Silent Spring was published in 1962. Alida, the daughter of a neighbor was bookkeeper for Griggs, an office supply and book store in downtown Bellingham. Griggs closed in 2014 after a 100 year run. Alida brought home a copy of Silent Spring. Her family read it. They lent their copy to my dad and mom. Dad, Mom, and I all read it.
The neighbors were big fans of Carson. Their family was inclined to extremes. At one point, they became vegetarians. During their vegetarian phase, the patriarch of the clan was a frequent guest at the heavy platters of the roast beef from cull dairy cows that were the mainstay of the Waschke Road diet. The vegetarian distraction did not last long, but the patriarch’s frequent appearance at our dinner table colored the reaction of my parents to his enthusiasm for Rachel Carson.
Dad was not a fan of chemical herbicides and pesticides. He often talked about the declining effectiveness of DDT. When he first applied it around the cattle, he said the barn flies died so quickly, he swept a black carpet of fly carcasses from the barn floor. The next time he sprayed, flies died, but not as fast or in as great a quantity. Within a few years, he said DDT scarcely worked.
Sometime in the 1960s, burdock, the invasive weed that inspired Velcro, became a problem in the barnyard and the outskirts of the woods. Burdock burrs got in cows manes and tails and had to be cut out. Without tending, wads of burrs grew softball sized and interfered with the cows’ feeding. For a while, Dad carried a hand pump sprayer and spot sprayed burdock with 2 4.D, the broad leaf herbicide, like people use glyphosate (Roundup) today. That lasted about a season before he decided that a grub hoe was cheaper and more effective. For a couple of years of we carried around grub hoes and rooted out every burdock we saw before seeds formed. Then the burdock practically disappeared and the grub hoes stayed in the tool shed.
Dad continued to use chemicals, but he was always skeptical. He maintained chemicals were most effective if they were used lightly as a supplement to traditional cultivation and weeding, but he never said they were bad, just over used.
But let me get back to Rachel Carson. She predicted that bird populations, especially birds of prey like hawks and eagles, would decline if DDT and other pesticides and herbicides continued to be used indiscriminately. She hit the right note at the right time and eventually the environmental protection act was passed.
You can argue that the EPA is an unwarranted extension of government and a bureaucratic nightmare, but I disagree. I’ll go along that most large organizations have elements of inefficiency and confusion—I developed software products for several Fortune 500 corporations and I will testify that if the Waschke Homestead had been run like a corporation, we all would have starved long ago.
Some people think government is less efficient than private enterprise. I disagree there too. I’ve executed software contracts with the Department of Defense, Allstate Corporation, NATO, Deutsche Bank, and dozens of other large organizations. Both government and private enterprises can be run well or badly. Good ones are effective and efficient, bad ones are incompetent and wasteful. And small business is not off the hook. It’s quality that counts, not private versus public, big versus small.
We could use more good businessmen in government, not scam artists who have failed in serial bankruptcies, but good men who have a track record of success. And a lot of businesses could use the scrupulous integrity of good public servants. I’ll admit that there is less incentive to become a public servant today. It’s easier to make your first million in business than public service. From what I have seen, good public servants are in it to serve the public, and there are fewer such people today. I profoundly wish that were not so. Note that I have not mentioned politicians. I did not intend to. A good politician is harder to find these days than a hummingbird nest. They exist, but you have to keep your eyes open.
When I was a kid, seeing a hawk was rare. So rare that Dad would stop the tractor to watch them hunting field mice over the pastures. Eagles? Who ever saw an eagle in the 50s and 60s? That has changed. When I walk Waschke Road and the fields, I see hawks and eagles almost daily. Farmers stopped spraying DDT from fifty-gallon drums and started using chemicals carefully instead of indiscriminately. It’s not perfect, but it is so much better now.
And the hawks and the eagles came back.
Photos by Jake Knapp (C9 Photography).