Pesticides, such as DDT and others, carried by the wind or washed off the land into rivers, end up in lakes and oceans. Many of these pesticides take years to lose their potency. Small marine organisms take in the pesticides. Larger fish eat small fish that eat contaminated organisms. Finally birds eat the fish. At each stage up the ‘food chain’ the insoluble pesticides concentrate. As a result many species, especially birds, are dying out.

One example is found on California’s Anacapa Islands. There, of 500 mating pairs of brown pelicans, only one young was produced last summer due to pesticides interfering with their reproductive systems.

And keep in mind that pesticides have been found from pole to pole, in Arctic seals and Antarctic penguins!

Chemical Poisoning

The German magazine Stern says that “in the last 25 years about one and a half million tons of DDT have been sprayed onto the surface of the earth. That is about 75,000 freight train carloads of poison. . . . DDT dissolves very slowly. Of the 75,000 carloads, 50,000 are still highly active. These 50,000 carloads have . . . formed a poisonous veil that covers the entire earth.”

Cows and animals used for meat eat vegetation containing DDT and other chemicals. So much of these chemicals has gotten into food and drink that many mothers who nurse their babies produce milk that contains more DDT than the law allows in dairy cow’s milk. A British scientist reports that British breast-fed babies consume at least ten times the recommended maximum of the pesticide dieldrin alone, and West Australians even more.