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!!!!PLEASE ANSWER THE THREE QUESTIONS BASE OF THE READING!!!

KEEP IT SIMPLE AND SHORT

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A) What potential dangers did Rachel Carson warn people of that are now very much realities?

B) How does Wangari Maathai's Green Belt Movement in Kenya guide people toward becoming stewards of the planet?

C) How are Carson's and Maathai's ideas relevant to those of us living in Southern California in 2018? Why?

Answer these 3 questions with responses of 3-4 complex sentences--labeling them clearly with A, B, C.

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RACHEL CARSON The Obligation to Endure (1962) publi move Ca and read prev bestselling author. The and eart] side mod timo pow I turl assa dar the tiss the problem of chemical pesticides in Silent Spring, Rachel BEFORE SHE TOOK up Carson (1907–1964) was already a respected scientist and a After earning a master's degree in zoology from Johns Hopkins University in 1932, and its later incarnation as the Fish and Wildlife Service. In 1949, she rose to the she spent her early career as an aquatic biologist with the U.S. Bureau of Fisheries position of chief editor of publications for the Fish and Wildlife Service and pub- lished three books about the ocean: Under the Sea-Wind (1941), The Sea Around National Book Award and sold so many copies that Carson was able to give up Us (1951), and The Edge of the Sea (1955). The second of these books won the her job and devote her time to writing. With the publication of her most famous work, Silent Spring, Carson took on the unfamiliar role of social activist. The book began as a magazine article about the environmental impact of pesticides, especially of the compound dichlorodiphe- nyltrichloroethane, better known as DDT. During and after World War II, DDT had been used throughout the world to control insects, remove disease threats, and increase food production. Carson traced the poisonous effects of DDT and other pesticides through the ecosystem, beginning with plants and insects and moving to fish, birds, wildlife, domestic animals, and finally to people, for whom, Carson argued, DDT was a carcinogen. When the book was published, the chemical pesticide industry launched a major counterstrike aimed at discrediting Carson. Despite their attack, the book became a phenomenal bestseller and caused millions of Americans to consider the effects of chemicals on their environment. Furthermore, it caused many to reevaluate their faith in technology, scientific progress, and the role of govern- ment in protecting their interests. Carson died of breast cancer in 1964 before she could see the effect of her work on the world. In 1972, largely because of Silent Spring, the Environmental Protec- tion Agency banned the use of DDT. In 1980, Carson was posthumously awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom. And in 1999, the Modern Library Editorial en in rel do an hi in pc er ki 01 th е e Board ranked Silent Spring as one of the most important nonfiction books of the twentieth century. H t Carson's accomplishment in Silent Spring, the second chapter of which follows, goes beyond exposing the dangers of pesticides. The portrait that she created of a deeply interconnected natural world, where changes to one species have far-reaching, unforeseen consequences for the entire ecological system, struck a deep chord with her readers and even changed their perception of nature. Today, many consider the RACHEL CARSON • The Obligation to Endure 329 movement. publication of Silent Spring to mark the beginning of the modern environmental Carson's claim about the dangers of chemicals is primarily supported by facts and statistics. She links together a series of historical and scientific facts to focus previously viewed by many in only a positive light. readers' attention on the negative consequences of using chemicals-chemicals The history of life on earth has been a history of interaction between living things and their surroundings. To a large extent, the physical form and the habits of the earth's vegetation and its animal life have been molded by the environment. Con- sidering the whole span of earthly time, the opposite effect, in which life actually modifies its surroundings, has been relatively slight. Only within the moment of time represented by the present century has one species-man-acquired significant power to alter the nature of his world. During the past quarter century this power has not only increased to one of dis- turbing magnitude but it has changed in character. The most alarming of all man's assaults upon the environment is the contamination of air, earth, rivers, and sea with dangerous and even lethal materials. This pollution is for the most part irrecoverable; the chain of evil it initiates not only in the world that must support life but in living tissues is for the most part irreversible. In this now universal contamination of the environment, chemicals are the sinister and little-recognized partners of radiation in changing the very nature of the world—the very nature of its life. Strontium 90, released through nuclear explosions into the air, comes to earth in rain or drifts down as fallout, lodges in soil, enters into the grass or corn or wheat grown there, and in time takes up its abode in the bones of a human being, there to remain until his death. Similarly, chemicals sprayed on croplands or forests or gardens lie long in soil, entering into living organisms, passing from one to another in a chain of poisoning and death. Or they pass mysteriously by underground streams until they emerge and, through the alchemy of air and sunlight, combine into new forms that kill vegetation, sicken cattle, and work unknown harm on those who drink from once pure wells. As Albert Schweitzer has said, “Man can hardly even recognize the devils of his own creation." It took hundreds of millions of years to produce the life that now inhabits the earth—eons of time in which that developing and evolving and diversifying life reached a state of adjustment and balance with its surroundings. The environment , rigorously shaping and directing the life it supported, contained elements that were hostile as well as supporting. Certain rocks gave out dangerous radiation; even within the light of the sun, from which all life draws its energy, there were short-wave radia- tions with power to injure. Given time-time not in years but in millennia--life 1. Albert Schweitzer: German-Alsatian theologian, philosopher, music scholar, and physician (1875-1965), who won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1952 for his lifelong devotion to providing medical services in Africa SCIENCE AND NATURE of nature. environ that acc cells to s future de Some sible to by inady ironic to trivial as Allt our dist 5 few unu brought what we we exar is neces producti pay fart Americ adjusts, and a balance has been reached. For time is the essential ingredient; but in the modern world there is no time. The rapidity of change and the speed with which new situations are created follow the impetuous and heedless pace of man rather than the deliberate pace of Radiation is no longer merely the background radiation of rocks, the bombardment of cosmic rays, the ultraviolet of the sun that have existed before there was any life on earth; radiation is now the unnatural creation of man's tampering with the atom. The chemicals to which life is asked to make its adjustment are no longer merely the calcium and silica and copper and all the rest of the minerals washed out of the rocks and carried in rivers to the sea; they are the synthetic creations of man's inventive mind, brewed in his laboratories, and having no counterparts in nature. To adjust to these chemicals would require time on the scale that is nature's; it would require not merely the years of a man's life but the life of generations. And even this, were it by some miracle possible, would be futile, for the new chemicals come from our laboratories in an 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 chemicals to which the bodies of men and animals are required somehow 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- 1940's over 200 basic chemicals have been created for use in killing insects, weeds, rodents, and other organisms described in the modern vernacular as “pests”; and they are sold under several thousand different brand names. These sprays, dusts, and aerosols are now applied almost universally to farms, gardens, forests, and homes-nonselective chemicals that have the power to kill every insect, the "good" and the "bad," to still the song 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 intended target may be only a few weeds or insects. Can anyone believe it is possible to lay down such a barrage of poisons on the surface of the earth without making it unfit for all life? They should not be called "insec- ticides," but "biocides." The whole process of spraying seems caught up in an endless spiral. Since DDT was released for civilian use, a process of escalation has been going on in which ever more toxic materials must be found. This has happened because insects, in a trium- phant vindication of Darwin's principle of the survival of the fittest, have evolved super races immune to the particular insecticide used, hence a deadlier one has always to be developed and then a deadlier one than that. It has happened also because , for reasons to be described later, destructive insects often undergo a “flareback," or resurgence, after spraying, in numbers greater than before. Thus the chemical war never won, and all life is caught in its violent crossfire. Along with the possibility of the extinction of mankind by nuclear war, the central problem of our age has therefore become the contamination of man's total total ca when a anothe ages un obtain All saying, and th with th The wake i insects Overt half a princip Dis togeth disaste of som is see, th also th Un These RACHEL CARSON . The Obligation to Endure at in 331 low ure. ent future depends. life om. the cks ive might determine his own future by something so seemingly POS- it 5 ad als nd environment with such substances of incredible potential for harm-substances that accumulate in the tissues of plants and animals and even penetrate the germ cells to shatter or alter the very material of heredity upon which the shape of the Some would-be architects of our future look toward a time when it will be sible to alter the human germ plasm by design. But we may easily be doing so now by inadvertence, for many chemicals, like radiation, bring about gene mutations. It is 10 ironic to think that man trivial as the choice of an insect spray. All this has been risked—for what? Future historians may well be amazed by our distorted sense of proportion. How could intelligent beings seek to control a few unwanted species by a method that contaminated the entire environment and brought the threat of disease and death even to their own kind? Yet this is precisely what we have done. We have done it, moreover, for reasons that collapse the moment use of pesticides is necessary to maintain farm production. Yet is our real problem not one of over- production? Our farms, despite measures to remove acreages from production and to farmers not to produce, have yielded such a staggering excess of crops that the American taxpayer in 1962 is paying out more than one billion dollars a year as the total carrying cost of the surplus-food storage program. And is the situation helped when one branch of the Agriculture Department tries to reduce production while another states, as it did in 1958, “It is believed generally that reduction of crop acre- under provisions of the Soil Bank will stimulate interest in use of chemicals to ages obtain maximum production on the land retained in crops.” All this is not to say there is no insect problem and no need of control. I am saying, rather, that control must be geared to realities, not to mythical situations, and that the methods employed must be such that they do not destroy us along with the insects. age man, ts n e е pay E, 7 The problem whose attempted solution has brought such a train of disaster in its wake is an accompaniment of our modern way of life. Long before the age of insects inhabited the earth—a group of extraordinarily varied and adaptable beings. Over the course of time since man's advent, a small percentage of the more than half a million species of insects have come into conflict with human welfare in two principal ways: as competitors for the food supply and as carriers of human disease . Disease-carrying insects become important where human beings are crowded together, especially under conditions where sanitation is poor, as in time of natural disaster or war or in situations of extreme poverty and deprivation. Then control of some sort becomes necessary. It is a sobering fact, however, as we shall presently see, that the method of massive chemical control has had only limited success, and also threatens to worsen the very conditions it is intended to curb. Under primitive agricultural conditions the farmer had few insect problems. arose with the intensification of agriculture the devotion of immense 15 332 SCIENCE AND NATURE acreages to a single crop. Such a system set the stage for explosive increases in specific insect populations. Single-crop farming does not take advantage of the ; as an to be. Nature has introduced great variety into the landscape, but man has displayed a passion for simplifying it. Thus he undoes the built-in checks and balances by which nature holds the species within bounds. One important natural check is a limit on the amount of suitable habitat for each species. Obviously then, an insect build up devoted to wheat than on one in which wheat is intermingled with other crops to means of su edge of anin mote an eve invasions. that lives on wheat can Much of ecologists in but we selda farm which the insect is not adapted. there were r The same thing happens in other situations. A generation or more ago, the towns soon discove sweeps through the elms, carried by a beetle that would have only limited chance Have we which is in demand tha Shepard, "ic toleration a a diet of we who are no prevent insa Yet such insect-free specialists a evidence th "The regula assessor and entomologi: and federal of large areas of the United States lined their streets with the noble elm tree. Now the beauty they hopefully created is threatened with complete destruction as disease to build up large populations and to spread from tree to tree if the elms were only occasional trees in a richly diversified planting. Another factor in the modern insect problem is one that must be viewed against a background of geologic and human history: the spreading of thousands of different kinds of organisms from their native homes to invade new territories. This worldwide migration has been studied and graphically described by the British ecologist Charles Elton in his recent book The Ecology of Invasions. During the Cretaceous Period, some hundred million years ago, flooding seas cut many land bridges between continents and living things found themselves confined in what Elton calls "colossal separate nature reserves.” There, isolated from others of their kind, they developed many new species. When some of the land masses were joined again, about 15 million years ago, these species began to move out into new territories—a movement that is not only still in progress but is now receiving considerable assistance from man. The importation of plants is the primary agent in the modern spread of species, for animals have almost invariably gone along with the plants, quarantine being comparatively recent and not completely effective innovation. The United States Office of Plant Introduction alone has introduced almost 200,000 species and vari- eties of plants from all over the world. Nearly half of the 180 or so major insect enemies of plants in the United States are accidental imports from abroad, and most of them have come as hitchhikers on plants. In new territory, out of reach of the restraining hand of the natural enemies that kept down its numbers in its native land, an invading plant or animal is able to become enormously abundant. Thus it is no accident that our most troublesome insects are introduced species. These invasions, both the naturally occurring and those dependent on human assistance, are likely to continue indefinitely . Quarantine and massive chemical campaigns are only extremely expensive ways of buying time. We are faced, accord- ing to Dr. Elton, "with a life-and-death need not just to find new technological It is not contend tha nately into for harm. 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