In the beginning of the book, she discusses how only recently has man developed the power to greatly alter the environment. She talks about the different ways that man and insects conflict, such as with the farmer with his crops or many people in a small area in Africa getting a disease by the spread of insects. She points out that man has a great problem with insects, even if they don’t cause us any harm. She says that maybe man wants a world that is too sterile. She says that the public, not the government, needs to be the one to decide whether they want to continue on the same road of hurting the environment. She then talks about some various pesticides and their uses. She mainly talks about DDT (dichloro-diphenyl-trichloro-ethane) but also talks about such poisons as malathion, dieldrin, heptachlor, and other arsenic-based pesticides or herbicides. She talks about some of the effects they have had on people or animals such as one time when a doctor injected himself with a small dose of poison to test the effects on himself, but before he could reach for the antidote, the poison paralyzed him and soon killed him. She points out that many people are rightly outraged at the effects of radiation, but no one seems to care too much about the same effects being caused by pesticides.

She then goes on to talk about the poisons effect on the water and soil and how it affects animals, plants, and people that live on or nearby the affected resource. She cited that in a great number of tests done in 1960 on fish living near areas that had been sprayed with DDT, every single fish tested had DDT in its tissue. Not every single one had a lethal amount of DDT, but because of cell multiplying and the way your body stores small amounts of poison, a non-lethal amount of poison could soon multiply into a lethal or close-to-lethal amount, which can be passed on to offspring. In this way, the parent and the young fish are subject to poisoning. This poisoning of the fish in the water also affects the birds which depend on the fish as a source of food. If the fish is poisoned and the bird catches and eats it, it then contains the poison in its tissues also. Poison in the soil is also a great problem because many living organisms depend on the soil as well as water. If the soil is poisoned and a tree can not live, animals that depend on that tree for food or shelter are affected indirectly by the poisoning of the soil. Also, birds often get poisoned by eating worms that were poisoned from the soil. Poisoned soil can also poison underground water systems which flow into other lakes and bodies of water and in turn poison them. Next, she goes on to talk about herbicides and their affect on plants and the environment. In one example she gives, roadsides were sprayed with a herbicide containing arsenic. Since the spraying was done way too much and extra poison was just dumped on the roadside instead of being disposed of properly, many cows died. Besides just making the world much prettier, she argues that we don’t need to spray plants so much because they provide shelter, food, and nesting areas for many animals. By spraying, we are indirectly killing many animals not meant to be affected, but they are. This is one point she stresses excessively. Man does not think about the repercussions of spraying for unwanted plants or insects. He just knows that he doesn’t want that certain organism there, so it needs to go. Later, when he kills many animals not intended to be harmed, he wonders why this happened. The answer is simple. Man is impatient by nature and does not want to go through the process of making sure what he is going to do will not do any extra harm because he is afraid it might impede his getting what he wanted in the first place.

Then she goes on to discuss the needless killing of many innocent animals trying to get rid of the Japanese beetle. Even though a great number of animals were killed and hundreds of thousands of dollars were spent trying to eradicate the beetle, when they stopped, the beetle population was no smaller than when they started. The whole time there was another way, though. If the government had done a little research, they would have found out that a parasite discovered in Europe specifically kills the Japanese beetle. The program was finally tried and got the beetle population under control, without any unnecessary killing. Next, she specifically concentrates on the needless killing of birds. In one instance, she talks about a man who works for an environmental organization and watches and documents hawks every year when they fly over his workplace during migration. He noted that ever since insecticidal spraying began in the area, the number of hawks has steadily dropped until the latest time when he saw an extremely small number of young hawks. Once again, almost all dead hawks tested had lethal amounts of poison in their tissue. She then begins to talk about the excessive spraying that had recently been going on. At one time, insecticides were scarce and only used whenever necessary and then with great caution. At this time, though, with the surplus of small planes left from World War II and the constant development of new insecticides, the government was going crazy with spraying. In one story, she said that while trying to eradicate one species of moth, a whole town was sprayed, including the residential and commercial areas leaving business men in suits and anyone outside wet with insecticide.

Next, she talks about how no one in that time was safe from these insecticides. Levels of poisons were legal up to a small (but still possibly harmful) amount, so in almost every food eaten, insecticides could be found, too. Even Eskimos that were tested, she said, were found to have levels of DDT in their bodies from when they went to the United States Public Health Service Hospital in Anchorage for surgery and ate the food there. She then talks about what affects the poisons have on humans and later actually how the poisons affect the cells in your body. She talks about how these poisons can cause cancer and how the American Cancer Society estimated that 45,000,000 Americans living in 1962 would eventually develop cancer. She talks about how not only is it just one chemical at a time acting on the body that hurts you, but it is when more than one chemical is put together and they alter each other’s affect that it can get really dangerous.

She talks about how insecticides are no good because insects become immune to them after so long, and the population actually grows instead of decreases. When you spray, you kill all the weak insects, and all the strong ones that can survive the insecticides mate and produce more strong insects until finally a whole species of insect in an area is immune to a certain insecticide. Finally, she goes into great detail about other possibilities besides spraying. She talks about how nature has a system of checks and balances where if totally left alone, would eventually take affect. If man doesn’t want to wait that long, though, many insects or parasites can be imported that specifically kill the insects that we don’t want. Also, this alternative does not pose any threat to humans, plants, or other animals as does spraying with insecticides.