Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and passage of the Clean Air and Clean Water Acts. Critics called Carson’s claims “more poisonous than the chemicals she condemns” and labeled her “an alarmist, mystic and hysterical woman.” As the 20 th century’s most influential environmental book, it catalyzed the modern environmental movement, and sparked creation of the U.S. Carson’s legacy: Bird species recoveries since DDTīirds are beloved by many, and Silent Spring became a bestseller despite brutal industry attacks. The cranes are threatened by everything from habitat loss, drought and pesticide use to hunting and egg collecting. The gray crowned crane has two endangered subspecies in African wetlands, savannas, farms and ranchlands, and is declining. Scores of songbirds vanished, too, as did cormorants, pelicans and other waterbirds. Peregrine falcons went missing from parts of North America. The California condor was extinct in the wild by 1987 just 27 were left alive in captivity. Incapable of reproducing, just 417 bald eagles remained in the lower 48 U.S. Thin-shelled, fragile eggs fractured in bird nests, unable to support the weight of a growing embryo. The biocide also interfered with calcium metabolism in egg production, particularly in birds of prey, which were “catastrophically impacted,” says Alexander Lees, a conservation biologist at Manchester Metropolitan University and an associate of the Cornell Lab of Ornithology. It leached into soil and water, contaminating the rodents, worms, insects, fish and other prey that birds fed on, killing some outright. Later studies determined that it causes neurological damage, is toxic to wildlife and humans, stores in fatty tissues, and bioaccumulates in greater and greater concentrations up the food chain.ĭDT sparked a global avian catastrophe. Image courtesy of the Science History Institute.ĭDT was the world’s first modern synthetic insecticide, a chlorinated hydrocarbon that lingers in the environment. Its toxic bioaccumulation proved to be a disaster for birds, leading to the biocide’s being banned. DDT was hailed as a miracle biocide and was produced and marketed for years with virtually no environmental testing. military declared this revolutionary biocide to be “the most powerful of the new weapons the army is now using in its war on insect-borne diseases,” specifically malaria, yellow fever, typhus and bubonic plague.Īfter the war, planes “broadcast sprayed” leftover stockpiles across the United States and many other countries to kill weeds, crop-eating insects and to control mosquitoes. 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.” In her landmark 1962 book, Silent Spring, biologist Rachel Carson chronicled the damage - and looming consequences - of human “contamination of air, earth, rivers, and sea with dangerous and even lethal materials,” which she called “elixirs of death.” In the book’s spellbinding opening parable, which profiles a fictional town of the future, she wrote:
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