The history of life on earth has been a history of between living things and their surroundings. To a large extent, the form and the habits of the earth's vegetation and its animal life have been moulded by the . Considering the whole span of earthly time, the opposite effect, in which life actually its surroundings, has been relatively slight. Only within the moment of time represented by the present century has one species - man - acquired power to the nature of his world.
During the past quarter-century this power has not only increased to one of disturbing magnitude but it has changed in character. The most alarming of all man's assaults upon the 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 not only in the world that must support life but in living tissues is for the most part . In this now universal contamination of the , are the sinister and little-recognized of radiation in changing the very nature of the world - the very nature of its life. Strontium 90, through 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, 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 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 .'
It took hundreds of millions of years to produce the life that now inhabits the earth - aeons of time in which that developing and and life reached a state of and balance with its surroundings. The , rigorously shaping and directing the life it supported, contained 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 , there were short-wave radiations with power to . Given time - time not in years but in millennia - life , 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 follow the impetuous and heedless pace of man rather than the deliberate pace of nature. Radiation is no longer merely the background radiation of rocks, the bombardment of cosmic rays, the ultra-violet of the sun that have existed before there was any life on earth; radiation is now the unnatural of man's tampering with the atom. The to which life is asked to make its 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 of man's inventive mind, brewed in his laboratories, and having no counterparts in nature.
To to these would time on the scale that is nature's; it would not merely the years of a man's life but the life of . And even this, were it by some miracle possible, would be futile, for the new come from our laboratories in an endless stream; almost five hundred find their way into actual use in the United States alone. The figure is staggering and its are not easily grasped - five hundred new to which the bodies of men and animals are somehow to each year, 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 two hundred basic have been 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 - non-selective 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 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 'insecticides', but 'biocides'.
The whole of spraying seems caught up in an endless spiral. Since DDT was for civilian use, a of escalation has been going on in which ever more toxic materials must be found. This has happened because insects, in a triumphant vindication of Darwin's of the of the fittest, have super races immune to the particular insecticide used, 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 a 'flareback', or resurgence, after spraying, in numbers greater than before. Thus the war is never won, and all life is caught in its violent crossfire.
Along with the possibility of the extinction of mankind by war, the central problem of our age has therefore become the contamination of man's total with such substances of incredible for harm - substances that 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 future depends.
Some would-be architects of our future look towards a time when it will be possible to alter the human germ plasm by . But we may easily be doing so now by inadvertence, for many , like radiation, bring about gene mutations. It is ironic to think that man might determine his own future by something so seemingly trivial as the choice of an insect spray.
All this has been risked - for what? Future historians may well be amazed by our sense of . How could seek to control a few unwanted species by a that contaminated the entire and brought the threat of disease and death even to their own kind? Yet this is what we have done. We have done it, moreover, for reasons that the moment we examine them. We are told that the and use of pesticides is necessary to farm production. Yet is our real problem not one of over-production? Our farms, measures to acreages from production and to pay 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 programme. 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 acreages under provisions of the Soil Bank will stimulate interest in use of chemicals to production on the land 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 employed must be such that they do not destroy us along with the insects.