endless stream; almost five hundred annually find their way into actual use in the United States
alone. The figure is staggering and its implications are not easily grasped—500 new c hemicals
to which the bodies of men and animals are required s omehow to adapt each year, chemicals
totally outside the limits of biologic experience.
Among them are many that are used in man’s war against nature. Since the mid-1940s over 200
basic chemicals have been created for us e in killing insects , weeds , rodents , and other
organis ms des cribed in the mode rn vernacular as ‘pes ts ’; and they are s old under s everal
thous and different brand names. Thes e s prays , dus ts , and aeros ols are now applied almos t
univers ally to farms , gardens , fores ts , and homes— nons elective chemicals that have the power
to kill every ins ect, the ‘good’ and the ‘bad’, to s till the s ong of birds and the leaping of fish in
the streams, to coat the leaves with a deadly film, and to linger on in soil—all this though the
intende d target may be only a few weeds or ins ects. Can anyone believe it is possible to lay
down s uch a barrage of pois ons on the surface of the earth without making it unfit for all life?
They s hould not be called ‘ins ecticides ’, but ‘biocides ’. The whole proces s of s praying s eems
caught up in an endles s s piral. Since DDT was released for civilian use, a process of escalation
has been going on in which eve r more toxic materials mus t be found. This has happened
becaus e ins ects , in a triumphant vindication of Darwin’s principle of the survival of the fittest,
have evolved s uper races immune to the particular ins ecticide us ed, hence a deadlier one has
always to be developed—and then a deadlier one than that. It has happened als o becaus e, for
reas ons to be des cribed later, des tructive ins ects often unde rgo a ‘flareback’, or res urgence,
after s praying, in numbers greater than before. T hus the che mical war is never won, a nd all life
is caught in its violent cros s fire.
Along with the pos s ibility of the extinction of mankind by nuclear war, the central problem of
our age has therefore become the contamination of man’s total environme nt with s uch
s ubs tances of incredible potential for harm—s ubs tances that accumulate in the tiss ues of
plants and animals and even penetrate the germ cells to shatter or alter the very material
of heredity upon which the s hape of the future de pends.
Some would-be architects of our future look toward a time when it will be poss ible to alter the
human germ plas m by des ign. But we may easily be doing s o now by inadvertence, for many
chemicals, like radiation, bring about gene mutations. It is ironic to think that man might
determine his own future by s omething s o s eemingly trivial as the choice of an ins ect s pray.
All this has been risked—for what? Future historians may well be amazed by our distorted
s ense of proportion. How could intelligent beings s eek to control a few unwanted s pecies by a
method that contaminated the enti re environment and brought the threat of dis eas e and death
even to their own kind? Yet this is precisely what we have done. We have done it, more over,
for reas ons that collaps e the mome nt we exa mine them. We are told that the e normous and
expanding us e of pes ticides is neces sary to maintain farm production. Yet is our real problem
not one of overproduction? Our farms , des pite meas ures to remove acreages from production
and to pay farme rs not to produce, have yielded s uch a s taggering excess of crops that the
American taxpayer in 1962 is paying out more than one billion dollars a year as the total
carrying cos t of the s urplus-food s torage progra m. And is the s ituation helped whe n one branch
of the Agriculture Department tries to reduce production while anothe r s tates , as it did in 1958,
‘It is believed generally that reduction of crop acreages under provis ions of the Soil Bank will
stimulate interest in use of chemicals to obtain maximum produc tion on the land retained in
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