Word: soils
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1960-1969
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...book is support for this nightmare curtain raiser. In a chapter titled "Elixirs of Death," she lists the synthetic insecticides, beginning with DDT, that came into use at the end of World War II. All of them are dangerous, she says without reservation. Already they are everywhere: in soil, rivers, ground water, even in the bodies of living animals and humans. "They occur in mother's milk." she says, using emotion-fanning words, "and probably in the tissues of the unborn child." And worse is to come. "This birth-to-death contact," she warns, "contributes to the progressive buildup...
There is no doubt about the impact of Silent Spring; it is a real shocker. Many unwary readers will be firmly convinced that most of the U.S.-with its animals, plants, soil, water and people-is already laced with poison that will soon start taking a dreadful toll, and that the only hope is to stop using chemical pesticides and let the age-old "balance of nature" take care of obnoxious insects...
...related chemicals are almost as dangerous, but luckily they break down quickly into harmless substances and so leave no poisonous residue on fruits and vegetables or in the soil. Their disadvantage is that they can poison farm workers who handle them carelessly. Miss Carson describes these very rare accidents and gets shock effect out of them, but they are comparable to accidents caused by careless handling of such violent industrial chemicals as sulfuric acid. The highly toxic phosphates are no menace to the general public, which seldom comes in contact with them...
...populations. The robins live on earthworms (that is why they are plentiful in the suburbs, where worm-bearing lawns abound), which concentrate insecticides without being damaged themselves. When the robins eat these insecticide-full worms, they die. The slaughter may continue for several years, until the DDT in the soil has disintegrated...
...DOWN TOWN. The time is long gone when the Flatiron Building was an architectural astonishment, and when the Woolworth Building held sway as the tallest in the world, but even the old soil that was the birthplace of the skyscraper has sprouted new towers. The area received a massive booster shot this year with the completion of David Rockefeller's 60-story Chase Manhattan Bank Building, packed with modern art and surrounded by a plaza roughly the size of Venice's Piazza San Marco. The dancing glass wall of No. 2 Broadway brings a note of new brightness...