by the time Rachel Carson published Silent Spring, we knew there were ramifications we didn't-- couldn't have anticipated, the most amazing being biomagnification. When eagles began to disappear in the United States, scientists tracked it down to the fact that DDT sprayed at low concentrations would be amplified up the food chain. So by the time you get to the fatty glands and the fat tissue and the shell glands of birds and the breasts of women, DDT was concentrated hundreds of thousands of times beyond what we had sprayed it at. By the 1960s, women's breast milk was considered too toxic to feed to babies.

we gave the man who discovered the insecticidal properties of DDT, Paul Muller, he got a Nobel Prize for it in 1948

banning DDT also seemed ludicrous until it wasn’t.

In 1945, against the advice of investigators who had studied the pharmacology of the compound and found it dangerous for all forms of life, DDT (chlorophenoethane, dichloro-diphenyl-trichloroethane) was released in the United States and other countries for general use by the public as an insecticide. . . .