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Rachel Carson

What has already silenced the voices of spring in countless towns in America? This book is an attempt to explain.

Silent Spring

It is 1962. Rock-a-Stacks, Flintstone pedal cars, and Chatty Cathy dolls are the hit toys. John Glenn orbits Earth. Thalidomide is removed from the market. Soviets are building missile bases in Cuba. It is the height of the Cold War. The American mood is heavy with security concerns. And bird populations in the Western world are quietly plummeting.

At a press conference in late summer, President Kennedy is fielding questions about external military threats, when a reporter asks about a threat, not from abroad but on American soil. Captured on black-and-white film, it’s a startling interaction.

4 pm 29 August 1962. US State Department Auditorium. Dressed in a dark, slim-notched lapel suit and white dress shirt with striped tie and white pocket square, President Kennedy stands at a wooden podium conducting a twenty-eight-minute press conference.

Reporter, off-camera: There appears to be growing concern among scientists of the possibility of dangerous long-range side effects from widespread use of DDT and other pesticides. Have you considered asking the Department of Agriculture or Public Health Service to take a closer look at this?

President Kennedy pivots left to address the reporter.

President Kennedy: Yes, and I know that they already are. (He stretches his right arm across the podium to emphasize his point.) I think particularly, of course, since Miss Carson’s book.

“Miss Carson’s book” was none other than Rachel Carson’s soon- to-be-monumental Silent Spring. And the threat? DDT—short for dichlorodiphenyltrichloroethane—a colorless chemical compound that became available in the United States in 1945 as an agricultural and household pesticide. With a title inspired by the last two lines of Keats’s 1819 poem “La Belle Dame sans Merci” (“The sedge has withered from the lake, / And no birds sing.”), Silent Spring explained to everyday Americans the devastating impact of DDT’s widespread use. Carson challenged the practice of indiscriminate spraying in homes, neighborhoods, and the countryside, during a time when research into side effects was negligible to nonexistent. Her groundbreaking research with a team of female scientists persuasively linked DDT and other pesticides to cancer in humans and unnaturally high death rates in wildlife, particularly birds. Her book conveyed the idea that the world is an interconnected web of life that needs protection to a receptive public, an outraged chemical industry, and a mute government. Over the summer of 1962, Silent Spring was brilliantly serialized in the New Yorker ahead of its publication by Houghton Mifflin in September. Once published, it was a pop culture blockbuster. The first ecology book to have such a profound impact in the United States, it dramatically shifted the public’s ecological consciousness.

In her time, Rachel Louise Carson was to ecology what, in our time, The Notorious Ruth Bader Ginsberg is to the judiciary: an unlikely rock star. Petite and soft-spoken, with a steely inner resolve, she was a whip-smart scientist with a poet’s vision who understood the power of storytelling. Born in 1907, Carson earned a master’s in zoology from Johns Hopkins University in 1932. She planned to continue studying for a doctorate, but the Depression forced her to drop out of school and find work to support her family. She worked for the federal government, eventually becoming editor in chief of all U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service publications. The success of her sea trilogy—its second installment, The Sea Around Us (1951), spent eighty-one weeks on the New York Times bestseller list—gave her the financial freedom to write full-time. A year later, it also won both the Burroughs Medal for nature writing and the National Book Award for nonfiction. A documentary of the book won an Oscar.

It may be hard to imagine now, but until Silent Spring, few people—not the public, not the government, not even the scientific community—understood the links between toxicity and pesticides. But when songbirds began turning up dead in a friend’s garden, Carson started researching and felt called to open the public’s eyes and take on the chemical industry. Before Silent Spring, DDT was actually celebrated in the media—a 1947 advertisement in Time magazine claimed, “DDT is good for mee-e-e!” In television commercials, housewives in festive floral party dresses, hair pinned in victory rolls, sashayed through their homes to rapturous orchestral music while spraying the “miracle” product under sofa cushions and inside pianos. DuPont’s slogan, “Better Things for Better Living . . . Through Chemistry,” was the tune of the day—until Silent Spring exposed the downside.

In language anyone could understand, Carson explained how profligate use of synthetic chemical pesticides after World War II upset the delicate balance of ecosystems. She connected plummeting bird populations—brown and white pelicans, peregrine falcons, and golden and bald eagles—to the way DDT altered the birds’ calcium metabolism, resulting in thin eggshells. Because the shells couldn’t support the weight of an incubating bird, nests turned into omelets. Poisons that washed into waterways traveled up the food chain in ever-greater concentrations, affecting worms, insects, fish, birds, soil, and ultimately humans, Carson wrote. Her opening chapter, “A Fable for Tomorrow,” vividly frames the stakes.

There was once a town in the heart of America where all life seemed to be in harmony with its surroundings. The town lay in the midst of a checkerboard of prosperous farms, with fields of grain and hillsides of orchards where, in spring, white clouds of bloom drifted above the green fields. In autumn, oak and maple and birch set up a blaze of color that flamed and flickered across a backdrop of pines. Then foxes barked in the hills and deer silently crossed the fields, half hidden in the mists of the fall mornings.

Along the roads, laurel, viburnum, and alder, great ferns and wild flowers delighted the traveler’s eye through much of the year. Even in winter the roadsides were places of beauty, where countless birds came to feed on the berries and on the seed heads of the dried weeds rising above the snow. The countryside was, in fact, famous for the abundance and variety of its bird life, and when the flood of migrants was pouring through in spring and fall people traveled from great distances to observe them. Others came to fish the streams, which flowed clear and cold out of the hills and contained shady pools where trout lay. So it had been from the days many years ago when the first settlers raised their houses, sank their wells, and built their barns.

Then a strange blight crept over the area and everything began to change. Some evil spell had settled on the community: mysterious maladies swept the flocks of chickens; the cattle and sheep sickened and died. Everywhere was a shadow of death. The farmers told of much illness among their families. In the town the doctors were becoming more and more puzzled by new kinds of sickness that had appeared among their patients. There had been several sudden and unexplained deaths, not only among the adults but also among the children, who would be stricken while they were at play and die within a few hours.

There was a strange stillness. The birds, for example—where had they gone? Many people spoke of them, puzzled and disturbed. The feeding stations in the backyards were deserted. The few birds seen anywhere were moribund; they trembled violently and could not fly. It was a spring without voices. On the mornings which had once throbbed with the dawn chorus of robins, catbirds, doves, jays, wrens, and scores of other bird voices there was now no sound; only silence lay over the fields and woods and marsh.

On the farms, the hens brooded, but no chicks hatched. The farmers complained that they were unable to raise any pigs—the litters were small and the young survived only a few days. The apple trees were coming into bloom but no bees droned among the blossoms, so there was no pollination and there would be no fruit.

The roadsides, once so attractive, were now lined with brown and withered vegetation as though swept by fire. These, too, were silent, deserted by all living things. Even the streams were lifeless. Anglers no longer visited them, for all the fish had died.

In the gutters under the eaves and between the shingles of the roofs, a white granular powder still showed a few patches; some weeks before it had fallen like snow upon the roofs and lawns, the fields and streams.

No witchcraft, no enemy action had silenced the rebirth of new life in this stricken world. The people had done it themselves.

Though a fable, this passage resonated with people, and it illustrates Carson’s gift for simplifying complex scientific information and for lyrical storytelling. “Nature has introduced great variety into the landscape,” she wrote in the New Yorker. “But man has displayed a passion for simplifying it. Thus he undoes the built-in checks and balances by which nature holds the species within bounds.” Her writing emotionally invigorated people and raised public consciousness about chemical pollution in a way that had never been done. “Know the facts,” she urged readers, while backing up her own research in Silent Spring with a whopping fifty-five pages of scientific references.

The public, Carson felt, acquiesced to the use of pesticides simply because lack of research on the subject seemed to indicate all was okay. It was not. She encouraged readers to become proactive consumers and citizen scientists. “We urgently need an end to these false assurances, to the sugarcoating of unpalatable facts. It is the public that is being asked to assume the risks that the insect controllers calculate. The public must decide whether it wishes to continue on the present road, and it can do so only when in full possession of the facts.” For the first time, Americans questioned the government and the scientists who reassured them there were no toxic links between pesticides and health—while children played in billowing clouds of DDT pumped by trucks through American neighborhoods and climbed fruit trees to wave as crop dusters sprayed chemicals on orchards.

Gardeners and farmers were unaware that when they sprayed their homes and land for gypsy moths or mosquitoes, it upset a larger web of life. “The problem I dealt with in Silent Spring is not an isolated one,” she wrote in the New York Times in 1962.

The excessive and ill-advised use of chemical pesticides is merely one part of a sorry whole—the reckless pollution of our living world with harmful and dangerous substances. Until very recently, the average citizen assumed that “Someone” was looking after these matters and that some little understood but confidently relied upon safeguards stood like shields between his person and any harm. Now he has experienced, from several different directions, a rather rude shattering of these beliefs.

While President Kennedy was receptive—he established a presidential advisory committee on the subject—the old boys’ club and the chemical industry went to war with Carson, leveling personal attacks on her gender, marital status, and “hysterical” character as a woman—to say nothing of her science. The Department of Agriculture refused to speak to her. She was accused of being a communist, a fanatic, and—horrors!—a hippie. The chemical industry was concerned about her effect on homemakers who might think twice before buying bug bombs. “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,” said Robert White-Stevens, a former biochemist, assistant director of the agricultural research division of American Cyanamid, and spokesman for the biochemical industry in the 1960s.

Said another critic: “Silent Spring. It kept reminding me of trying to win an argument with a woman. It can’t be done.”

And yet another: “We can live without birds and animals, but we cannot live without business.”

Nevertheless, she persisted.

Carson biographer Linda Lear writes about how women were, in fact, Silent Spring’s most receptive audience. “Women were concerned with a spectrum of pollution and contamination issues: fluoride in water, food additives, thalidomide, radioactive fallout, government secrecy, and corporate deception. They linked their concern with their primary roles as housewives and mothers and with the protection of future generations. Their outlook was not so much economic as humane.”

Eventually, Kennedy’s science advisory committee report, “The Uses of Pesticides,” concluded that Carson’s evidence was stronger than her critics admitted. The Saturday Review wrote:

Silent Spring, winner of eight awards, is the history-making bestseller that stunned the world with its terrifying revelation about our contaminated planet. No science-fiction nightmare can equal the power of this authentic and chilling portrait of the unseen destroyers which have already begun to change the shape of life as we know it.

Silent Spring is the devastating attack on human carelessness, greed and irresponsibility. It should be read by every American who does not want it to be the epitaph of a world not very far behind us in time.

Many people attending Kennedy’s 1962 press conference would later see President Nixon heed Silent Spring’s warnings and establish the Environmental Protection Agency in 1970. It wouldn’t be Kennedy, and it wouldn’t be Carson. Within twenty months of that remarkable moment, both history makers would be dead—the charismatic president assassinated at the age of forty-six, the biologist claimed by breast cancer at fifty-six. In 1972, DDT was banned, and this, combined with the Endangered Species Act, is a major reason bald eagles and peregrine falcons rebounded from near-extinction.

Silent Spring would go on to be celebrated by Discover magazine as one of the top twenty-five science books ever written, and Carson named one of Time magazine’s “100 Most Influential People of the Twentieth Century.” Her book remains one of the most prominent pieces of literature on industrial malpractice and is credited with birthing the modern environmental movement in the United States and Europe.

The Notorious RLC changed the world.