AUTHOR: RACHEL CARSON
DATE: 1962
Silent Spring was written by Rachel Carson, a US marine biologist who had become convinced that the then rapidly expanding use of pesticides was having a seriously detrimental effect on the environment. The chemical industry, which she suggested was misrepresenting the impact of its products to the public, fought back fiercely but Carson’s arguments proved highly persuasive to a receptive American audience.
The book prompted a reversal in national policy with regard to pesticide use and was a major influencing factor in the establishment of the US Environmental Protection Agency. But of still greater significance was its role in raising awareness of broader environmental issues among a public that had previously been largely unengaged with the subject. As such, the work is widely considered the world’s first major work of environmentalist literature and a pivotal moment in the growth of the international environmental movement.
Born in 1907 in Pennsylvania, Carson was educated at the Woods Hole Marine Biological Laboratory and then Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore. She was that rare combination of talented scientist and skilled communicator, a professional aquatic biologist who wrote and edited for a number of publications, eventually becoming editor-in-chief for the US Fish and Wildlife Service. Then, in 1951, she wrote The Sea Around Us, which became a bestseller and earned her a US National Book Award. Flushed with this success, she was now able to devote herself full-time to writing.
THE FIRST LETTER
One of the factors that persuaded Carson to write her book was a letter written to the Boston Herald in January 1958 by her friend, Olga Owens Huckins. Huckins reported the death of birds on her property in Duxbury, Massachusetts, following the spraying of DDT there to get rid of mosquitoes. After a pilot dumped a small excess of the chemical on her land, she reported: ‘The “harmless” shower-bath killed seven of our lovely songbirds outright. We picked up three dead bodies the next morning right by the door. They were birds that had lived close to us, trusted us, and built their nests in our trees year after year.’ Sending a copy of the note to Carson, Huckins perhaps inadvertently helped alter the course of environmental history, and those birds at least might not have died in vain.
Meanwhile, American agriculture was becoming increasingly reliant on a ‘miracle’ pesticide called DDT. It had been developed shortly before the outbreak of the Second World War and had come to wider notice when it was used in the South Pacific to reduce the populations of malaria-carrying insects on islands hosting US troops. DDT was then quickly developed for civilian use, coming onto the market in 1945. Its great selling-point was that, unlike other pesticides, it did not target a small range of species but could erase huge numbers at a stroke. The chemical industry highlighted the great advantages that this could bring to farmers and there were few dissenting voices. Its inventor, Paul Hermann Müller, even received a Nobel Prize in 1948 ‘for his discovery of the high efficiency of DDT as a contact poison against several arthropods’.
However, it became increasingly apparent that the indiscriminate nature of such chemicals had serious implications. When the Department of Agriculture began aerial spraying of DDT in 1957 to eradicate fire ants, Carson was among several interested parties keeping an eye on its impact. This was the beginning of what would become Silent Spring, for which she secured a publishing deal in 1958. However, it soon became clear that such was the quantity of data and other evidence she was gathering that the book would be greater in scope than she first imagined.
By 1960, she’d looked at several hundred instances of pesticide exposure, examining the impact on humans (including potential carcinogenic effects and genetic changes) and on the wider environment too. She spent the majority of the following year completing the manuscript, a task made harder as she also faced a diagnosis of breast cancer.
She urged that pesticide sprays should be restricted as much as possible, focusing on a biotic approach ahead of chemical pesticides. She warned that ecosystems were being endangered by the non-selective nature of pesticides that were wiping out essential species. Entire food chains were being poisoned out of existence, from the insects up. DDT stayed active in ecosystems for weeks and months at a time, even after dilution by rainwater. Moreover, she raised the prospect that some pests – for instance, malaria-carrying mosquitoes – might develop resistance.
Highlighting the damage that humans are capable of inflicting on the world, Carson thought about calling the book Man Against Nature. Instead, she opted for the title that she had until then reserved for a chapter on birds. It was, the story goes, inspired by lines from John Keats’ ‘La Belle Dame sans Merci’: ‘The sedge is wither’d from the lake, And no birds sing.’ The book was serialized in the New Yorker prior to publication and received significant public attention, but the chemical industry, fearful of its revelations, came out strongly against it and Carson.
There were unsuccessful attempts to sue her, her publisher and the New Yorker for libel. An expensive PR campaign was launched that promoted the benefits of pesticide use while seeking to discredit Carson personally, often in pretty crude ways. One former US secretary of agriculture questioned in public ‘why a spinster with no children was so interested in genetics’. The American Cyanamid Company, meanwhile, claimed: ‘If Man were to faithfully follow the teachings of Miss Carson, we would return to the Dark Ages, and the insects and diseases and vermin would once again inherit the earth.’
But the public’s concern had been mobilized in an unprecedented way, and only more so when CBS ran a television special in the spring of 1963 based around the book. ‘Man’s attitude toward nature,’ Carson told the documentary-makers, ‘is today critically important simply because we have now acquired a fateful power to alter and destroy nature. But Man is a part of nature, and his war against nature is inevitably a war against himself.’
Carson tragically died as a result of her cancer in April 1964. By then, the book had sold in excess of a million copies. Moreover, it would inspire genuine change. President Kennedy had ordered the President’s Science Advisory Committee to examine the claims made in Silent Spring, as a result of which a nationwide ban was implemented on DDT in agriculture. Carson had also highlighted the conflict of interest that existed as a result of the Department of Agriculture being responsible for both representing the interests of the agricultural industry and regulating pesticides. So, in 1970, the US Environmental Protection Agency was established.
But most importantly, Silent Spring changed the terms of the environmental debate and spurred the growth of a populist environmental movement, both in the US and abroad. By highlighting the threats to human health and to the existence of entire animal species – while also warning of the questionable integrity of industry – she tapped into a discourse that engaged the public at large. H. Patricia Hynes, retired Professor of Environmental Health at the Boston University School of Public Health, has noted: ‘Silent Spring altered the balance of power in the world. No one since would be able to sell pollution as the necessary underside of progress so easily or uncritically.’ Renowned broadcaster and naturalist David Attenborough, meanwhile, has suggested that – with the exception of Darwin’s Origin of Species – Silent Spring is the book that changed the scientific world more than any other.