Beyond Earth Day: Fulfilling the Promise

5. An Invisible Threat

5 An Invisible Threat Since pesticides were developed in the 1940s, we have turned loose on the Earth a massive dose of compounds that can cripple or kill and which are tragically indiscriminate in their attacks. —1970 Like most people, I didn’t question it when the trucks pulled up and fogged the neighborhood with DDT (dichlorodiphenyltrichloroethane)— blanketing the plants, the trees, the grasses, and everything else. That was in 1960–61, some forty years ago, and they were spraying to wipe out mosquitoes in the community of Maple Bluff, located just outside Madison, Wisconsin. We were living at the governor’s residence at the time, and my sister , Janet Lee, was visiting. She put two and two together right away. “My God,” she said. “This is crazy. Don’t they realize this is a general medication of the whole community of life? They aren’t just killing mosquitoes, they’re killing birds, they’re killing insects—they’re killing all kinds of things.” I hadn’t thought of it before, but she was right. They were spraying a highly toxic pesticide all over the neighborhood so folks could sit outside in mosquito territory and not get bitten. It seemed like a bad idea. But nobody back then knew how bad it ultimately would prove to be. That incident prompted a proposal to ban the use of the pesticide DDT. I continued to push the issue when elected to the U.S. Senate, introducing the first proposal for a nationwide ban on DDT in 1963, though it took another ten years for that to happen. Several Wisconsin newspapers attacked the proposal, advising that “Sen. Nelson should leave science to the scientists.” Well, you didn’t have to be much of 87 a scientist to understand that this was a dangerous, high-stakes game we were playing with nature. Five years later, I was the first witness called to testify in a case that would make Wisconsin the first state in the nation to ban DDT. The Environmental Defense Fund had filed a petition asserting that DDT was a pollutant of Wisconsin waters. The trial opened December 2, 1968, with great fanfare under the dome of the state capitol in Madison. The crowd was so large that the first sessions had to be held in the Assembly chambers. Local newspapers, which had paid little attention to my earlier speeches against DDT, covered this event with banner headlines. The case hinged on whether the plaintiffs could prove, under the state’s water pollution law, that DDT met the definition of a pollutant of Wisconsin waters. After six months of testimony and a parade of twenty-five witnesses for the plaintiffs, state hearing examiner Maurice Van Susteren ruled it did. DDT was banned in Wisconsin. When Rachel Carson’s blockbuster book Silent Spring came out in 1962, it started a vigorous national dialogue on herbicides and pesticides that continues to this day. With her compelling prose, Carson dramatized for the American public the notion that saturating the landscape in DDT and other chemicals was harmful not only to plants and wildlife but to people as well. After her book came out, she came under heavy attack from scientists and representatives of the chemical industry who said she wasn’t qualified to draw such dramatic conclusions. At around the same time I ran into a distinguished scientist friend, Dr. Jim Crow, on campus at the University of Wisconsin–Madison and raised the point with him. “You know,” I said, “all of these scientists are attacking her as being unqualified and so forth—what do you think of all this?” “Well, she may not be qualified to reach such sweeping conclusions ,” he said. “And one can certainly question her qualifications.” He paused then and added: “But in my gut, I know she’s right.” By a wonderful coincidence, in July 2001—almost forty years after Dr. Crow put his trust in his gut—we met again on the university campus at a meeting of the Wisconsin Academy of Sciences, Arts and Letters . Fortunately, Dr. Jim Crow’s gut was right, and DDT is gone. You’re killing bees. Now, if you kill the bees, who’s going to do the pollinating? It’s not a tough scientific question; it’s just common sense. 88 IMPERILED PLANET When Carson wrote of major fish kills, and of robins, warblers, cardinals, and other backyard birds dying...