- Rachel Carson’s “Silent Spring” catalyzed the modern environmental movement and sparked a ban on DDT in the U.S. and most other nations, though DDT has since been replaced by a growing number of other harmful biocides.
- Now, 60 years later, birds may face more threats than any other animal group because they live in — or migrate through — every habitat on Earth. Birds are impacted by land-use changes, pollution (ranging from pesticides to plastics), climate change, invasive species, diseases, hunting, the wildlife trade, and more.
- The 2022 update to the “State of the World’s Birds” report notes winners and losers amid increasing human alteration of the planet, but documents a continuing downward trend.
“It was a spring without voices. On the mornings that had once throbbed with the dawn chorus of robins, catbirds, doves, jays, wrens, and scores of other bird voices there was now no sound; only silence lay over the fields and woods and marsh.”
Silent Spring focused on DDT. During World War II, the U.S. military declared this revolutionary biocide to be “the most powerful of the new weapons the army is now using in its war on insect-borne diseases,” specifically malaria, yellow fever, typhus and bubonic plague.
After the war, planes “broadcast sprayed” leftover stockpiles across the United States and many other countries to kill weeds, crop-eating insects and to control mosquitoes.
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