Pacific Ocean. Upon their well-timed arrival in the autumn of each year for centuries, the agile birds frolic, preen themselves, feed, and bathe in and around the water’s edge of the estuary they have chosen. 

However, due to the Industrial Revolution and mankind’s ever-increasing dependency on the use of chemicals since the 1940s, avian populations worldwide have declined precipitously. Scientists and ornithologists from the Manomet Bird Observatory in Plymouth, Massachusetts, found that from 1975 to 1995, the population of the sanderling declined a staggering eighty percent. The birds had been closely monitored as they flew southward along the East Coast of the United States toward their wintering ground. The plight of the sandpipers was nearly as bad over the same time period.

The problem that led to the decline of sanderlings is disturbing. Nearly every stream and rivulet in western Peru reeked of pesticide molecules or PCB particles, which, no doubt, the birds were ingesting as they fed or bathed along the riverbanks. Downstream in Peru, pesticides have been and are still used aggressively to combat insects and rodents in wheat fields, orchards, rice fields, and livestock farms. Toxaphene is used as a cotton field pesticide to combat the boll weevil. The Peruvian government has been very lax and way behind the United States in the regulation and enforcement of pesticide use. Thousands of sanderlings and other migratory birds pick up and transport a substantial number of pesticide particles to various way stations on their return flights to North America. 

Scientists and ornithologists have learned that PCB contaminants in avian species have interfered with their reproductive abilities, navigation sensory systems, and neurological functions. There is now good reason to regard endocrine-disrupting chemicals as a major long-term threat to the world’s biodiversity. There exists a deep and complex interconnection between man, animals, and avian creatures in the natural environment, and as intelligent beings, we must realize that our very survival in future generations depends largely on how we respect and manage our industrial activities and products in relation to nature and the environmental habitats of other living species.

A prime example of how manmade chemical compounds and pesticides began to inflict real harm on animal life in the United States is the mink crash of the early 1950s in the Great Lakes region. Minks are very sensitive to PCB molecules or related particles and were nearly wiped out over a three-year period from exposure to polychlorinated biphenyl molecules present in fish, which are a major food source for the mink population of North America. The fish themselves had been contaminated from industrial waste materials released into Lake Erie, Lake Ontario, and Lake Huron. Biologists discovered that muskrats were barely affected because they are plant eaters and not carnivores like the minks. The impact was felt when female minks failed to bear offspring as a result of being exposed to as little as 3 to 5 parts per million of PCBs. A number of minks examined post-mortem also revealed 8 to 10 parts per million of PCB molecules in their body tissue.

During the mid-to-upper 1950s, a similar decline in Britain and western Europe occurred in the case of English otters, which had been exposed to PCBs. The chemical substances in microscopic amounts had been carried by windborne air currents across Great Britain from the industrial heartland of Europe.

After decades of manufacturing and industrial development in the Great Lakes region of the United States, a spawning ground for a myriad of chemical substances and molecules had developed. Biologists and toxicologists from the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) found that there were at least 600 different kinds of chemical compounds and toxins present in the waters of Lake Erie, Lake Ontario, and Lake Michigan during a survey conducted in 1995. Both lake trout and salmon nearly became extinct before 1960 but have rebounded modestly since that time. When exposed to as little as 4 parts per million of dioxin (or 2,3,7,8-TCDD), trout eggs show significant mortality rates. At the higher level of 6 or 7 or more parts per million, all living trout eggs will surely perish. After the mink crash in the Great Lakes circa 1960, the price of mink coats for women skyrocketed in the boutiques of New York, London, and Paris.

Much further away in the 400-mile-long Lake Baikal in Russia, a related toxic chemical spill from an industrial waste dumping incident in 1987 caused the death of more than 9,000 seals. Further west, in the waters of the Baltic Sea and Wadden Sea, the populations of gray seals and harbor seals of Western Europe declined by nearly two-thirds between 1960 and 1985. They have only rebounded slightly since then.

In a different environmental venue in Central America and the southern United States, the loss of frogs has been alarming over the past four decades. The known cause, as in many other cases, is the impairment of the frogs’ hormone and reproductive systems, which are extremely sensitive to chemical impostor molecules. Some PCBs significantly limit the frogs’ ability to reproduce. Even the now-rare golden toad of Costa Rica has declined drastically in number. According to respected herpetologists from the University of California, Berkeley, a comprehensive study concluded in 2010 confirmed this trend.

It will take a few decades for the affected environments and ecosystems to be cleaned up. Many chemical compounds today are classified as biohazard materials, and extra care should always be applied when transporting, delivering, or disposing of such materials. It is hoped that through improved waste disposal methods and good stewardship, mankind will salvage and preserve the health of his planet. As stewards of our world, we all share a responsibility to manage our resources wisely, without unreasonable excess or wastefulness. 

It is of great concern to scientists and sociologists around the world what the destiny of the human race will be unless mankind is able to achieve more effective control of the environment, including the biological and chemical forces that influence it. The biological anomalies and endocrine disruptors affecting animals and avian species of Earth will, in time, have a profound impact on humans because we are all connected. There should be no doubt that the laws of biogenesis and divine creation established a perfectly balanced world, and that our presence here is a great gift—with fundamental obligations attached.

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Bibliography

• Journal of Toxicology and Environmental Health, 33(4): 455–520, by T. Kugiak & J. Ludwig (1991)
• Ecology and Conservation, by C. Mason, Cambridge University Press (1990)
• Environmental Science and Technology, 22(9): 1071–1079, by Derek Muir & R. Norstrom (1988)
• British Medical Journal, 305: 609–613, by Dr. Niels Skakkebæk (1992)
• Clinical Endocrine Psychology, by W.B. Saunders (1987)
• American Journal of Epidemiology, 121(2): 269–281, by T. Colton (1985)
• The Physiology of Reproduction, 2nd ed., by T. Neill (1994)
• Between Earth and Sky: How CFCs Changed Our World and Endangered the Ozone Layer, by S. Cagin, Pantheon (1993)
• Journal of the Fisheries Research Board of Canada, 35(11): 1401–1409, by D. Hallett & R. Sonstegard (1978)
• Distemper Virus in the Baikal Seals, 338: 209–210, by P. Ross & L. Visser (1988)
• Suffer the Children: The Story of Thalidomide, by Dr. John Meter, Viking (1979)
• Mosby’s Medical, Nursing, and Health Dictionary, 8th ed., by D.M. Anderson, Chief Lexicographer (Mosby’s Inc., St. Louis, 2018)

Note From the Author

On this day I would like to gratefully thank everyone in the bibliography of the article named herein living and deceased and other contributors for their inspiration which led me to draft my condensed interpretation of the crisis our world is experiencing and facing for many decades to come, both in “The Perils Created in the Manmade Production of Chemical Pesticides and Other Toxins.” We must preserve to the best of our ability the gift of planet Earth which God has so graciously given us without prejudice. 

-Peter M. Bergne, May 12, 2025

Headline photo courtesy of the John James Audubon Center at Mill Grove, Montgomery County Audubon Collection, and Zebra Publishing