In 1957, Marjorie “Hiddy” Spock, the younger sister of famed pediatrician Dr. Benjamin Spock, was living on Long Island and growing vegetables. Her partner Polly was wasting away from a mysterious malady suspected to be connected with DDT. Long Island was being treated with DDT dropped from planes to combat the invasive gypsy moth caterpillar, which had devastating forests in the US for over half a century by then. One day, an unannounced plane made 14 passes over Spock's property, dropping DDT. Her garden wilted. It became infested with garden pests she'd never seen before. A neighbor lost all the fish he was raising. Bird species disappeared from the neighborhood. Spock decided to sue the government. More than a dozen homeowners, farmers, and wildlife enthusiasts joined her.
Their case against the government was based on the Fifth Amendment to the Constitution, which banned the government from taking property and lives without due process, and from taking land without compensation. It also involved the Fourteenth Amendment, which barred trespassing on private property.
The case reached the Supreme Court, where it was dismissed on a technicality. But it had drawn the interest of Rachel Carson, who used the information collected by the plaintiffs to write her 1962 book Silent Spring, which led congress to ban the use of DDT and also inspired the modern environmental movement. Read an excerpt from the new book How to Sell a Poison: The Rise, Fall, and Toxic Return of DDT by Elena Conis telling the story of how this important lawsuit came about at LitHub. -via Damn Interesting
(Image credit: Xanthis)
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I know every country has bad characters doing bad stuff, but the older I get it sickens me to think of what we did to the people of vietnam with ddt
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While I lived in Louisiana for 10 years (16 yrs ago) the local gov't would hire contractors to spray the area, several times per year, where I lived with a poison to kill mosquitos. I had a small pond in my front yard and had taken to growing 'feeder fish' goldfish in my pond. Goldfish will get very large similar to koi if their environment is large enough. My1 inch fish grew to be between 6 and 8 inches, they were healthy and pretty to look at. I could hand feed them, too. One day I came out to the pond and the fish were all dead. They were killed by the poison airdropped on them without my knowledge. I didn't know any poison had even been sprayed over my house and yard. I began again to grow new feeder fish and sure enough one day I found them dead. I finally found out about the poison after my 3rd try to raise my fish. I couldn't stop the parish from poisoning the land but I could cover the small pond with a tarp so the water would not be poisoned. Having my land next to a little bayou we had caught the local tiny fish and those fish never died from that aerial poison. Hardy little dudes. I wonder if my many autoimmune issues were caused by all of this poison I unknowingly lived with?
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