Silent Spring by Rachel Carson
Half of the books I’ve read in the past year have referenced Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring. These references appear, as expected, in conservation writing, but also in some surprising places., like in this Carl Sagan quote: “As a youngster, I was inspired by the popular science books of . . . Rachel Carson.” This underscores Carson’s strengths. She was both a trained scientist (marine biologist) and a terrific writer; one of her earlier books, The Sea Around Us, was on the New York Times best-seller list for eighty-six weeks. Her early writing, depicting nature, is often called “poetic.” Silent Spring, however, is a dense technical book, which through a weighty accumulation of evidence lays out a strong case positing that indiscriminate use of pesticides and herbicides is doing grave harm to the environment and to human beings.
Published in 1962, Silent Spring details the world of the 1940s and ’50s, when there was an unchecked rush to use newly discovered chemicals to control insects. A particular focus is on the class of chemicals known as chlorinated hydrocarbons—DDT being one of these. In 1939, the Nobel Prize was awarded for the discovery of DDT as an insecticide, and excitement to use the chemical compound ensued. Carson describes scenes like the following, which sound crazy today but were commonplace then: “The planes hired by the United States Department of Agriculture and the New York Department of Agriculture and Markets in 1957 showered down the prescribed DDT-in-fuel-oil with impartiality. They sprayed truck gardens and dairy farms, fish ponds and salt marshes. They sprayed the quarter-acre lots of suburbia, drenching a housewife making a desperate effort to cover her garden before the roaring plane reached her, and showering insecticide over children at play and commuters at railway stations.”
Silent Spring deserves a great deal of the credit for creating our modern conventional wisdom. The “DDT is good for me” advertisement, shown above, that appeared in Time magazine in 1947 demonstrates the industry marketing of the time. Carson, for the first time, presented another voice: one contending that DDT has many downsides, including high toxicity to fish, thinning bird eggshells, and accumulation in animals higher up the food chain (including humans), leading to cancer and liver disease. This view had an enormous impact after publication, including on President John F. Kennedy, who requested that his science advisory investigate the claims. Predictably, there was a large backlash from chemical and agricultural interests—including personal attacks. For example, a former US secretary of agriculture called the unmarried Carson a “spinster.”
The debate over the claims in her book lasts to this day. It is easy to cherry-pick one of the many studies she references and demonstrate that it has not stood the test of time or to profess that even though DDT has risks, it is still the most effective tool we have for combating malaria. On the flip side, it is clear that today it is still very difficult to predict the long-term impact of spreading chemicals. For example, the accumulation of pesticides in the Great Salt Lake has resulted in a chemical-laden dust now blowing across that region as the lake dries up. There is also a frightening decline in insect populations worldwide (including beneficial ones, like pollinators).
The specifics, though, were not the most important impact of Silent Spring. Rather, it was the broadening of public awareness. “It is not my contention that chemical insecticides must never be used,” Carson wrote. “I do contend that we have put poisonous and biologically potent chemicals indiscriminately into the hands of persons largely or wholly ignorant of their potentials for harm. We have subjected enormous numbers of people to contact with these poisons, without their consent and often without their knowledge.”
Through this awareness, the modern environmental movement was launched, which brought a counterweight to unchecked risks to our environment. Carson testified before Congress in 1963, and her work can be directly tied to passage of the Clean Air Act (1963), the Wilderness Act (1964), the National Environmental Policy Act (1970), the Clean Water Act (1972), and the Endangered Species Act (1973). It also led to the establishment of the Environmental Protection Agency in 1970. That very EPA then outright banned DDT use in 1972. Beyond impact at the federal government level, watchdog groups like Friends of the Earth and Greenpeace trace their beginnings to Carson’s book.
Since its initial publication, millions of copies of the book have been sold, generating broad grassroots action that continues to this day. For example mothers in Springdale, Pennsylvania (coincidently, Carson’s hometown), were recently inspired to file a class-action suit to force the local coal plant to install cleaning technology. These results establish Silent Spring as one of the most influential books of the last sixty years.
One quote: “Who has made the decision that sets in motion these chains of poisonings, this ever-widening wave of death that spreads out, like ripples when a pebble is dropped into a still pond? Who has placed in one pan of the scales the leaves that might have been eaten by the beetles and in the other the pitiful heaps of many-hued feathers, the lifeless remains of the birds that fell before the unselective bludgeon of insecticidal poisons? Who has decided—who has the right to decide—for the countless legions of people who were not consulted that the supreme value is a world without insects, even though it be also a sterile world ungraced by the curving wing of a bird in flight?”