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Silent Spring is a book about the danger of pesticides and DDT by Rachel Carson.  She talks about a lot of incidents where humans ignorantly tried to control pest with pesticides and just made things worse.

In some cases, humans were even killed or became seriously ill from being in sprayed fields or touching the nozzle of the hose used for spraying. 

In one case the forest service sprayed a forest with DDT to kill off the pest spruce budworm, which were causing harm to the spruce trees.  But, with the spruce budworm controlled, the spider mites no longer had the predator and they multiplied.  They became more of a harm to the forest than the spruce budworm ever were. 

This is only one example of how pesticides are bad for the environment, and how trying to control pests can make things worse.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, January 12th, 2010 at 10:27 am and is filed under Book. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.