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"There was once a town in the heart of America where all life seemed to live in harmony with its surroundings...Then a strange blight crept over the area and everything began to change. Some evil spell had settled on the community..." (Silent Spring). DDT was first synthesized, for no purpose, in 1874 by German chemist Othmar Zeidler. In 1939, Dr. Paul Müller independently produced DDT. Müller encountered that DDT quickly killed flies, aphids, mosquitoes, walking sticks and Colorado potato beetles. Peak usage of DDT occurred in 1962, when 80 million kilograms of DDT was used and 82 million kilograms produced.Carson's encounter with the effects of DDT led her to believe that it was a serious threat. DDT (short for dichloro-diphenyl-trichloro-ethane) has many emergent properties that make it a lethal product. For instance, DDT has the ability to stay in the environment for a long time and is absorbed by plants, and animals that eat the plants or other animals. This almost immortal property of DDT is encountered when the "poisonous chemicals traveled from a manufacturing plant to a farming district several miles away, there to poison wells, sicken humans and livestock, and damage crops..." (Carson 43). The pros and cons of DDT are still debatable to do this day. In some views, DDT has played a substantial role in fighting off malaria, which is a disease associated with mosquitoes. Field studies have encountered that DDT residues repel 95 to 97 percent of major malaria mosquitoes in the Americas. "To only a few chemicals does man owe as great a debt as to DDT... In little more than two decades, DDT has prevented 500 million human deaths, due to malaria, that otherwise would have been inevitable" (junkscience). A report as of 2001 encountered that malaria cases have skyrocketed in Africa since its ban: more than 300 million people are diagnosed and of those 1 million die. In other cases DDT is accused to be associated with the decline of a substantial amount of bird populations. Carson ventures to state that bird species had faced a serious decline with the extensive application of DDT. However, The Audubon Society's annual bird census in 1960 reported that at least 26 kinds of birds became more numerous during 1941 - 1960. Many of the situations that Carson encounters create a negative aspect of DDT. Carson explains the indiscriminate use of DDT when she states in her novel: "These sprays, dusts, and aerosols are now applied almost universally to farms, gardens, forests, and homes-nonselective chemicals that have the power to kill every insect, 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 insects. 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 'insecticides,' but 'biocides'" (154). What seemed at once a serene picture of nature had turned into a world of pollution and death in her eyes. Carson encountered effects of DDT in humans as well. It is suggested in her book that DDT can be the cause of illness and maybe even cancer in humans. Carson writes: "Probably no person is immune to contact with this spreading contamination unless he lives in the most isolated situation imaginable...the average citizen is seldom aware of the deadly materials with which he is surrounding himself..." (174). Although DDT was accused of this lethal property evidence has suggested that "... weakly estrogenic organochlorine compounds such as PCBs, DDT, and DDE are NOT a cause of breast cancer" (junkscience). Concentrations of DDT build up through the ecosystem by means of water transportation in ground rivers or by being around a spraying and having contact with the chemical. There have been cases of people dying when they work at farms and plants because of extreme exposure. Silent Spring recalls the encounters that Carson has with the effects of DDT. In simple and direct dictation, Carson writes her knowledge of the pesticide so that others might encounter for themselves the lethal effects of DDT. With this exchange of knowledge came a revolutionizing reaction from the people.
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