OF BUGS AND BOMBS
Meyer, Ernest L.
Of Bugs And Bombs By ERNEST L. MEYER Westport, Conn. INSECT pests are raising hob in our garden. There are bugs on the cucumbers and borers in the corn. Caterpillars, Japanese beetles, slugs,...
...For exactly the same reasons we should be wary in the use of that super-destroyer of the human animal, the atomic bomb...
...NO nations or races—and but few individuals—are wholly corrupt and surely in the ash-heaps of Hiroshima and Nagasaki perished many who might have helped the world on a better road...
...RECENTLY the new miracle killer was tested in the marshes of New Jersey where mosquitoes grow to inspiring size...
...A note of warning against the slaughter of all insects was sounded by Dr...
...Fred C. Bishopp, assistant chief of the U. S. Department of Agriculture's bureau of entomology...
...Some prey on our enemy species as parasites or predators, some contribute by destroying noxious weeds, some by breaking down dead plants and animals so that they are returned to the soil to serve as plant food...
...Furthermore, many of our crops so essential for livestock, soil improvement and prevention of soil erosion would be barren or produce very light seed crops...
...But the enthusiasm of spectators was dampened by the fact that DDT also killed fish...
...Until that stage arrives, however, the fact remains that DDT metes out destruction with no ethical check...
...Some aid by working over and aerating the soil, and others furnish dyes for the fine arts, fibers for clothing, or food for beneficial wildlife, our livestock and man...
...How often we have prayed for some magic formula which with a single tvhiff could deliver our crops from their diverse hosts of destroyers...
...We know from sad experience that no single brand of exterminator can wipe out all these pests—it takes laborious application of various types of powders and sprays to cope with the nuisance...
...This is true of alfalfa, the clovers and others...
...Or a religious leader like Kobo Daishi who taught his disciples to strive after perfect enlightenment not for their sake alone, but also that they might help their fellows...
...DDT did its job heroically...
...It killed the mosquitoes...
...Bishopp, quoted in the press, said that no more than 55,000 of the 620,000 known species of insects are recognized by scientists as being injurious...
...And until some means of moral control over this new power is invented, it behooves us, in the name of sanity, to use the new power with discrimination and wisdom...
...Thirty important food crops depend largely or solely upon insects to pollinate them...
...And bees and a host of other insects extremely useful to man died, too, in the massacre magnificent...
...Or artists like Toba Sojo, Sesshiu, and Ganku...
...And all that great school of sculptors and bronze-casters and potters and makers of textiles who contributed to beauty inherited by all mankind...
...Caterpillars, Japanese beetles, slugs, plant lice and a hundred other species of minute monsters are holding carnival in the flower beds, the young apple trees, and the patches of edible truck just coming to harvest...
...But in those blasted heaps may also lie the bodies of other Japanese who might in the years ahead have contributed to the goodness and gaiety of life just as their ancestors did in times that are gone...
...Long ago the laboratories of a beneficent war machine developed an insect destroyer deluxe and deadly called DDT which, sprayed on jungles by airplanes, rid the regions of maiaria-bearing mosquitoes and other carnivorous pests making miserable the lot of the foot-soldier...
...Now, it appears, our prayers have been answered...
...But the atomic bomb, like DDT, is ethically blind, and unless we harness power to wisdom we shall stand in a world bereft of bad men, but of good men, too...
...IT is true, of course, that DDT is still in an experimental stage and it may very well be that with perfection will come the ability to unloose its concentrated death against only those forms of insect and animal life that are definitely vicious...
...He added: "Thousands of species might be classed as neutral and other thousands as beneficial...
...In the ruins that once were Hiroshima and Nagasaki there may lie, it is true, the shattered bodies of wicked men, of potential butchers of another Bataan...
...It exterminates the good and the bad with magnificent indifference...
...Assume that and you must beiieve in the utterly savage and shocking credo of one of our own commanders who characterized the Japanese as a breed of monkeys without tails, meriting nothing but extinction...
...And lately came word that the magic formula is being released to civilians, as in the case of penicillin, and again we praise war from which all blessings flow...
...It is a monstrous distortion of any, honest moral code to assume that the bombs that splintered two Japanese cities to rubble annihilated only, men, women, and children thoroughly depraved and sub-human...
...Japanese like the writer of delightful essays, Kenko-boshi, or the journalist Fukuzawa Yukichi, who fought valiantly for social justice and rights of the individual...
...a world without cutworms and crops and Japanese beetles—and butterflies...
Vol. 9 • September 1945 • No. 36
