This year marks the 60th anniversary of the publication of Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring, one of the most influential assessments yet written of our impact on the environment. Carson’s compelling and ultimately effective argument for controlling the use of DDT and other synthetic insecticides is one of the founding texts of the modern environmental movement. But it is more than a historical record. By identifying issues about our relationship with the earth that continue to challenge us today, Silent Spring inspires us to act.
Even before it appeared in bookstores in late September of 1962, Silent Spring ignited controversy. When The New Yorker printed excerpts three months earlier, Velsicol Chemical Corporation, a major manufacturer of DDT, threatened to sue the magazine and the book’s publisher, Houghton Mifflin. Spokesmen for various corporations and organizations affiliated with the chemical industry questioned Carson’s motivation and arguments, at times attacking the author in deeply personal terms. But these efforts proved ineffective and even came to be viewed with suspicion. This was, after all, a decade when many grew increasingly skeptical of the authority asserted by big business and government. And it was also a time of growing awareness and concern about damage to the environment like that which Carson documented in Silent Spring.
Carson’s extensive research and carefully constructed arguments brought credibility to those concerns. They also had a significant impact on public policy. When then President John F. Kennedy was asked during a press conference whether the Department of Agriculture and Public Health Service would be looking into the risks of the widespread use of DDT, he responded, “since Miss Carson’s book they already are.” Subsequently he directed the Life Sciences Panel of the President’s Science Advisory Committee to review Carson’s assertions. When they did, they confirmed her findings.
In April of 1963 Rachel Carson made her case on national television when CBS broadcast a documentary about Silent Spring. A month later she testified at Senate hearings considering legislation to regulate the use of pesticides. When she did Senator Abraham Ribicoff of Connecticut said in welcoming Carson, “You are the lady who started all this.” This echo of the phrase Abraham Lincoln had used when greeting Harriet Beecher Stowe supports the contention that at that moment the impact of Carson’s book on American environmental consciousness was comparable to that which Uncle Tom’s Cabin had on the movement to abolish slavery.
We find the far-reaching impact of Silent Spring on public policy today in federal, state, and local environmental regulations and agencies. Prominent among these is the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) which ended government licensing of DDT soon after it was created in 1970. The author of an official history of the EPA, published 30 years after Silent Spring appeared, wrote that Carson’s book, “elicited a public outcry for direct government action to protect the wild; not for its future exploitation, but for its own innate value,” and continued, “In the process of transforming ecology from dispassionate science to activist creed, Carson unwittingly launched the modern idea of environmentalism: a political movement which demanded the state not only preserve the Earth, but act to regulate and punish those who polluted it”.
Rachel Carson’s efforts to raise awareness of the dangers of DDT and other synthetic pesticides were extraordinarily effective. But Carson was not the first person to question the use of chemicals to control pests. Nor was the broad public concern with DDT that Silent Spring inspired unprecedented. Naturally-occurring elements like arsenic and lead had long been used to control insects that attacked agricultural products. For example, in the late 1800s arsenic was combined with copper to produce Paris Green, a pigment that was repurposed as an insecticide and deployed in an effort to control Colorado potato beetles. Part of the history of its use as well as those of similar compounds were accounts of the poisoning of livestock and humans who were exposed to these insecticides or who inadvertently consumed them.
Carson also did not herself discover how the chemicals that had been developed during the Second World War to contain the spread of diseases like typhus could damage the environment. Rather, troubled by her own and others’ observations of the impacts of the broad use of DDT to control insects, she dove into scientific research on a broad range of subjects and integrated the individual findings of myriad studies into a comprehensive picture of what she believed to be a disaster in the making. Then, with her exceptional skills as a writer, she described already observed impacts of the use of modern insecticides, the evidence for their probable causes, the mechanisms by which they operated, and the potential for future devastation. And Carson wrote about all this compellingly and with language that a general audience could understand.
Rachel Carson possessed the skills, interests, and passion that were essential to tell the story she did in Silent Spring. Born near Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, she demonstrated an early interest in nature and in writing. Entering college planning to become an author, she switched her major to biology part-way through. Upon graduating she undertook further study in zoology at Johns Hopkins where, in 1932, she completed her Master’s degree. Unable to continue graduate work because of financial hardships her family faced, Carson accepted a position writing scripts for radio programs for the U.S. Bureau of Fisheries. Then, in 1936, she began a fifteen-year career as a scientist and editor with the Bureau’s successor agency, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. Ultimately, she became the Editor-in-Chief of all its publications.
The summer before starting at Johns Hopkins, Carson spent six weeks at the Marine Biological Laboratory in Woods Hole, Massachusetts as an early career researcher. It was the first time she actually saw, heard, smelled, and touched the ocean, and it marked the start of a deep interest in marine environments. The experience provided part of the foundation for much of her own research and subsequent writing, notably Under the Sea Wind, The Sea Around Us, and The Edge of the Sea, the three books she published prior to Silent Spring. In each she combined scientific knowledge, a deep appreciation for marine life, and a generous desire to share both with others. Publishers and the public responded. As it would with Silent Spring, The New Yorker published excerpts of both The Sea Around Us and The Edge of the Sea. The first of these two won a National Book award for non-fiction and the John Burroughs Award for nature writing
When Rachel Carson took on the impact of pesticides on the environment, it was as an author with an established reputation as what today we might call a science educator and a large following. But this time her goal was not to celebrate the wonders of the marine environment or describe life at the line where sea and land met, but rather to describe the peril posed by chemicals being widely spread over land and water and consumed, often unknowingly, by living creatures. Carson identified issues raised by the use of DDT and other synthetic insecticides such as chlordane, dieldrin, and aldrin. These included their high levels of toxicity and the large numbers of organisms they killed, the ability of some toxic chemicals to accumulate in organisms over time, and the paths by which toxins consumed by target species ended up poisoning others that relied on them as food.
The book offered a detailed but comprehensible introduction to the basic chemistry behind these substances. It also highlighted the propensity of some of them to change chemically, becoming more toxic once ingested, and the potential for interactions between multiple chemicals to form compounds more lethal than their original components were individually. Carson also reported on decisions made by government agencies to encourage the use of dangerous chemicals when the circumstances did not warrant them or when less damaging but more effective, time-tested strategies, including the introduction of parasitic insects, existed for controlling pests.
When writing Silent Spring, Rachel Carson recognized the need to adopt a different tone than that which had served her so well in her books about the sea. Rather than descriptive, Silent Spring was to be a plea for action she felt essential to ensure the survival of the environment. Given this and Carson’s acknowledged skill as a writer, it is worthy of note that rather than building an argument using simple declarative statements about the demonstrable effects of DDT or other insecticides, Carson was more likely to say that evidence suggested that a chemical had an impact or created the possibility that there was one.
Consider a question she posed in the chapter describing the impacts of chemicals on soils. “Is it reasonable to suppose that we can apply broad-spectrum insecticide to kill the burrowing larval stages of a crop-destroying insect, for example, without also killing the ‘good’ insects whose function may be the essential one of breaking down organic matter?” This rhetorical strategy has been described as her completely intentional attempt to provide her readers with, “…a clearly defined role in an otherwise inaccessible scientific controversy. Uncertainty shaped the promise of Carson’s book to let the public decide for themselves.” It stood in sharp contrast to the dictatorial tone proponents often employed when they advocated for the use of chemical pesticides.
I think there is another and related reason for Carson’s suggestion of uncertainty about the impact of DDT and other pesticides. As she makes clear repeatedly in the book, the evidence available at the time she was writing could only hint at what the impacts might be years into the future, the appropriate time scale given the ability of the chemicals she described to persist and remain active in the environment along with their capacity, once introduced into living organisms, to continue to impact their functioning.
A recent article in Scientific American illustrates this point. It reports on the latest findings of a study that has tracked the outcomes of more than 20,000 San Francisco Bay Area pregnancies from 1959 to 1966. The results suggest that the impacts of DDT extend beyond those who were originally exposed to the insecticide and have been passed on to their descendants. Specifically, it found the granddaughters of women exposed to elevated levels of DDT when they were pregnant are now manifesting developments linked to DDT exposure that signal they are likely to experience future health issues.
Reading Silent Spring today inspires gratitude not only to Rachel Carson for her commitment to researching and telling the story, but also to those she influenced. These were people who took her message to heart, built a tide of public opinion in support for the responsible care of the environment, and advanced public policies. Together they ensured that the two-page fable describing a spring without birdsong with which Rachel Carson began her book has remained a fable for six decades since she wrote it. Carson sadly only lived long enough to see the first days of that effort. She succumbed to cancer in 1964.
But it is also impossible not to feel some despair as we think of the collapse of pollinator populations, the growing list of endangered species, the threat of deforestation, the wide dispersal of “forever chemicals” in the environment, and climate change. While one crucial battle against the use of toxic chemicals in insecticides was won, what of the others? The use of DDT may now be cautiously restricted to very carefully controlled applications in situations where it is the only effective agent for taming an insect-borne disease like malaria, but it is possible to walk into a garden center and buy a highly toxic spray in a container on the back of which, in very small print, are directions and statements assigning any damage caused by the product to the consumer.
In making the case for the control of synthetic pesticides Rachel Carson not only described how they worked physiologically in flora and fauna. She also pointed out how they had achieved broad acceptance in our society. Carson described the unbridled enthusiasm with which the scientific, technological, and business communities embraced the groundbreaking and, truth be told, lifesaving advances made in the field of chemistry during the Second World War. She reported how the allocation of research dollars disproportionately favored finding peacetime uses for products like DDT rather than examining what “collateral damage” their unrestricted use might cause. And by writing Silent Spring she demonstrated how important it is that at least some of us, and even better many of us, make the effort to understand how our culture’s values, actions, and practices impact the environment, tell that story, organize to shape public opinion, and advocate for the earth.
