#needless havoc

[chmaldon]

7. Needless Havoc

A brief summary of Rachel Carson's Silent Spring Chapter 7 by Alex Kellam

      Humans have wanted to conquer the earth for a long time. Animals have been abused and taken advantage of, often leading to endangerment or extinction. Now all forms of life are starting to be killed on a massive scale with insecticides. Many innocent creatures get killed by insecticides, but agencies claim these deaths are negligible and that only insects get the full effect of the chemicals. Those in charge of decision making are looking to individuals who are too specialized in their fields, leading to uninformed decisions and inaccurate conclusions on the ecology of organisms and the effects chemicals might have on them.To top it off the insect controllers are the people with the greatest power and they choose to keep letting these chemicals negatively affect the environment.

      Major attempts at controlling insects often leads the destruction of the things people love in nature, this in turn deprives people of their pleasure. This can have permanent results as well. To keep insects at bay, spraying is repeated, adding to animal and plant populations having no chance of re-establishment. In Michigan  27,000 acres were sprayed with the highly inexpensive, but toxic and dangerous Aldrin to get rid the Japanese beetle. It caused a mass death of animals and birds, both local and migratory. Unfortunately, this included citizens with symptoms of vomiting, dizziness and chest pains.  When biologists studied the area after the spraying the amount of death was massive. Grub eating birds were annihilated, having eaten the infested bugs, other birds were killed from bathing in the water and mammals who were found had obvious signs of death by poison. Domestic animals were affected too, house cats were wiped out and livestock were either killed or left disorientated from the poisoning.

    With the lack of funding correlating with the minor amount of resources for studying insecticides being non-existent, control agencies continued to use more Aldrin, which is found to be 100 to 300 times more toxic than DDT. This was done without evidence that the Japanese beetle was bringing any harm to these areas, they were only growing increasingly in population. It is proven that parasitic insects and bacteria can be used to kill and stabilize the Japanese beetle population. The truth is insecticides have to be used repeatedly and the cost to the environment and human health is much more expensive than importing some organisms. Carson ends this chapter debating on whether civilization can wage a war on life without killing itself and losing its humanity in the process.

[litc-lotsxe-perring]

Civilised

I've chosen the word "civilised" to be the most important word in chapter seven ofSilent Springby Rachel Carson (Needless Havoc.) She brings up both the tangible and intangible aspects of the word. Most specifically, on page 99, she uses it in the sentence, "the question is whether any civilisation can wage relentless war on life without destroying itself, and without losing the right to be called civilised." This is an incredibly powerful statement, because after all of the facts she presents, it really makes one wonder how we can simply try to poison out the bugs and weeds we don't want and let all kinds of creatures suffer, and yet we still think that we are the civilised ones!

In the first paragraph of the chapter, she brings up how man is constantly trying to reign supreme over nature, though we have a record of destruction on our planet and the creatures we live with. Yet we think that we can still conquer nature because we are the "civilised" ones. At first read of this paragraph, we're caught up in her guilt inflicting tone with such phrases as, "conquest of nature," "destruction directed against the earth," "slaughter of the buffalo," and "massacre if the shorebirds." But at second read, after reading the whole chapter, it's the perfect example of how we so unfairly to the rest of the world consider ourselves the superior ones because we think we are civilised. Her second paragraph is meant to induce more guilt by mentioning that there are casualties from the poisons that no one cares about.

She goes on to offer us an ultimatum, we can either accept the fact that the losses have been severe, or we can believe that nothing gas happened. This is an interesting rhetorical technique, and works well with her use of a rhetorical question. And it brings up an interesting point, because people often consider others uncivilised for denying the truth.

For the next few pages, she shows us a plethora of examples of how we've managed to kill many, many creatures by the poisons we've used in our quest tocontrolnature, and specifically insects. The implied ideas that I get from most of these pages are that we humans are absolutely disgusting with what we are willing to do to achieve our comfortable standard of living, and that there is no way we can consider ourselves civilised if we are okay with the things we are doing and the things we are harming.

Carson goes on for a few paragraphs to talk about how we can't even use selective poisons and how we harm innocent and pleasant forms of life. Her last sentence of the chapter is completely perfect, "by acquiescing in an act that can cause such suffering to a living creature, who among us is not diminished as a human being?"  This last rhetorical question brings back the importance of the word "civilised." If we're diminished as a human being, doesn't that make us less civilised?