Rachel Carson testifies before the US Senate in 1963 to urge Congress to curb the sale of chemical pesticides and aerial spraying.
CREDIT: Associated Press
RACHEL CARSON was a marine biologist, an elegant writer, and a reluctant activist. She became a household name when her 1962 book Silent Spring alerted the public to the dangers that pesticides (such as DDT) have on the environment and on health. More broadly, her work questioned the chemical industry’s political influence, government complicity with the industry, and scientists’ faith in technology as an easy solution to most problems.
After World War II, American business embarked on a crusade to persuade Americans that science and technology could save humankind from the threats of disease, war, and hunger, could make society more efficient and productive, and could generally make life easy. Some major breakthroughs—such as Jonas Salk’s discovery of a vaccine for polio—bolstered this belief in science as savior. New inventions—television, air conditioners, freezers and frozen food, fast cars, jet planes, and the first giant computers—persuaded many Americans to equate increasing technology with social and economic progress. The business crusade extended to other realms, such as support for nuclear power both as a source of energy and as a key element in the Cold War “atoms for peace” propaganda. DuPont, one of the nation’s largest corporations, promoted its products through the popular slogan “Better living through chemistry.”
Carson’s most profound influence was creating popular skepticism of business claims about the safety of chemicals in our food, water, air, toys, clothes, and other aspects of the environment and daily life. Her work helped spark the modern environmental movement. In 1970, six years after she died, Congress established the Environmental Protection Agency. Two years later, the federal government banned the use of DDT.
Carson was a prolific and graceful writer who learned how to translate her understanding of scientific facts into works that raised public awareness about the natural world. Her specialized knowledge of marine biology, genetics, and other fields never diminished her sense of the majesty of the natural environment. “The pleasures, the values of contact with the natural world are not reserved for the scientist,” she wrote. “They are available to anyone who will place himself under the influence of a lonely mountain top—or the sea—or the stillness of a forest; or who will stop to think about so small a thing as the mystery of a growing seed.”
Carson was born near Springdale, Pennsylvania, where her parents made a modest living on their small farm, now preserved as the Rachel Carson Homestead. At the Pennsylvania College for Women (now Chatham University), Carson explored her two passions: literature and biology. Despite society’s prejudice against women in science, Carson’s biology teacher, Mary Scott Skinker, encouraged her to pursue graduate school at Johns Hopkins University. She earned her masters degree in zoology and genetics in 1932 and taught for a few years at Johns Hopkins and at the University of Maryland, while spending her summer conducting research at the Marine Biological Laboratory at Woods Hole, Massachusetts.
In the midst of the Depression, Carson lacked the funds to finish her Ph.D. She took a temporary position with the US Bureau of Fisheries (now the US Fish and Wildlife Service) as the writer for the Romance Under the Seas radio show. In 1936 the bureau hired her as a full-time biologist. She eventually became the chief editor of all publications for the bureau. She edited scientific articles and wrote pamphlets about natural resources and conservation, including a series about the national wildlife refuge system, which gave her valuable field experience.
Carson supplemented her government income by writing articles for the Baltimore Sun on the delicate relationship between humans and the ecology of Chesapeake Bay. She expanded her 1937 article for Atlantic Monthly, “Undersea,” into a book, Under the Sea-Wind, published in 1941. It earned critical acclaim but little popular attention.
Her next book, The Sea Around Us (1952), brought her fame and many scientific honors. “Great poets from Homer down to Masefield have tried to evoke the deep mystery and endless fascination of the ocean,” the New York Times said in a review. “But the slender, gentle Miss Carson seems to have the best of it. Once or twice in a generation does the world get a physical scientist with literary genius. Miss Carson has written a classic in The Sea Around Us.” The book was on the New York Times best-seller list for eighty-six weeks—thirty-nine weeks as the top seller—and won the National Book Award. Next came The Edge of the Sea, published in 1955. These three books about the ocean made Carson’s reputation as a popular naturalist, science writer, and speaker and gave her the financial independence to quit her government job and devote herself to writing.
Silent Spring marked a shift in her career—from writer to social critic and activist, challenging the practices of industry, government, and many fellow scientists.
During World War II, the United States used the insecticide DDT to kill lice and mosquitoes and to protect against outbreaks of malaria and typhus. After the war, chemical companies produced over 200 pesticides for use by farmers, foresters, and millions of suburbanites determined to keep insects off their lawns. Pesticide use grew from 125 million pounds in 1945 to 600 million pounds a decade later, but the public was generally unaware of the dangers. As early as 1945 Carson proposed an article on pesticides to Readers Digest, but the magazine was not interested. In 1957 DDT was sprayed as part of a mosquito-control campaign in Massachusetts, near the home of Carson’s friend Olga Owens Huckins. Huckins sent Carson a letter she had written to the Boston Herald describing how the aerial spraying had destroyed her backyard bird sanctuary. “All these birds died horribly,” Huckins wrote, but the mosquitoes remained. Worse, the state had not informed the residents about the use of the pesticide.
This information led Carson to worry about the use and abuse of science and technology. Human arrogance and power, she believed, could be used to “change drastically—or even destroy—the physical world.” After four years of research, Carson’s Silent Spring carefully documented the dangers of pesticides and herbicides. (The title referred to a spring when no birdsongs could be heard because the birds had been killed by pesticides.) She revealed the long-term presence of toxic chemicals in water and on land and its threat to animals, their habitat, and humans. Among other things, she documented the presence of DDT in breast milk.
The New Yorker serialized Silent Spring before its publication as a book in September 1962. Excerpts were also published in Audubon magazine. Carson called for a ban on the more harmful, long-lasting chemicals like DDT and for tighter government regulations on the manufacture and sale of other chemicals. She urged scientists to find other ways to fight pests to reduce the deadly poisons in the environment. Carson accused the chemical industry of intentionally spreading misinformation and government officials of uncritically accepting industry’s claims. “The ‘control of nature’ is a phrase conceived in arrogance,” Carson wrote, “born of the Neanderthal age of biology and philosophy, when it was supposed that nature exists for the convenience of man.”
Anticipating attacks by industry, Carson and her publisher sent chapters to many noted scientists and others who would support the book’s findings, including US Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas, an ardent environmentalist. He publicly endorsed the book, saying, “We need a Bill of Rights against the 20th century poisoners of the human race.”
As predicted, the chemical industry attacked Silent Spring as “sinister” and “hysterical.” Industry spokespersons called Carson an alarmist. Robert White-Stevens, a biochemist for American Cyanamid and a key industry spokesperson, said that the book’s claims were “gross distortions of the actual facts, completely unsupported by scientific, experimental evidence, and general practical experience in the field.” He warned, “If man were to 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,” and he labeled Carson “a fanatic defender of the cult of the balance of nature.” DuPont, Monsanto, and other corporations, including baby food companies, as well as the pesticide industry trade group, the National Agricultural Chemicals Association, spent hundreds of thousands of dollars to produce brochures and articles attacking Carson’s credentials and promoting and defending pesticides.
The media was generally sympathetic to Carson. In a July 3, 1962, editorial, the New York Times wrote, “If her series [in the New Yorker] helps arouse public concern to immunize Government agencies against the blandishments of the hucksters and enforces adequate controls, the author will be as deserving of the Nobel Prize as was the inventor of DDT.” On July 22, the Times ran an article with the headline “Silent Spring Is Now Noisy Summer: Pesticide Industry Up in Arms over a New Book.” The story began, “The $300,000,000 pesticides industry has been highly irritated by a quiet woman author whose previous works on science have been praised for the beauty and precision of the writing.” But the reviewer for Time magazine attacked Carson’s “oversimplifications and downright errors. . . . Many of the scary generalizations—and there are lots of them—are patently unsound.”
The chemical industry’s campaign against Silent Spring brought more attention to the book, increasing public awareness and sales. It became a best seller. CBS Reports broadcast an hour-long television program about it, even after two major corporate sponsors withdrew their support. The industry attacks strengthened Carson’s warnings about the misuse of science. “Such a liaison between science and industry is a growing phenomenon, seen in other areas as well,” Carson said. “The American Medical Association, through its newspaper, has just referred physicians to a pesticide trade association for information to help them answer patients’ questions about the effects of pesticides on man.”
President John F. Kennedy discussed Silent Spring at a press conference and appointed a presidential science advisory committee to look into the problem of pesticides. Congress held hearings on the topic. Carson testified before both groups. In 1963 the Kennedy task force issued a report supporting Carson’s scientific claims. The committee chairman, Jerome B. Wiesner, said the uncontrolled use of poisonous chemicals, including pesticides, was “potentially a much greater hazard” than radioactive fallout.
As the first grassroots environmental organizations emerged, they turned Silent Spring into a manifesto for change. Carson died in 1964 at fifty-six, unable to see the changes that her work had inspired. In the decades since, our understanding of the dangers of toxic chemicals—and our doubts about the claims of the chemical industry and others—have grown as other scientists and journalists, such as Barry Commoner and Bill Moyers, and hundreds of advocacy groups, such as the Sierra Club and Pesticide Watch, have followed in Carson’s footsteps.