Nature Knows Best -- Happy Earth Day!!

I apologize for the gap in posts! I have been super busy with school work and admissions events. I have enough tough week and weekend coming up, but I will do my best to post again soon.


Happy Earth Day!! I feel it is appropriate to talk about respecting and loving nature today. Below I talk about three points which emphasize why we should not try to fight or fix nature's "problems." Instead we should embrace natural solutions.

A common theme throughout my studies in college has been that nature knows best and nature will always win. As I briefly mentioned in my previous post about Silent Spring, Rachel Carson mentions that natural controls are the best way to deal with pests. If we use chemicals to control insect and weed pests, we are introducing harmful chemicals into the environment and speeding up the evolution of the pests we are killing. Over time, species build up a resistance to factors that are killing the species. When we spray chemicals we are forcing the species we kill to evolve at a more rapid pace, which could some day cause the "pests's" ability to survive to surpass the human ability to create or find a chemical that can kill the pest. It is better to use natural controls for pests like predators or natural pheromones that certain insects or plants, which are not harmful to our crops, that will hunt or repel the unwanted species.

I also learned about nature concurring man in my Popular Science Writing course last year. We learned about slumps, specifically rotational slumps. A rotational slump is a type of landslide in which masses of sediments move in a rotational manor. Below is a diagram of a rotational slump. We saw an example of a slump in Cobleskill on a field trip. Our professor told us that humans had cut into the hillside to create a roadway. The hill that was cut into now slumps annually, especially during wet weather, and workers have to clean up the road and put up materials to block the sediments from slumping into the road again. No matter how much effort is put into stopping the slump, the hillside continues to rotate and sediments fall. We also learned that man made or widened water ways, with steep sides in particular, will also eventually slump. Houses built above the waterway will eventually slump into the water. One house that will slump probably in 100 years or so is the Vanderbilt Mansion in Hyde Park, New York.

The last area of nature people control that I wish to discuss is agriculture. People control the land to produce food to survive. Of course, I have no problem with using the resources around us to survive, but we should do it in a more natural way. Organic agriculture focuses on building up soil quality. Soil is one of the most important parts of growing health crops. Conventional agriculture methods use chemicals that deplete the nutrients in the soil. When soil quality is decreased plants cannot get the nutrients they need and it cannot hold water as well. When soil dries out and there are few plants around whose roots usually hold the soil in place erosion can occur. If the soil quality is depleted enough, huge amounts of erosion can occur like during the Dust Bowl.

The moral of my ranting is nature has a way of taking care of itself. In time, nature will win against our modifications or our modifications will destroy nature enough that we cannot use resources the way we used to. It is best to use natural pest controls, farming methods that focus on the soil, and chose to develop the land where we do not have to make so many changes.

Silent Spring Review

Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring sparked the environmental movement in the United States. Silent Spring is an important part of environmental history. Everyone should want to learn about the environment for the decisions we make as individuals and the policy decisions we support will affect the environment for future generations. I recommending Silent Spring for anyone interested in environmental issues, especially those who to study and improve the environment. Even though many of the facts in Carson’s book are out of date, the basic concepts she talks about are still important to understanding the environment today.

I read Silent Spring last year for my Environmental Politics and Policy class. The main points in Silent Spring are the chemicals we use kill everything, the small doses of chemicals we are exposed to each day build up over time, and chemicals are only a temporary solution that can actually make the situation worse. Below is an adaptation of the review I wrote about the book. I hope the facts discussed in the review spark your interest and maybe even inspire you to pick up the book and see what you may learn from it. Enjoy!

Carson opens the book by describing the beauty of a small town in the country eventually destroyed by a “strange blight” or “evil spell”. This town is fictional, but the situation she describes was found all across the country at the time she wrote the book. “They should not be called ‘insecticides’ but ‘biocides’”. This short quote by Carson sums up one of her most important points; pesticides kill everything, not just their intended target. Pesticides destroy protective enzymes, block the oxidation process, prevent the normal functioning of organs, and may even cause cancer. When people use pesticides, they are not only destroying the pests they are targeting they are harming themselves. The use of pesticides may also wipe out other species of pests or even species not considered pests because the chemicals poison an entire area.

Another main point in Silent Spring is chemicals are everywhere. The small doses of poison people expose themselves to every day build up in fatty tissues over time. This build up is called chronic poisoning. Toxins also build up in the food chain. Biomagnification is the buildup of toxins in the fatty tissues of organisms as a result of eating other organisms that each contain a small dose of the toxin. Carson discusses the buildup of chemicals throughout the book and about how we cannot possibly test for all of the chemicals around us. “But we do not know the identity of all the chemicals or their total quantity, and we do not presently have any dependable tests for identifying them in highly diluted state”.

The storage of chlorinated hydrocarbons begins with the smallest intake and the toxic chemicals are stored in the fatty tissues of the body. “When these reserves of fat are drawn upon the poison may then strike quickly.” Pesticide poisoning does not happen immediately. The toxins build up over time and symptoms are not observed until it is too late to prevent suffering. Unfortunately, people need tangible, obvious results in order to pay attention to an issue. As Dr. Rene Dubos said, “Men are naturally most impressed by diseases which have obvious manifestations, yet some of their worst enemies creep on them unobtrusively.”

            Chemicals are only a temporary solution to a pest problem and they tend to cause the problem to return worse than it was before the use of chemicals. Over time, insect and other pest populations become resistant to chemicals. This is a classic example survival of the fittest. A few of the insects are not affected by the pesticides and are able to reproduce and pass their resistance on to their offspring. Insects reproduce much more quickly than humans do and resistance to pesticides can develop quickly. Nature has its own controls on pests that are better than any chemical we will ever make.

“The first is that the really effective control of insects is that applied by nature, not by man. Populations are kept in check by something the ecologists call resistance of the environment, and this has been so since the first life was created. The amount of food available, conditions of the weather and climate, the presence of competing or predatory species, all are critically important. ‘The greatest single factor in preventing insects from overwhelming the rest of the world is the internecine warfare which they carry out among themselves, said the entomologist Robert Metcalf. Yet most of the chemicals now used kill all insects, our friends and enemies alike.”

(Below is the conclusion word-for-word from my paper. The opinion I express in the conclusion is the reason I am considering the career path toward working with environmental policies. I feel it is very important that policy makers understand the scientific and environmental impacts of the policies they draft, agree upon, and pass.)

Carson’s basic points about the danger of using chemicals, their overall ineffectiveness when it comes to pest resistance, the unknown consequences of using chemicals, their negative impacts on non-targeted species and humans, and the effectiveness of nature on its own are still relevant to our practices today. Policy makers should better understand the impacts of the use of these chemicals in order to make better-informed decisions. Any policy maker who is going to deal with policies that effect the environment, especially those that involve the use of chemicals, should have the basic knowledge of the effect of the chemicals that Carson discusses in Silent Spring. If people understood that the negative impacts of chemicals and the positive results of natural controls that Carson discusses are still relevant today, policy could be shaped to lessen the use of chemicals that would lessen our negative impact on the environment and save money by not spending money to continually apply chemicals where they are not effective.