abroad and s uccess fully es tablis hed in New England. The Agriculture Depa rtment its elf has
credited thes e importations with appreciably reducing the frequency and des tructivenes s of
gyps y moth outbreaks. This natural control, plus quarantine meas ures and local s praying,
achieved what the Departme nt in 195 5 des cribed as ‘outs tanding res triction of dis tribution and
damage’. Yet only a year after expressing satisfaction with the state of affairs, its Plant P e s t
Control Divis ion embarked on a program calling for the blanket spraying of several million acres
a year with the announced i ntention of eventually ‘eradicating’ the gypsy moth. (‘Eradication’
means the complete and final extinction or exte rmi nation of a species throughout its range. Yet
as s uccess ive programs have failed, the Department has found it neces s ary to s peak of s econd
or third ‘eradications’ of the same species in the same area.)
The Department’s all-out chemical war on the gyps y moth began on an ambitious scale. In 1956
nearly a million acres were s prayed in the s tates of Penns ylvania, New Jers ey, Michigan, and
New York. Many complaints of damage were made by people in the s prayed areas.
Cons ervationis ts became increas ingly dis turbed as the pattern of s praying huge areas began to
es tablis h its elf. When plans were announced f or s praying 3 million acres in 1957 oppos ition
became even stronger. State and federal agriculture officials characteristically shrugged off
individual complaints as unimportant. The Long Is land area included within the gyps y moth
s praying in 1957 cons is ted chiefly of heavily populated towns and s uburbs and of s ome coas tal
areas with bordering s alt mars h. Nas sau County, Long Is land, is the mos t dens ely s ettled county
in New York apart from New York City its elf. In what s eems the height of abs urdity, the ‘threat
of infes tation of the New York City metropolitan area’ has been cited as an important
jus tification of the program. The gyps y moth is a fores t ins ect, certainly not an inhabitant of
cities. Nor does it live in meadows, cultivated fields, gardens, or marshes. Nevertheless, the
planes hired by the United States Departme nt of Agriculture and the Ne w York Department of
Agriculture and Markets in 1957 s howered down the prescribed DDT-in-fuel-oil with
impartiality. They sprayed truck garde ns and dairy farms , fis h ponds and s alt mars hes. They
s prayed the quarter-acre lots of s uburbia, drenching a hous ewife making a des perate effort to
cover he r garden before the roaring plane reache d he r, and s howe ring ins ecticide over children
at play and commuters at railway stations. At Setauket a fine quarter horse drank from a trough
in a field which the planes had s prayed; ten hours later it was dead. Automobiles were s potted
with the oily mixture; flowers and s hrubs were rui ned. Birds , fis h, crabs , and us eful ins ects were
killed.
A group of Long Is land citizens led by the world-famous ornithologis t Robert Cus hman Murphy
had s ought a court injunction to prevent the 1957 s praying. Denied a preliminary injunction,
the protes ting citizens had to s uffer the pres cribed drenching with DDT, but the reafter
pers is ted in efforts to obtain a permane nt injunc tion. But becaus e the act had already been
performed the courts held that the petition for an injunction was ‘moot’. The cas e was carried
all the way to the Supreme Court, which declined to hear it. Justice William O. Douglas, strongly
dis s enting from the decis ion not to review the cas e, held that ‘the alarms that many experts
and res pons ible officials have raised about the perils of DDT underline the public importance of
this case.’
The s uit brought by the Long Is land citizens at leas t s erved to focus public attenti on on the
growing trend to mas s application of ins ecticides , and on the power and inclination of the
control agencies to disregard supposedly inviolate prope rty rights of private citizens.
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