Counting Our Blessings

(A foreword to the Indian edition of Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring)

One of the astonishing features of life that you notice in Europe or in the United States of America is the general absence of birds and their lively music in residential areas. You can awaken in the morning, in Frankfurt, Amsterdam or even Woods Hole, and it is deathly still. There is no chatter of birds, no chirruping of crickets and no croaking of frogs. It is not that these creatures do not exist any longer in Europe or the U.S., but you will find them largely in well-demarcated, protected nature reserves or wilderness areas.

This is to be contrasted with the experience of countries like Malaysia or India. Be it in the city or the village, daylight arrives with birdsong, twittering, whistling and cooing. The monsoon brings with it its own special sound: the chorus of frogs in the fields. Despite the imposition of ‘development’, nature continues to be alive and prolific in our part of the world. For this, we should count our blessings. If you want to understand and appreciate the true significance and value of these blessings, then you should read Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring.

The spring season, signalling the end of winter in the United States of America or in Europe, was always heralded by the arrival of birds and birdsong. Silent Spring tells the story of how the use of poisonous chemicals, particularly DDT, to eliminate insect pests, so thoroughly decimated wildlife over the years that by the sixties – when Carson sat down to write the book - spring had already begun to arrive unaccompanied by birds.

Carson’s book was the first study of its kind to indicate that there was an acute problem with the use of chemical insecticides. The need to protect the products of modern agricultural science (high yielding varieties of crops, grown as monocultures) from pests led scientists to create a wide range of deadly poisons which they hoped would make large agricultural areas sterile and free from insects of every description and size, so that food and other agricultural commodities required for humans could grow undisturbed. From the nature and quantities generated and stocked in the pesticide arsenal, it appeared as though scientists wanted farmers to get rid of the insect world altogether.

Silent Spring questioned the morality – and the scientific rationale – of using broad-spectrum pesticides that killed thousands of beneficial, or neutral insects, in their action of killing the few that were actually troublesome. (With the same mentality, similar strategies were introduced in the field of public health and modern medicine. DDT and BHC were produced in vast quantities to deal with mosquitoes. Similarly, modern medicine came up with new tools or drugs which are actually called anti-biotics.)

The result of unleashing a wide array of lethal chemicals in agricultural fields led to a chain of ecological imbalances in natural populations. Sprayed in fields, the chemical brews eliminated spiders, butterflies, frogs, snakes, birds and several other members of a complex living community, most of whom were incapable of doing any harm to the crop and some of whom in fact actually preyed on the insects that destroyed crops. Pesticides eliminated whole species of bees, which played the vital role of cross-pollinating plants. Having found their way into freshwater streams and rivers, they killed the fish and tadpoles there.

(Below the soil, the use of man-made chemicals for fertilizing crops drove away the earthworm, once dubbed by Charles Darwin as the ‘builder of civilisation’.)

Probably no other book on the environment in the twentieth century had as much impact on public consciousness as Silent Spring. It inaugurated the environment movement in the United States of America. Today the use of DDT and PCBs (polychlorinated biphenyls) has been almost completely outlawed in the U.S., and some of the species most at risk from those pesticides, such as eagles and peregrine falcons, are no longer facing extinction, but have in fact staged a remarkable come-back after the use of these substances was banned.

In one important matter, however, there has been no change at all. The production of a variety of deadly chemicals has continued unabated. The chemical industry continues to have a simple slogan: produce first, think later. In fact, for years after the publication of Silent Spring, the chemical industry refused to acknowledge the validity of Carson’s work and ganged up against her; it even tried to malign her and to ridicule her data.

Today, the number of man-made chemicals in use in the US alone is over 100,000, most of them either untested or inadequately tested for their impact on the environment and on living beings. DDT and PCBs, while not used in the U.S., are still routinely produced there and cynically sold to other countries. In the U.S., they have been replaced by narrow-spectrum pesticides of even higher toxicity, which have also not been adequately tested and pose equal or even greater risks. Since Silent Spring hit the market, pesticide use in the U.S. on farms alone has doubled (to 900,000 tonnes a year) and pesticide production has increased by 400%.

Today’s scenario is therefore, if anything, even grimmer. In 1996, Theo Colborn, Dianne Dumanoski and John Peterson Myers published Our Stolen Future (a book which is widely seen as a worthy successor to Silent Spring). Our Stolen Future traces birth defects, sexual abnormalities and reproductive failures in wildlife to their source: man-made chemicals that mimic the action of natural hormones in the human body, thereby upsetting normal reproductive and developmental processes. It documents a wide range of strange behaviours: eagles that lost their natural instinct to mate and raise young; disappearing otters; the inability of minks around the Great Lakes to produce pups; alligators with tiny penises; a plague among seals near Denmark.

The damage documented in the book is not limited to the animal kingdom. Human beings are affected as well. Sperm counts have dropped by as much as 50 percent in recent decades. Women have begun to suffer a dramatic rise in hormone-related cancers, endometriosis and other disorders.

The chemicals responsible for these deadly effects are now to be found all over the planet. The most significant aspect of these chemicals is that they produce impacts when they are present in the human body in extremely minute doses. Worse, such substances – also known as Persistent Organic Pollutants (POPs) – are not biodegradable and can be around for decades.

Counterpose the attitudes behind the production and use of such toxic chemicals with that of simpler folk of an era not too far into the past. I was told this story by a young Jain monk, Hitruchi Maharaj, to demonstrate the care which an older society took of other species, among them lowly kidas (insects). He said that till about 40-50 years ago in Gujarat, society patronized an elaborate system for the protection of even the lowliest of prani (living beings). In India rice, wheat or wheat flour is hand-cleaned before it is processed further or cooked. This is not only to remove fine stones that have got into the grain, but to remove prani: small worms and insects. In Gujarat, after the prani were picked out, they were never killed. They would be placed in a cup on a handful of wheat flour. Weekly, a man with a cart would travel around the city or village, shouting ‘prani! prani!’ The women would hand over the cups of wheat flour with the prani to the man who would then take the entire lot away to the panjrapole (animal shelter). In the panjrapole, all the prani would be placed in a special protected enclosure, safely out of the reach of lizards and other predators, where they lived out their natural lives.

The use of toxic chemicals to kill prani is a fairly recent phenomenon in India, associated almost wholly with the green revolution. Since the technology of the green revolution was imported from Western countries lock, stock and barrel, it came equipped with its own philosophical baggage of justifiable biocide. Predictably, its extension in India has had similar devastating and senseless consequences.

Here too, however, we may still be able to count some blessings. First, despite our best efforts and intentions, India remains one of the lowest users of pesticides in the world. In the year 2000, we produced 90,000 tonnes of pesticides (up from 26,000) tones in 1966). Compare this with the 900,000 tonnes produced by the United States in the same year! 60% of pesticides used on Indian farms are limited to cotton growing areas. Contrast this with the use of pesticides in the United States, where it is extended to almost all crops.

Second, the intensive use of even this relatively smaller quantity of poisons - smaller, when measured against the quantities used in the U.S. – has already reached a dead end. As the recent tragic suicides of Indian farmers show, we are already reaching the outer limits of usefulness of these lethal chemicals. Farmers in the State of Andhra Pradesh and Karnataka have committed suicide when even the latest and most potent of pesticide brews available to them have failed to stem insect invasions which have devastated their crops. In fact, such suicides have now become an almost regular feature in the Indian countryside.

Once every potent chemical has been used and found wanting, there is simply no alternative but to return to traditional - and less toxic - means of controlling the insects that modern farming methods have turned into pests.

Other India Press is committed to exposing this deadly mirage of a green revolution that has ended up turning the planet blue. Though Silent Spring is a classic, it has never been available in India, even though it was first published in the U.S. way back in 1962 (and where it has gone into more than 30 editions). OIP is happy to bring out the first Indian edition, and hopes to publish in the near future an Indian edition of Our Stolen Future as well.

The use of lethal pesticides has forced us to submit ourselves and other living beings (prani) to forms of distress and suffering that makes those associated with our ordinary karma appear positively beneficent. The point is that the world cannot be caring of life and still love chemicals. It may appear difficult and trying to get out of our dependence on chemicals, but for those who love the planet, their children and the future, nature has given us the clearest of messages, documented in vivid detail in the pages of Silent Spring.