The Haunting Past: A History of Unbridled Pesticide Use

For many summers in my preteens and teens I would be in a summer sleep-away camp in Lenox, Massachusetts. For reasons I will never understand, my parents decided to send me to a tennis camp. I hated tennis.

It was my good fortune though that the camp also had a great nature center and nature program, and that is where I bloomed. It was where I was first formally introduced to Mother Nature and all her wonders. I learned about insects, especially butterflies. I learned about animals and live trapping (and releasing), practicing with groundhogs and chipmunks. I began my bird list, which I still maintain some 60ish years later in the same “Peterson’s Field Guide to Birds of the Northeast” that I still have. I was befriended by a renowned naturalist by the name of Bill Lindquist who became my first mentor.

This was all during a time of environmental naivete. I recall going into Manhattan with my parents at a time when the air was so polluted that the sky, more often than not, had a pale yellow hue to it and my eyes would sting from the pollution caused from smokestacks, car and bus exhausts. Gardeners were using chemicals to kill garden bugs that we would never consider using these days, and their persistence shows up in our environment so many years later.

Back at summer camp there was a ritual several times during the summers when on a calm evening at dusk a pickup truck would slowly drive past all the campers’ cabins as it emitted a white fog creating a dense billowing cloud as kids would run out of their cabins to play in the man-made mist in spite of our counselors’ warnings to stay inside. The cabins had no windows, just screened openings where windows would be on a house.

I would realize decades later that the fog coming out of the back of the pickup truck was the result of diesel fuel, mixed with a pesticide, that was heated to create a smoke, the fog that we played in. We had no clue.

In fact, we were so naive, even the adults among us, that we had no idea what this magical fog did other than kill mosquitoes, the intended target. The fog covered the entire campus in its white cloud. The next morning the beach where we would swim and take our Red Cross swimming tests would be covered with hundreds of dead fish. I never remember anyone ever making an association between the fogging and the dead fish.

It must have been in the early 1970s when I was driving down Halsey Neck Lane in Southampton to the beach overlook at Coopers Beach where I would have my morning coffee. The road was covered with the bodies of hundreds and hundreds of dead birds all the way from Hill Street down to Meadow Lane. The day before, the linden trees lining Halsey Neck Lane had been sprayed for insects.

In 1962 when I was 13 years old my parents read a book by Rachel Carson, a marine biologist. The book was “Silent Spring.” Looking back, I can’t imagine why I read the book, but I do remember there was a great deal of talk about it as well as controversy. In the 1940s Carson became alarmed with the advent of synthetic pesticides that were developed after World War II. Many were designed as nerve and stomach poisons that were also thought to have insecticidal properties, and they became widely used for that purpose. One of them was DDT, the same material that was sprayed at dusk each summer, several times, at the summer camp I went to.

It was landowners on Long Island who filed suit in federal court to have such sprayings stopped. They lost their suit, but it went to the Supreme Court, where the petitioners were granted the right to get injunctive relief against the potential environmental damages in the future, and this was the beginning of our environmental laws that are the basis for the banning of pesticides like DDT in the United States.

Unfortunately, DDT and its substitute chlordane (in mammals a cholinesterase and endocrine inhibitor) are what we refer to as being persistent in the environment. Some get attached to soil particles and remain in the soil for generations. Some, like DDT, showed up in cow’s milk and in human breast milk where the chemical constituents become bound to fatty tissue where they remained — and their remnants can still be found to this day.

Even more astonishing to me was the fact that my father, a man of science and medicine, kept a bag of DDT in our garage for years and used it freely. He used it on the dozen or so fruit trees he loved to grow and tend. We ate the apples, peaches, plums, pears and cherries. My mother made pies and gave them to friends. Pretty scary stuff.

Think that was the end of it? From 1957 through 1959, cranberries grown in the United States were found to contain high levels of a common herbicide that contained aminothiazole. At the time, this chemical was thought to be an agent that contributed to cancer in humans. Rachel Carson appeared at congressional hearings trying to have the herbicide banned. The chemical industry began what are referred to as “aggressive” tactics to contradict her assertions, but the available scientific literature confirmed her suspicions. We stopped eating cranberries, even at Thanksgiving, and no longer drank cranberry juice. The cranberry industry and their pesticide suppliers got the message as cranberry farmers lost their livelihoods.

If you won’t read “Silent Spring” at the very least go to Wikipedia and search “Silent Spring.” If you were born after the 1960s and never read the book you may find just this short piece enlightening.

I offer this short lament as a precursor to next week’s column on insecticides. I’ll cover the ones that are safe as well as effective and how to use them and how to know what to use and when, safely. It will warm up, the aphids, beetles, chewers and chompers that will be after your foliage and fruits are not far behind. The idea is to know how to manage them, not eradicate them. I’ll also get into the many, many insects that are valuable to us as they eat other insects. But many, not all, pesticides can’t differentiate between what insect is detrimental and which are helpful. That’s a lesson that every single gardener needs to learn.

And if you think the East End is immune? Do some research on Temik, or aldicarb, a pesticide that was widely used on local farms — maybe one near you. These two didn’t poison everything around us. Just our water. Teach your children (and grandchildren well) just as the song says. Keep growing.