B io ph ile Issu e 18 - Biophile Magazine

after the area had been sprayed againstmosquitoes, a Massachusetts friend ofCarson's wrote a letter to the BostonHerald in 1958 demanding that officials"stop the spraying of poisons from the air."Carson read the letter and realized that"everything which meant most to me as anaturalist was being threatened." She decidedto make DDT the subject of her nextbook, tentatively entitled Man Against theEarth.represent our willingness to rush aheadand use something new without knowingwhat the results are going to be."Suddenly in a single summer, chemicalscience had fallen from its pedestal. By lateAugust, reporters were asking PresidentKennedy if federal officials would beinvestigating the long-range effects ofpesticides. "They already are," he answered"I think particularly, of course, since MissCarson's book, but they are examining theAccording to the WorldwatchInstitute, a higher percentage ofcrops in America are now lost topests than before pesticides werefirst widely used.chapters, theauthor followed thetrail of pesticides from farm to familytable, provided a "Who's Who" of toxicchemicals—DDT, chlordane, malathion,parathion—and noted that pesticides accumulatein fatty tissues of organisms.Reaction to Silent Spring was quick,strong and largely negative. Life claimedthat Carson had "overstated her case."Time, citing scientists' claims that insecticideswere "harmless," dismissed it as an"emotional and inaccurate outburst." Thechemical and food industries came afterCarson aggressively. Chemical and EngineeringNews, a chemical industry trademagazine, linked Carson with "pseudoscientistsand faddists," denounced her"high-pitched sequences of anxieties" andbelittled her credentials. The NutritionFoundation mailed scathing reviews of thebook to newspapers. The National AgriculturalChemicals Association launcheda $250, 000 campaign to refute it, andthe Monsanto Corporation published aparody of Carson's opening fable, describinga world without pesticides, overrunby insects and disease. In a cartoon in theNovember 10, 1962, issue of the SaturdayReview, a man lamented "I had just cometo terms with fallout, and along comesRachel Carson."But there were voices of praise as well.Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglascalled Silent Spring "the most importantchronicle of this century for the humanrace."While undergoing debilitating radiationtreatments, Carson answered hercritics.No civilization, she said,"can wage relentless war onlife without destroying itself,and without losing the rightto be called civilized."But working on it in 1960, she was diagnosedwith breast cancer and underwenta mastectomy. Subsequent radiation treatmentsleft her nauseated and bedridden.The book she had expected to finish in afew months dragged on for four years.Finally, inJune 1962, the first of a threepartexcerpt from Silent Spring appearedin the New Yorker magazine. Beforethe final instalment hit newsstands, theVelsicol Corporation, which manufacturedthe pesticide chlordane (bannedin 1988), threatened to sue the magazinefor libel. "Everything in those articles hasbeen checked and is true," replied the NewYorker's legal counsel. "Go ahead and sue."The company never did, but the attackshad only begun. One reader wrote thatCarson's work "probably reflects her Communistsympathies."Then, in July, news broke that a supposedlyharmless drug given to thousands ofpregnant women in Europe for morningsickness had been determined to causewidespread birth defects. Newspapers andmagazines ran photographs of babies bornwithout arms and legs or otherwise physicallydeformed. "It's all of a piece," said Carson."Thalidomide and pesticides—theymatter."Silent Spring went on sale September27 and raced to the top of the New YorkTimes best-seller list where it stayed formost of the fall. By Christmas, the book,which begins with Carson's fable aboutan idyllic countryside that teemed withwildlife until "a strange blight crept overthe area and everything began to change,"had sold more than 100,000 copies. In subsequentShe insisted she was not against all pesticidesand had never called for banningthem, only for restricting their use. Publicopinion wavered. Then television tippedthe scales in her favor.In April 1963, 15 million Americanswatched CBS Reports' "The Silent Springof Rachel Carson.""We still talk in terms of conquest," Carsonsaid. "I think we're challenged, as mankindhas never been challengedbefore, to prove our maturity andour mastery, not of nature but ofourselves."Her thoughtful and reservedpresentation struck a chord withviewers: hundreds wrote concerned lettersto Carson, CBS, the USDA, the PublicHealth Service and the PDA. A month later,President Kennedy's Science AdvisoryCommittee released its own report onpesticides, which backed Carson's thesis,criticized the government and the chemicalindustry, and called for "orderly reductionsof persistent pesticides."Today, despite the banning of DDT in1972, pesticides are still widely used, andCarson, who died in 1964 at age 56 ofheart disease and the cancer she battledso valiantly, still comes in for criticism."Rachel Carson's book was a brilliant pieceof writing and a seminal work, but it's clearnow that she was more fearful of pesticidesthan was warranted," says DennisAvery, former senior agriculture expertBiophile Issue 1817