Word: peste
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...people, where a purely feudal society had precariously survived the advent of the welfare state. Utterly interlaced through confinement and bloodlines, the islanders were leading lives somehow larger than life, gossiping about each other ("When Donald Garvard's got a bucket in him, he can be a pest of hell"), struggling to make a living from the land and the edges of the sea, engulfed in a romantic sense of the past that curls over and around the island like a North Sea fog. McPhee settled down in a cottage sublet from a crofter named Donald Gibbie to watch...
Widely used to control pest-borne diseases, DDT is now everywhere-the land, the sea, the fat tissues of animals and humans. Unfortunately, the miracle spray also kills helpful birds and insects, can sicken farm workers, and has been known to contaminate mothers' milk. Last November the Federal Government decided to phase out all but "essential uses" of DDT by next December. As a first step, it "canceled" four specific uses that account for 35% of the U.S.'s annual consumption. Yet manufacturers still produce as much DDT as ever: 100 million lbs. per year, 20% of which...
...French naturalist in Medford imported some gypsy moths for a breeding experiment. A few of the moths escaped, and the species had become ? severe pest by the turn of the century. The caterpillars completely defoliated Cambridge's trees, and most of Harvard's elms died, only to be replaced by more elms...
Thanks to biological controls, the gypsy moth is no longer a pest here, but in the long run, spraying did more harm than good, many entomologists claim. Some 25 parasites and predators were introduced to control the moth, and insecticides allegedly hindered these parasites in establishing themselves in some areas...
...hormonal insecticides were to succeed, they would have to attack only one pest, while leaving the species' natural insect predators unharmed. Otherwise, hormones would be merely a more potent variety of DDT from an ecologist's point of view...