(What else was there to do, other than watching black-and-white TV on a small screen in a cramped, low-ceilinged living room?) In warm, summer months particularly, we often saw the familiar clouds sprayed out by the mosquito-control truck and inhaled its sweet, overpowering aroma. When I was growing up in small-town Florida, my dad sometimes took us for a drive after dinner. Can we respond in time, or will we finally suffer the consequences of Carson’s ‘silent spring’? Today, the combination of habitat destruction, seasonal shifts due to global climate change, and a new generation of pesticides like neonicotinoids has dramatically increased the threat to beneficial insects. Almost 60 years ago, Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring sounded the warning that the pesticide DDT was decimating ecologically critical insect populations, along with the animals that fed on them.
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