08/10/05 18:12:28
続きです。
For Rachel Carson that moment came with a letter from her friend Olga Owens Huckins.
In the letter, which was written in January 1958, Mrs. Huckins told Rachel Carson of her bitter experience.
Mrs. Huckins and her husband looked after a private bird sanctuary ----- two acres of fenced-in land covered with growing trees, with a small pond ----- behind their home in Massachusetts.
In 1957,
when the planes sent by the state repeatedly spread deadly pesticides over marshes as part of a mosquito control project, they killed a very large number of birds in the Huckins’ sanctuary.
Rachel Carson was horrified by the carefree way in which chemicals were being used.
It was apparent that the new chemicals presented a major threat to a great deal of the natural world that she loved.
What ultimate effect this use of large amounts of chemicals would have on human life itself, no one seemed to know.
But she saw clearly that people were, more than ever before, approaching the Earth not with humility, but with arrogance.
For the moment, she did not consider this special problem as the topic of her next book.
But she began to assemble evidence of the destruction people were spreading through their environment by using pesticides too much.
At that time it came to her attention that a magazine was considering an article dealing with the benefits of applying pesticides from the air.
“If this is true,” she wrote to the magazine’s editor-in-chief,
“I cannot refrain from calling to your attention the enormous danger ----- both to wildlife and more seriously, to public health
---- in these rapidly growing projects for insect control using pesticides, especially those widely distributed by airplanes.”
She went on to give him many of the facts on which she based her warning.