How ‘Silent Spring’ Ignited the Environmental Movement
Illustration by Valero Doval
By ELIZA GRISWOLD
Published: September 21, 2012
On June 4, 1963, less than a year after the controversial environmental
classic “Silent Spring” was published, its author, Rachel Carson,
testified before a Senate subcommittee on pesticides. She was 56 and
dying of breast cancer. She told almost no one. She’d already survived a
radical mastectomy. Her pelvis was so riddled with fractures that it
was nearly impossible for her to walk to her seat at the wooden table
before the Congressional panel. To hide her baldness, she wore a dark
brown wig.
Illustration by Valero Doval
Carson family photograph, from the Rachel Carson Council.
Carson as a child, reading to her dog Candy.
Associated Press
Carson testifying before a Senate subcommittee on pesticides in 1963.
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“Every once in a while in the history of mankind, a book has appeared
which has substantially altered the course of history,” Senator Ernest
Gruening, a Democrat from Alaska, told Carson at the time.
“Silent Spring” was published 50 years ago this month. Though she did
not set out to do so, Carson influenced the environmental movement as no
one had since the 19th century’s most celebrated hermit, Henry David
Thoreau, wrote about Walden Pond. “Silent Spring” presents a view of
nature compromised by synthetic pesticides, especially DDT. Once these
pesticides entered the biosphere, Carson argued, they not only killed
bugs but also made their way up the food chain to threaten bird and fish
populations and could eventually sicken children. Much of the data and
case studies that Carson drew from weren’t new; the scientific community
had known of these findings for some time, but Carson was the first to
put them all together for the general public and to draw stark and
far-reaching conclusions. In doing so, Carson, the citizen-scientist,
spawned a revolution.
“Silent Spring,” which has sold more than two million copies, made a
powerful case for the idea that if humankind poisoned nature, nature
would in turn poison humankind. “Our heedless and destructive acts enter
into the vast cycles of the earth and in time return to bring hazard to
ourselves,” she told the subcommittee. We still see the effects of
unfettered human intervention through Carson’s eyes: she popularized
modern ecology.
If anything, environmental issues have grown larger — and more urgent —
since Carson’s day. Yet no single work has had the impact of “Silent
Spring.” It is not that we lack eloquent and impassioned environmental
advocates with the capacity to reach a broad audience on issues like
climate change. Bill McKibben was the first to make a compelling case,
in 1989, for the crisis of global warming in “The End of Nature.”
Elizabeth Kolbert followed with “Field Notes From a Catastrophe.” Al
Gore sounded the alarm with “An Inconvenient Truth,” and was awarded the
Nobel Prize. They are widely considered responsible for shaping our
view of global warming, but none was able to galvanize a nation into
demanding concrete change in quite the way that Carson did.
What was it that allowed Carson to capture the public imagination and to forge America’s environmental consciousness?
Saint Rachel, “the nun of nature,” as she is called, is
frequently invoked in the name of one environmental cause or another,
but few know much about her life and work. “People think she came out of
nowhere to deliver this Jeremiad of ‘Silent Spring,’ but she had three
massive best sellers about the sea before that,” McKibben says. “She was
Jacques Cousteau before there was Jacques Cousteau.”
The sea held an immense appeal to a woman who grew up landlocked and
poor as Carson did. She was born in 1907 in the boom of the Industrial
Age about 18 miles up the Allegheny River from Pittsburgh, in the town
of Springdale. From her bedroom window, she could see smoke billow from
the stacks of the American Glue Factory, which slaughtered horses. The
factory, the junkyard of its time, was located less than a mile away,
down the gently sloping riverbank from the Carsons’ four-room log cabin.
Passers-by could watch old horses file up a covered wooden ramp to
their death. The smell of tankage, fertilizer made from horse parts, was
so rank that, along with the mosquitoes that bred in the swampland near
the riverbank called the Bottoms, it prevented Springdale’s 1,200
residents from sitting on their porches in the evening.
Her father, Robert Carson, was a ne’er-do-well whose ventures inevitably
failed; Carson’s elder sister, Marian, did shift work in the town’s
coal-fired power plant. Carson’s mother, Maria, the ambitious and
embittered daughter of a Presbyterian minister, had great hopes that her
youngest daughter, Rachel, could be educated and would escape
Springdale. Rachel won a scholarship to Pennsylvania College for Women,
now known as Chatham University, in Pittsburgh. After graduation, she
moved to Baltimore, where she attended graduate school for zoology at
Johns Hopkins University and completed a master’s degree before dropping
out to help support her family. The Carsons fared even worse during the
Depression, and they fled Springdale, leaving heavy debts behind.
Carson became a science editor for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service,
an agency founded under the New Deal. Eager to be a writer, she
freelanced for The Atlantic and Reader’s Digest, among other
publications. Driven by her love of the sea, she wrote on everything
from where to go for summer vacation to what to do with the catch of the
day to the life cycles of sea creatures. Carson believed that people
would protect only what they loved, so she worked to establish a “sense
of wonder” about nature. In her best-selling sea books — “The Sea Around
Us,” “The Edge of the Sea” and “Under the Sea-Wind” — she used simple
and sometimes sentimental narratives about the oceans to articulate
sophisticated ideas about the inner workings of largely unseen things.
Carson was initially ambivalent about taking on what she referred to as
“the poison book.” She didn’t see herself as an investigative reporter.
By this time, she’d received the National Book Award for “The Sea Around
Us” and established herself as the naturalist of her day. This was a
much folksier and less controversial role than the one “the poison book”
would put her in. Taking on some of the largest and most powerful
industrial forces in the world would have been a daunting proposition
for anyone, let alone a single woman of her generation. She tried to
enlist other writers to tackle the dangers of pesticides. E.B. White,
who was at The New Yorker, which serialized Carson’s major books, gently
suggested that she investigate pesticides for The New Yorker herself.
So she did.
“Silent Spring” begins with a myth, “A Fable for
Tomorrow,” in which Carson describes “a town in the heart of America
where all life seemed to live in harmony with its surroundings.”
Cognizant of connecting her ideal world to one that readers knew, Carson
presents not a pristine wilderness but a town where people, roads and
gutters coexist with nature — until a mysterious blight befalls this
perfect place. “No witchcraft,” Carson writes, “no enemy action had
silenced the rebirth of new life in this stricken world. The people had
done it themselves.”
Carson knew that her target audience of popular readers included scores
of housewives. She relied upon this ready army of concerned citizens
both as sources who discovered robins and squirrels poisoned by
pesticides outside their back doors and as readers to whom she had to
appeal. Consider this indelible image of a squirrel: “The head and neck
were outstretched, and the mouth often contained dirt, suggesting that
the dying animal had been biting at the ground.” Carson then asks her
readers, “By acquiescing in an act that causes such suffering to a
living creature, who among us is not diminished as a human being?”
Her willingness to pose the moral question led “Silent Spring” to be
compared with Harriet Beecher Stowe’s “Uncle Tom’s Cabin,” written
nearly a century earlier. Both books reflected the mainstream Protestant
thinking of their time, which demanded personal action to right the
wrongs of society. Yet Carson, who was baptized in the Presbyterian
Church, was not religious. One tenet of Christianity in particular
struck her as false: the idea that nature existed to serve man. “She
wanted us to understand that we were just a blip,” says Linda Lear,
author of Carson’s definitive biography, “Witness for Nature.” “The
control of nature was an arrogant idea, and Carson was against human
arrogance.”
“Silent Spring” was more than a study of the effects of synthetic
pesticides; it was an indictment of the late 1950s. Humans, Carson
argued, should not seek to dominate nature through chemistry, in the
name of progress. In Carson’s view, technological innovation could
easily and irrevocably disrupt the natural system. “She was the very
first person to knock some of the shine off modernity,” McKibben says.
“She was the first to tap into an idea that other people were starting
to feel.”
Carson’s was one of several moral calls to arms published at the start
of the ’60s. Jane Jacobs’s “Death and Life of American Cities,” Michael
Harrington’s “Other America,” Ralph Nader’s “Unsafe at Any Speed” and
Betty Friedan’s “Feminine Mystique” all captured a growing
disillusionment with the status quo and exposed a system they believed
disenfranchised people. But “Silent Spring,” more than the others, is
stitched through with personal rage. In 1960, according to Carson’s
assistant, after she found out that her breast cancer had metastasized,
her tone sharpened toward the apocalyptic. “She was more hostile about
what arrogant technology and blind science could do,” notes Lear, her
biographer.
“No one,” says Carl Safina, an oceanographer and MacArthur fellow who
has published several books on marine life, “had ever thought that
humans could create something that could create harm all over the globe
and come back and get in our bodies.” Safina took me out in his sea
kayak around Lazy Point, an eastern spoke of Long Island, to see three
kinds of terns, which zipped around us over the bay. We then crossed the
point in his red Prius to visit thriving osprey, one species of bird
that was beginning to die out when “Silent Spring” made public that DDT
weakened their eggshells. As we peered through binoculars at a
40-foot-high nest woven from sticks, old mops and fishnets, a glossy
black osprey returned to his mate and her chicks with a thrashing fish
in his talons. Safina told me that he began to read “Silent Spring” when
he was 14 years old, in the back seat of his parents’ sedan.
“I almost threw up,” he said. “I got physically ill when I learned that
ospreys and peregrine falcons weren’t raising chicks because of what
people were spraying on bugs at their farms and lawns. This was the
first time I learned that humans could impact the environment with
chemicals.” That a corporation would create a product that didn’t
operate as advertised —“this was shocking in a way we weren’t inured
to,” Safina said.
Though Carson talked about other pesticides, it was DDT — sprayed
aerially over large areas of the United States to control mosquitoes and
fire ants — that stood in for this excess. DDT was first synthesized in
1874 and discovered to kill insects in 1939 by Paul Hermann Müller, who
won the Nobel Prize in 1948 for this work. During World War II, DDT
applied to the skin in powder form proved an effective means to control
lice in soldiers. But it wasn’t just DDT’s effectiveness that led to its
promotion, Carson maintained; it was a surfeit of product and labor. In
her speeches, Carson claimed that after the war, out-of-work pilots and
a glut of the product led the United States government and industry to
seek new markets for DDT among American consumers.
By the time Carson began to be interested in pesticides, in the
mid-1940s, concerns related to DDT were mounting among wildlife
biologists at the Patuxent Research Refuge in Laurel, Md., which was
administered by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, and elsewhere.
Controversy over pesticides’ harmful effects on birds and plants led to
high-profile lawsuits on the part of affected residents who wanted to
stop the aerial spraying.
Carson used the era’s hysteria about radiation to snap her readers to
attention, drawing a parallel between nuclear fallout and a new,
invisible chemical threat of pesticides throughout “Silent Spring.” “We
are rightly appalled by the genetic effects of radiation,” she wrote.
“How then, can we be indifferent to the same effect in chemicals that we
disseminate widely in our environment?”
Carson and her publisher, Houghton Mifflin, knew that such comparisons
would be explosive. They tried to control the response to the book by
seeking support before publication. They sent galleys to the National
Audubon Society for public endorsement.
The galleys landed on the desk of Audubon’s biologist, Roland Clement,
for review. Clement, who will turn 100 in November, currently lives in a
studio on the 17th floor of a retirement community in New Haven, about a
mile from Yale University’s Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library,
where Carson’s papers are kept. “I knew of everything she wrote about,”
he told me over lunch at his home this summer. “She had it right.”
The book, which was published on Sept. 27, 1962, flew
off the shelves, owing largely to its three-part serialization in The
New Yorker that summer. “Silent Spring” was also selected for the
Book-of-the-Month Club, which delighted Carson. But nothing established
Carson more effectively than her appearance on “CBS Reports,” an
hourlong television news program hosted by a former war correspondent,
Eric Sevareid. On camera, Carson’s careful way of speaking dispelled any
notions that she was a shrew or some kind of zealot. Carson was so sick
during filming at home in suburban Maryland that in the course of the
interview, she propped her head on her hands. According to Lear as well
as William Souder, author of a new biography of Carson, “On a Farther
Shore,” Sevareid later said that he was afraid Carson wouldn’t survive
to see the show broadcast.
The industry’s response to “Silent Spring” proved more aggressive than
anyone anticipated. As Lear notes, Velsicol, a manufacturer of DDT,
threatened to sue both Houghton Mifflin and The New Yorker. And it also
tried to stop Audubon from excerpting the book in its magazine. Audubon
went ahead and even included an editorial about the chemical industry’s
reaction to the book. But after “Silent Spring” came out, the society
declined to give it an official endorsement.
The personal attacks against Carson were stunning. She was accused of
being a communist sympathizer and dismissed as a spinster with an
affinity for cats. In one threatening letter to Houghton Mifflin,
Velsicol’s general counsel insinuated that there were “sinister
influences” in Carson’s work: she was some kind of agricultural
propagandist in the employ of the Soviet Union, he implied, and her
intention was to reduce Western countries’ ability to produce food, to
achieve “east-curtain parity.”
But Carson also had powerful advocates, among them President John F.
Kennedy, who established a presidential committee to investigate
pesticides. Then, in June 1963, Carson made her appearance before the
Senate subcommittee. In her testimony, Carson didn’t just highlight the
problems that she identified in “Silent Spring”; she presented the
policy recommendations she’d been working on for the past five years.
When faced with a chance to do so, Carson didn’t call for a ban on
pesticides. “I think chemicals do have a place,” she testified.
She argued vehemently against aerial spraying, which allowed the
government to dump pesticides on people’s property without their
permission. She cited dairy farmers in upstate New York, whose milk was
banned from the market after their land was sprayed to eradicate gypsy
moths. As Carson saw it, the federal government, when in industry’s
thrall, was part of the problem. That’s one reason that she didn’t call
for sweeping federal regulation. Instead, she argued that citizens had
the right to know how pesticides were being used on their private
property. She was reiterating a central tenet of “Silent Spring”: “If
the Bill of Rights contains no guarantee that a citizen shall be secure
against lethal poisons distributed either by private individuals or by
public officials, it is surely only because our forefathers, despite
their considerable wisdom and foresight, could conceive of no such
problem.” She advocated for the birth of a grass-roots movement led by
concerned citizens who would form nongovernmental groups that she called
“citizen’s brigades.”
The results of her efforts were mixed, and even her allies have
different opinions of what Carson’s legacy actually means. Carson is
widely credited with banning DDT, by both her supporters and her
detractors. The truth is a little more complicated. When “Silent Spring”
was published, DDT production was nearing its peak; in 1963, U.S.
companies manufactured about 90,000 tons. But by the following year, DDT
production in America was already on the wane. Despite the pesticide
manufacturers’ aggression toward Carson and her book, there was mounting
evidence that some insects were increasingly resistant to DDT, as
Carson claimed. After Roland Clement testified before the Senate
subcommittee, he says, Senator Abraham Ribicoff, the Democrat from
Connecticut who was chairman of the committee, pulled him aside. “He
told me that the chemical companies were willing to stop domestic use of
DDT,” Clement says, but only if they could strike a bargain: as long as
Carson and Clement would accept the companies’ continued export of DDT
to foreign countries, the companies would consider the end of domestic
use. Their message was clear, Clement says: “Don’t mess with the boys
and their business.”
Though Clement was a supporter of Carson’s, he believes that she got
both too much credit and too much blame after “Silent Spring” came out.
“It’s a fabrication to say that she’s the founder of the environmental
movement,” Clement says. “She stirred the pot. That’s all.” It wasn’t
until 1972, eight years after Carson’s death, that the United States
banned the domestic sale of DDT, except where public health concerns
warranted its use. American companies continued to export the pesticide
until the mid-1980s. (China stopped manufacturing DDT in 2007. In 2009,
India, the only country to produce the pesticide at the time, made 3,653
tons.)
The early activists of the new environmental movement
had several successes attributed to Carson — from the Clean Air and
Water Acts to the establishment of Earth Day to President Nixon’s
founding of the Environmental Protection Agency, in 1970. But if “Silent
Spring” can be credited with launching a movement, it also sowed the
seeds of its own destruction.
The well-financed counterreaction to Carson’s book was a prototype for
the brand of attack now regularly made by super-PACs in everything from
debates about carbon emissions to new energy sources. “As soon as
‘Silent Spring’ is serialized, the chemical companies circle the wagons
and build up a war chest,” Souder says. “This is how the environment
became such a bitter partisan battle.”
In a move worthy of Citizens United, the chemical industry undertook an
expensive negative P.R. campaign, which included circulating “The
Desolate Year,” a parody of “A Fable for Tomorrow” that mocked its
woeful tone. The parody, which was sent out to newspapers around the
country along with a five-page fact sheet, argued that without
pesticides, America would be overrun by insects and Americans would not
be able to grow enough food to survive.
One reason that today no single book on, say, climate change could have
the influence that “Silent Spring” did, Souder argues, is the five
decades of political fracturing that followed its publication. “The
politicized and partisan reaction created by ‘Silent Spring’ has
hardened over the past 50 years,” Souder says. Carson may have regarded
“Silent Spring” and stewardship of the environment as a unifying issue
for humankind, but a result has been an increasingly factionalized
arena.
Carson was among the first environmentalists of the modern era to be
charged with using “soft science” and with cherry-picking studies to
suit her ideology. Fifty years later, the attacks on Carson continue.
Her opponents hold her responsible for the death of millions of African
children from malaria; in Michael Crichton’s novel “State of Fear,” one
character says that “banning DDT killed more people than Hitler,” a
sentiment Crichton publicly agreed with. The Web site rachelwaswrong.org,
which is run by the Competitive Enterprise Institute, a free-market
advocacy group based in Washington, makes a similar charge: “Today,
millions of people around the world suffer the painful and often deadly
effects of malaria because one person sounded a false alarm.”
But much of Carson’s science was accurate and forward-looking. Dr. Theo
Colborn, an environmental health analyst and co-author of a 1996 book,
“Our Stolen Future,” about endocrine disrupters — the chemicals that can
interfere with the body’s hormone system — points out that Carson was
on the cutting edge of the science of her day. “If Rachel had lived,”
she said, “we might have actually found out about endocrine disruption
two generations ago.”
Today, from Rachel Carson’s old bedroom window in
Springdale, you can see the smokestacks of the Cheswick coal-fired power
plant less than a mile away: an older red-and-white, candy-striped
stack and a newer one, called a scrubber, installed in 2010 to remove
sulfur dioxide. It later needed repairs, but with the approval of the
Allegheny County Health Department, it stayed open, and the plant
operated for three months without full emission controls. The plants
says it is in compliance with current E.P.A. emissions standards for
coal-fired plants, though new ones will take full effect in 2016.
Springdale’s board of supervisors supports the plant’s business. As
David Finley, president of Springdale Borough put it, the noise from the
plant used to bother a handful of residents, but it “sounds like money”
to many others. The plant buys fresh water from an underground river
that runs through the borough and has paid for things like Little League
uniforms and repairs to the municipal swimming pool. Springdale has
been nicknamed “Power City” since the days Carson lived there. The
high-school sports teams are called the Dynamos; their mascot is Reddy
Kilowatt, the cartoon character of the electricity lobby.
A few months ago, two citizens in Springdale volunteered to be
representatives in a class-action suit, which charges that the
coal-fired plant “installed limited technology” to control emissions
that they claim are damaging 1,500 households. One of the plaintiffs,
Kristie Bell, is a 33-year-old health care employee who lives in a
two-story yellow-brick house with a broad front porch, a few blocks from
Carson’s childhood home. Bell said it was “Silent Spring” that
encouraged her to step forward. “Rachel Carson is a huge influence,”
Bell said, sitting at her kitchen table after work on a sultry evening
last summer. “She’s a motivator.” For Bell, Carson’s message is a call
to mothers to stand up against industry to protect the health of their
families.
Detractors have argued that the lawsuit is the creation of
personal-injury attorneys. (Because of the difficulty of making a clear
health case, the plaintiffs are claiming property damage caused by
corrosive ash.) But Bell said that it’s not about money. “I never sit
outside on my front porch because I don’t know what’s coming out of that
smokestack,” she said. One hundred years ago, when Carson was a child,
residents of Springdale had the same concern — one that informed
Carson’s worldview. “When we start messing around with Mother Nature,”
Bell said, “bad things happen.”
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