record of des truction and death of A merican wildlife has accumulated. Let us look at s ome of
thes e progra ms and s ee what has happened.
During the fall of 1959 some 27,000 acres in s outheas tern Michigan, including numerous
s uburbs of Detroit, were heavily dusted from the air with pellets of aldrin, one of the most
dangerous of all the chlorinated hy drocarbons. The program was conducte d by the Michigan
Department of Agriculture wi th the coope ration of the Unite d States Department of
Agriculture ; its announced purpos e was control of the Japanes e beetle. Little need was s hown
for this dras tic and dangerous action. On the contrary, Walter P. Nickell, one of the bes t-known
and bes t-informed naturalis ts in the s tate, who s pends much of his time in the field with long
periods in s outhe rn Michigan every s umme r, declared: ‘ For more than thirty years , to my direct
knowledge, the Japanese beetle has been pres ent in the city of Detroit in s mall numbe rs. The
numbers have not shown any appreciable increase in all this lapse of years. I have yet to see a
s ingle Japanes e beetle [in 1959] other than the few caught in Government catch traps in
Detroit...Eve ry thing is being kept so secret that I have not yet been able to obtain any
information whats oever to the effect that they have increas ed in numbers .’ An official release
by the s tate agency merely declared that the beetle had ‘put in its appearance’ in the areas
des ignated for the aerial attack upon it. Despite the lack of justification the program was
launched, with the s tate providing the manpowe r and s upervis ing the ope ration, the federal
government providing equipme nt and additional men, and the communi ties paying for the
insecticide. The Japanes e beetle, an ins ect accidentally importe d into the United States , was
dis covered in New Je rs ey in 1916, when a few shiny beetles of a metallic green color were seen
in a nurs ery near Riverton. The beetles , at firs t unrecognized, we re finally identified as a
common inhabitant of the main is lands of Japan. Apparently the y had entere d the U nited
States on nurs ery s tock imported before res trictions were es tablis hed in 1912.
From its original point of entra nce the Japanes e beetle has s pread rather widely throughout
many of the s tates eas t of the Mississippi, where conditions of temperature and rainfall are
suitable for it. Each year some outward movement beyond the exis ting bounda ries of its
distribution usually takes place. In the eastern areas where the beetles have been longes t
es tablis hed, attempts have been made to s et up natural controls. Where this has been done,
the beetle populations have been kept at relatively low levels, as many records attest. D es pi te
the record of reas onable control in eastern areas, the midwestern states now on the fringe of
the beetle’s range have launched an attack worthy of the mos t deadly enemy ins tead of only a
moderately des tructive ins ect, employing the mos t dangerous chemicals dis tributed in a
manne r that exposes large numbers of people, their domes tic animals , and all wildlife to the
pois on intended for the beetle. As a res ult thes e Japanes e beetle programs have caus ed
s hocking des truction of animal life and have expos ed human beings to undeniable hazard.
Sections of Michigan, Kentuck y, Iowa, Indiana, Illinois, and Missouri are all experiencing a rain
of chemicals in the name of beetle control. The Michigan s praying was one of the firs t large-
scale attacks on the Japanese beetle from the air. The choice of aldrin, one of the deadlies t of
all chemicals, was not determined by any peculiar suitability for Japanese beetle control, but
s imply by the wis h to s ave 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 ans wer to the query ‘What precautions s hould I take?’ was ‘For y ou,
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