Silent Spring

obedience-and-authority

• Their professional prestige, sometimes their very jobs depend on the perpetuation of chemical methods. Can we then expect them to bite the hand that literally feeds them?

  SSR-RC-139

• The agriculturists still for the most part blithely put their faith in the development of new and ever more toxic chemicals, although the present difficulties have been born of just such specious reasoning.

  SSR-RC-041

• DDT is now so universally used that in most minds the product takes on the harmless aspect of the familiar. Perhaps the myth of the harmlessness of DDT rests on the fact that one of its first uses was the wartime dusting.

  CARS-SS-RC-012

mortality

• If we destroy an enzyme at any point, the wheel stops turning — oxidation within the cell comes to a halt. It makes no difference which enzyme is affected.

  CARS-SS-RC-138

• For centuries many of the inhabitants of this region suffered from what came to be known as 'the Reichenstein disease' — chronic arsenic poisoning from contaminated drinking water.

  SSR-RC-179

trauma-and-survival

• They found the poison in all of the testes of male robins, in developing egg follicles, in embryos within the eggs, and in a newly hatched, dead nestling.

  CARS-SS-RC-082