Kenneth Mellanby - Pesticides and Pollution

Collins New Naturalist 50

Cover Page

Title Page Collins New Naturalist 50

Editors’ Preface

Author’s Preface

CHAPTER ONE

INTRODUCTION

CHAPTER TWO

AIR POLLUTION

CHAPTER THREE

WATER POLLUTION

CHAPTER FOUR

RADIATION

CHAPTER FIVE

POLLUTION OF THE OCEAN AND THE SHORE

CHAPTER SIX

HERBICIDES AND WEED CONTROL

CHAPTER SEVEN

FUNGICIDES

CHAPTER EIGHT

INSECTICIDES AND INSECT CONTROL

CHAPTER NINE

SUBSTANCES USED TO CONTROL OTHER INVERTEBRATE PESTS

CHAPTER TEN

THE CONTROL OF VERTEBRATE PESTS

CHAPTER ELEVEN

THE FUTURE – IMPROVEMENT OR DISASTER?

Bibliography

Appendix

Index

Plates

Copyright

About the Publisher

The New Naturalist series, now some way beyond its half century of volumes and its quarter century of years, has had much cause for gratitude to the senior officers of our kingdom’s Nature Conservancy who have so valuably contributed to its books and its task.

It could be expected that a servant of a statutory body, when discussing problems of conservation and ecology of political, economic and social moment (as nearly all such problems are) might adopt a somewhat statutory tone of voice. None of our Natural Conservancy authors has yet done so; nor has Dr. Mellanby, who handles in this book what can be vulgarly described (if it is not mixing a biological metaphor) as the hottest potato in the nature business. The impact of modern industry’s chemical products (themselves the products of vastly expensive and brilliant research) upon our environment—the air we breathe, the water we drink, the food we eat, and the animals and plants with which we try peacefully to coexist—is a subject so vast, so emotion-rousing, so socially provoking that almost anybody could be forgiven for approaching it with fearful frenzy on the one hand, or with careful dissemblance or even dissimulation on the other. Not so Mellanby: this is a calm book, and a deeply thought-out book, and patently a balanced book: the kind of book we expected from the leader of one of the finest teams of ecological analysts in the country. Of course we knew it would be so, when we persuaded the Director of the Monks Wood Experimenal Station to write it.

Kenneth Mellanby’s approach is magnificently lucid, the more so because of his deft use of illuminative detail, alternating with wise generalisations that show the deepest understanding of the history of pollution and the eternal struggle of man against predators and pests. He has had to specialise in being general: be not only historian but geographer, physiographer, chemist and physicist as well as biologist to arrive at a sense of proportion and balance, and a true evaluation of the present tides and streams of wastes and poisons, their natural history, control, cause, cure and care.

This book has been written without fear or favour, and with the fairest analyses of mistakes and successes. It persuades us of the need for everybody’s deeper understanding of the problems involved, and that our human stock, with the increase of its population and its civilised wants, has courted risks, certainly invited disasters and suffered a few—and yet may have succeeded in arriving at a point of common-sense confidence in a clean (or cleanish) planet in the predictable future. The planet is presently a pretty dirty one: but some clever ecologists and conservationists have voices that are now being heard, and may be heeded before it is too late.

All books on pesticides and pollution must be compared with the late Rachel Carson’s classic Silent Spring of 1963, which started the general public of all the educated world wondering. Kenneth Mellanby’s book is not of the same genre, and it would have been most inappropriate if it had been. Miss Carson’s book was a chamber of horrors, and, as regards the insecticidal events of its time, as every responsible naturalist (including Dr. Mellanby) would agree, accurate. It did a power of good. This book, we predict, will do further good; for it does the next thing. It does not say how awful! for this has already been said, and in Rachel Carson’s context justifiably. It says how does the business really work, and what next? and proceeds to spell it out, in a masterly style and depth that we are proud to be associated with.

THE EDITORS

In this book I have tried to deal with the subject of environmental pollution in Britain in an objective way. The public, and particularly those members of the public who are interested in the conservation of wild life, are very familiar with many types of pollution, but they cannot always judge their importance. Sometimes atomic radiation seems to be all-important, particularly when questions of military strategy are discussed. Our many fishless rivers are clear evidence of the serious effects of the pollution of fresh water, and every year our newspapers have pictures of dead seabirds covered with oil on our beaches. Great publicity has been given to agricultural chemicals. The remarkable impact of Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring has suggested that insecticides are the greatest danger. I have deliberately avoided dealing with this book in the text, not because I underrate its contribution to the subject, but because I think that the time has come to try to look at all sides of the problem. Rachel Carson, when dealing with insecticides and herbicides, was careful to give us the facts as they applied to the United States, but she selected her facts, and gave us an advocate’s case. At the time, this was a useful service to science, and equally selective rejoinders from the chemical industry have done little to reassure the public. Other and more objective books on the effects of pesticides are listed in the bibliography. One of my main tasks has been to try to fit pesticides into the general picture of pollution from all sources.

The writer of a book like this needs to call on many others for help. Over a good many years I have discussed these problems with scientists from many countries, and I have tried to digest their views and the contents of their publications. The question of pesticides must have special mention. I have been fortunate in being able to discuss these problems with Dr. N. W. Moore, head of the Nature Conservancy’s Toxic Chemicals and Wild Life Section at Monks Wood Experimental Station, and with the members of his team. Dr. Moore was the first scientist in Britain to organise research work on this subject, and he and his colleagues have made major contributions towards the understanding of their problem. I have received immense help from them at all stages and have taken up a great deal of their time in detailed discussion. I hasten to add, however, that they are in no way to blame for any faults in my presentation of the subject.

The editors of this series have given valuable help. Sir Julian Huxley originally suggested that I should write this book, and made useful proposals as to its contents. Sir Dudley Stamp also gave me much encouragement, and the most courteous application of the spur whenever I fell behind my schedule. Without this I would never have finished the book. He read the manuscript and I shall treasure the appreciative letter he wrote me about it not long before his untimely death.