SILENT SPRING

Chapter I

There was once a town called Green Meadows, a place of
great beauty where all life seemed to live in harmony with
its surroundings. The town lay in the midst of a checker-
board 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. Green
Meadows was, in fact, famous for the abundance and variety
of its bird life, and when the flood of migrants was pouring

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through in spring and fall people came from great distances
to observe them. Others visited Green Meadows to fish the
streams, which came down clear and cold out of the hills
and contained shady pools where trout lay.

This was Green Meadows, from the days many years ago
when the first settlers raised their houses, sunk 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 sud-
denly 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 ronbins, 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.

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On the farms around Green Meadows 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 Green Meadows. The people had done it themselves.

Green Meadows does not exist, yet it might easily have a thousand counterparts in America or elsewhere in the world. As yet I know of no community that has experienced all the misfortunes that befell this imaginary town. Yet every one of these disasters has actually happened somewhere, and many real communities have already had a substantial part of these misfortunes visited upon them. A grim specter has crept upon us almost unnoticed, and the imaginary tragedy of Green Meadows may easily become a stark reality we all shall know.

Chapter II

4a

The history of life on earth has been a history of inter-action 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 and directed 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, Actinium 90, released through nuclear explosions into the air, comes to earth in rain or drifts down as fallout,

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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. 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. But 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 speed with which new situations are created follow the impetuous and heedless pace of man,

## Chapter IV

Alone among all the planets that whirl through space
on their orbits around the sun, the earth is a water planet,
with by far the greater part of its surface covered with
an ocean mantle. But in the midst of plenty we are in
want, and of all our natural resources water has become
the most precious. 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 threatened with critical short-
ages. Yet in an age when man has forgotten his origins
and is blind even to his most essential needs for sur-
vival, water along with other resources has become the
victim of his indifference to preserving the integrity
of his environment.

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 all aspects of our

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environment. This pollution is in part by physical agents -- radiation in all its forms, the products of nuclear explosions, the wastes from reactors, laboratories, and hospitals. Pollution is also occuring by chemical agents discharged into air and water by factories, applied to croplands and gardens, forests and fields, entering into the manufacture or processing of almost everything we use or consume. Many of the chemical agents 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 hazard to users of water has increased. As we have seen, the production of such synthetic chemicals in large volume began in the 1940's. It has now reached such proportions that an alarming 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 defy detection or identification by the methods in ordinary use by purification plants. Most of them are so stable that they are immune to the processes that would normally bring about their breakdown

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or deterioration. Traditional methods of waste treatment do not remove them. Once introduced into the sources of public water supply such chemicals, with all their varied but undeniable toxicity, remain as threats, first to the fishes and other life inhabiting the waters and then to the animals and human beings who will eventually drink the water.

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 water-borne residues of some 500,000,000 pounds of agricultural chemicals that have been applied to farm lands 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

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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 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 in-
visible, making its presence known when hundreds or thou-
sands 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 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 Wild-