Silent Spring

Rachel Carson’s DDT

What is DDT? DDT is a non-selective insecticide. It killed all insect pests good or bad. As Rachel Carson put it in Silent Spring it had the power to; ‘still the songs 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 through the intended target of a few insect pests’.

Rachel Carson was one of the first writers to publicise the concept of bioaccumulation of toxic chemicals. She discusses bioaccumulation in reference to DDT in quite some detail, explaining how the smallest intakes of DDT are stored in fatty storage depots of animals where they accumulate every time they are ingested. This is then passed on from one animal to the next through the food chain, becoming more concentrated the further up the food chain you went.

Rachel Carson was also one of the first to highlight the capacity of chemical pollutants like DDT to move from mother to child. She discusses how significant levels of DDT residues have been measured in breast-milk and the possibility of chemical pollutants transversing the placental barrier in the womb. She even goes on to discuss the increased sensitivity of infants to the effects of toxic chemical pollutants.

Silent Spring is a truly ground-breaking book. It was prophetic in some of the predictions that it made of the possible effects of chemicals that were unknown at the time. It seemed as though she knew the possible effects of toxic chemicals like DDT. In some instances you felt as though she was writing about the endocrine-disrupting qualities of DDT itself! How could she have possibly known in 1962? Thirty or so years before the term was first used to describe the darker toxic effects of some chemicals?

For more information go to:
Silent Spring