applied in such great dilution that for every part of chemical there would be 70 million parts of water. Control of the gnats was at first good, but by 1954 the treatment had to be repeated, this time at the rate of 1 part of insecticide in 50 million parts of water. The destruction of the gnats was thought to be virtually complete. The following winter months brought the first intimation that other life was affected: the western grebes on the lake began to die, and soon more than a hundred of them were reported dead. At Clear Lake the western grebe is a breeding bird and also a winter visitant, attracted by the abundant fish of the lake. It is a bird of spectacular appearance and beguiling habits, building its floating nests in shallow lakes of western United States and Canada. It is called the ‘swan grebe’ with reason, for it glides with scarcely a ripple across the lake surface, the body riding low, white neck and shining black head held high. The newly hatched chick is clothed in soft gray down; in only a few hours it takes to the water and rides on the back of the father or mother, nestled under the parental wing coverts. Following a third assault on the ever-resilient gnat population, in 1957, more grebes died. As had been true in 1954, no evidence of infectious disease could be discovered on examination of the dead birds. But when someone thought to analyze the fatty tissues of the grebes, they were found to be loaded with DDD in the extraordinary concentration of 1600 parts per million. The maximum concentration applied to the water was part per million. How could the chemical have built up to such prodigious levels in the grebes? These birds, of course, are fish eaters. When the fish of Clear Lake also were analyzed the picture began to take form—the poison being picked up by the smallest organisms, concentrated and passed on to the larger predators. Plankton organisms were found to contain about 5 parts per million of the insecticide (about 25 times the maximum concentration ever reached in the water itself); plant-eating fishes had built up accumulations ranging from 40 to 300 parts per million; carnivorous species had stored the most of all. One, a brown bullhead, had the astounding concentration of 2500 parts per million. It was a house-that-Jack-built sequence, in which the large carnivores had eaten the smaller carnivores, that had eaten the herbivores, that had eaten the plankton, that had absorbed the poison from the water. Even more extraordinary discoveries were made later. No trace of DDD could be found in the water shortly after the last application of the chemical. But the poison had not really left the lake; it had merely gone into the fabric of the life the lake supports. Twenty-three months after the chemical treatment had ceased, the plankton still contained as much as 5.3 parts per million. In that interval of nearly two years, successive crops of plankton had flowered and faded away, but the poison, although no longer present in the water, had somehow passed from generation to generation. And it lived on in the animal life of the lake as well. All fish, birds, and frogs examined a year after the chemical applications had ceased still contained DDD. The amount found in the flesh always exceeded by many times the original concentration in the water. Among these living carriers were fish that had hatched nine months after the last DDD application, grebes, and California gulls that had built up concentrations of more than 2000 parts per million. Meanwhile, the nesting colonies of the grebes dwindled—from more than 1000 pairs before the first insecticide treatment to about 30 pairs in 1960. And even the thirty seem to have nested in vain, for no young grebes have been observed on the lake since the last DDD application. This whole chain of poisoning, then, seems to rest on a base of minute plants which must have been the original concentrators. But what of the opposite end of the food chain—the human being who, in probable ignorance of all this sequence of events, has rigged his fishing tackle, caught a string of fish from the waters of Clear Lake, and taken them home to fry for his supper? What could a heavy dose of DDD, or perhaps repeated doses, do to him? Although the California Department of Public Health professed to see no hazard, nevertheless in 1959 it required that the use of DDD in the lake be stopped. In view of the scientific evidence of the vast biological potency of this chemical, the action seems a minimum safety measure. The physiological effect of DDD is probably unique among insecticides, for it destroys part of the adrenal gland— the cells of the outer layer known as the adrenal cortex, which secretes the hormone cortin. This destructive effect, known since 1948, was at first believed to be confined to dogs, because it was not revealed in such experimental animals as monkeys, rats, or rabbits. It seemed suggestive, however, that DDD produced in dogs a condition very similar to that occurring in man in the presence of Addison’s disease. Recent medical research has revealed that DDD does strongly suppress the function of the human adrenal cortex. Its cell-destroying capacity is now clinically utilized in the treatment of a rare type of cancer which develops in the adrenal gland. . . . The Clear Lake situation brings up a question that the public needs to face: Is it wise or desirable to use substances with such strong effect on physiological processes for the control of insects, especially when the control measures involve introducing the chemical directly into a body of water? The fact that the insecticide was applied in very low concentrations is meaningless, as its explosive progress through the natural food chain in the lake demonstrates. Yet Clear Lake is typical of a large and growing number of situations where solution of an obvious and often trivial problem creates a far more serious but conveniently less tangible one. Here the problem was resolved in favor of those annoyed by gnats, and at the expense of an unstated, and probably not even clearly understood, risk to all who took food or water from the lake. It is an extraordinary fact that the deliberate introduction of poisons into a reservoir is becoming a fairly common practice. The purpose is usually to promote recreational uses, even though the water must then be treated at some expense to make it fit for its intended use as drinking water. When sportsmen of an area want to ‘improve’ fishing in a 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. The procedure has a strange, Alice-in-Wonderland quality. The reservoir was created as a public water supply, yet the community, probably unconsulted about the sportsmen’s project, is forced either to drink water containing poisonous residues or to pay out tax money for treatment of the water to remove the poisons—treatments that are by no means foolproof. As ground and surface waters are contaminated with pesticides and other chemicals, there is danger that not only poisonous but also cancer-producing substances are being introduced into public water supplies. Dr. W. C. Hueper of the National Cancer Institute has warned that ‘the danger of cancer hazards from the consumption of contaminated drinking water will grow considerably within the foreseeable future.’ And indeed a study made in Holland in the early 1950s provides support for the view that polluted waterways may carry a cancer hazard. Cities receiving their drinking water from rivers had a higher death rate from cancer than did those whose water came from sources presumably less susceptible to pollution such as wells. Arsenic, the environmental substance most clearly established as causing cancer in man, is involved in two historic cases in which polluted water supplies caused widespread occurrence of cancer. In one case the arsenic came from the slag heaps of mining operations, in the other from rock with a high natural content of arsenic. These conditions may easily be duplicated as a result of heavy applications of arsenical insecticides. The soil in such areas becomes poisoned. Rains then carry part of the arsenic into streams, rivers, and reservoirs, as well as into the vast subterranean seas of groundwater. Here again we are reminded that in nature nothing exists alone. To understand more clearly how the pollution of our world is happening, we must now look at another of the earth’s basic resources, the soil. 5. Realms of the Soil THE THIN LAYER of soil that forms a patchy covering over the continents controls our own existence and that of every other animal of the land. Without soil, land plants as we know them could not grow, and without plants no animals could survive. Yet if our agriculture-based life depends on the soil, it is equally true that soil depends on life, its very origins and the insecticide to kill the burrowing larval stages of a crop-destroying insect, for example, without also killing the ‘good’ insects whose function may be the essential one of breaking down organic matter? Or can we use a nonspecific fungicide without also killing the fungi that inhabit the roots of many trees in a beneficial association that aids the tree in extracting nutrients from the soil? The plain truth is that this critically important subject of the ecology of the soil has been largely neglected even by scientists and almost completely ignored by control men. Chemical control of insects seems to have proceeded on the assumption that the soil could and would sustain any amount of insult via the introduction of poisons without striking back. The very nature of the world of the soil has been largely ignored. From the few studies that have been made, a picture of the impact of pesticides on the soil is slowly emerging. It is not surprising that the studies are not always in agreement, for soil types vary so enormously that what causes damage in one may be innocuous in another. Light sandy soils suffer far more heavily than humus types. Combinations of chemicals seem to do more harm than separate applications. Despite the varying results, enough solid evidence of harm is accumulating to cause apprehension on the part of many scientists. Under some conditions, the chemical conversions and transformations that lie at the very heart of the living world are affected. Nitrification, which makes atmospheric nitrogen available to plants, is an example. The herbicide 2,4-D causes a temporary interruption of nitrification. In recent experiments in Florida, lindane, heptachlor, and BHC (benzene hexachloride) reduced nitrification after only two weeks in soil; BHC and DDT had significantly detrimental effects a year after treatment. In other experiments BHC, aldrin, lindane, heptachlor, and DDD all prevented nitrogen-fixing bacteria from forming the necessary root nodules on leguminous plants. A curious but beneficial relation between fungi and the roots of higher plants is seriously disrupted. Sometimes the problem is one of upsetting that delicate balance of populations by which nature accomplishes far- reaching aims. Explosive increases in some kinds of soil organisms have occurred when others have been reduced by insecticides, disturbing the relation of predator to prey. Such changes could easily alter the metabolic activity of the soil and affect its productivity. They could also mean that potentially harmful organisms, formerly held in check, could escape from their natural controls and rise to pest status. One of the most important things to remember about insecticides in soil is their long persistence, measured not in months but in years. Aldrin has been recovered after four years, both as traces and more abundantly as converted to dieldrin. Enough toxaphene remains in sandy soil ten years after its application to kill termites. Benzene hexachloride persists at least eleven years; heptachlor or a more toxic derived chemical, at least nine. Chlordane has been recovered twelve years after its application, in the amount of 15 per cent of the original quantity. Seemingly moderate applications of insecticides over a period of years may build up fantastic quantities in soil. Since the chlorinated hydrocarbons are persistent and long-lasting, each application is merely added to the quantity remaining from the previous one. The old legend that ‘a pound of DDT to the acre is harmless’ means nothing if spraying is repeated. Potato soils have been found to contain up to 15 pounds of DDT per acre, corn soils up to 19. A cranberry bog under study contained 34.5 pounds to the acre. Soils from apple orchards seem to reach the peak of contamination, with DDT accumulating at a rate that almost keeps pace with its rate of annual application. Even in a single season, with orchards sprayed four or more times, DDT residues may build up to peaks of 30 to 50 pounds. With repeated spraying over the years the range between trees is from 26 to 60 pounds to the acre; under trees, up to 113 pounds. Arsenic provides a classic case of the virtually permanent poisoning of the soil. Although arsenic as a spray on growing tobacco has been largely replaced by the synthetic organic insecticides since the mid-40s, the arsenic content of cigarettes made from American-grown tobacco increased more than 300 per cent between the years 1932 and 1952. Later studies have revealed increases of as much as 600 per cent. Dr. Henry S. Satterlee, an authority on arsenic toxicology, says that although organic insecticides have been largely substituted for arsenic, the tobacco plants continue to pick up the old poison, for the soils of tobacco plantations are now thoroughly impregnated with residues of a heavy and relatively insoluble poison, arsenate of lead. This will continue to release arsenic in soluble form. The soil of a large proportion of the land planted to tobacco has been subjected to ‘cumulative and well-nigh permanent poisoning’, according to Dr. Satterlee. Tobacco grown in the eastern Mediterranean countries where arsenical insecticides are not used has shown no such increase in arsenic content. We are therefore confronted with a second problem. We must not only be concerned with what is happening to the soil; we must wonder to what extent insecticides are absorbed from contaminated soils and introduced into plant tissues. Much depends on the type of soil, the crop, and the nature and concentration of the insecticide. Soil high in organic matter releases smaller quantities of poisons than others. Carrots absorb more insecticide than any other crop studied; if the chemical used happens to be lindane, carrots actually accumulate higher concentrations than are present in the soil. In the future it may become necessary to analyze soils for insecticides before planting certain food crops. Otherwise even unsprayed crops may take up enough insecticide merely from the soil to render them unfit for market. This very sort of contamination has created endless problems for at least one leading manufacturer of baby foods who has been unwilling to buy any fruits or vegetables on which toxic insecticides have been used. The chemical that caused him the most trouble was benzene hexachloride (BHC), which is taken up by the roots and tubers of plants, advertising its presence by a musty taste and odor. Sweet potatoes grown on California fields where BHC had been used two years earlier contained residues and had to be rejected. In one year, in which the firm had contracted in South Carolina for its total requirements of sweet potatoes, so large a proportion of the acreage was found to be contaminated that the company was forced to buy in the open market at a considerable financial loss. Over the years a variety of fruits and vegetables, grown in various states, have had to be rejected. The most stubborn problems were concerned with peanuts. In the southern states peanuts are usually grown in rotation with cotton, on which BHC is extensively used. Peanuts grown later in this soil pick up considerable amounts of the insecticide. Actually, only a trace is enough to incorporate the telltale musty odor and taste. The chemical penetrates the nuts and cannot be removed. Processing, far from removing the mustiness, sometimes accentuates it. The only course open to a manufacturer determined to exclude BHC residues is to reject all produce treated with the chemical or grown on soils contaminated with it. Sometimes the menace is to the crop itself—a menace that remains as long as the insecticide contamination is in the soil. Some insecticides affect sensitive plants such as beans, wheat, barley, or rye, retarding root development or depressing growth of seedlings. The experience of the hop growers in Washington and Idaho is an example. During the spring of 1955 many of these growers undertook a large-scale program to control the strawberry root weevil, whose larvae had become abundant on the roots of the hops. On the advice of agricultural experts and insecticide manufacturers, they chose heptachlor as the control agent. Within a year after the heptachlor was applied, the vines in the treated yards were wilting and dying. In the untreated fields there was no trouble; the damage stopped at the border between treated and untreated fields. The hills were replanted at great expense, but in another year the new roots, too, were found to be dead. Four years later the soil still contained heptachlor, and scientists were unable to predict how long it would remain poisonous, or to recommend any procedure for correcting the condition. The federal Department of Agriculture, which as late as March 1959 found itself in the anomalous position of declaring heptachlor to be acceptable for use on hops in the form of a soil treatment, belatedly withdrew its registration for such use. Meanwhile, the hop growers sought what redress they could in the courts. As applications of pesticides continue and the virtually indestructible residues continue to build up in the soil, it is almost certain that we are heading for trouble. This was the consensus of a group of specialists who met at Syracuse University in 1960 to discuss the ecology of the soil. These men summed up the hazards of using ‘such potent and little understood tools’ as chemicals and radiation: ‘A few false moves on the part of man may result in destruction of soil productivity and the arthropods may well take over.’ 6. Earth’s Green Mantle the weapons is the use of chemical sprays. Now millions of acres of sagebrush lands are sprayed each year. What are the results? The eventual effects of eliminating sage and seeding with grass are largely conjectural. Men of long experience with the ways of the land say that in this country there is better growth of grass between and under the sage than can possibly be had in pure stands, once the moisture-holding sage is gone. But even if the program succeeds in its immediate objective, it is clear that the whole closely knit fabric of life has been ripped apart. The antelope and the grouse will disappear along with the sage. The deer will suffer, too, and the land will be poorer for the destruction of the wild things that belong to it. Even the livestock which are the intended beneficiaries will suffer; no amount of lush green grass in summer can help the sheep starving in the winter storms for lack of the sage and bitterbrush and other wild vegetation of the plains. These are the first and obvious effects. The second is of a kind that is always associated with the shotgun approach to nature: the spraying also eliminates a great many plants that were not its intended target. Justice William O. Douglas, in his recent book My Wilderness: East to Katahdin, has told of an appalling example of ecological destruction wrought by the United States Forest Service in the Bridger National Forest in Wyoming. Some 10,000 acres of sagelands were sprayed by the Service, yielding to pressure of cattlemen for more grasslands. The sage was killed, as intended. But so was the green, lifegiving ribbon of willows that traced its way across these plains, following the meandering streams. Moose had lived in these willow thickets, for willow is to the moose what sage is to the antelope. Beaver had lived there, too, feeding on the willows, felling them and making a strong dam across the tiny stream. Through the labor of the beavers, a lake backed up. Trout in the mountain streams seldom were more than six inches long; in the lake they thrived so prodigiously that many grew to five pounds. Waterfowl were attracted to the lake, also. Merely because of the presence of the willows and the beavers that depended on them, the region was an attractive recreational area with excellent fishing and hunting. But with the ‘improvement’ instituted by the Forest Service, the willows went the way of the sagebrush, killed by the same impartial spray. When Justice Douglas visited the area in 1959, the year of the spraying, he was shocked to see the shriveled and dying willows—the ‘vast, incredible damage’. What would become of the moose? Of the beavers and the little world they had constructed? A year later he returned to read the answers in the devastated landscape. The moose were gone and so were the beaver. Their principal dam had gone out for want of attention by its skilled architects, and the lake had drained away. None of the large trout were left. None could live in the tiny creek that remained, threading its way through a bare, hot land where no shade remained. The living world was shattered. . . . Besides the more than four million acres of rangelands sprayed each year, tremendous areas of other types of land are also potential or actual recipients of chemical treatments for weed control. For example, an area larger than all of New England—some 50 million acres—is under management by utility corporations and much of it is routinely treated for ‘brush control’. In the Southwest an estimated 75 million acres of mesquite lands require management by some means, and chemical spraying is the method most actively pushed. An unknown but very large acreage of timber-producing lands is now aerially sprayed in order to ‘weed out’ the hardwoods from the more spray-resistant conifers. Treatment of agricultural lands with herbicides doubled in the decade following 1949, totaling 53 million acres in 1959. And the combined acreage of private lawns, parks, and golf courses now being treated must reach an astronomical figure. The chemical weed killers are a bright new toy. They work in a spectacular way; they give a giddy sense of power over nature to those who wield them, and as for the long-range and less obvious effects—these are easily brushed aside as the baseless imaginings of pessimists. The ‘agricultural engineers’ speak blithely of ‘chemical plowing’ in a world that is urged to beat its plowshares into spray guns. The town fathers of a thousand communities lend willing ears to the chemical salesman and the eager contractors who will rid the roadsides of ‘brush’—for a price. It is cheaper than mowing, is the cry. So, perhaps, it appears in the neat rows of figures in the official books; but were the true costs entered, the costs not only in dollars but in the many equally valid debits we shall presently consider, the wholesale broadcasting of chemicals would be seen to be more costly in dollars as well as infinitely damaging to the long-range health of the landscape and to all the varied interests that depend on it. Take, for instance, that commodity prized by every chamber of commerce throughout the land—the good will of vacationing tourists. There is a steadily growing chorus of outraged protest about the disfigurement of once beautiful roadsides by chemical sprays, which substitute a sere expanse of brown, withered vegetation for the beauty of fern and wild flower, of native shrubs adorned with blossom or berry. ‘We are making a dirty, brown, dying-looking mess along the sides of our roads,’ a New England woman wrote angrily to her newspaper. ‘This is not what the tourists expect, with all the money we are spending advertising the beautiful scenery.’ In the summer of 1960 conservationists from many states converged on a peaceful Maine island to witness its presentation to the National Audubon Society by its owner, Millicent Todd Bingham. The focus that day was on the preservation of the natural landscape and of the intricate web of life whose interwoven strands lead from microbes to man. But in the background of all the conversations among the visitors to the island was indignation at the despoiling of the roads they had traveled. Once it had been a joy to follow those roads through the evergreen forests, roads lined with bayberry and sweet fern, alder and huckleberry. Now all was brown desolation. One of the conservationists wrote of that August pilgrimage to a Maine island: ‘I returned...angry at the desecration of the Maine roadsides. Where, in previous years, the highways were bordered with wildflowers and attractive shrubs, there were only the scars of dead vegetation for mile after mile...As an economic proposition, can Maine afford the loss of tourist goodwill that such sights induce?’ Maine roadsides are merely one example, though a particularly sad one for those of us who have a deep love for the beauty of that state, of the senseless destruction that is going on in the name of roadside brush control throughout the nation. Botanists at the Connecticut Arboretum declare that the elimination of beautiful native shrubs and wildflowers has reached the proportions of a ‘roadside crisis’. Azaleas, mountain laurel, blueberries, huckleberries, viburnums, dogwood, bayberry, sweet fern, low shadbush, winterberry, chokecherry, and wild plum are dying before the chemical barrage. So are the daisies, black-eyed Susans, Queen Anne’s lace, goldenrods, and fall asters which lend grace and beauty to the landscape. The spraying is not only improperly planned but studded with abuses such as these. In a southern New England town one contractor finished his work with some chemical remaining in his tank. He discharged this along woodland roadsides where no spraying had been authorized. As a result the community lost the blue and golden beauty of its autumn roads, where asters and goldenrod would have made a display worth traveling far to see. In another New England community a contractor changed the state specifications for town spraying without the knowledge of the highway department and sprayed roadside vegetation to a height of eight feet instead of the specified maximum of four feet, leaving a broad, disfiguring, brown swath. In a Massachusetts community the town officials purchased a weed killer from a zealous chemical salesman, unaware that it contained arsenic. One result of the subsequent roadside spraying was the death of a dozen cows from arsenic poisoning. Trees within the Connecticut Arboretum Natural Area were seriously injured when the town of Waterford sprayed the roadsides with chemical weed killers in 1957. Even large trees not directly sprayed were affected. The leaves of the oaks began to curl and turn brown, although it was the season for spring growth. Then new shoots began to be put forth and grew with abnormal rapidity, giving a weeping appearance to the trees. Two seasons later, large branches on these trees had died, others were without leaves, and the deformed, weeping effect of whole trees persisted. I know well a stretch of road where nature’s own landscaping has provided a border of alder, viburnum, sweet fern, and juniper with seasonally changing accents of bright flowers, or of fruits hanging in jeweled clusters in the fall. The road had no heavy load of traffic to support; there were few sharp curves or intersections where brush could obstruct the driver’s vision. But the sprayers took over and the miles along that road became something to be traversed quickly, a sight to be endured with one’s mind closed to thoughts of the sterile and hideous world we are letting our technicians make. But here and there authority had somehow faltered and by an unaccountable oversight there were oases of beauty in the midst of austere and regimented control—oases that made the desecration of the greater part of the road the more unbearable. In such places my spirit lifted to the sight of the drifts of white clover or the clouds of purple vetch with here shrubs assert control and the trees do not return. The best and cheapest controls for vegetation are not chemicals but other plants. The method has been tested in research areas scattered throughout the eastern United States. Results show that once properly treated, an area becomes stabilized, requiring no respraying for at least 20 years. The spraying can often be done by men on foot, using knapsack sprayers, and having complete control over their material. Sometimes compressor pumps and material can be mounted on truck chassis, but there is no blanket spraying. Treatment is directed only to trees and any exceptionally tall shrubs that must be eliminated. The integrity of the environment is thereby preserved, the enormous value of the wildlife habitat remains intact, and the beauty of shrub and fern and wildflower has not been sacrificed. Here and there the method of vegetation management by selective spraying has been adopted. For the most part, entrenched custom dies hard and blanket spraying continues to thrive, to exact its heavy annual costs from the taxpayer, and to inflict its damage on the ecological web of life. It thrives, surely, only because the facts are not known. When taxpayers understand that the bill for spraying the town roads should come due only once a generation instead of once a year, they will surely rise up and demand a change of method. Among the many advantages of selective spraying is the fact that it minimizes the amount of chemical applied to the landscape. There is no broadcasting of material but, rather, concentrated application to the base of the trees. The potential harm to wildlife is therefore kept to a minimum. The most widely used herbicides are 2,4-D, 2,4,5-T, and related compounds. Whether or not these are actually toxic is a matter of controversy. People spraying their lawns with 2,4-D and becoming wet with spray have occasionally developed severe neuritis and even paralysis. Although such incidents are apparently uncommon, medical authorities advise caution in use of such compounds. Other hazards, more obscure, may also attend the rise of 2,4-D. It has been shown experimentally to disturb the basic physiological process of respiration in the cell, and to imitate X-rays in damaging the chromosomes. Some very recent work indicates that reproduction of birds may be adversely affected by these and certain other herbicides at levels far below those that cause death. Apart from any directly toxic effects, curious indirect results follow the use of certain herbicides. It has been found that animals, both wild herbivores and livestock, are sometimes strangely attracted to a plant that has been sprayed, even though it is not one of their natural foods. If a highly poisonous herbicide such as arsenic has been used, this intense desire to reach the wilting vegetation inevitably has disastrous results. Fatal results may follow, also, from less toxic herbicides if the plant itself happens to be poisonous or perhaps to possess thorns or burs. Poisonous range weeds, for example, have suddenly become attractive to livestock after spraying, and the animals have died from indulging this unnatural appetite. The literature of veterinary medicine abounds in similar examples: swine eating sprayed cockleburs with consequent severe illness, lambs eating sprayed thistles, bees poisoned by pasturing on mustard sprayed after it came into bloom. Wild cherry, the leaves of which are highly poisonous, has exerted a fatal attraction for cattle once its foliage has been sprayed with 2,4-D. Apparently the wilting that follows spraying (or cutting) makes the plant attractive. Ragwort has provided other examples. Livestock ordinarily avoid this plant unless forced to turn to it in late winter and early spring by lack of other forage. However, the animals eagerly feed on it after its foliage has been sprayed with 2,4-D. The explanation of this peculiar behavior sometimes appears to lie in the changes which the chemical brings about in the metabolism of the plant itself. There is temporarily a marked increase in sugar content, making the plant more attractive to many animals. Another curious effect of 2,4-D has important effects for livestock, wildlife, and apparently for men as well. Experiments carried out about a decade ago showed that after treatment with this chemical there is a sharp increase in the nitrate content of corn and of sugar beets. The same effect was suspected in sorghum, sunflower, spiderwort, lambs quarters, pigweed, and smartweed. Some of these are normally ignored by cattle, but are eaten with relish after treatment with 2,4-D. A number of deaths among cattle have been traced to sprayed weeds, according to some agricultural specialists. The danger lies in the increase in nitrates, for the peculiar physiology of the ruminant at once poses a critical problem. Most such animals have a digestive system of extraordinary complexity, including a stomach divided into four chambers. The digestion of cellulose is accomplished through the action of micro-organisms (rumen bacteria) in one of the chambers. When the animal feeds on vegetation containing an abnormally high level of nitrates, the micro-organisms in the rumen act on the nitrates to change them into highly toxic nitrites. Thereafter a fatal chain of events ensues: the nitrites act on the blood pigment to form a chocolate-brown substance in which the oxygen is so firmly held that it cannot take part in respiration, hence oxygen is not transferred from the lungs to the tissues. Death occurs within a few hours from anoxia, or lack of oxygen. The various reports of livestock losses after grazing on certain weeds treated with 2,4-D therefore have a logical explanation. The same danger exists for wild animals belonging to the group of ruminants, such as deer, antelope, sheep, and goats. Although various factors (such as exceptionally dry weather) can cause an increase in nitrate content, the effect of the soaring sales and applications of 2,4-D cannot be ignored. The situation was considered important enough by the University of Wisconsin Agricultural Experiment Station to justify a warning in 1957 that ‘plants killed by 2,4-D may contain large amounts of nitrate.’ The hazard extends to human beings as well as animals and may help to explain the recent mysterious increase in ‘silo deaths’. When corn, oats, or sorghum containing large amounts of nitrates are ensiled they release poisonous nitrogen oxide gases, creating a deadly hazard to anyone entering the silo. Only a few breaths of one of these gases can cause a diffuse chemical pneumonia. In a series of such cases studied by the University of Minnesota Medical School all but one terminated fatally. . . . ‘Once again we are walking in nature like an elephant in the china cabinet.’ So C. J. Briejèr, a Dutch scientist of rare understanding, sums up our use of weed killers. ‘In my opinion too much is taken for granted. We do not know whether all weeds in crops are harmful or whether some of them are useful,’ says Dr. Briejèr. Seldom is the question asked, What is the relation between the weed and the soil? Perhaps, even from our narrow standpoint of direct self-interest, the relation is a useful one. As we have seen, soil and the living things in and upon it exist in a relation of interdependence and mutual benefit. Presumably the weed is taking something from the soil; perhaps it is also contributing something to it. A practical example was provided recently by the parks in a city in Holland. The roses were doing badly. Soil samples showed heavy infestations by tiny nematode worms. Scientists of the Dutch Plant Protection Service did not recommend chemical sprays or soil treatments; instead, they suggested that marigolds be planted among the roses. This plant, which the purist would doubtless consider a weed in any rosebed, releases an excretion from its roots that kills the soil nematodes. The advice was taken; some beds were planted with marigolds, some left without as controls. The results were striking. With the aid of the marigolds the roses flourished; in the control beds they were sickly and drooping. Marigolds are now used in many places for combating nematodes. In the same way, and perhaps quite unknown to us, other plants that we ruthlessly eradicate may be performing a function that is necessary to the health of the soil. One very useful function of natural plant communities—now pretty generally stigmatized as ‘weeds’—is to serve as an indicator of the condition of the soil. This useful function is of course lost where chemical weed killers have been used. Those who find an answer to all problems in spraying also overlook a matter of great scientific importance—the need to preserve some natural plant communities. We need these as a standard against which we can measure the changes our own activities bring about. We need them as wild habitats in which original populations of insects and other organisms can be maintained, for, as will be explained in Chapter 16, the development of resistance to insecticides is changing the genetic factors of insects and perhaps other organisms. One scientist has even suggested that some sort of ‘zoo’ should be established to preserve insects, mites, and the like, before their genetic composition is further changed. Some experts warn of subtle but far-reaching vegetational shifts as a result of the growing use of herbicides. The chemical 2,4-D, by killing out the broad-leaved plants, allows the grasses to thrive in the reduced competition—now some of the grasses themselves have become ‘weeds’, presenting a new problem in control and giving the cycle another turn. This strange situation is acknowledged in a recent issue of a journal devoted to crop problems: ‘With the widespread use of 2,4-D to control broadleaved weeds, grass weeds in particular have increasingly become a threat to corn and Seven years later the last dense growth of the prickly pear had been destroyed and the once uninhabitable areas reopened to settlement and grazing. The whole operation had cost less than a penny per acre. In contrast, the unsatisfactory attempts at chemical control in earlier years had cost about £10 per acre. Both of these examples suggest that extremely effective control of many kinds of unwanted vegetation might be achieved by paying more attention to the role of plant-eating insects. The science of range management has largely ignored this possibility, although these insects are perhaps the most selective of all grazers and their highly restricted diets could easily be turned to man’s advantage. 7. Needless Havoc AS MAN PROCEEDS toward his announced goal of the conquest of nature, he has written a depressing record of destruction, directed not only against the earth he inhabits but against the life that shares it with him. The history of the recent centuries has its black passages—the slaughter of the buffalo on the western plains, the massacre of the shorebirds by the market gunners, the near-extermination of the egrets for their plumage. Now, to these and others like them, we are adding a new chapter and a new kind of havoc—the direct killing of birds, mammals, fishes, and indeed practically every form of wildlife by chemical insecticides indiscriminately sprayed on the land. Under the philosophy that now seems to guide our destinies, nothing must get in the way of the man with the spray gun. The incidental victims of his crusade against insects count as nothing; if robins, pheasants, raccoons, cats, or even livestock happen to inhabit the same bit of earth as the target insects and to be hit by the rain of insect-killing poisons no one must protest. The citizen who wishes to make a fair judgment of the question of wildlife loss is today confronted with a dilemma. On the one hand conservationists and many wildlife biologists assert that the losses have been severe and in some cases even catastrophic. On the other hand the control agencies tend to deny flatly and categorically that such losses have occurred, or that they are of any importance if they have. Which view are we to accept? The credibility of the witness is of first importance. The professional wildlife biologist on the scene is certainly best qualified to discover and interpret wildlife loss. The entomologist, whose specialty is insects, is not so qualified by train- ing, and is not psychologically disposed to look for undesirable side effects of his control program. Yet it is the control men in state and federal governments—and of course the chemical manufacturers—who steadfastly deny the facts reported by the biologists and declare they see little evidence of harm to wildlife. Like the priest and the Levite in the biblical story, they choose to pass by on the other side and to see nothing. Even if we charitably explain their denials as due to the shortsightedness of the specialist and the man with an interest this does not mean we must accept them as qualified witnesses. The best way to form our own judgment is to look at some of the major control programs and learn, from observers familiar with the ways of wildlife, and unbiased in favor of chemicals, just what has happened in the wake of a rain of poison falling from the skies into the world of wildlife. To the bird watcher, the suburbanite who derives joy from birds in his garden, the hunter, the fisherman or the explorer of wild regions, anything that destroys the wildlife of an area for even a single year has deprived him of pleasure to which he has a legitimate right. This is a valid point of view. Even if, as has sometimes happened, some of the birds and mammals and fishes are able to re-establish themselves after a single spraying, a great and real harm has been done. But such reestablishment is unlikely to happen. Spraying tends to be repetitive, and a single exposure from which the wildlife populations might have a chance to recover is a rarity. What usually results is a poisoned environment, a lethal trap in which not only the resident populations succumb but those who come in as migrants as well. The larger the area sprayed the more serious the harm, because no oases of safety remain. Now, in a decade marked by insect-control programs in which many thousands or even millions of acres are sprayed as a unit, a decade in which private and community spraying has also surged steadily upward, a record of destruction and death of American wildlife has accumu- lated. Let us look at some of these programs and see what has happened. 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. Little need was shown for this drastic and dangerous action. On the contrary, Walter P. Nickell, one of the best-known and best-informed naturalists in the state, who spends much of his time in the field with long periods in southern Michigan every summer, declared: ‘For more than thirty years, to my direct knowledge, the Japanese beetle has been present in the city of Detroit in small numbers. The numbers have not shown any appreciable increase in all this lapse of years. I have yet to see a single Japanese beetle [in 1959] other than the few caught in Government catch traps in Detroit...Everything is being kept so secret that I have not yet been able to obtain any information whatsoever to the effect that they have increased in numbers.’ An official release by the state agency merely declared that the beetle had ‘put in its appearance’ in the areas designated for the aerial attack upon it. Despite the lack of justification the program was launched, with the state providing the manpower and supervising the operation, the federal government providing equipment and additional men, and the communities paying for the insecticide. The Japanese beetle, an insect accidentally imported into the United States, was discovered in New Jersey in 1916, when a few shiny beetles of a metallic green color were seen in a nursery near Riverton. The beetles, at first unrecognized, were finally identified as a common inhabitant of the main islands of Japan. Apparently they had entered the United States on nursery stock imported before restrictions were established in 1912. From its original point of entrance the Japanese beetle has spread rather widely throughout many of the states east of the Mississippi, where conditions of temperature and rainfall are suitable for it. Each year some outward movement beyond the existing boundaries of its distribution usually takes place. In the eastern areas where the beetles have been longest established, attempts have been made to set up natural controls. Where this has been done, the beetle populations have been kept at relatively low levels, as many records attest. Despite the record of reasonable control in eastern areas, the midwestern states now on the fringe of the beetle’s range have launched an attack worthy of the most deadly enemy instead of only a moderately destructive insect, employing the most dangerous chemicals distributed in a manner that exposes large numbers of people, their domestic animals, and all wildlife to the poison intended for the beetle. As a result these Japanese beetle programs have caused shocking destruction of animal life and have exposed human beings to undeniable hazard. Sections of Michigan, Kentucky, Iowa, Indiana, Illinois, and Missouri are all experiencing a rain of chemicals in the name of beetle control. The Michigan spraying was one of the first large-scale attacks on the Japanese beetle from the air. The choice of aldrin, one of the deadliest of all chemicals, was not determined by any peculiar suitability for Japanese beetle control, but simply by the wish to save money—aldrin was the cheapest of the compounds available. While the state in its official release to the press acknowledged that aldrin is a ‘poison’, it implied that no harm could come to human beings in the heavily populated areas to which the chemical was applied. (The official answer to the query ‘What precautions should I take?’ was ‘For you, none.’) An official of the Federal Aviation Agency was later quoted in the local press to the effect that ‘this is a safe operation’ and a representative of the Detroit Department of Parks and Recreation added his assurance that ‘the dust is harmless to humans and will not hurt plants or pets.’ One must assume that none of these officials had consulted the published and readily available reports of the United States Public Health Service, the Fish and Wildlife Service, and other evidence of the extremely poisonous nature of aldrin. Acting under the Michigan pest control law which allows the state to spray indiscriminately without notifying or gaining permission of individual landowners, the low-lying planes began to fly over the Detroit area. The city authorities and the Federal Aviation Agency were immediately besieged by calls from worried citizens. After receiving nearly 800 As the chemical penetrated the soil the poisoned beetle grubs crawled out on the surface of the ground, where they remained for some time before they died, attractive to insect-eating birds. Dead and dying insects of various species were conspicuous for about two weeks after the treatment. The effect on the bird populations could easily have been foretold. Brown thrashers, starlings, meadowlarks, grackles, and pheasants were virtually wiped out. Robins were ‘almost annihilated’, according to the biologists’ report. Dead earthworms had been seen in numbers after a gentle rain; probably the robins had fed on the poisoned worms. For other birds, too, the once beneficial rain had been changed, through the evil power of the poison introduced into their world, into an agent of destruction. Birds seen drinking and bathing in puddles left by rain a few days after the spraying were inevitably doomed. The birds that survived may have been rendered sterile. Although a few nests were found in the treated area, a few with eggs, none contained young birds. Among the mammals ground squirrels were virtually annihilated; their bodies were found in attitudes characteristic of violent death by poisoning. Dead muskrats were found in the treated areas, dead rabbits in the fields. The fox squirrel had been a relatively common animal in the town; after the spraying it was gone. It was a rare farm in the Sheldon area that was blessed by the presence of a cat after the war on beetles was begun. Ninety per cent of all the farm cats fell victims to the dieldrin during the first season of spraying. This might have been predicted because of the black record of these poisons in other places. Cats are extremely sensitive to all insecticides and especially so, it seems, to dieldrin. In western Java in the course of the antimalarial program carried out by the World Health Organization, many cats are reported to have died. In central Java so many were killed that the price of a cat more than doubled. Similarly, the World Health Organization, spraying in Venezuela, is reported to have reduced cats to the status of a rare animal. In Sheldon it was not only the wild creatures and the domestic companions that were sacrificed in the campaign against an insect. Observations on several flocks of sheep and a herd of beef cattle are indicative of the poisoning and death that threatened livestock as well. The Natural History Survey report describes one of these episodes as follows: The sheep...were driven into a small, untreated bluegrass pasture across a gravel road from a field which had been treated with dieldrin spray on May 6. Evidently some spray had drifted across the road into the pasture, for the sheep began to show symptoms of intoxication almost at once...They lost interest in food and displayed extreme restlessness, following the pasture fence around and around apparently searching for a way out...They refused to be driven, bleated almost continuously, and stood with their heads lowered; they were finally carried from the pasture...They displayed great desire for water. Two of the sheep were found dead in the stream passing through the pasture, and the remaining sheep were repeatedly driven out of the stream, several having to be dragged forcibly from the water. Three of the sheep eventually died; those remaining recovered to all outward appearances. This, then, was the picture at the end of 1955. Although the chemical war went on in succeeding years, the trickle of research funds dried up completely. Requests for money for wildlife-insecticide research were included in annual budgets submitted to the Illinois legislature by the Natural History Survey, but were invariably among the first items to be eliminated. It was not until 1960 that money was somehow found to pay the expenses of one field assistant—to do work that could easily have occupied the time of four men. The desolate picture of wildlife loss had changed little when the biologists resumed the studies broken off in 1955. In the meantime, the chemical had been changed to the even more toxic aldrin, 100 to 300 times as toxic as DDT in tests on quail. By 1960, every species of wild mammal known to inhabit the area had suffered losses. It was even worse with the birds. In the small town of Donovan the robins had been wiped out, as had the grackles, starlings, and brown thrashers. These and many other birds were sharply reduced elsewhere. Pheasant hunters felt the effects of the beetle campaign sharply. The number of broods produced on treated lands fell off by some 50 per cent, and the number of young in a brood declined. Pheasant hunting, which had been good in these areas in former years, was virtually abandoned as unrewarding. In spite of the enormous havoc that had been wrought in the name of eradicating the Japanese beetle, the treatment of more than 100,000 acres in Iroquois County over an eight-year period seems to have resulted in only temporary suppression of the insect, which continues its westward movement. The full extent of the toll that has been taken by this largely ineffective program may never be known, for the results measured by the Illinois biologists are a minimum figure. If the research program had been adequately financed to permit full coverage, the destruction revealed would have been even more appalling. But in the eight years of the program, only about $6000 was provided for biological field studies. Meanwhile the federal government had spent about $375,000 for control work and additional thousands had been provided by the state. The amount spent for research was therefore a small fraction of 1 per cent of the outlay for the chemical program. These midwestern programs have been conducted in a spirit of crisis, as though the advance of the beetle presented an extreme peril justifying any means to combat it. This of course is a distortion of the facts, and if the communities that have endured these chemical drenchings had been familiar with the earlier history of the Japanese beetle in the United States they would surely have been less acquiescent. The eastern states, which had the good fortune to sustain their beetle invasion in the days before the synthetic insecticides had been invented, have not only survived the invasion but have brought the insect under control by means that represented no threat whatever to other forms of life. There has been nothing comparable to the Detroit or Sheldon sprayings in the East. The effective methods there involved the bringing into play of natural forces of control which have the multiple advantages of permanence and environmental safety. During the first dozen years after its entry into the United States, the beetle increased rapidly, free of the restraints that in its native land hold it in check. But by 1945 it had become a pest of only minor importance throughout much of the territory over which it had spread. Its decline was largely a consequence of the importation of parasitic insects from the Far East and of the establishment of disease organisms fatal to it. Between 1920 and 1933, as a result of diligent searching throughout the native range of the beetle, some 34 species of predatory or parasitic insects had been imported from the Orient in an effort to establish natural control. Of these, five became well established in the eastern United States. The most effective and widely distributed is a parasitic wasp from Korea and China, Tiphia vernalis. The female Tiphia, finding a beetle grub in the soil, injects a paralyzing fluid and attaches a single egg to the undersurface of the grub. The young wasp, hatching as a larva, feeds on the paralyzed grub and destroys it. In some 25 years, colonies of Tiphia were introduced into 14 eastern states in a cooperative program of state and federal agencies. The wasp became widely established in this area and is generally credited by entomologists with an important role in bringing the beetle under control. An even more important role has been played by a bacterial disease that affects beetles of the family to which the Japanese beetle belongs—the scarabaeids. It is a highly specific organism, attacking no other type of insects, harmless to earthworms, warm-blooded animals, and plants. The spores of the disease occur in soil. When ingested by a foraging beetle grub they multiply prodigiously in its blood, causing it to turn an abnormally white color, hence the popular name, ‘milky disease’. Milky disease was discovered in New Jersey in 1933. By 1938 it was rather widely prevalent in the older areas of Japanese beetle infestation. In 1939 a control program was launched, directed at speeding up the spread of the disease. No method had been developed for growing the disease organism in an artificial medium, but a satisfactory substitute was evolved; infected grubs are ground up, dried, and combined with chalk. In the standard mixture a gram of dust contains 100 million spores. Between 1939 and 1953 some 94,000 acres in 14 eastern states were treated in a cooperative federal- state program; other areas on federal lands were treated; and an unknown but extensive area was treated by private organizations or individuals. By 1945, milky spore disease was raging among the beetle populations of Connecticut, New York, New Jersey, Delaware, and Maryland. In some test areas infection of grubs had reached as high as 94 per cent. The distribution program was discontinued as a governmental enterprise in 1953 and production was taken over by a private laboratory, which continues to supply individuals, garden clubs, citizens’ associations, and all others interested in beetle control. consist of one dove pair and perhaps one catbird family. It is hard to explain to the children that the birds have been killed off, when they have learned in school that a Federal law protects the birds from killing or capture. ‘Will they ever come back?’ they ask, and I do not have the answer. The elms are still dying, and so are the birds. Is anything being done? Can anything be done? Can I do anything? A year after the federal government had launched a massive spraying program against the fire ant, an Alabama woman wrote: ‘Our place has been a veritable bird sanctuary for over half a century. Last July we all remarked, “There are more birds than ever.” Then, suddenly, in the second week of August, they all disappeared. I was accustomed to rising early to care for my favorite mare that had a young filly. There was not a sound of the song of a bird. It was eerie, terrifying. What was man doing to our perfect and beautiful world? Finally, five months later a blue jay appeared and a wren.’ The autumn months to which she referred brought other somber reports from the deep South, where in Mississippi, Louisiana, and Alabama the Field Notes published quarterly by the National Audubon Society and the United States Fish and Wildlife Service noted the striking phenomenon of ‘blank spots weirdly empty of virtually all bird life’. The Field Notes are a compilation of the reports of seasoned observers who have spent many years afield in their particular areas and have unparalleled knowledge of the normal bird life of the region. One such observer reported that in driving about southern Mississippi that fall she saw ‘no land birds at all for long distances’. Another in Baton Rouge reported that the contents of her feeders had lain untouched ‘for weeks on end’, while fruiting shrubs in her yard, that ordinarily would be stripped clean by that time, still were laden with berries. Still another reported that his picture window, ‘which often used to frame a scene splashed with the red of 40 or 50 cardinals and crowded with other species, seldom permitted a view of as many as a bird or two at a time.’ Professor Maurice Brooks of the University of West Virginia, an authority on the birds of the Appalachian region, reported that the West Virginia bird population had undergone ‘an incredible reduction’. One story might serve as the tragic symbol of the fate of the birds—a fate that has already overtaken some species, and that threatens all. It is the story of the robin, the bird known to everyone. To millions of Americans, the season’s first robin means that the grip of winter is broken. Its coming is an event reported in newspapers and told eagerly at the breakfast table. And as the number of migrants grows and the first mists of green appear in the woodlands, thousands of people listen for the first dawn chorus of the robins throbbing in the early morning light. But now all is changed, and not even the return of the birds may be taken for granted. The survival of the robin, and indeed of many other species as well, seems fatefully linked with the American elm, a tree that is part of the history of thousands of towns from the Atlantic to the Rockies, gracing their streets and their village squares and college campuses with majestic archways of green. Now the elms are stricken with a disease that afflicts them throughout their range, a disease so serious that many experts believe all efforts to save the elms will in the end be futile. It would be tragic to lose the elms, but it would be doubly tragic if, in vain efforts to save them, we plunge vast segments of our bird populations into the night of extinction. Yet this is precisely what is threatened. The so-called Dutch elm disease entered the United States from Europe about 1930 in elm burl logs imported for the veneer industry. It is a fungus disease; the organism invades the water-conducting vessels of the tree, spreads by spores carried by the flow of sap, and by its poisonous secretions as well as by mechanical clogging causes the branches to wilt and the tree to die. The disease is spread from diseased to healthy trees by elm bark beetles. The galleries which the insects have tunneled out under the bark of dead trees become contaminated with spores of the invading fungus, and the spores adhere to the insect body and are carried wherever the beetle flies. Efforts to control the fungus disease of the elms have been directed largely toward control of the carrier insect. In community after community, especially throughout the strongholds of the American elm, the Midwest and New England, intensive spraying has become a routine procedure. What this spraying could mean to bird life, and especially to the robin, was first made clear by the work of two ornithologists at Michigan State University, Professor George Wallace and one of his graduate students, John Mehner. When Mr. Mehner began work for the doctorate in 1954, he chose a research project that had to do with robin populations. This was quite by chance, for at that time no one suspected that the robins were in danger. But even as he undertook the work, events occurred that were to change its character and indeed to deprive him of his material. Spraying for Dutch elm disease began in a small way on the university campus in 1954. The following year the city of East Lansing (where the university is located) joined in, spraying on the campus was expanded, and, with local programs for gypsy moth and mosquito control also under way, the rain of chemicals increased to a downpour. During 1954, the year of the first light spraying, all seemed well. The following spring the migrating robins began to return to the campus as usual. Like the bluebells in Tomlinson’s haunting essay ‘The Lost Wood’, they were ‘expecting no evil’ as they reoccupied their familiar territories. But soon it became evident that something was wrong. Dead and dying robins began to appear in the campus. Few birds were seen in their normal foraging activities or assembling in their usual roosts. Few nests were built; few young appeared. The pattern was repeated with monotonous regularity in succeeding springs. The sprayed area had become a lethal trap in which each wave of migrating robins would be eliminated in about a week. Then new arrivals would come in, only to add to the numbers of doomed birds seen on the campus in the agonized tremors that precede death. ‘The campus is serving as a graveyard for most of the robins that attempt to take up residence in the spring,’ said Dr. Wallace. But why? At first he suspected some disease of the nervous system, but soon it became evident that ‘in spite of the assurances of the insecticide people that their sprays were “harmless to birds” the robins were really dying of insecticidal poisoning; they exhibited the well-known symptoms of loss of balance, followed by tremors, convulsions, and death.’ Several facts suggested that the robins were being poisoned, not so much by direct contact with the insecticides as indirectly, by eating earthworms. Campus earthworms had been fed inadvertently to crayfish in a research project and all the crayfish had promptly died. A snake kept in a laboratory cage had gone into violent tremors after being fed such worms. And earthworms are the principal food of robins in the spring. A key piece in the jigsaw puzzle of the doomed robins was soon to be supplied by Dr. Roy Barker of the Illinois Natural History Survey at Urbana. Dr. Barker’s work, published in 1958, traced the intricate cycle of events by which the robins’ fate is linked to the elm trees by way of the earthworms. The trees are sprayed in the spring (usually at the rate of 2 to 5 pounds of DDT per 50-foot tree, which may be the equivalent of as much as 23 pounds per acre where elms are numerous) and often again in July, at about half this concentration. Powerful sprayers direct a stream of poison to all parts of the tallest trees, killing directly not only the target organism, the bark beetle, but other insects, including pollinating species and predatory spiders and beetles. The poison forms a tenacious film over the leaves and bark. Rains do not wash it away. In the autumn the leaves fall to the ground, accumulate in sodden layers, and begin the slow process of becoming one with the soil. In this they are aided by the toil of the earthworms, who feed in the leaf litter, for elm leaves are among their favorite foods. In feeding on the leaves the worms also swallow the insecticide, accumulating and concentrating it in their bodies. Dr. Barker found deposits of DDT throughout the digestive tracts of the worms, their blood vessels, nerves, and body wall. Undoubtedly some of the earthworms themselves succumb, but others survive to become ‘biological magnifiers’ of the poison. In the spring the robins return to provide another link in the cycle. As few as 11 large earthworms can transfer a lethal dose of DDT to a robin. And 11 worms form a small part of a day’s rations to a bird that eats 10 to 12 earthworms in as many minutes. Not all robins receive a lethal dose, but another consequence may lead to the extinction of their kind as surely as fatal poisoning. The shadow of sterility lies over all the bird studies and indeed lengthens to include all living things within its potential range. There are now only two or three dozen robins to be found each spring on the entire 185-acre campus of Michigan State University, compared with a conservatively estimated 370 adults in this area before spraying. In 1954 every robin nest under observation by Mehner produced young. Toward the end of June, 1957, when at least 370 young birds (the normal replacement of the adult population) would have been foraging over the campus in the years before spraying began, Mehner could find only one young robin. A year later Dr. Wallace was to report: ‘At no time during the spring or summer [of 1958] did I see a fledgling robin anywhere on the main campus, and so far I have failed to find anyone else who has seen one there.’ Part of this failure to produce young is due, of course, to the fact that one or more of a pair of robins dies before the nesting cycle is completed. But Wallace has significant records which point to something more sinister—the actual destruction of the birds’ capacity to reproduce. He has, for example, ‘records of robins and other birds building nests but first time in many years. Three nuthatches he found later provided a sorry little step-by-step lesson in cause and effect: one was feeding on an elm, another was found dying of typical DDT symptoms, the third was dead. The dying nuthatch was later found to have 226 parts per million of DDT in its tissues. The feeding habits of all these birds not only make them especially vulnerable to insect sprays but also make their loss a deplorable one for economic as well as less tangible reasons. The summer food of the white-breasted nuthatch and the brown creeper, for example, includes the eggs, larvae, and adults of a very large number of insects injurious to trees. About three quarters of the food of the chickadee is animal, including all stages of the life cycle of many insects. The chickadee’s method of feeding is described in Bent’s monumental Life Histories of North American birds: ‘As the flock moves along each bird examines minutely bark, twigs, and branches, searching for tiny bits of food (spiders’ eggs, cocoons, or other dormant insect life).’ Various scientific studies have established the critical role of birds in insect control in various situations. Thus, woodpeckers are the primary control of the Engelmann spruce beetle, reducing its populations from 45 to 98 per cent and are important in the control of the codling moth in apple orchards. Chickadees and other winter-resident birds can protect orchards against the cankerworm. But what happens in nature is not allowed to happen in the modern, chemical-drenched world, where spraying destroys not only the insects but their principal enemy, the birds. When later there is a resurgence of the insect population, as almost always happens, the birds are not there to keep their numbers in check. As the Curator of Birds at the Milwaukee Public Museum, Owen J. Gromme, wrote to the Milwaukee Journal: ‘The greatest enemy of insect life is other predatory insects, birds, and some small mammals, but DDT kills indiscriminately, including nature’s own safeguards or policemen... In the name of progress are we to become victims of our own diabolical means of insect control to provide temporary comfort, only to lose out to destroying insects later on? By what means will we control new pests, which will attack remaining tree species after the elms are gone, when nature’s safeguards (the birds) have been wiped out by poison?’ Mr. Gromme reported that calls and letters about dead and dying birds had been increasing steadily during the years since spraying began in Wisconsin. Questioning always revealed that spraying or fogging had been done in the area where the birds were dying. Mr. Gromme’s experience has been shared by ornithologists and conservationists at most of the research centers of the Midwest such as the Cranbrook Institute in Michigan, the Illinois Natural History Survey, and the University of Wisconsin. A glance at the Letters-from-Readers column of newspapers almost anywhere that spraying is being done makes clear the fact that citizens are not only becoming aroused and indignant but that often they show a keener understanding of the dangers and inconsistencies of spraying than do the officials who order it done. ‘I am dreading the days to come soon now when many beautiful birds will be dying in our back yard,’ wrote a Milwaukee woman. ‘This is a pitiful, heartbreaking experience... It is, moreover, frustrating and exasperating, for it evidently does not serve the purpose this slaughter was intended to serve... Taking a long look, can you save trees without also saving birds? Do they not, in the economy of nature, save each other? Isn’t it possible to help the balance of nature without destroying it?’ The idea that the elms, majestic shade trees though they are, are not ‘sacred cows’ and do not justify an ‘open end’ campaign of destruction against all other forms of life is expressed in other letters. ‘I have always loved our elm trees which seemed like trademarks on our landscape,’ wrote another Wisconsin woman. ‘But there are many kinds of trees...We must save our birds, too. Can anyone imagine anything so cheerless and dreary as a springtime without a robin’s song?’ To the public the choice may easily appear to be one of stark black-or-white simplicity: Shall we have birds or shall we have elms? But it is not as simple as that, and by one of the ironies that abound throughout the field of chemical control we may very well end by having neither if we continue on our present, well-traveled road. Spraying is killing the birds but it is not saving the elms. The illusion that salvation of the elms lies at the end of a spray nozzle is a dangerous will-o’- the-wisp that is leading one community after another into a morass of heavy expenditures, without producing lasting results. Greenwich, Connecticut sprayed regularly for ten years. Then a drought year brought conditions especially favorable to the beetle and the mortality of elms went up 1000 per cent. In Urbana, Illinois, where the University of Illinois is located, Dutch elm disease first appeared in 1951. Spraying was undertaken in 1953. By 1959, in spite of six years’ spraying, the university campus had lost 86 per cent of its elms, half of them victims of Dutch elm disease. In Toledo, Ohio, a similar experience caused the Superintendent of Forestry, Joseph A. Sweeney, to take a realistic look at the results of spraying. Spraying was begun there in 1953 and continued through 1959. Meanwhile, however, Mr. Sweeney had noticed that a city-wide infestation of the cottony maple scale was worse after the spraying recommended by ‘the books and the authorities’ than it had been before. He decided to review the results of spraying for Dutch elm disease for himself. His findings shocked him. In the city of Toledo, he found, ‘the only areas under any control were the areas where we used some promptness in removing the diseased or brood trees. Where we depended on spraying the disease was out of control. In the country where nothing has been done the disease has not spread as fast as it has in the city. This indicates that spraying destroys any natural enemies. ‘We are abandoning spraying for the Dutch elm disease. This has brought me into conflict with the people who back any recommendations by the United States Department of Agriculture but I have the facts and will stick with them.’ It is difficult to understand why these midwestern towns, to which the elm disease spread only rather recently, have so unquestioningly embarked on ambitious and expensive spraying programs, apparently without waiting to inquire into the experience of other areas that have had longer acquaintance with the problem. New York State, for example, has certainly had the longest history of continuous experience with Dutch elm disease, for it was via the Port of New York that diseased elm wood is thought to have entered the United States about 1930. And New York State today has a most impressive record of containing and suppressing the disease. Yet it has not relied upon spraying. In fact, its agricultural extension service does not recommend spraying as a community method of control. How, then, has New York achieved its fine record? From the early years of the battle for the elms to the present time, it has relied upon rigorous sanitation, or the prompt removal and destruction of all diseased or infected wood. In the beginning some of the results were disappointing, but this was because it was not at first understood that not only diseased trees but all elm wood in which the beetles might breed must be destroyed. Infected elm wood, after being cut and stored for firewood, will release a crop of fungus-carrying beetles unless burned before spring. It is the adult beetles, emerging from hibernation to feed in late April and May, that transmit Dutch elm disease. New York entomologists have learned by experience what kinds of beetle-breeding material have real importance in the spread of the disease. By concentrating on this dangerous material, it has been possible not only to get good results, but to keep the cost of the sanitation program within reasonable limits. By 1950 the incidence of Dutch elm disease in New York City had been reduced to of 1 per cent of the city’s 55,000 elms. A sanitation program was launched in Westchester County in 1942. During the next 14 years the average annual loss of elms was only of 1 per cent a year. Buffalo, with 185,000 elms, has an excellent record of containing the disease by sanitation, with recent annual losses amounting to only of 1 per cent. In other words, at this rate of loss it would take about 300 years to eliminate Buffalo’s elms. What has happened in Syracuse is especially impressive. There no effective program was in operation before 1957. Between 1951 and 1956 Syracuse lost nearly 3000 elms. Then, under the direction of Howard C. Miller of the New York State University College of Forestry, an intensive drive was made to remove all diseased elm trees and all possible sources of beetle-breeding elm wood. The rate of loss is now well below 1 per cent a year. The economy of the sanitation method is stressed by New York experts in Dutch elm disease control. ‘In most cases the actual expense is small compared with the probable saving,’ says J. G. Matthysse of the New York State College of Agriculture. ‘If it is a case of a dead or broken limb, the limb would have to be removed eventually, as a precaution against possible property damage or personal injury. If it is a fuel-wood pile, the wood can be used before spring, the bark can be peeled from the wood, or the wood can be stored in a dry place. In the case of dying or dead elm trees, the expense of prompt removal to prevent Dutch elm disease spread is usually no greater than would be necessary later, for most dead trees in urban regions must be removed eventually.’ The situation with regard to Dutch elm disease is therefore not entirely hopeless provided informed and intelligent adults, some production of eggs, but few or no young birds. In seeking an explanation, only one appears to fit all the facts. This is that the reproductive capacity of the birds has been so lowered by some environmental agent that there are now almost no annual additions of young to maintain the race. Exactly this sort of situation has been produced artificially in other birds by various experimenters, notably Dr. James DeWitt of the United States Fish and Wildlife Service. Dr. DeWitt’s now classic experiments on the effect of a series of insecticides on quail and pheasants have established the fact that exposure to DDT or related chemicals, even when doing no observable harm to the parent birds, may seriously affect reproduction. The way the effect is exerted may vary, but the end result is always the same. For example, quail into whose diet DDT was introduced throughout the breeding season survived and even produced normal numbers of fertile eggs. But few of the eggs hatched. ‘Many embryos appeared to develop normally during the early stages of incubation, but died during the hatching period,’ Dr. DeWitt said. Of those that did hatch, more than half died within 5 days. In other tests in which both pheasants and quail were the subjects, the adults produced no eggs whatever if they had been fed insecticide-contaminated diets throughout the year. And at the University of California, Dr. Robert Rudd and Dr. Richard Genelly reported similar findings. When pheasants received dieldrin in their diets, ‘egg production was markedly lowered and chick survival was poor.’ According to these authors, the delayed but lethal effect on the young birds follows from storage of dieldrin in the yolk of the egg, from which it is gradually assimilated during incubation and after hatching. This suggestion is strongly supported by recent studies by Dr. Wallace and a graduate student, Richard F. Bernard, who found high concentrations of DDT in robins on the Michigan State University campus. They found the poison in all of the testes of male robins examined, in developing egg follicles, in the ovaries of females, in completed but unlaid eggs, in the oviducts, in unhatched eggs from deserted nests, in embryos within the eggs, and in a newly hatched, dead nestling. These important studies establish the fact that the insecticidal poison affects a generation once removed from initial contact with it. Storage of poison in the egg, in the yolk material that nourishes the developing embryo, is a virtual death warrant and explains why so many of DeWitt’s birds died in the egg or a few days after hatching. Laboratory application of these studies to eagles presents difficulties that are nearly insuperable, but field studies are now under way in Florida, New Jersey, and elsewhere in the hope of acquiring definite evidence as to what has caused the apparent sterility of much of the eagle population. Meanwhile, the available circumstantial evidence points to insecticides. In localities where fish are abundant they make up a large part of the eagle’s diet (about 65 per cent in Alaska; about 52 per cent in the Chesapeake Bay area). Almost unquestionably the eagles so long studied by Mr. Broley were predominantly fish eaters. Since 1945 this particular coastal area has been subjected to repeated sprayings with DDT dissolved in fuel oil. The principal target of the aerial spraying was the salt-marsh mosquito, which inhabits the marshes and coastal areas that are typical foraging areas for the eagles. Fishes and crabs were killed in enormous numbers. Laboratory analyses of their tissues revealed high concentrations of DDT—as much as 46 parts per million. Like the grebes of Clear Lake, which accumulated heavy concentrations of insecticide residues from eating the fish of the lake, the eagles have almost certainly been storing up the DDT in the tissues of their bodies. And like the grebes, the pheasants, the quail, and the robins, they are less and less able to produce young and to preserve the continuity of their race. . . . From all over the world come echoes of the peril that faces birds in our modern world. The reports differ in detail, but always repeat the theme of death to wildlife in the wake of pesticides. Such are the stories of hundreds of small birds and partridges dying in France after vine stumps were treated with an arsenic-containing herbicide, or of partridge shoots in Belgium, once famous for the numbers of their birds, denuded of partridges after the spraying of nearby farmlands. In England the major problem seems to be a specialized one, linked with the growing practice of treating seed with insecticides before sowing. Seed treatment is not a wholly new thing, but in earlier years the chemicals principally used were fungicides. No effects on birds seem to have been noticed. Then about 1956 there was a change to dual-purpose treatment; in addition to a fungicide, dieldrin, aldrin, or heptachlor was added to combat soil insects. Thereupon the situation changed for the worse. In the spring of 1960 a deluge of reports of dead birds reached British wildlife authorities, including the British Trust for Ornithology, the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds, and the Game Birds Association. ‘The place is like a battlefield,’ a landowner in Norfolk wrote. ‘My keeper has found innumerable corpses, including masses of small birds— Chaffinches, Greenfinches, Linnets, Hedge Sparrows, also House Sparrows...the destruction of wild life is quite pitiful.’ A gamekeeper wrote: ‘My Partridges have been wiped out with the dressed corn, also some Pheasants and all other birds, hundreds of birds have been killed... As a lifelong gamekeeper it has been a distressing experience for me. It is bad to see pairs of Partridges that have died together.’ In a joint report, the British Trust for Ornithology and the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds described some 67 kills of birds—a far from complete listing of the destruction that took place in the spring of 1960. Of these 67, 59 were caused by seed dressings, 8 by toxic sprays. A new wave of poisoning set in the following year. The death of 600 birds on a single estate in Norfolk was reported to the House of Lords, and 100 pheasants died on a farm in North Essex. It soon became evident that more counties were involved than in 1960 (34 compared with 23). Lincolnshire, heavily agricultural, seemed to have suffered most, with reports of 10,000 birds dead. But destruction involved all of agricultural England, from Angus in the north to Cornwall in the south, from Anglesey in the west to Norfolk in the east. In the spring of 1961 concern reached such a peak that a special committee of the House of Commons made an investigation of the matter, taking testimony from farmers, landowners, and representatives of the Ministry of Agriculture and of various governmental and non-governmental agencies concerned with wildlife. ‘Pigeons are suddenly dropping out of the sky dead,’ said one witness. ‘You can drive a hundred or two hundred miles outside London and not see a single kestrel,’ reported another. ‘There has been no parallel in the present century, or at any time so far as I am aware, [this is] the biggest risk to wildlife and game that ever occurred in the country,’ officials of the Nature Conservancy testified. Facilities for chemical analysis of the victims were most inadequate to the task, with only two chemists in the country able to make the tests (one the government chemist, the other in the employ of the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds). Witnesses described huge bonfires on which the bodies of the birds were burned. But efforts were made to have carcasses collected for examination, and of the birds analyzed, all but one contained pesticide residues. The single exception was a snipe, which is not a seed-eating bird. Along with the birds, foxes also may have been affected, probably indirectly by eating poisoned mice or birds. England, plagued by rabbits, sorely needs the fox as a predator. But between November 1959 and April 1960 at least 1300 foxes died. Deaths were heaviest in the same counties from which sparrow hawks, kestrels, and other birds of prey virtually disappeared, suggesting that the poison was spreading through the food chain, reaching out from the seed eaters to the furred and feathered carnivores. The actions of the moribund foxes were those of animals poisoned by chlorinated hydrocarbon insecticides. They were seen wandering in circles, dazed and half blind, before dying in convulsions. The hearings convinced the committee that the threat to wildlife was ‘most alarming’; it accordingly recommended to the House of Commons that ‘the Minister of Agriculture and the Secretary of State for Scotland should secure the immediate prohibition for the use as seed dressings of compounds containing dieldrin, aldrin, or heptachlor, or chemicals of comparable toxicity.’ The committee also recommended more adequate controls to ensure that chemicals were adequately tested under field as well as laboratory conditions before being put on the market. This, it is worth emphasizing, is one of the great blank spots in pesticide research everywhere. Manufacturers’ tests on the common laboratory animals—rats, dogs, guinea pigs—include no wild species, no birds as a rule, no fishes, and are conducted under controlled and artificial conditions. Their application to wildlife in the field is anything but precise. England is by no means alone in its problem of protecting birds from treated seeds. Here in the United States the problem has been most troublesome in the rice-growing areas of California and the South. For a number of years California rice growers have been treating seed with DDT as protection against tadpole shrimp and scavenger beetles the mother fish had dug in the stream bottom. In the cold of winter they developed slowly, as was their way, and only when spring at last brought thawing and release to the forest streams did the young hatch. At first they hid among the pebbles of the stream bed—tiny fish about half an inch long. They took no food, living in the large yolk sac. Not until it was absorbed would they begin to search the stream for small insects. With the newly hatched salmon in the Miramichi that spring of 1954 were young of previous hatchings, salmon a year or two old, young fish in brilliant coats marked with bars and bright red spots. These young fed voraciously, seeking out the strange and varied insect life of the stream. As the summer approached, all this was changed. That year the watershed of the Northwest Miramichi was included in a vast spraying program which the Canadian Government had embarked upon the previous year—a program designed to save the forests from the spruce budworm. The budworm is a native insect that attacks several kinds of evergreens. In eastern Canada it seems to become extraordinarily abundant about every 35 years. The early 1950s had seen such an upsurge in the budworm populations. To combat it, spraying with DDT was begun, first in a small way, then at a suddenly accelerated rate in 1953. Millions of acres of forests were sprayed instead of thousands as before, in an effort to save the balsams, which are the mainstay of the pulp and paper industry. So in 1954, in the month of June, the planes visited the forests of the Northwest Miramichi and white clouds of settling mist marked the crisscross pattern of their flight. The spray—one half pound of DDT to the acre in a solution of oil— filtered down through the balsam forests and some of it finally reached the ground and the flowing streams. The pilots, their thoughts only on their assigned task, made no effort to avoid the streams or to shut off the spray nozzles while flying over them; but because spray drifts so far in even the slightest stirrings of air, perhaps the result would have been little different if they had. Soon after the spraying had ended there were unmistakable signs that all was not well. Within two days dead and dying fish, including many young salmon, were found along the banks of the stream. Brook trout also appeared among the dead fish, and along the roads and in the woods birds were dying. All the life of the stream was stilled. Before the spraying there had been a rich assortment of the water life that forms the food of salmon and trout—caddis fly larvae, living in loosely fitting protective cases of leaves, stems or gravel cemented together with saliva, stone fly nymphs clinging to rocks in the swirling currents, and the wormlike larvae of blackflies edging the stones under riffles or where the stream spills over steeply slanting rocks. But now the stream insects were dead, killed by the DDT, and there was nothing for a young salmon to eat. Amid such a picture of death and destruction, the young salmon themselves could hardly have been expected to escape, and they did not. By August not one of the young salmon that had emerged from the gravel beds that spring remained. A whole year’s spawning had come to nothing. The older young, those hatched a year or more earlier, fared only slightly better. For every six young of the 1953 hatch that had foraged in the stream as the planes approached, only one remained. Young salmon of the 1952 hatch, almost ready to go to sea, lost a third of their numbers. All these facts are known because the Fisheries Research Board of Canada had been conducting a salmon study on the Northwest Miramichi since 1950. Each year it had made a census of the fish living in this stream. The records of the biologists covered the number of adult salmon ascending to spawn, the number of young of each age group present in the stream, and the normal population not only of salmon but of other species of fish inhabiting the stream. With this complete record of prespraying conditions, it was possible to measure the damage done by the spraying with an accuracy that has seldom been matched elsewhere. The survey showed more than the loss of young fish; it revealed a serious change in the streams themselves. Repeated sprayings have now completely altered the stream environment, and the aquatic insects that are the food of salmon and trout have been killed. A great deal of time is required, even after a single spraying, for most of these insects to build up sufficient numbers to support a normal salmon population—time measured in years rather than months. The smaller species, such as midges and blackflies, become reestablished rather quickly. These are suitable food for the smallest salmon, the fry only a few months old. But there is no such rapid recovery of the larger aquatic insects, on which salmon in their second and third years depend. These are the larval stages of caddis flies, stoneflies, and mayflies. Even in the second year after DDT enters a stream, a foraging salmon parr would have trouble finding anything more than an occasional small stonefly. There would be no large stoneflies, no mayflies, no caddis flies. In an effort to supply this natural food, the Canadians have attempted to transplant caddis fly larvae and other insects to the barren reaches of the Miramichi. But of course such transplants would be wiped out by any repeated spraying. The budworm populations, instead of dwindling as expected, have proved refractory, and from 1955 to 1957 spraying was repeated in various parts of New Brunswick and Quebec, some places being sprayed as many as three times. By 1957, nearly 15 million acres had been sprayed. Although spraying was then tentatively suspended, a sudden resurgence of budworms led to its resumption in 1960 and 1961. Indeed there is no evidence anywhere that chemical spraying for budworm control is more than a stopgap measure (aimed at saving the trees from death through defoliation over several successive years), and so its unfortunate side effects will continue to be felt as spraying is continued. In an effort to minimize the destruction of fish, the Canadian forestry officials have reduced the concentration of DDT from the ½ pound previously used to ¼ pound to the acre, on the recommendation of the Fisheries Research Board. (In the United States the standard and highly lethal pound-to-the-acre still prevails.) Now, after several years in which to observe the effects of spraying, the Canadians find a mixed situation, but one that affords very little comfort to devotees of salmon fishing, provided spraying is continued. A very unusual combination of circumstances has so far saved the runs of the Northwest Miramichi from the destruction that was anticipated—a constellation of happenings that might not occur again in a century. It is important to understand what has happened there, and the reasons for it. In 1954, as we have seen, the watershed of this branch of the Miramichi was heavily sprayed. Thereafter, except for a narrow band sprayed in 1956, the whole upper watershed of this branch was excluded from the spraying program. In the fall of 1954 a tropical storm played its part in the fortunes of the Miramichi salmon. Hurricane Edna, a violent storm to the very end of its northward path, brought torrential rains to the New England and Canadian coasts. The resulting freshets carried streams of fresh water far out to sea and drew in unusual numbers of salmon. As a result, the gravel beds of the streams which the salmon seek out for spawning received an unusual abundance of eggs. The young salmon hatching in the Northwest Miramichi in the spring of 1955 found circumstances practically ideal for their survival. While the DDT had killed off all stream insects the year before, the smallest of the insects—the midges and blackflies had returned in numbers. These are the normal food of baby salmon. The salmon fry of that year not only found abundant food but they had few competitors for it. This was because of the grim fact that the older young salmon had been killed off by the spraying in 1954. Accordingly, the fry of 1955 grew very fast and survived in exceptional numbers. They completed their stream growth rapidly and went to sea early. Many of them returned in 1959 to give large runs of grilse to the native stream. If the runs in the Northwest Miramichi are still in relatively good condition this is because spraying was done in one year only. The results of repeated spraying are clearly seen in other streams of the watershed, where alarming declines in the salmon populations are occurring. In all sprayed streams, young salmon of every size are scarce. The youngest are often ‘practically wiped out’, the biologists report. In the main Southwest Miramichi, which was sprayed in 1956 and 1957, the 1959 catch was the lowest in a decade. Fishermen remarked on the extreme scarcity of grilse—the youngest group of returning fish. At the sampling trap in the estuary of the Miramichi the count of grilse was only a fourth as large in 1959 as the year before. In 1959 the whole Miramichi watershed produced only about 600,000 smolt (young salmon descending to the sea). This was less than a third of the runs of the three preceding years. Against such a background, the future of the salmon fisheries in New Brunswick may well depend on finding a substitute for drenching forests with DDT. . . . The eastern Canadian situation is not unique, except perhaps in the extent of forest spraying and the wealth of facts that have been collected. Maine, too, has its forests of spruce and balsam, and its problem of controlling forest insects. Maine, by artificial propagation or other means, has been able to rebuild this commercially important run. There are ways to solve this problem—to preserve the forests and to save the fishes, too. To assume that we must resign ourselves to turning our waterways into rivers of death is to follow the counsel of despair and defeatism. We must make wider use of alternative methods that are now known, and we must devote our ingenuity and resources to developing others. There are cases on record where natural parasitism has kept the budworm under control more effectively than spraying. Such natural control needs to be utilized to the fullest extent. There are possibilities of using less toxic sprays or, better still, of introducing microorganisms that will cause disease among the budworms without af- fecting the whole web of forest life. We shall see later what some of these alternative methods are and what they promise. Meanwhile, it is important to realize that chemical spraying of forest insects is neither the only way nor the best way. The pesticide threat to fishes may be divided into three parts. One, as we have seen, relates to the fishes of running streams in northern forests and to the single problem of forest spraying. It is confined almost entirely to the effects of DDT. Another is vast, sprawling, and diffuse, for it concerns the many different kinds of fishes—bass, sunfish, trappies, suckers, and others that inhabit many kinds of waters, still or flowing, in many parts of the country. It also concerns almost the whole gamut of insecticides now in agricultural use, although a few principal offenders like endrin, toxaphene, dieldrin, and heptachlor can easily be picked out. Still another problem must now be considered largely in terms of what we may logically suppose will happen in the future, because the studies that will disclose the facts are only beginning to be made. This has to do with the fishes of salt marshes, bays, and estuaries. It was inevitable that serious destruction of fishes would follow the widespread use of the new organic pesticides. Fishes are almost fantastically sensitive to the chlorinated hydrocarbons that make up the bulk of modern insecticides. And when millions of tons of poisonous chemicals are applied to the surface of the land, it is inevitable that some of them will find their way into the ceaseless cycle of waters moving between land and sea. 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. This is a problem that concerns a great many people. Some 25 million Americans look to fishing as a major source of recreation and another 15 million are at least casual anglers. These people spend three billion dollars annually for licenses, tackle, boats, camping equipment, gasoline, and lodgings. Anything that deprives them of their sport will also reach out and affect a large number of economic interests. The commercial fisheries represent such an interest, and even more importantly, an essential source of food. Inland and coastal fisheries (excluding the offshore catch) yield an estimated three billion pounds a year. Yet, as we shall see, the invasion of streams, ponds, rivers, and bays by pesticides is now a threat to both recreational and commercial fishing. Examples of the destruction of fish by agricultural crop sprayings and dustings are everywhere to be found. In California, for example, the loss of some 60,000 game fish, mostly bluegill and other sunfish, followed an attempt to control the riceleaf miner with dieldrin. In Louisiana 30 or more instances of heavy fish mortality occurred in one year alone (1960) because of the use of endrin in the sugarcane fields. In Pennsylvania fish have been killed in numbers by endrin, used in orchards to combat mice. The use of chlordane for grasshopper control on the high western plains has been followed by the death of many stream fish. Probably no other agricultural program has been carried out on so large a scale as the dusting and spraying of millions of acres of land in southern United States to control the fire ant. Heptachlor, the chemical chiefly used, is only slightly less toxic to fish than DDT. Dieldrin, another fire ant poison, has a well-documented history of extreme hazard to all aquatic life. Only endrin and toxaphene represent a greater danger to fish. All areas within the fire ant control area, whether treated with heptachlor or dieldrin, reported disastrous effects on aquatic life. A few excerpts will give the flavor of the reports from biologists who studied the damage: From Texas, ‘Heavy loss of aquatic life despite efforts to protect canals’, ‘Dead fish...were present in all treated water’, ‘Fish kill was heavy and continued for over 3 weeks’. From Alabama, ‘Most adult fish were killed [in Wilcox County] within a few days after treatment,’ ‘The fish in temporary waters and small tributary streams appeared to have been completely eradicated.’ In Louisiana, farmers complained of loss in farm ponds. Along one canal more than 500 dead fish were seen floating or lying on the bank on a stretch of less than a quarter of a mile. In another parish 150 dead sunfish could be found for every 4 that remained alive. Five other species appeared to have been wiped out completely. In Florida, fish from ponds in a treated area were found to contain residues of heptachlor and a derived chemical, heptachlor epoxide. Included among these fish were sunfish and bass, which of course are favorites of anglers and commonly find their way to the dinner table. Yet the chemicals they contained are among those the Food and Drug Administration considers too dangerous for human consumption, even in minute quantities. So extensive were the reported kills of fish, frogs, and other life of the waters that the American Society of Ichthyologists and Herpetologists, a venerable scientific organization devoted to the study of fishes, reptiles, and amphibians, passed a resolution in 1958 calling on the Department of Agriculture and the associated state agencies to cease ‘aerial distribution of heptachlor, dieldrin, and equivalent poisons—before irreparable harm is done.’ The Society called attention to the great variety of species of fish and other forms of life inhabiting the southeastern part of the United States, including species that occur nowhere else in the world. ‘Many of these animals,’ the Society warned, ‘occupy only small areas and therefore might readily be completely exterminated.’ Fishes of the southern states have also suffered heavily from insecticides used against cotton insects. The summer of 1950 was a season of disaster in the cotton-growing country of northern Alabama. Before that year, only limited use had been made of organic insecticides for the control of the boll weevil. But in 1950 there were many weevils because of a series of mild winters, and so an estimated 80 to 95 per cent of the farmers, on the urging of the county agents, turned to the use of insecticides. The chemical most popular with the farmers was toxaphene, one of the most destructive to fishes. Rains were frequent and heavy that summer. They washed the chemicals into the streams, and as this happened the farmers applied more. An average acre of cotton that year received 63 pounds of toxaphene. Some farmers used as much as 200 pounds per acre; one, in an extraordinary excess of zeal, applied more than a quarter of a ton to the acre. The results could easily have been foreseen. What happened in Flint Creek, flowing through 50 miles of Alabama cotton country before emptying into Wheeler Reservoir, was typical of the region. On August 1, torrents of rain descended on the Flint Creek watershed. In trickles, in rivulets, and finally in floods the water poured off the land into the streams. The water level rose six inches in Flint Creek. By the next morning it was obvious that a great deal more than rain had been carried into the stream. Fish swam about in aimless circles near the surface. Sometimes one would throw itself out of the water onto the bank. They could easily be caught; one farmer picked up several and took them to a spring-fed pool. There, in the pure water, these few recovered. But in the stream dead fish floated down all day. This was but the prelude to more, for each rain washed more of the insecticide into the river, killing more fish. The rain of August 10 resulted in such a heavy fish kill throughout the river that few remained to become victims of the next surge of poison into the stream, which occurred on August 15. But evidence of the deadly presence of the chemicals was obtained by placing test goldfish in cages in the river; they were dead within a day. The doomed fish of Flint Creek included large numbers of white crappies, a favorite among anglers. Dead bass and sunfish were also found, occurring abundantly in Wheeler Reservoir, into which the creek flows. All the rough-fish population of these waters was destroyed also—the carp, buffalo, drum, gizzard shad, and catfish. None showed signs of disease—only the erratic movements of the dying and a strange deep wine color of the gills. In the warm enclosed waters of farm ponds, conditions are very likely to be lethal for fish when insecticides are applied in the vicinity. As many examples show, the poison is carried in by rains and runoff from surrounding lands. Sometimes the ponds receive not only contaminated runoff but also a direct dose as crop-dusting pilots neglect to shut off the duster in passing over a pond. Even without such complications, normal agricultural use subjects fish to far heavier concentrations of chemicals than would be required to kill them. In other words, a marked reduction in the poundages used would hardly alter the lethal situation, for applications of over 0.1 pound per acre to the pond itself are generally considered hazardous. And the poison, once introduced, is hard to get rid of. One pond that had been treated with DDT to role of pesticide pollution in estuaries, salt marshes, bays, and other coastal waters. Not only do these areas receive the contaminated discharge of rivers but all too commonly they are sprayed directly in efforts to control mosquitoes or other insects. Nowhere has the effect of pesticides on the life of salt marshes, estuaries, and all quiet inlets from the sea been more graphically demonstrated than on the eastern coast of Florida, in the Indian River country. There, in the spring of 1955, some 2000 acres of salt marsh in St. Lucie County were treated with dieldrin in an attempt to eliminate the larvae of the sandfly. The concentration used was one pound of active ingredient to the acre. The effect on the life of the waters was catastrophic. Scientists from the Entomology Research Center of the State Board of Health surveyed the carnage after the spraying and reported that the fish kill was ‘substantially complete’. Everywhere dead fishes littered the shores. From the air sharks could be seen moving in, attracted by the helpless and dying fishes in the water. No species was spared. Among the dead were mullets, snook, mojarras, gambusia. The minimum immediate overall kill throughout the marshes, exclusive of the Indian River shoreline, was 20-30 tons of fishes, or about 1,175,000 fishes, of at least 30 species [reported R. W. Harrington, Jr. and W.L. Bidlingmayer of the survey team]. Mollusks seemed to be unharmed by dieldrin. Crustaceans were virtually exterminated throughout the area. The entire aquatic crab population was apparently destroyed and the fiddler crabs, all but annihilated, survived temporarily only in patches of marsh evidently missed by the pellets. The larger game and food fishes succumbed most rapidly...Crabs net upon and destroyed the moribund fishes, but the next day were dead themselves. Snails continued to devour fish carcasses. After two weeks, no trace remained of the litter of dead fishes. The same melancholy picture was painted by the late Dr. Herbert R. Mills from his observations in Tampa Bay on the opposite coast of Florida, where the National Audubon Society operates a sanctuary for seabirds in the area including Whiskey Stump Key. The sanctuary ironically became a poor refuge after the local health authorities undertook a campaign to wipe out the salt-marsh mosquitoes. Again fishes and crabs were the principal victims. The fiddler crab, that small and picturesque crustacean whose hordes move over mud flats or sand flats like grazing cattle, has no defense against the sprayers. After successive sprayings during the summer and fall months (some areas were sprayed as many as 16 times), the state of the fiddler crabs was summed up by Dr. Mills: ‘A progressive scarcity of fiddlers had by this time become apparent. Where there should have been in the neighborhood of 100,000 fiddlers under the tide and weather conditions of the day [October 12] there were not over 100 which could be seen anywhere on the beach, and these were all dead or sick, quivering, twitching, stumbling, scarcely able to crawl; although in neighboring unsprayed areas fiddlers were plentiful.’ The place of the fiddler crab in the ecology of the world it inhabits is a necessary one, not easily filled. It is an import- ant source of food for many animals. Coastal raccoons feed on them. So do marsh-inhabiting birds like the clapper rail, shore- birds, and even visiting seabirds. In the New Jersey salt marsh sprayed with DDT, the normal population of laughing gulls was decreased by 85 per cent for several weeks, presumably because the birds could not find sufficient food after the spraying. The marsh fiddlers are important in other ways as well, being useful scavengers and aerating the mud of the marshes by their extensive burrowings. They also furnish quantities of bait for fishermen. The fiddler crab is not the only creature of tidal marsh and estuary to be threatened by pesticides; others of more obvious importance to man are endangered. The famous blue crab of the Chesapeake Bay and other Atlantic Coast areas is an example. These crabs are so highly susceptible to insecticides that every spraying of creeks, ditches, and ponds in tidal marshes kills most of the crabs living there. Not only do the local crabs die, but others moving into a sprayed area from the sea succumb to the lingering poison. And sometimes poisoning may be indirect, as in the marshes near Indian River, where scavenger crabs attacked the dying fishes, but soon themselves succumbed to the poison. Less is known about the hazard to the lobster. However, it belongs to the same group of arthropods as the blue crab, has essentially the same physiology, and would presumably suffer the same effects. This would be true also of the stone crab and other crus- taceans which have direct economic importance as human food. The inshore waters—the bays, the sounds, the river estuaries, the tidal marshes—form an ecological unit of the utmost importance. They are linked so intimately and indispensably with the lives of many fishes, mollusks, and crustaceans that were they no longer habitable these seafoods would disappear from our tables. Even among fishes that range widely in coastal waters, many depend upon protected inshore areas to serve as nursery and feeding grounds for their young. Baby tarpon are abundant in all that labyrinth of mangrove-lined streams and canals bordering the lower third of the western coast of Florida. On the Atlantic Coast the sea trout, croaker, spot, and drum spawn on sandy shoals off the inlets between the islands or ‘banks’ that lie like a protective chain off much of the coast south of New York. The young fish hatch and are carried through the inlets by the tides. In the bays and sounds— Currituck, Pamlico, Bogue, and many others—they find abundant food and grow rapidly. Without these nursery areas of warm protected, food-rich waters the populations of these and many other species could not be maintained. Yet we are allowing pesticides to enter them via the rivers and by direct spraying over bordering marshlands. And the early stages of these fishes, even more than the adults, are especially susceptible to direct chemical poisoning. Shrimp, too, depend on inshore feeding grounds for their young. One abundant and widely ranging species supports the entire commercial fishery of the southern Atlantic and Gulf states. Although spawning occurs at sea, the young come into the estuaries and bays when a few weeks old to undergo successive molts and changes of form. There they remain from May or June until fall, feeding on the bottom detritus. In the entire period of their inshore life, the welfare of the shrimp populations and of the industry they support depends upon favorable conditions in the estuaries. Do pesticides represent a threat to the shrimp fisheries and to the supply for the markets? The answer may be contained in recent laboratory experiments carried out by the Bureau of Commercial Fisheries. The insecticide tolerance of young commercial shrimp just past larval life was found to be exceedingly low—measured in parts per billion instead of the more commonly used standard of parts per million. For example, half the shrimp in one experiment were killed by dieldrin at a concentration of only 15 per billion. Other chemicals were even more toxic. Endrin, always one of the most deadly of the pesticides, killed half the shrimp at a concentration of only half of one part per billion. The threat to oysters and clams is multiple. Again, the young stages are most vulnerable. These shellfish inhabit the bottoms of bays and sounds and tidal rivers from New England to Texas and sheltered areas of the Pacific Coast. Although sedentary in adult life, they discharge their spawn into the sea, where the young are free-living for a period of several weeks. On a summer day a fine-meshed tow net drawn behind a boat will collect, along with the other drifting plant and animal life that make up the plankton, the infinitely small, fragile-as-glass larvae of oysters and clams. No larger than grains of dust, these transparent larvae swim about in the surface waters, feeding on the microscopic plant life of the plankton. If the crop of minute sea vegetation fails, the young shellfish will starve. Yet pesticides may well destroy substantial quantities of plankton. Some of the herbicides in common use on lawns, cultivated fields, and roadsides and even in coastal marshes are extraordinarily toxic to the plant plankton which the larval mollusks use as food—some at only a few parts per billion. The delicate larvae themselves are killed by very small quantities of many of the common insecticides. Even exposures to less than lethal quantities may in the end cause death of the larvae, for inevitably the growth rate is retarded. This prolongs the period the larvae must spend in the hazardous world of the plankton and so decreases the chance they will live to adulthood. For adult mollusks there is apparently less danger of direct poisoning, at least by some of the pesticides. This is not necessarily reassuring, however. Oysters and clams may concentrate these poisons in their digestive organs and other tissues. Both types of shellfish are normally eaten whole and sometimes raw. Dr. Philip Butler of the Bureau of Commercial Fisheries has pointed out an ominous parallel in that we may find ourselves in the same situation as the robins. The robins, he reminds us, did not die as a direct result of the spraying of DDT. They died because they had eaten earthworms that had already concentrated the pesticides in their tissues. . . . Although the sudden death of thousands of fish or crustaceans in some stream or pond as the direct and visible effect of ‘eradicating’ the gypsy moth. (‘Eradication’ means the complete and final extinction or extermination of a species throughout its range. Yet as successive programs have failed, the Department has found it necessary to speak of second or third ‘eradications’ of the same species in the same area.) The Department’s all-out chemical war on the gypsy moth began on an ambitious scale. In 1956 nearly a million acres were sprayed in the states of Pennsylvania, New Jersey, Michigan, and New York. Many complaints of damage were made by people in the sprayed areas. Conservationists became increasingly disturbed as the pattern of spraying huge areas began to establish itself. When plans were announced for spraying 3 million acres in 1957 opposition became even stronger. State and federal agriculture officials characteristically shrugged off individual complaints as unimportant. The Long Island area included within the gypsy moth spraying in 1957 consisted chiefly of heavily populated towns and suburbs and of some coastal areas with bordering salt marsh. Nassau County, Long Island, is the most densely settled county in New York apart from New York City itself. In what seems the height of absurdity, the ‘threat of infestation of the New York City metropolitan area’ has been cited as an important justification of the program. The gypsy moth is a forest insect, certainly not an inhabitant of cities. Nor does it live in meadows, cultivated fields, gardens, or marshes. Nevertheless, the planes hired by the United States Department of Agriculture and the New York Department of Agriculture and Markets in 1957 showered down the prescribed DDT-in-fuel-oil with impartiality. They sprayed truck gardens and dairy farms, fish ponds and salt marshes. They sprayed the quarter-acre lots of suburbia, drenching a housewife making a desperate effort to cover her garden before the roaring plane reached her, and showering insecticide over children at play and commuters at railway stations. At Setauket a fine quarter horse drank from a trough in a field which the planes had sprayed; ten hours later it was dead. Automobiles were spotted with the oily mixture; flowers and shrubs were ruined. Birds, fish, crabs, and useful insects were killed. A group of Long Island citizens led by the world-famous ornithologist Robert Cushman Murphy had sought a court injunction to prevent the 1957 spraying. Denied a preliminary injunction, the protesting citizens had to suffer the prescribed drenching with DDT, but thereafter persisted in efforts to obtain a permanent injunction. But because the act had already been performed the courts held that the petition for an injunction was ‘moot’. The case was carried all the way to the Supreme Court, which declined to hear it. Justice William O. Douglas, strongly dissenting from the decision not to review the case, held that ‘the alarms that many experts and responsible officials have raised about the perils of DDT underline the public importance of this case.’ The suit brought by the Long Island citizens at least served to focus public attention on the growing trend to mass application of insecticides, and on the power and inclination of the control agencies to disregard supposedly inviolate property rights of private citizens. The contamination of milk and of farm produce in the course of the gypsy moth spraying came as an unpleasant surprise to many people. What happened on the 200-acre Waller farm in northern Westchester County, New York, was revealing. Mrs. Waller had specifically requested Agriculture officials not to spray her property, because it would be impossible to avoid the pastures in spraying the woodlands. She offered to have the land checked for gypsy moths and to have any infestation destroyed by spot spraying. Although she was assured that no farms would be sprayed, her property received two direct sprayings and, in addition, was twice subjected to drifting spray. Milk samples taken from the Wallers’ purebred Guernsey cows 48 hours later contained DDT in the amount of 14 parts per million. Forage samples from fields where the cows had grazed were of course contaminated also. Although the county Health Department was notified, no instructions were given that the milk should not be marketed. This situation is unfortunately typical of the lack of consumer protection that is all too common. Although the Food and Drug Administration permits no residues of pesticides in milk, its restrictions are not only inadequately policed but they apply solely to interstate shipments. State and county officials are under no compulsion to follow the federal pesticides tolerances unless local laws happen to conform—and they seldom do. Truck gardeners also suffered. Some leaf crops were so burned and spotted as to be unmarketable. Others carried heavy residues; a sample of peas analyzed at Cornell University’s Agricultural Experiment Station contained 14 to 20 parts per million of DDT. The legal maximum is 7 parts per million. Growers therefore had to sustain heavy losses or find themselves in the position of selling produce carrying illegal residues. Some of them sought and collected damages. As the aerial spraying of DDT increased, so did the number of suits filed in the courts. Among them were suits brought by beekeepers in several areas of New York State. Even before the 1957 spraying, the beekeepers had suffered heavily from use of DDT in orchards. ‘Up to 1953 I had regarded as gospel everything that emanated from the U.S. Department of Agriculture and the agricultural colleges,’ one of them remarked bitterly. But in May of that year this man lost 800 colonies after the state had sprayed a large area. So widespread and heavy was the loss that 14 other beekeepers joined him in suing the state for a quarter of a million dollars in damages. Another beekeeper, whose 400 colonies were incidental targets of the 1957 spray, reported that 100 per cent of the field force of bees (the workers out gathering nectar and pollen for the hives) had been killed in forested areas and up to 50 per cent in farming areas sprayed less intensively. ‘It is a very distressful thing,’ he wrote, ‘to walk into a yard in May and not hear a bee buzz.’ The gypsy moth programs were marked by many acts of irresponsibility. Because the spray planes were paid by the gallon rather than by the acre there was no effort to be conservative, and many properties were sprayed not once but several times. Contracts for aerial spraying were in at least one case awarded to an out-of-state firm with no local address, which had not complied with the legal requirement of registering with state officials for the purpose of establishing legal responsibility. In this exceedingly slippery situation, citizens who suffered direct financial loss from damage to apple orchards or bees discovered that there was no one to sue. After the disastrous 1957 spraying the program was abruptly and drastically curtailed, with vague statements about ‘evaluating’ previous work and testing alternative insecticides. Instead of the 3½ million acres sprayed in 1957, the treated areas fell to ½ million in 1958 and to about 100,000 acres in 1959, 1960, and 1961. During this interval, the control agencies must have found news from Long Island disquieting. The gypsy moth had reappeared there in numbers. The expensive spraying operation that had cost the Department dearly in public confidence and good will—the operation that was intended to wipe out the gypsy moth for ever—had in reality accomplished nothing at all. . . . Meanwhile, the Department’s Plant Pest Control men had temporarily forgotten gypsy moths, for they had been busy launching an even more ambitious program in the South. The word ‘eradication’ still came easily from the Department’s mimeograph machines; this time the press releases were promising the eradication of the fire ant. The fire ant, an insect named for its fiery sting, seems to have entered the United States from South America by way of the port of Mobile, Alabama, where it was discovered shortly after the end of the First World War. By 1928 it had spread into the suburbs of Mobile and thereafter continued an invasion that has now carried it into most of the southern states. During most of the forty-odd years since its arrival in the United States the fire ant seems to have attracted little atten- tion. The states where it was most abundant considered it a nuisance, chiefly because it builds large nests or mounds a foot or more high. These may hamper the operation of farm machinery. But only two states listed it among their 20 most important insect pests, and these placed it near the bottom of the list. No official or private concern seems to have been felt about the fire ant as a menace to crops or livestock. With the development of chemicals of broad lethal powers, there came a sudden change in the official attitude toward the fire ant. In 1957 the United States Department of Agriculture launched one of the most remarkable publicity campaigns in its history. The fire ant suddenly became the target of a barrage of government releases, motion pictures, and government-inspired stories portraying it as a despoiler of southern agriculture and a killer of birds, livestock, and man. A mighty campaign was announced, in which the federal government in cooperation with the afflicted states would ultimately treat some 20,000,000 acres in nine southern states. ‘United States pesticide makers appear to have tapped a sales bonanza in the increasing numbers of broad-scale pest elimination programs conducted by the U.S. Department of Agriculture,’ cheerfully reported one trade journal in 1958, as the fire ant program got under way. Never has any pesticide program been so thoroughly and deservedly damned by practically everyone except the evidence of damage as exaggerated and misleading. The facts, however, continue to accumulate. In Hardin County, Texas, for example, opossums, armadillos, and an abundant raccoon population virtually disappeared after the chemical was laid down. Even the second autumn after treatment these animals were scarce. The few raccoons then found in the area carried residues of the chemical in their tissues. Dead birds found in the treated areas had absorbed or swallowed the poisons used against the fire ants, a fact clearly shown by chemical analysis of their tissues. (The only bird surviving in any numbers was the house sparrow, which in other areas too has given some evidence that it may be relatively immune.) On a tract in Alabama treated in 1959 half of the birds were killed. Species that live on the ground or frequent low vegetation suffered 100 per cent mortality. Even a year after treatment, a spring die-off of songbirds occurred and much good nesting territory lay silent and unoccupied. In Texas, dead blackbirds, dickcissels, and meadowlarks were found at the nests, and many nests were deserted. When specimens of dead birds from Texas, Louisiana, Alabama, Georgia, and Florida were sent to the Fish and Wildlife Service for analysis, more than 90 per cent were found to contain residues of dieldrin or a form of heptachlor, in amounts up to 38 parts per million. Woodcocks, which winter in Louisiana but breed in the North, now carry the taint of the fire ant poisons in their bodies. The source of this contamination is clear. Woodcocks feed heavily on earthworms, which they probe for with their long bills. Surviving worms in Louisiana were found to have as much as 20 parts per million of heptachlor in their tissues 6 to 10 months after treatment of the area. A year later they had up to 10 parts per million. The consequences of the sublethal poisoning of the woodcock are now seen in a marked decline in the proportion of young birds to adults, first observed in the season after fire ant treatments began. Some of the most upsetting news for southern sportsmen concerned the bobwhite quail. This bird, a ground nester and forager, was all but eliminated on treated areas. In Alabama, for example, biologists of the Alabama Cooperative Wildlife Research Unit conducted a preliminary census of the quail population in a 3600-acre area that was scheduled for treatment. Thirteen resident coveys—121 quail—ranged over the area. Two weeks after treatment only dead quail could be found. All specimens sent to the Fish and Wildlife Service for analysis were found to contain insecticides in amounts sufficient to cause their death. The Alabama findings were duplicated in Texas, where a 2500-acre area treated with heptachlor lost all of its quail. Along with the quail went 90 per cent of the songbirds. Again, analysis revealed the presence of heptachlor in the tissues of dead birds. In addition to quail, wild turkeys were seriously reduced by the fire ant program. Although 80 turkeys had been counted on an area in Wilcox County, Alabama, before heptachlor was applied, none could be found the summer after treatment—none, that is, except a clutch of unhatched eggs and one dead poult. The wild turkeys may have suffered the same fate as their domestic brethren, for turkeys on farms in the area treated with chemicals also produced few young. Few eggs hatched and almost no young survived. This did not happen on nearby untreated areas. The fate of the turkeys was by no means unique. One of the most widely known and respected wildlife biologists in the country, Dr. Clarence Cottam, called on some of the farmers whose property had been treated. Besides remarking that ‘all the little tree birds’ seemed to have disappeared after the land had been treated, most of these people reported losses of livestock, poultry, and household pets. One man was ‘irate against the control workers,’ Dr. Cottam reported, ‘as he said he buried or otherwise disposed of 19 carcasses of his cows that had been killed by the poison and he knew of three or four additional cows that died as a result of the same treatment. Calves died that had been given only milk since birth.’ The people Dr. Cottam interviewed were puzzled by what had happened in the months following the treatment of their land. One woman told him she had set several hens after the surrounding land had been covered with poison, ‘and for reasons she did not understand very few young were hatched or survived.’ Another farmer ‘raises hogs and for fully nine months after the broadcast of poisons, he could raise no young pigs. The litters were born dead or they died after birth.’ A similar report came from another, who said that out of 37 litters that might have numbered as many as 250 young, only 31 little pigs survived. This man had also been quite unable to raise chickens since the land was poisoned. The Department of Agriculture has consistently denied livestock losses related to the fire ant program. However, a veterinarian in Bainbridge, Georgia, Dr. Otis L. Poitevint, who was called upon to treat many of the affected animals, has summarized his reasons for attributing the deaths to the insecticide as follows. Within a period of two weeks to several months after the fire ant poison was applied, cattle, goats, horses, chickens, and birds and other wildlife began to suffer an often fatal disease of the nervous system. It affected only animals that had access to contaminated food or water. Stabled animals were not affected. The condition was seen only in areas treated for fire ants. Laboratory tests for disease were negative. The symptoms observed by Dr. Poitevint and other veterinarians were those described in authoritative texts as indicating poisoning by dieldrin or heptachlor. Dr. Poitevint also described an interesting case of a two-month-old calf that showed symptoms of poisoning by heptachlor. The animal was subjected to exhaustive laboratory tests. The only significant finding was the discovery of 79 parts per million of heptachlor in its fat. But it was five months since the poison had been applied. Did the calf get it directly from grazing or indirectly from its mother’s milk or even before birth? ‘If from the milk,’ asked Dr. Poitevint, ‘why were not special precautions taken to protect our children who drank milk from local dairies?’ Dr. Poitevint’s report brings up a significant problem about the contamination of milk. The area included in the fire ant program is predominantly fields and croplands. What about the dairy cattle that graze on these lands? In treated fields the grasses will inevitably carry residues of heptachlor in one of its forms, and if the residues are eaten by the cows the poison will appear in the milk. This direct transmission into milk had been demonstrated experimentally for heptachlor in 1955, long before the control program was undertaken, and was later reported for dieldrin, also used in the fire ant program. The Department of Agriculture’s annual publications now list heptachlor and dieldrin among the chemicals that make forage plants unsuitable for feeding to dairy animals or animals being finished for slaughter, yet the control divisions of the Department promote programs that spread heptachlor and dieldrin over substantial areas of grazing land in the South. Who is safeguarding the consumer to see that no residues of dieldrin or heptachlor are appearing in milk? The United States Department of Agriculture would doubtless answer that it has advised farmers to keep milk cows out of treated pastures for 30 to 90 days. Given the small size of many of the farms and the largescale nature of the program—much of the chemical applied by planes—it is extremely doubtful that this recommendation was followed or could be. Nor is the prescribed period adequate in view of the persistent nature of the residues. The Food and Drug Administration, although frowning on the presence of any pesticide residues in milk, has little authority in this situation. In most of the states included in the fire ant program the dairy industry is small and its products do not cross state lines. Protection of the milk supply endangered by a federal program is therefore left to the states themselves. Inquiries addressed to the health officers or other appropriate officials of Alabama, Louisiana, and Texas in 1959 revealed that no tests had been made and that it simply was not known whether the milk was contaminated with pesticides or not. Meanwhile, after rather than before the control program was launched, some research into the peculiar nature of heptachlor was done. Perhaps it would be more accurate to say that someone looked up the research already published, since the basic fact that brought about belated action by the federal government had been discovered several years before, and should have influenced the initial handling of the program. This is the fact that heptachlor, after a short period in the tissues of animals or plants or in the soil, assumes a considerably more toxic form known as heptachlor epoxide. The epoxide is popularly described as ‘an oxidation product’ produced by weathering. The fact that this transformation could occur had been known since 1952, when the Food and Drug Administration discovered that female rats, fed 30 parts per million of heptachlor, had stored 165 parts per million of the more poisonous epoxide only 2 weeks later. These facts were allowed to come out of the obscurity of biological literature in 1959, when the Food and Drug Administration took action which had the effect of banning any residues of heptachlor or its epoxide on food. This ruling put at least a temporary damper on the program; although the Agriculture Department continued to press for its annual appropriations for fire ant control, local agricultural agents became increasingly reluctant to advise farmers to use