Considering the Silent Spring

Couple things, while you’re here, to those in charge of protecting our environment.

First, it was brought to my attention on Thursday that you have officially rejected the ban against a knowingly toxic pesticide with a high risk to childhood brain development, known as Chlorpyrifos. To be clear, I am not a scientist and I am not even a big fan of science (I barely know how to pronounce that toxin outloud). But I am a teacher, and I do care about our children. So forgive me when I ask this, but if experts and researchers all across the agricultural industry, including a majority of the scientists within your own building, have issued warnings against this product, why do you disown their findings as if their studies are based on partisanship, rather than months and years of daily, competent investment? And please help me understand the title of your office, otherwise known as the Environmental Protection Agency. If your primary role is to “protect” our environment, why are you choosing, against better judgment, to risk harming it, and us, and all the little ones we’re trying to raise? Doesn’t that make your existence an oxy moron (with emphasis)?

Second, I realize that under this present administration of our government, your decisions do not reflect the will of the people, but rather, the will of a select minority, namely your temporary and erratic supervisor in the White House (someone who, I might add, has no expertise in or thorough knowledge of the potential hazards that your office studies… someone who has no business informing the decisions of your office). But that being the case, I thought it might be worth pointing out that when people use the term “diabolical” to describe the manner in which you, and this administration, manage our nation’s affairs, they are talking about things like this, the notion that you would knowingly choose to allow something with a high probability of harm, to hell with the risks. In a civilized world, we call this disgraceful. And yes, diabolical. In short, we call it evil.

Before the EPA was formed, Rachel Carson, writing in the early 1960s, shared this in her work on the Silent Spring, “As man proceeds toward his announced goal of the conquest of nature, he has written a depressing record of destruction, directed not only against the earth he inhabits, but against the life that shares it with him… under the philosophy that now seems to guide our destinies, nothing must get in the way of the man with the spray gun.” Seeing as more than fifty years later, after decades of progress, we are now returning to this outdated philosophy, I wonder how many of you might be willing to stand in the field when they spray. Seriously. I wonder.