Mistakes and the process of correcting them accompany the development of technology. However, after one recognition toward the new accomplishment is correctively established, the mistakes that are made during the exploring process are Often hidden. The ban on using DDT in the US is such a case. The collective recognition of DDT now only suggests that it is a harmful chemical pesticide which is banned from being used. Some would know that there is a bestseller, Silent Spring, which pushed that government prohibition. However, few people know what really happened before that prohibition.
A fog formed by white powder permeates the countrysides. Trees, houses, and street lamps seem dim behind the fog. Planes fly across the sky, scattering the powders. Underneath are some people having their meals outdoors, so the powder falls into their bowls and is eaten together with the food. Farm vehicles are driven through the farm tracks, spraying the powder to the cornfield. A crowd of children follow the car hand in hand, curiously watching the farmers doing their regular work. People who lived in American countrysides during the 1950s were accustomed to such scene. Because they were informed that the powder can serve as means of stamping out insect borne disease and winning the farmers’ war against crop destroyers. That white powder is DDT (Dichlorodiphenyltrichloroethane), a powerful pesticide.
That was not the first time for Americans to use this chemical medicament. “First synthesized by a graduate student in 1874, DDT went unnoticed until its potential application as an insecticide was discovered by chemist Paul H. Müller while working for the Swiss company Geigy during the late 1930s” (The Truth). Then the work of Müller was disclosed to the American military’s Office of Scientific Research and Development (OSRD) in October 1942 by Victor Froelicher, who was Geigy’s New York representative. After doing series of examination on Müller’s data, OSRD’s experts realized the importance of this medicament. OSRD soon decided to get it produced in quantity,. because Malaria, a mosquito-borne infectious disease, seized sixty thousand American soldiers’ life during World War II (Byrne). OSRD considered DDT as an approach to relieve this damage due to its excellent pest-killing effect.
In the January of 1944, the first shipment of sixty tons of DDT reached the war place in Naples, Italy, beginning its first show on the American military stage. Actually, it seized back the lives of not only American soldiers but also more than a million Italians from the epidemics spread by Germans. During that period, stations were set up in the palazzos of Naples, and as the people walked by in lines, military police officers with spray guns dusted them with DDT. Other spray teams prowled the town, dusting public buildings and shelters. And then, “Within days, the city’s vast population of typhus-transmitting lice was virtually exterminated; by month’s end, the epidemic was over” (Stapleton). The elimination of the epidemic was considered the human’s success toward disease as well as the world’s success toward Nazis. From then on, DDT was regarded as a hero and “marches with the troops,” declared the Allied high command. As its creator, Paul Müller was then given the Nobel Prize for Medicine in 1948. Presenting the award, the Nobel Committee said: “DDT has been used in large quantities in the evacuation of concentration camps, of prisoners and deportees. Without any doubt, the material has already preserved the life and health of hundreds of thousands” (G. Fischer).
With the coming of peace, “DDT became available to civilian public health agencies around the world. They had good reason to put it to use immediately, since over 80 percent of all infectious diseases afflicting humans are carried by insects or other small arthropods” (E. J. L. Soulsby). Besides, the pest-killing effect of DDT contributed to boom the agricultural production, which pushed it open to private use in the US. Then occurred the normal scene depicted above in the American countryside during the 1950s. Americans were still submerged in the miracle created by DDT. In their minds, the product tookakes on the harmless aspect of the familiar, until the publishingpublishingment of Rachel Carson’s book Silent Spring woke them up.
In the first chapter of her book, A Fable for Tomorrow, Carson presents a prediction of the future with the wide use of DDT that based on the misfortune of a town. The town was once a peaceful one “where all life seemed to live in harmony with its surroundings” (Carson). With its gifted natural landscapes, the town was attractive to all creatures all year round. However, one day, “some evil spell had settled on the community: mysterious maladies swept the flocks of chickens; the cattle and sheep sickened and died” (Carson). The conversation between farmers involved much concern about the strange illness among their families. More and more new kinds of sickness were appearing among patients that puzzled the doctors. Everywhere in the town was a shadow of death. Not only among adults but even among children, the sudden and unexplained deaths occurred. Children “would be stricken suddenly while at play and die within a few hours” (Carson). The once dynamic town quieted down. The laughter of children could no longer be caught. The chirp of birds disappeared as well and the few birds seen anywhere were moribund; they trembled violently and could not fly. No bees droned among the blossoms even during the blossom season. The once attractive roadsides were now lined with browned and withered vegetation as though swept by fire. Even the streams were now lifeless. Some evidence suggested what is the initiator of evil: “In the gutters under the eaves and between the shingles of the roofs, a white granular powder still show a few patches; some weeks before it had fallen like snow upon the roofs and the lawns, the field and streams” (Carson). At the end of this chapter, Carson makes it clear that “this town does not actually exist, but it might easily have a thousand counterparts in America”. The fable of the town is the miniature of the whole America with the DDT used in quantity.
Later in this book, as a reputable ecologist and biologist, Carson gives a detailed explanation ofto the horrible nature of DDT. Although the powder form of DDT makes it not readily absorbed through skin, it is easily dissolved in oil. If swallowed, it can be absorbed slowly through the digestive tract. It can also be absorbed by lungs. “Once it has entered the body it is stored largely in organs rich in fatty substance (because DDT itself is fat-soluble) such as the adrenals, testes, or thyroid” (Carson). Moreover, the storage of DDT in the body is accumulative until high levels are reached: “an intake of as little as 1/10 of 1 part per million in the diet results in storage of about 10 to 15 parts per million, an increase of one hundredfold or more” (Carson). One part in a in a million sounds like a very small amount to us, but for a toxic chemical medicament, it is a huge dose. In fact, the product is so potent that a minute quantity can bring about vast changes in the body. Carson introduces an animal experiments to reflect the effect of DDT powder: three3 parts per million DDT inhibits an essential enzyme in the heart muscle; 5 parts per million can bring about necrosis or disintegration of liver cells. That is to say, in fact, DDT is harmful to all creatures, including all animals and human beings. Another discovery points out that DDT can be not only accumulated in an organic bodies but also passed on from one organism to another through all the links of the food chains–that means they cannot be decomposed easily and might be passed in the biosphere forever. Although it begins with little amount of DDT in an creature, it may end up with a heavy concentration. Apart from that, the poison may also be passed on from mother to offspring. Carson then names the DDT elixirs of death–“People exposed to DDT while working with the chemical or by accidental exposure report a prickling sensation of the mouth, nausea, dizziness, confusion, headache, lethargy, incoordination, vomiting, fatigue, and tremors” (Casarett). Carson also points out that the accumulation can also raise the rate of cancer and cause reproductive or birth effect (i.e. give birth to babies) for human and all animals. Carson reveals the evil fact of the DDT: no one on the land can avoid being “polluted” by it. And the slow poisoning is extend overtime.
Carson’s discovery caused a stir amongon the American social media. The headline of Tthe New York Times published on July 22, 1962 declared “Silent Spring is now noisy summer”. The editor wrote that “the public debate over pesticides is just beginning and the industry is preparing for a long seige” (Kelly). The pPublic was astonished by the disclosed fact: the white powder that can be seen everywhere on their daily basis is in fact a toxic thing, yet no one toldells them the truth and the government even advocateds the use of DDT. Besides, with that heavy quantity of DDT being used annually, about 300 million pounds, people got panic and worried about their physical health.
However, although the public was already outrage, Carson’s concern was not settled
immediately. Her announcement violated the interest of the chemical industry and the public endowed chemists. Besides, the US government and military who used and popularized DDT were targeted by the book. Some scholars who represented the government began to attack her by saying her articles presented very poor science. Opponents of Silent Spring also attacked her personally because of her gender. Actually, “In post war America, science was god and science was male”, said Linda Lear, who also wrote an introduction to Silent Spring. Queries crowded to Carson, and “They accused her of being radical, disloyal, unscientific, and hysterical” (Stoll).
Miss Rachel Carson’s reference to the selfishness of insecticide manufacturers probably reflects her Communist sympathies, like a lot of our writers these days. We can live without birds and animals, but, as the current market slump shows, we cannot live without business. As for insects, isn’t it just like a woman to be scared to death of a few little bugs! As long as we have the H-bomb everything will be O.K.
—-Letter to the editor of the New Yorker. (Smith 2001)
Those people ignored the detriment of DDT and focused on pursuing their own interest. The revolution against DDT had just beguan.
Eventually, ten years after the publishment of Silent Spring, in 1972, the US government decided to ban on DDT’s agricultural use. However, few people know how environmentalists and other people struggled to push the ban and how American people suffered from the persistent useing of DDT. Their efforts and suffering leave no mark. There wasere the devastating hurt left on the nature and the people lived in that period, but little or nothing were added to America’s cultural memory. Cultural memory is “memory that is shared outside the avenues of formal historical discourse yet is entangled with cultural products and imbued with cultural meaning” (Sturken). However, personal memory and history, which are the faithful records of what happened in the past time, are somewhat distinct from the cultural memory. Memories of living in the 1950s’ countryside, being encircled by DDT powder only belong to the people of that age. Only those people know how DDT was misused and how people around them got sick due to that.
The only knowledge that most American people now have about DDT is that it is toxic and was banned in America. However, they have no idea about how their parents and grandparents were hurt by DDT. And this kind of hurt was even passed to themselves through blood ties, remembering that DDT can be passed from mother to offsprings. American people today are living on the land that was once nearly destroyed and their own health isare still threatened by this medicament. Now if we search DDT through the internet, what can be found is its common information. Without Carson’s book and the comments from people who read it, nearly no mark of that history can be discovered. It seems that that long-lasting war against DDT does not ever exist and no one suffered from DDT’s side-effect.
This is a deficiency of cultural memory. This part of personal memory is forgotten by the collective community. As claimed by Sturken, “Forgetting is a form of death ever present within life. . . . But forgetting is also the great problem of politics” (Sturken). The memory of DDT has been erased to some extent out of political purpose. However, that elimination is accompanied by danger. People before have no knowledge about DDT and thus misused it before and the same thing would happen on some other things. Without the painful memory, people cannot be that caution when applying new technologies.