The Obligation to Endure: by Rachel Carson

"No witchcraft, no enemy action had silenced the rebirth of new life  in a stricken world. The people had done it to themselves." We've contaminated the air we breath, earth, rivers, and sea with some of the most dangerous chemicals. We've become a world of cloning, gene modifications, and continuous inventions of new chemicals. "Almost 500(chemicals) annually find their way into actual use in the U.S. alone." That's a huge number of chemicals to have to adapt to yearly, and even if you are not digesting the chemicals directly, these chemicals still get into your body. Carson talks mainly about pesticides, which were made to kill insects, weeds, rodents etc. "These non-selective chemicals have the power to kill every insect, the "good" and the "bad." It's something I've never actually thought about with pesticides. It doesn't just kill one specific insect, it kills them all. This is what we spray over our crops and that is seeping into the soil,  eventually landing in  our own bodies. A non-selective killing agent. "We are told that the enormous and expanding use of pesticides is necessary to maintain farm production. Yet is our real problem not one of overproduction?" It's an undeniable truth, we are a wasteful country. I'm sure the amount of food thrown away in the U.S daily could feed most of the hungry in this world. If we are just throwing out the extra food, what do we need to maintain? Why do we need to use this chemical in efforts to make even more that we will throw out too? Carson says that the insect problem only arose with the intensification of agriculture, the devotion of immense acreages to a single crop. Nature usually has a great deal of variety, and certain plants are suitable for certain insects. When they are spaced out the amount of each insect can not grow to a great amount. But take out the variety and insert one crop and the insect that feeds of that plant now has that much more room to grow it's populations. We wouldn't of needed these pesticides if we didn't take out the variety that nature gave us and replace it with a simplified single crop farms. As Albert Schweitzer said, "Man can hardly even recognize the devils of his own creation." And instead of trying to understand crops and their native habitats so that we can come up with efficient and natural ways to fixing a problem, we continue to come up with more and more toxic chemicals and technologies that have dire consequences for the Earth and ourselves. "We allow the chemical death rain to fall as though there was no alternative...Have we fallen into a mesmerized state that makes us accept as inevitable that which is inferior or detrimental, as though having lost the will or vision to demand that which is good?"