The Obligation to Endure
Rachel Carson
Rachel Loui Carson (1907–1964), professor, aquatic biologist, editor, and writer, was born in Springfield, Pennsylvania, and died in Silver Spring, Maryland. She received a B.A. degree from the Pennsylvania College for Women in 1929 and an M.A. from Johns Hopkins University in 1932 before pursuing further graduate study at Marine Biological Laboratory in Massachutts. Carson was variously affiliated with the University of Maryland, on the zoology staff; with the U.S. Bureau of Fisheries; and with Johns Hopkins University. She held memberships in the American Ornithologists’ Union, the National Institute of Arts and Letters, the Royal Society of Literature, the Audubon Society, and the Society of Women Geographers. Her extensive awards and honors include the George Westinghou Science Writing Award in 1950; the National Book Award in 1951 for The Sea Around Us, a Guggenheim fellowship, and numerous medals, honorary citations, and degrees. Carson’s mother led her to a love of nature, which she successfully combined with her desire to write.
She began publishing at the age of ten. Widely praid for her vivid descriptions of the a in the nonfiction best-ller The Sea Around Us (1951; rev. ed., 1966, reprinted, 1989) and in The Edge of the Sea (1955; reprinted, 1980), Carson went on to write her most influential and controversial book, Silent Spring (1962; limited ed., 1980; 25th anniversary ed., 1987), which sold over 500,000 hardcover copies. Silent Spring criticizes farmers for using environmentally hazardous chemicals and illustrates the devastation the chemicals wreak upon both animals and humans. Heavily documented, Silent Spring precipitated such public concern that President John F. Kennedy subquently launched a federal investigation into the problem. In May 1963, the President’s Science Advisory Committee agreed with Carson and urged more stringent controls and further rearch.
The Obligation to Endure
Rachel Carson
The history of life on earth has been a history of interaction between living things and thei
r surroundings. To a large extent, the physical form and the habits of the earth’s vegetation and its animal life have been molded by the environment. Considering the whole span of earthly time, the opposite effect, in which life actu-ally modifies its surroundings, has been relatively slight. Only within the moment of time reprented by the prent century has one species—man—acquired significant power to alter the nature of his world.
slf是什么意思>广州成人高考During the past quarter century this power has not only incread to one of disturbing magnitude but it has changed in character. The most alarming of all man’s assaults upon the environment is the contamination of air, earth, rivers, and a with dangerous and even lethal materials. This pollution is for the most part irrecoverable; the chain of evil it initiates not only in the world that must support life but in living tissues is for the most part irreversible. In this now universal conta-mination of the environment, chemicals are the sinister and little recognized part-ners of radiation in changing the very nature of the world—the very nature of its life. Strontium 90, relead through nuclear explosions into the air, comes to earth in rain or drifts down as fallout, lodges in soil, enters the grass or c
皮肤黑粗糙>光棍节英语怎么说orn 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, chemicals sprayed on croplands or forests or garden 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 emerge and through the alchemy of air and sunlight, combine into new forms that kill vegetation, sicken cattle, and work unknown harm on tho who drink from once pure wells. As Albert Schweitzer has said, “Man can hardly even recognize the devils of his own creation.”
It took hundreds of millions of years to produce the life that now inhabits the earth—eons of time in which that developing and evolving and diversifying life reached a state of adjustment and balance with its surroundings. The environment, rigorously shaping and directing the life it supported, contained elements 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 energy, there were short-wave radiations with power to injure. Given time—time not in years but in millen-nia—life adjusts, and a balance has been reached. For ti
me is the esntial ingredient; but in the modern world there is no time.
最近几年The rapidity of change and the speed with which new situations are created 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 ultraviolet of the sun that have existed before there was any life on earth; radiation is now the unnatural creation of man’s tamper-ing with the atom. The chemicals to which life is asked to make its adjustment 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 a; they are the synthetic creations of man’s inventive mind, brewed in his laboratories, and having no coun-terparts in nature.
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老鹰乐队好听的歌To adjust to the chemicals would require time on the scale that is nature’s; it would require not merely the years of a man’s life but the life of generations. And even this, were it by some miracle possible, would be futile, for the new chemicals come from our laboratories in an endless stream; almost five hundred annually find their way into actual
u in the United States alone. The figure is staggering and its implications are not easily grasped—500 new chemicals to which the bodies of men and animals are required somehow to adapt each year, chemicals totally outside the limits of biologic experience.
blessingAmong them are many that are ud in man’s war against nature. Since the mid-1940s over 200 basic chemicals have been created for u in killing incts, weeds, rodents, and other organisms described in the modern vernacular as “pests”; and they are sold under veral thousand different brand names.
yoheThe sprays, dusts, and aerosols are now applied almost universally to farms, gardens, forests, and homes—nonlective chemicals that have the power to kill every inct, 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 target may be only a few weeds or incts. 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 “incticides,” but “biocides.”
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The whole process of spraying ems caught up in an endless spiral. Since DDT was relead for civilian u, a process of escalation has been going on in which ever more toxic materials must be found. This has happened becau incts, in a triumphant vindication of Darwin’s principle of the survival of the fittest, have evolved super races immune to the particular incticide ud, hence a deadlier one has always to be developed—and then a deadlier one than that. It has happened also becau destructive incts often undergo a “flareback,” or resurgence, after spraying, in numbers greater than before. Thus the chemical war is never won, and all life is caught in its violent crossfire.
