Reaping What We Sow

I am just now reading Silent Spring, the book by Rachel Carson that warned the world in 1962 about the dangers related to the toxic chemicals that were (and still are) so freely being administered to an oblivious world in her day. I am amazed at how thorough her research was then (she was a trained marine biologist) and how prescient and prophetic it appears now.

There is so much that could be quoted, but one particular section was particularly scary. She discusses the latency factor of carcinogenic chemicals—how effects (e.g., cancers) don't show up in many cases until years after a person has been exposed to carcinogens. She gives many examples from her own era (1950's - early 1960's), and then says this (remember, this book was published in 1962):

"The full maturing of whatever seeds of malignancy have been sown by these chemicals is yet to come."

Jump to 2009 -- I don't have time to look up today's exact predictions, but I have read in recent years that current estimates are that one in three Americans will die of cancer, approaching two in three in the not-to-distant future. Thirty-plus years after she wrote about the "seeds of malignancy" that were being sown in the soil, water, air, and food we consume, the malignant harvest appears to be coming in on schedule.

How anyone today can be casual about the consumption of foods treated with poisonous herbicides and pesticides, using toxic cleaning products, home pest-control poisons, and other toxic resources is easy to understand: we don't have the long view of life. Today's actions may not bear fruit for many years, but they will bear fruit (Galatians 6:7).