Module 1.2 - A Turning Point Event for Environmental Science (Rachel Carsen video- silent spring)

 Okay first off, watching this video my mouth literally fell open. It's crazy to think how science can evolve and persuade people to do basically anything... like spray the entire planet with dichloro-diphenyl-trichloroethane,(DDT). This video has me scared to take the coronavirus vaccine, but also at the same time I want to trust and believe in science, but look how wrong they were before.. They can be wrong again. That is scary and has me over here sitting in my chair thinking. The video that I selected to write about for this blog posting is written and directed by Michelle Ferrari. The reason that this video was made was to make people aware of how we can think that something will solve one problem, when in reality it is causing more severe and harmful consequences in the long run. In 1939 a scientist named Paul Muller realized that a chemical he had come across, (DDT), was a fantastic insecticide. What dichloro-diphenyl- trichloroethane would do is it would attack the nervous system of an insect when it was absorbed by its feet, and then the insect would be incapable of moving and therefore would lay there and eventually die. Muller actually won the Nobel Prize in 1948 for this discovery. In the 1900s there were several diseases that insects could carry, like malaria, yellow fever, and the one that was mentioned in this particular video was flea-borne typhus. Flea- borne typhus was carried by lice, and if it went untreated it was possible that you could die. Because of the fear of this, they shipped DDT by boats across seas to protect soldiers. They were spraying this by plane as crop dusters, and people were even standing in ridiculously long lines to be sprayed with this chemical, thinking that it was something that was helping or benefiting them. Yes there was no physical harm being done to the human body that they could tell first hand, but the amount of toxins and pollution that was being put into the atmosphere and stratosphere was definitely making an impact on the food chain, which spoiler alert, we are a part of. And even though they couldn’t tell physically that this was affecting them, we have now found out from research and time that DDT was causing liver damage and other things. Then when this DDT polluted air would go through its hydrologic cycle and become the water in the rivers, lakes , and ponds it was the water circulating in the fish and frogs that inhabited those environments. From there, the predatory birds that would eat these fish and frogs were noticeable starting to die off. The lack of birds is what was the muse for Rachel Carsen to write her book Silent Spring. This book is literally about how the spring had gone silent due to all of the song birds that were dying from their DDT infected diet.  Rachel Carsen is very well known for being one of the first scientists to have such an impact on educating people about the environmental movement that needed to take place. We were literally killing off our own food chain, over something so small and ridiculous. Silent Spring was a best selling book during its publication time, which was  September of 1962.  The publication of Silent Spring made other scientists start being curious of what was really going on with the disappearance of birds. All over the globe there were recordings of birds with high DDT in their bloodstreams laying eggs with shells so thin that the egg was never being able to fully develop before cracking open by itself. Finally in 1970 multiple countries such as Hungary, Norway, and Sweden placed a ban on the usage of DDT, but us being the american money hungry asses that we are we continued to use and distribute DDT for two more years, and did not discontinue its usage until 1972. Finally in 2004, it was a very well known fact that DDT was doing absolute pollution damage to our planet so a treaty known as the Stockholm Convention on Persistent Organic Pollutants, (POPs),  was signed by over 170 countries banning DDT unless the emergency use of a malaria outbreak occurs.