Chapter 3 The duty of patience

The history of life on Earth has been the history of interactions between organisms and their surroundings.It can be said that to a large extent, the natural forms and habits of plants and animals on earth are shaped by the environment.For the entire period of Earth's time, the reaction of life to modify the environment has actually been relatively small.It was only after the emergence of a new species of life—human beings—that life had the extraordinary ability to transform the nature around it. Over the past quarter of a century this power has not grown to disturbing proportions, but it has led to certain changes.Most appalling of all man's assaults on the environment is the contamination of air, land, rivers, and sea with dangerous, even deadly substances.To a large extent, this kind of pollution is irreversible. It not only enters the world on which life depends, but also enters into biological tissues. This evil chain cannot be changed to a large extent.In this present general pollution of the environment, in the process of altering nature and the very nature of life, chemicals play a pernicious role which is at least comparable to the hazards of radiation. , the strontium 90 released in the nuclear explosion will fall to the ground with rain and drift dust, live in the soil, enter the grass, grain or wheat growing on it, and continue to enter human bones , and it will remain there until its complete decay.Likewise, chemicals that are withdrawn to fields, forests, and gardens remain long in the soil, enter the tissues of living things, and pass on and on in a chain of poisoning and death.Sometimes they move mysteriously with underground water flows, and when they reappear, they combine into new forms under the influence of air and sunlight. of people are harmed unknowingly.As Albert Schweitzer said: "It is precisely difficult for people to recognize the devils of their own creation."

It has taken millions of years to produce the life that now inhabits the earth, during which time the ever-growing, evolving and evolving life has reached a state of harmony and balance with its surroundings.In the environment that strictly constitutes and governs life, there are elements harmful to life and beneficial to it.Some rocks emit dangerous rays, and even the sun's rays, from which all life derives its energy, contain harmful short-wave rays.The time required for life to adjust its original balance is not measured in years but in millennia.Time is of the essence; but today's world is changing too quickly to adjust.

The speed with which new situations are produced and the rapidity of change have reflected the fierce and rash steps of man over the deliberate gait of nature.Radioactivity has existed in the radioactive background of rocks, cosmic ray explosions, and ultraviolet rays from the sun long before there was any life on earth; the radioactivity that exists is an artificial creation when people dry up atoms.The chemical substances encountered by life in its own adjustment are no longer just calcium, silicon, copper and other inorganic substances washed out of rocks and carried to the sea by rivers. Synthetics created in the laboratory that have no counterpart in nature.

It takes time to adjust these chemicals on the scales of nature; it takes not only a lifetime, but many generations.Even if by some miracle this adjustment was made possible, it would be of no avail, for new chemicals poured out of our laboratories in a constant trickle, almost five hundred chemical compounds a year in the United States alone. Find their way out in practical applications.These chemicals come in ever-changing shapes and are not easily mastered in their complexity—human and animal bodies struggle to adapt to five hundred of these chemicals every year, all of which have never been seen before. Experienced.

Many of these chemicals have been used in man's war against nature. Since the mid-1840s, more than two hundred basic chemicals have been created to kill insects, weeds, rodents, and other useful species. Organisms called "pests" in modern colloquialism.These chemicals are sold under thousands of different trade names. These sprayers, powders, and sprays are now almost ubiquitously used on farms, orchards, forests, and homes. These non-selective chemicals have the power to kill every kind of "good" and "bad" insects, They silence the song of the birds and the joy of the fish in the river, and coat the leaves in a deadly film that stays in the soil for a long time—all for the original purpose of which may have been merely a few weeds and insects.Who can believe that it is possible to drop a poisonous smoke bomb on the surface of the earth without endangering all life?They should not be called "pesticides" but "biocides".

The whole process of using medicines seems to be an endless upward spiral.Since DDT became available to the public, a process of escalation has begun as more toxic substances have been invented.This is because according to the great discovery of Darwin's principle of the survival of the fittest, insects can evolve to a higher level to obtain resistance to the specific insecticides used. After that, people have to invent a lethal drug again, and the insects can adapt to a higher level. Sagittarius, so a new and more poisonous drug was invented.The occurrence of this situation is also due to the reason described later. The pests often "retaliate", or revive again. After spraying the powder, the number is more than before.This way, the battle of chemicals is never won and all lives are shot in this mighty crossfire.

Along with the possibility of human beings being wiped out by nuclear war, there is also the central problem that the entire human environment has been polluted with incredibly insidious harmful substances, which accumulate in the tissues of plants and animals and even enter the In the reproductive cells, so that it destroys or changes the genetic material that determines the future form. Some self-proclaimed architects of our human future happily anticipate the day when we will be able to design and alter human cell protoplasm at will, but we can easily do this now through inadvertence, because many chemicals, like radiation, can cause genetic damage. The change.It is a great irony for mankind to think that something as seemingly insignificant as the choice of an insecticide can determine the future of people.

It was all risked—for what?Future historians may marvel at our poor judgment in weighing pros and cons.How can rational people seek ways to control some unwanted species, polluting the entire environment while threatening themselves with disease and death?However, this is exactly what we have done.Also, we did it because it didn't work for us to check out why.We hear that the widespread and heavy use of pesticides is needed to maintain farm productivity.But isn't our real problem just "overproduction"?Our farms, no longer thinking about changing yields per acre, and paying farmers not to produce, produced such a dizzying glut of grain that the American taxpayer paid for it in 1962. More than a billion dollars for the maintenance of an entire warehouse of surplus grain.A branch of the Department of Agriculture attempted to reduce production, while other states did as they did in 1958: "It is generally believed that the reduction in the number of grain acres under the provisions of the Land Bank will stimulate interest in the use of chemicals so as to obtain the highest yields on the land where crops remain." If so, how does it contribute to our fears?

All this is not to say that there are no pest problems and no need for control.I'm saying that control must be based on reality, not mythology, and must be done in a way that doesn't destroy us with the insects. It is a concomitant of our civilized way of life to try to solve this problem but to bring about a series of disasters.Long before humans appeared, insects inhabited the earth - a group of creatures of great diversity and harmony.In the intervening time since man appeared, a small number of the more than half a million species of insects have collided with human well-being in two major ways: by competing with humans for food, and by becoming vectors of human disease By.

Disease-transmitting insects become a major problem in crowded places where people live, especially in situations of poor sanitation, as during natural disasters, or in cases of war, or in situations of great poverty and loss, Control of some insects thus becomes necessary.It is a serious fact, as we shall shortly see, that mass chemical methods of control have had only limited success, but they have posed a greater threat to attempts to improve the situation. In the primitive days of farming, farmers rarely had problems with insects.These problems arose with the development of agriculture - the intensive cultivation of one type of grain over large areas of land.Such cultivation methods provide favorable conditions for a dramatic increase in the population of certain insects.The cultivation of a single crop does not conform to the law of natural development. This kind of agriculture is the agriculture imagined by engineers.Nature has endowed the landscape with great variety, yet man is eager to simplify it.In this way, people have destroyed the pattern and balance of the natural world. It turns out that only with this pattern and balance in nature can a certain limit of biological species be maintained.An important natural pattern is the limit on the size of the suitable habitat for each species.Apparently, a wheat-eating insect multiplies much faster in a field where wheat is exclusively grown than in a field where wheat is mixed with other grains to which the insect is not adapted.

The same thing happens in other cases as well.A generation or more ago, tall elm trees lined the streets of America's largest towns.And now, the beautiful landscape they had hoped to build is threatened with complete destruction as a disease brought by a beetle sweeps away the elm trees, and if interbreeding allows the elm to coexist with other tree species, the chances of the beetle multiplying and spreading Possibilities are necessarily limited. Another factor in modern insect problems is the background that must be examined in both geological and human history: Thousands of different species of organisms have spread and invaded new areas from their original habitats.This worldwide migration has been studied and vividly described by British ecologist Charlie Eden in his recent book Invasion Ecology.During the Cretaceous period millions of years ago, flooded seas cut off the land bridges between many continents, and creatures found themselves confined to what Eden liked to call "vast, isolated natural reserves."There they are isolated from other members of their kind, and they develop many new species.When these land masses were reconnected about 15 million years ago; these species began to migrate to new areas - a movement that is still underway and is being greatly helped by people. The importation of plants is a major cause of the spread of contemporary insect species, and because animals migrate almost eternally with plants, quarantine is a relatively new but not entirely effective measure.The US Plant Introduction Service alone has introduced almost 200,000 plant species from around the world.The insect enemies of nearly 90 species of plants in the United States were accidentally imported from abroad, and most came by plants like people who hitch a ride in someone else's car while hiking. An invasive plant or animal may flourish in a new area without the means to control it, a natural enemy that is declining in numbers in its native homeland.It is no accident, then, that our most annoying insects are introduced species. These invasions, whether natural or aided by humans, seem to be going on endlessly.Quarantines and huge chemical drug campaigns are just very expensive ways to buy time.We are faced with a situation, as Dr. Eden puts it: "It is not merely necessary to find technical means of suppressing this plant or that animal for the sake of life and death; basic knowledge of relationships; doing so will facilitate the establishment of a stable balance and contain the forces of vermin outbreaks and new invasions." Much of the required knowledge is now applicable, but we are not applying it.We train ecologists in our universities and even employ them in our government agencies, but we rarely listen to their advice.We allow the lethal chemicals to rain down as if there is no other way, when in fact there are many, and our ingenuity can quickly discover more if given the chance. Have we fallen into a perplexity which forces us to accept an inferior, harmful fate and loses the will and the ability to judge what is good?This kind of thinking, in the words of ecologist Bo Spater, is: "The idealized life is like a fish with its head above the water, slowly advancing within its own tolerance limit of environmental degradation...Why do we tolerate Poisoned food? Why do we tolerate a home built in a dull environment? Why do we tolerate war with something that is not quite our enemy? Why do we tolerate motor vehicles while being concerned about preventing insanity? noise? Who wants to live in a world that isn't just terribly miserable?" But one such world is upon us.The crusade for a world free of chemical poisons and pests seems to have taken hold among many experts and most of the so-called environmental protection offices.In every respect, there is evidence that those who are doing the spraying work display a brutal force.Neil Turner, an entomologist at Conrad, said: "Entomologists who conduct mediation work as if they were prosecutors, judges, jurors, tax assessors, cash collectors, and sheriffs. ’” The worst abuses of pesticides are going on without check, both in state and federal agencies. My opinion is not that chemical pesticides should not be used at all.What I'm arguing is that we put toxic and biologically potent chemicals indiscriminately, in large quantities, and completely into people's hands, without knowing their potential harm.We bring large numbers of people into contact with these poisons without their consent and often without their knowledge.If the Bill of Rights says nothing about the right of a citizen to be secured against the danger of lethal poisons distributed by private or public agencies, it is only because our ancestors, limited by their intelligence and foresight, could not conceive of such matters . I would further emphasize this: We have allowed these chemicals to be used with little or no investigation of their effects on soil, water, wildlife, and ourselves.Future generations will not necessarily be ready to condone our failure to carefully preserve the perfections of nature that support all life. Understanding of threats to the natural world remains limited to date.Now is the age of experts who focus only on their own problems and do not know whether the big problem of this small problem is narrow-minded.Now is again an age of industrial domination, in which the right to make money at any cost is seldom condemned.Small tranquillity pills of half-heartedness can suffice when the public is protesting in the face of some clear evidence of the harmful consequences of the application of pesticides.We urgently need to put an end to these false assurances and sugar wrapping around disgusting truths.It is the public that is asked to bear the dangers predicted by insect managers.People should decide whether they want to continue on the current path or wait until they have enough facts.Kim Rostand said, "The duty to endure gives us the right to know."