As the winter of 1938 limped into spring, the news from Europe grew increasingly grim. On March 12, Nazi soldiers stormed into Austria, annexing the country in a single day, while the world looked helplessly on. That September, as the annual Nuremberg Rally opened with an ominous display of militaristic fervor—goose-stepping marches, human swastika formations, booming Wagnerian overtures—Hitler announced a spate of new anti-Jewish racial laws. Jews were by now barred from holding passports or practicing in most professions. There were limits on where they could live and work, restrictions on who they could marry, worrisome new policies of forced deportation. On November 9, Kristallnacht, “the night of the broken glass,” Nazi thugs looted Jewish businesses and religious sites throughout Germany, torching more than one thousand synagogues and shattering the shop windows of thousands of Jewish stores. The violence sent shock waves across the world, as word of Hitler’s anti-Semitic excesses spread. By September 1939, German storm troopers had invaded Poland and Czechoslovakia, and on September 2, Great Britain and France responded with a declaration of war on Germany. To many, it seemed the world was coming unhinged.
But not everyone’s attention was on the bellicose Third Reich. That same cheerless September, a lone chemist named Paul Müller had a stunning breakthrough in his laboratory in nearby Basel, Switzerland. He was forty years old and employed by J. R. Geigy. Spurred by a severe food shortage that had nearly starved his country, for four long years he had been searching for a synthetic compound that would kill crop-destroying insects. One of his experiments involved a compound known as DDT (dichlorodiphenyltrichloroethane), which had first been synthesized in 1874. But no one had yet found a practical use for it. Now Müller saw one. Coating the inside of a glass box with the odorless white powder, he filled it with houseflies and waited. At first nothing seemed amiss. But by the next morning, all the insects were dead. A new batch of flies was added and they too suffered the same end. Even after he scoured the box with a solvent, the flies continued to expire, killed by invisible flecks of the substance.
By the following year, DDT was being hailed as one of the great triumphs of science, an illustration of mankind’s increasing mastery over the natural world; it was a panacea that would rid the earth of insects forever. Tests showed it was a highly effective weapon against mosquitoes, fleas, lice, and ticks, all hosts for deadly human diseases. DDT was cheap and long lasting; it could be mass-produced, and at low doses didn’t seem toxic to humans or warm-blooded animals. While no one really understood how it worked, it seemed to be some sort of “nerve poison.” Whatever its properties, it annihilated insects almost instantly. Soon it was being sped to war zones to combat typhus and other insect-borne scourges. Closer to home, people began spraying their bedsheets with the stuff to kill bedbugs, amazed that just one application worked “for months.” As refugees poured out of Nazi-occupied regions, DDT proved an effective delousing agent. By treating the interior walls of a house just twice a year, it appeared to stop the spread of malaria. As the war ground on, entire islands were sprayed aerially in advance of invasions. DDT could be dispersed as an emulsion with water, or mixed with chalk power and dusted on large target areas. When in 1944 a typhus epidemic in Naples was averted after the U.S. Army sprayed DDT on hundreds of thousands of civilians, its spectacular success made international headlines. Four years later Müller was awarded the Nobel Prize in physiology for medicine, his miracle compound celebrated as one of the “greatest medical discoveries in history.” All but a few lone wolves agreed.
IN JULY 1938, AN OCEAN AWAY, AND ONLY MONTHS BEFORE MÜLLER’S breakthrough, a shy young science writer with deep-set blue eyes and an intent, slightly preoccupied expression, sat behind the wheel of her father’s car. Her wavy, chin-length auburn hair was pinned behind her ears, to help with the withering heat, and she wore a sensible skirt that fell below her knees and a modest white button-down blouse. She might well have been taken for a demure small-town librarian, or a prim schoolteacher, except for the pile of technical volumes stacked beside her on the seat and the spiral notebook and serious binoculars, which spoke of something more single-minded and ambitious, more intense and sharply focused. She stole a glance in the mirror, aware that her attention had wandered. In the back seat, limp with exhaustion, drooped her sister’s two daughters, ages twelve and thirteen, their spindly legs akimbo. In the seat beside her, clutching the road map, sat her seventy-year-old mother, Maria Carson.
Though she had just turned thirty-one, Rachel Carson was already no stranger to financial hardship or personal responsibility. That Europe teetered on the brink of war seemed far away, difficult to register given the weight of her own worries, the pressures so much closer to home. Her father was dead now. Three years before he had stepped into the backyard and toppled face-first into the grass, dying moments later and taking with him any lingering illusions that he might somehow reverse the family’s financial woes. At the time, there wasn’t even money for the Carsons to accompany his body to the burial plot in Canonsburg, Pennsylvania, where he was quietly interred by a brother. Rachel and her mother had done what they could, which wasn’t much. In some ways his abrupt passing must have come as a relief, though neither Rachel nor her mother openly expressed it. Her father had been a distant, ineffectual figure, never a reliable breadwinner. At least now there was no longer a need for guilt or pretense for not having believed in him more.
Since then Carson’s responsibilities had only increased. Her older sister, Marian, once wild-hearted and attractive, had been unwell for several years, often too sick to hold down even a menial part-time position. Deserted by her feckless husband early in their marriage, Marian and her two daughters had moved in with Carson and her mother, leaving it to Rachel to make up the financial shortfall. By all logic, it should have been her brother, Robert, who stepped into the breach. But Robert’s income was erratic, when he had work at all. It was the depths of the Depression and the country was on its knees. The Carson family finances, precarious even in the best of times, were in desperate straits. Though Rachel was teaching part-time at the University of Maryland, to help support the family, while also enrolled at Johns Hopkins as a doctoral candidate in zoology—one of just five female students—she had seen no option but to drop out of Hopkins and look for a full-time teaching position. But in 1935, with millions still languishing in bread lines, such jobs, she discovered, were nonexistent, especially for a young woman.
What she had found was an odd position that no one seemed to want: a part-time government job writing brief, upbeat seven-minute radio scripts for an educational series on marine life, which her new boss at the U.S. Bureau of Fisheries described as a “problem assignment,” explaining that it would involve both an intimate knowledge of science and literary skills, the latter evidently in short supply in the department. Carson hadn’t seen it the same way. The job seemed to her a lifeline, except that it was only two days a week, and paid just $6.50 per day. But even its irregularity, she soon realized, came with a silver lining. As the year progressed and she interviewed shrimpers and oystermen, marine biologists and crabbers, sea captains and the owners of fish shacks, she found her head swimming with ideas for other, more in-depth stories, which she began to write on the days when she wasn’t at the office. The first feature she did was about shad fishing, which she sold to the Baltimore Sun. Since then she had sold the Sun other pieces—on oyster farming; the tuna catch off Nova Scotia; the mysterious, circular migration of the eel. At $20.00 a story, it seemed like a miracle. For the first time she could recall, things were looking up.
But then Marian died suddenly too. A year earlier, she had come down with pneumonia a few days after her fortieth birthday; she’d grown gaunt and pale and within days was gone. There was no one else to raise the two girls but Carson and her aging mother. At twenty-eight, Rachel had become the sole provider for a family of four. Any privacy or open time she had known was over.
Her college mentor urged her to take the civil service exam. And finally, in 1936, she was offered a full-time position with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, which carried the misleading title of junior aquatic biologist. In truth, she was allowed to do neither fieldwork nor anything even vaguely aquatic. Mostly she was charged with “women’s work”: editing and rewriting the reports of scientists who were out in the field—all of them predictably male. But she was managing to keep up her own writing, working on weekends and in the evenings when she got home from her job, often pushing deep into the night. It was a grueling schedule that ruled out any social life beyond the company of her mother and two nieces. But her perseverance was paying off. She was chipping away at a writing project she hoped would change her circumstances. It was to be a book about the life of the sea. She was driving to the small seaside town of Beaufort, North Carolina, at the southern end of the Outer Banks, to do research for it, using her long-awaited ten-day vacation from work to collect visual impressions for the story that was beginning to incubate in her head.
CARSON GRIPPED THE STEERING WHEEL, WATCHING THE ROAD AHEAD. It was a stifling day and the windows were down. Hot air blew through the car like a blast furnace. But as with so much in her young life, if Carson felt burdened by the heat, or the weight of her enormous financial responsibilities, if she resented the imposition of her sister’s children, or worried that she would never reconcile the division she felt between the needs of her family and the pull of her work, she chose not to dignify it. Carson seemed to accept her lot in a way peculiarly her own; it was not so much an absence of self-pity, but rather a swallowing and acceptance of troubles before pain or resentment could even arise. Though she was quiet and reserved, and there seemed a fragility about her, she was also uncommonly stoic. Fiercely ambitious for herself, Rachel Carson possessed a strength of mind and a determination that set her apart from most people. She had a rare doggedness, a capacity for sustained focus that even those who knew her found remarkable. She could be working into the early hours of the morning, almost asleep in her chair, yet still driving herself, as if fatigue were an indication of weakness or lack of will. It was not so much escape, or even freedom that Carson yearned for, but time and a measure of security. And family obligation was all she knew.
They reached the outskirts of Beaufort late that afternoon. Carson helped her mother and the girls get settled in their rented cabin, then climbed back into the car, keeping her eye out for landmarks so she could find her way back—the tidy white church on the corner where she turned, the pocked blue door of a shop. She was headed for the fisheries lab on nearby Pivers Island, just west of the historic town; from there she would decide where to commence work the next morning. Beaufort was an old and stately town, a sleepy port that pulsed with the ebb and flow of the tides, the flux of the sea winds. She piloted the car past tidy, white clapboard houses, some dating back to the 1700s, and on to the harbor, her eyes on the broad sound stippled with islands unspooling before her, the grassy salt marshes wading boldly into the shallows. At the fishing piers she slowed, taking in the gray-shingled fishermen’s shacks huddled at the water’s edge, the vacationers milling about, buying ice cream and buckets of fried seafood at the fish stands by the wharfs. She didn’t stop until she reached the fisheries station, where she finally got out and stood for a long time on the empty beach, breathing in the pungent salt air, staring intently at the view. From the low sand-and-scrub island, she could see the placid blue sheet of the inner sound, and in the distance, the checkered spire of the Cape Lookout Lighthouse. Farther out, she could just make out the long, nine-mile strip of beach and dunes called Shackleford Banks. It was here, Carson decided, she wanted to go.
Carson must have found someone from the fisheries station with a boat to ferry her over, because every morning for the next ten days, she chugged across the busy channel to the lovely uninhabited barrier island that separated the inner sound from the sea. Shackleford Banks was long and exceptionally narrow. Even at its highest point, it rose no more than five or six feet above the high-tide mark. But the variety of marine life and terrain she found there was perfect, she felt, for her purposes. On the ocean side, the thrashing sea hurled wave after wave against the strand; along the island’s inner shore, the water was almost still. There were tide pools and low-lying marsh ponds in the flats where the sand dunes descended to the sea. And she discovered that by walking just thirty minutes along the wild ocean side she lost sight of all civilization. Alone on the beach, with only the sea and sky and the long white ribbon of sand unfurling in either direction, time fell away.
Day after day Carson walked the beach, watching the surge and fall of the tides, the shorebirds patter across the wet sand, the puffs of blown sea froth rolling like “thistledown” along the strand. She stood at the ocean’s edge and listened to the waves, smelled the salt air, felt the sun on her back. She waded into the tide pools, spending hours studying the tiny sea creatures there: “little transparent worms with sharp biting jaws;” barnacles that tentatively opened their shells, rhythmically sifting the waters; clams stirring in the mud. Standing in the shallows, she noted how the crabholes “honeycombed” the beach with their “burrowings”; how the glittering light danced gently across the ribbed bottom of the sand. Swishing a hand into the salt ponds, she tasted their bitter tang.
Sometimes she lay in the dunes, arms behind her head, and watched the gulls wheel and glide across the sky, or closed her eyes and listened to the sounds—“the quick sharp sibilance” of a gust of sand blown over the dune; the “soft tinkling” of the ocean turning the shells on the wet sand; the harsh bark of the gulls.
Nothing escaped her hungry gaze. Carson studied the flora and fauna at Shackleford Banks with a kind of blinkered intensity, drawing upon all her senses, alert to the shifting light and hues of shore and sea, the cycles of the day, the smell of the marsh, the sounds of wind and sand and shorebird. Now and then, stopping to sit on the beach and record her thoughts, her small spiral notebook balanced on her lap, her earnest, down-turned face tensed in concentration, she would scribble out bits of broken narrative, ideas and sensory impressions, filling page after page with meticulous descriptions, intent on capturing all she saw.
Tireless, passionate, often she went out at dawn, when the sky was powdery and the dark waves flashed silver against the glassy sea; often she didn’t leave until dusk, when bird forms became “dark silhouettes” and the only light that remained was that mirrored in the pools of water left on the beach. Sometimes she returned after dark, having gone home briefly to eat and check on her family, and there, flashlight in hand, walked the night strand.
Many times before, in the midst of researching a story, Carson had stared out at the open sea and contemplated the long sweep of time it represented. She found it calming to think of the timelessness and circularity of its processes, the endless cycling of life and death and rebirth that was continuously reenacted there. To stand at the ocean’s edge, to feel “the breath of a mist drifting over a great salt marsh, to watch the flight of shore birds that have swept up and down the surf lines of the continents” for untold generations, was to bear witness, she thought, to things that had been going on for “countless thousands of years,” to see patterns that were as “ageless as sun and rain, or as the sea itself.” The sea was a place where one got a sense of the “great antiquity” of life, she felt. At its glacial depths, years gave way to centuries, and centuries, as she understood it, into ages of geologic time. It was a way of looking that she found helpful, a focus on the living flow of things, the eternal rhythms and relationships that had endured for eons. Viewing the sea from this vantage point provided “a little better perspective on human problems.”
Now, as her days at Shackleford Banks drew to a close, besides the details of the marine life she collected, it was this larger picture of the sea that began to preoccupy her. Before coming to Beaufort, she had conceived of the book as a shore guide of sorts, a descriptive account of the daily life of a handful of sea creatures. But now she saw that the book needed to be something more, a view of the sea that was bigger and more viscerally charged, that would dramatize the fragile web of connections that bound each sea creature to its particular home, as well as to its place in the savage pecking order that held sway among the other sea-dwelling residents there. Observing the splendid variety and strangeness of sea life at Shackleford had underscored what she already knew, which was that no single marine creature or its habitat could be understood in isolation. All were part of a greater system. Every living organism, no matter how huge or infinitesimally small, belonged to a “larger diverse community,” all “sustained by interdependence.” It was this she needed to animate for the reader—the elaborate interconnectedness of this delicate web, the mysterious and complicated “interplay” between the ecosystem and all its inhabitants. All life, she saw, “is connected.”
Carson’s holistic view of the earth and the ocean, her sense of the living world as a web of relationships and interconnections—what we now call ecology—was not an approach to science much practiced or honored at that moment. Most biologists at the time tended to count and categorize species, each according to its physical attributes, to see the world in atomized parts. Carson, by contrast, was focused on mapping the connections between living things, in understanding the links and interactions that sustained the entire web of life. At a time when the culture gave priority to specialists, when scientists were learning to break down the world to its molecular elements, she was seeing the natural world as a single, integrated system, as more a process than an inert place. The natural world was a balance of live and ever-evolving forces.
It was a way of thinking that would become Carson’s signature contribution, distinguishing her writing from others working at the time. Carson would effectively begin the modern environmental movement by popularizing the principles of ecology, writes Linda Lear, author of Carson’s definitive biography, Witness for Nature. She would become one of the most beloved and widely read nature writers of her day, the author of three bestselling books about the sea and a stunning, history-changing book that would break through the Cold War paranoia of her time to discuss the environment, thus winning the hearts and minds of everyday people. She would also become one of the first modern thinkers to get people wondering if “all technology was progress,” notes environmental historian Elizabeth Blum. Her position as someone outside the mainstream would allow her to challenge the status quo of 1950s culture and industry in a way that no one before her had. But all this remained in the future.
CARSON RETURNED TO HER HUMDRUM JOB AT THE U.S. FISH AND WILDLIFE Service the day after driving home to the modest split-level rental in suburban Maryland where she lived. Her days at Shackleford behind her, she fell back into her old schedule. Every morning, before leaving for her tiny, light-starved office, she handed her mother several pages of government stationery, on the back of which, drafted in longhand, was her previous night’s work. A slow, meticulous writer, on a good night she might log fifteen hundred words; but usually it was less, sometimes just five hundred. When she returned home each evening, she shared a quiet dinner with her mother, reviewed her nieces’ homework, and then padded off to her room to begin the night’s toil, finding the pages her mother had typed for her on the desk beside her Olivetti. It was a routine that Rachel and her mother would follow until the last draft was done, and that would continue for every book she wrote, a pact between mother and daughter that reached back into childhood. For in a sense, Rachel’s budding writing life was the joint realization of both mother and daughter. Every milestone Rachel achieved drew Maria closer to her long-cherished dream that Rachel have all the chances she herself had sacrificed on the day she met Robert Carson.
MARIA CARSON HAD MARRIED BELOW HER SOCIAL STATION. THE DAUGHTER of a stalwart Presbyterian minister who died early of consumption, she had come from some means. Delicate-boned, with deep-set eyes and the high forehead and chiseled features of her Scotch-Irish ancestors, she had attended an all-female seminary school, enjoying a robust classical education, a source of considerable pride. Cool and cerebral, a touch brusque, she’d been known as a driven student and a gifted musician. Educated to take up the mantle of “civic responsibility” and modest “Christian motherhood,” it had never occurred to her that she would find neither the time nor money to pursue her own musical or literary interests, or that marriage would narrow her prospects.
Maria was teaching school when she met Robert Carson. Reed thin and of medium height, with sympathetic blue eyes and prematurely thinning hair, at thirty he seemed worldly and exotic compared to the other young men she’d encountered. That he hadn’t completed high school, or was from a more hardscrabble family than hers, didn’t seem to her a problem. They both shared a love of music. Robert sang in his church choir. He had beautiful manners, and an appealing reserve. Quietly he courted the twenty-five-year-old Maria, and when he asked her to marry him less than a year later, she accepted, despite her mother’s disapproval.
They had their first two children sooner than they’d hoped. Marian, the eldest, was born in 1897; a son followed two years later, whom they named Robert, after his father. They had been living uneasily with Maria’s mother, and now they needed additional room.
Robert Carson went out in search of a home for his growing family. When he found a parcel he liked just eighteen miles up the Allegheny River from Pittsburgh, he secured an $11,000 mortgage, brashly confident that he could make the economics work. Sixty-four rolling acres, the land was just outside Springdale, Pennsylvania, a down-at-the-heels river community of twelve hundred that Robert was convinced was on the upswing. Graced with meadows and woodland, apple and pear orchards, the property had a two-story log house and a barn, a springhouse and a chicken coop, a honeysuckle-smothered porch, and a standing fireplace. If the house itself was meager—just four drafty rooms, with neither electricity nor indoor plumbing—the land around it was wild and untrammeled, the views expansive. It seemed full of potential. Maria set to work, and in the black dirt behind the barn, planted a large kitchen garden, which provided the family with fresh vegetables and flowers. Robert kept a few farm animals, though he showed no interest in farming, claiming to be a “city boy.” To the bankers he dealt with, Robert presented himself as a “developer.” His plan was to subdivide the lower part of his land into lots, which he hoped to market for $300 each. But until this scheme took off, he was working as a traveling insurance salesman, though this income too was erratic. Paid on commission according to what he sold, Robert often came home with pockets empty. To make up the shortfall, Maria gave music lessons and sold chickens, making do as best she could. But the family was still desperately poor.
Rachel entered the world on the morning of May 27, 1907. Her father, now forty-three, was often away, on the road for weeks at a stretch. Marian was by then in fifth grade, Robert Junior in first. To Maria’s delight, she had her pudgy-cheeked newborn all to herself. Rachel was a solitary, sweet-natured child, quiet but noticeably determined. At eight months, she was talking; as soon as she could walk, Maria took her outside, where they spent long hours wandering the meadows beyond the house. Maria encouraged her to wade into streams, to peer closely at seed cask and thistle, to read the light and listen for the wind. She showed her how to be slow, how to watch with all her senses, how to navigate the woods and know the stars. She gave her the names of every weed and wildflower they saw. It was a kind of second knowledge that Rachel learned at the same moment that she was beginning to read, and its precision and pleasures were at least as vital to her as her books.
To Maria, such interests were anything but idle. Like many women of her ilk, she had embraced the nature-study movement, a popular metaphysics in fashion at the turn of the century. The movement was in some respects a theological one, its focus the mystery and uplift of the natural world. The idea was that by studying nature, the “intricate design of the creator” would become apparent. Conservation was therefore a “divine obligation.” And so it followed that as a mother, one could do no greater good than to instill in one’s children a kinship toward nature and a love of the out-of-doors. It was a cause to which Maria devoted herself.
How disappointing, then, that of her three offspring, it was only Rachel, her youngest, for whom this earth love took. Marian dropped out of high school at the end of tenth grade, and eventually found work as a stenographer. At eighteen, she married a local boy who was four years older, but no more mature. Unable to afford rooms of their own, the couple moved in with the Carsons, adding to what was already a burdened household. Then one day the boy skipped town. Amidst the turmoil, Robert Junior moved out to the backyard, where he lived in a tent. And soon he too dropped out of high school. He worked for a while in a radio repair shop, and then volunteered for the army air service. When he returned to Springdale in 1919, having served for a short time in France, he was rumored to be arrogant and opportunistic. Later, one of his Springdale friends would remember Robert as “the only man I knew who would steal chickens from his own mother.”
All this lost potential only made Maria more determined to chart a different, brighter path for her youngest child. On inclement days, she read and sang to Rachel. She saw to it that she had art materials and paper, encouraged her to draw and write stories, to make her own little books. She surrounded her with games and puzzles, new books from the library, the latest nature magazines published for children. Another mother might have welcomed a moment of time to herself, a respite from the toil of housework and childcare. But Maria was not a woman who suffered defeat easily. Her answer to her older children’s hollow and hopeless lives was a furious and compensatory energy, all of which she directed toward Rachel’s enrichment. She wanted her last child to be independent and to excel, to escape the small, pinched world that she herself had been snared by.
Her efforts, fortunately, didn’t go unanswered. If Rachel was the proxy for her mother’s foiled ambitions, she was also the source of her greatest satisfaction. Maria couldn’t have asked for a more fervent pupil. Rachel was an omnivorous reader, keenly observant and diligent at school. She loved books and stories. Almost as soon as she mastered the use of a pencil, she began to compose her own. At eleven, she already longed to be a writer.
Rachel’s school in Springdale only went as far as tenth grade. At Maria’s urging, Rachel traveled by trolley to a town on the other side of the river for her two last years of high school. As always, Rachel rose quickly to the top of her class. But her teachers noted that she was often absent. Maria was a compulsive mother and whenever she heard rumors of an outbreak of illness, she kept Rachel at home, choosing to tutor her instead. Rachel never fell behind. But the pattern was socially isolating. Rachel had few friends and she wasn’t able to stay for after-school activities; the trolley schedule was irregular and she needed to get back to Springdale by the last train. On those rare occasions when she did ask someone back, it was awkward. Maria hovered and her manner frightened most of Rachel’s potential friends. One girl later remembered that winning the approval of the “stern-looking Mrs. Carson was an achievement.”
The Carson family’s insolvency was by now a subject of town gossip, which only added to Rachel’s troubles. Fiercely loyal to her family, she was mortified that even perfect strangers knew they couldn’t pay their bills. It seemed better to hold herself apart, to bury herself in books and the beauty and nurture she found in the natural world. Outside and alone, she could lose herself in the green immensity about her. Nature made no judgments, after all. Indeed, whatever unspoken anguish Rachel suffered, and certainly there was some, her separateness would also bring strength, serving to kindle a deep inner fortitude that would stand her in good stead later, a resourcefulness and sense of self-worth she might not otherwise have had were her circumstances easier. Rachel’s social isolation taught her to turn the other cheek in the face of human pettiness; it allowed her to follow her own heart.
Robert Carson’s bet on real estate, like most everything else he did, had been woefully wrong. When he bought the land, he’d been certain that Springdale would be a beneficiary of the booming Industrial Age. But in less than a decade, the town had become a casualty, a landscape of last resort. Now, from places on their property, Rachel could see smoke belching from the stacks of the American Glue Factory, where horses were marched up a covered wooden ramp to be slaughtered. At the train station, disembarking passengers were assaulted with the stench of horse parts ground up for fertilizer and glue. Industrial flues sullied the skyline, pumping out an acrid soot that burned the eyes and blackened the snow. In the craggy hills nearby, bulldozers clawed at the ore-filled rock, scarring the once-green landscape, replacing it with open sores of rubble and industrial waste. Springdale wasn’t a place where hopeful young families dreamed of moving. Robert Carson had misread the signs. No one wanted to buy his lots. None of this would be lost on Rachel, who would draw upon these memories thirty years later as she began Silent Spring.
IN THE SPRING OF 1925, A PARTIAL SCHOLARSHIP ALLOWED RACHEL TO go to college. As always, it was Maria who decided where, selecting Pennsylvania College for Women, an elite women’s school on the edge of Pittsburgh. That summer, desperate to make up the shortfall in Rachel’s tuition, Maria sold the family silver and china. Robert, who was now working part-time at a local power company, promised to raise the rest by borrowing against the Springdale lots. But his health was poor and he seemed increasingly irrelevant in the family.
Early that September, with a mix of uneasiness and anticipation, Rachel left for college. Her father had borrowed a car, a beat-up Model T Ford, so that he and Maria could drive her the sixteen miles to Pittsburgh. Rachel had just turned eighteen. Thin and fine-boned, with the same deep-set eyes as her mother, she pressed her face to the half-open window as the Ford passed through downtown Pittsburgh, her eyes widening as an electric streetcar rumbled by. The Ford entered a wealthier enclave then, and the road began to climb, narrowing to a ribbon as it ascended the leafy hillside to the ridge, where Rachel got her first glimpse of the campus: a cluster of elegant buildings dominated by an imposing three-story Gothic mansion crowned with medieval crenellations.
The family sat for a moment in the car. Well-dressed young women ambled along the walkways that traversed the lawns. Others gathered in small groups beneath the vine-covered arches of a second, equally imposing edifice. If Rachel felt a flutter of apprehension, if she felt suddenly conspicuous in her plain homemade clothes, the serviceable cotton dress her mother had sewn that summer, her sensible tie shoes, brown and badly scuffed, in spite of her mother’s efforts to cover the wear with polish; if she wished, now, that she’d made the time to do her hair, or worried about how she’d endure the days away from her mother, even if it was to be only a week, as Maria had promised, she did her best not to show it. Whatever flickers of uncertainty that went through Rachel’s mind, she swallowed them, as always. For even amidst these worries, even in the face of the manse before her, so different from her own home with its lack of indoor plumbing, she must also have been sharply aware of her elation, conscious that she had been working toward this moment for as long as she could remember.
Rachel settled in quickly. She chose rigorous classes and threw herself into the work. A passionate student, compulsive about being well prepared, in class she was always quick to raise her hand, the first to fire off an answer. It was a trait that didn’t always endear her to classmates, many of whom kept their distance, put off by the intensity of her ambition. The few girls who did get to know her found that she actually had a gentle wit and could be “slyly observant.” But to most of her peers, she seemed an overzealous grind, awkward and drearily earnest, a girl too freakishly studious to be much fun. And her apparent apathy about appearances didn’t help. Rachel was prone to bouts of acne, which hid her prettiness. Her thick oily hair required daily shampooing, which she often didn’t make the time to do. Though outwardly she claimed not to care about her looks, one friend felt she suffered inwardly, and for that reason skipped out on social events, preferring to spend her time studying in the library.
Maria Carson’s regular visits also complicated matters. Every Saturday after classes, Maria arrived at Rachel’s dorm and stayed until she went to bed. At first the girls with rooms near Rachel were sympathetic, imagining Rachel to be suffering from homesickness. But when Maria continued to appear every weekend throughout the year, they amended their impressions: behind Rachel’s back they mocked her.
It wasn’t until her sophomore year that life began to look up. Though Rachel was an English major, like all students, she was required to take at least one course in science. And so, in the fall of 1926, she signed up for introductory biology. Taught by one of the most charismatic figures on campus (and in some quarters one of the most controversial), Mary Scott Skinker’s beginning biology was a class the unambitious avoided. Skinker was a passionate and inspiring professor, but she was also a demanding one. Science, she believed, was the highest calling, and she expected nothing less than stellar work. Gentle but forthright, Skinker was known to periodically tangle with Cora Coolidge, the silver-haired president of the college.
Coolidge hailed from a wealthy Massachusetts family of patrician stock. She had grown up surrounded by politicians and men of letters, in drawing rooms where discussions of art and poetry were as common as air. A “large bosomy woman” at home in the world of men, she was a tireless champion of women’s education. And yet, despite her otherwise enlightened stance, she didn’t believe women should be encouraged to pursue advanced science. Women, in her opinion, possessed neither the “intellect” nor the “stamina” for such high-pressure careers, echoing a gender bias common in the 1920s. Though Coolidge herself was unmarried—and happily so—she felt that the foremost goal for all educated women was to be literate and capable wives and mothers. Skinker, who had a master’s degree in zoology and hoped to go on for a Ph.D., strenuously disagreed.
Skinker’s allure on campus went beyond her teaching. Tall and willowy, her chestnut hair cinched in a loose chignon, she had the swanlike grace of a dancer. Every evening, in the great chandeliered hall, the dining tables laid with silver and crystal, she arrived in formal dress, drawing the eyes of all assembled. She always wore a fresh flower pinned to her shoulder or waist. (It was rumored that the flowers were a gift from an amorous suitor waiting in the wings.) But then one day the flowers stopped arriving, leading to whispered speculations about a breakup. Skinker later revealed to a former student that she had abandoned the idea of getting married while at PCW.
Rachel felt an almost immediate affinity for the popular professor. Within weeks of joining her class, she had formed a deep and abiding attachment. Rachel not only admired what Miss Skinker taught, but also what she stood for: her high seriousness, the breadth of her scholarship, her absolute commitment to science. If the elegant and impassioned professor was an object of interest to many students, to Rachel she was something more: a role model, a woman in whose image she might remake herself. In class, seated up front, Rachel felt her imagination roar to life. Skinker taught that “all life was interconnected”; that time past and time present were eternally linked in the long, slow process of evolution. This “holistic” view of the living world—and humankind’s place in it—was to become the foundation of Rachel’s worldview. Under Skinker’s guiding hand, Rachel was learning the principles of ecology, although the word wasn’t yet in use. Rachel too started to wear a flower on her shoulder at dinner in an act of homage.
By junior year, Rachel was feeling increasingly unsettled. She was spending more and more time in the drafty, top-floor biology lab of Dilworth Hall, often returning after dinner to dissect specimens. A literature major, she had always assumed she would be a writer, as she and her mother planned. Writing wasn’t an easy career choice, certainly, but it was an acceptable profession for a woman. And it didn’t necessarily require that she become a teacher, which was where most women landed. Science, by contrast, was a nearly impossible path. Few women, no matter how exceptional, were accepted into graduate science programs. And those who were rarely found work afterward in full-time research or business. Instead they were shunted off to teach in women’s colleges, where, like Miss Skinker, they were often marginalized. Even the brilliant and well-qualified Miss Skinker had been unable to get beyond her master’s degree. Rachel, who was usually pragmatic, was for the first time finding it hard to do her writing assignments. “I have gone dead,” she scrawled to her adviser in a worried note. That February, after much agonizing, she finally changed her major to science and the conflict lifted.
Rachel had by now shed much of her social awkwardness. One winter night, after a fresh snowfall, she joined a group of girls on an impromptu sledding party. Flying downhill on trays temporarily lifted from the dining hall, they horsed around in the snow. Afterward, their sweaters and underthings soaked, they peeled off their clothes and showered, donned pajamas, and sat in front of the enormous fireplace in the dorm, eating potato salad and sandwiches. Then, turning off the lights, they sat in the firelight and sang until well past midnight. For Carson it was a rare moment of lighthearted abandon.
That same winter, Rachel’s roommate helped fix her up with a date for the yearly prom. The young man, Bob Frye, was a junior at a nearby college. Rachel purchased “silver slippers a size too small”—as was the fashion—and spent the few days before the dance working to break them in. Afterward, she wrote a friend that she’d had a “glorious time,” although oddly she made no further mention of Bob. Instead, Rachel went on at length about how glamorous Miss Skinker had appeared that evening: “Miss Skinker was a perfect knockout at the Prom . . . She wore a peach colored chiffon-velvet, with the skirt shirred just about 8 inches in front and a rhinestone pin at the waist.” According to Rachel’s roommate, Bob had looked like he was having difficulty making conversation with Rachel. Bob showed up the next day to take Rachel to a basketball game, and she saw him once more that semester. After that, Rachel never dated again. Perhaps the collapse of her sister’s marriage stood as a cautionary tale, perhaps the quiet disappointments of her mother’s. Or perhaps she simply wasn’t interested.
IN JUNE 1928, RACHEL GRADUATED MAGNA CUM LAUDE FROM PCW. MARIA made sure the news appeared in the local Springdale paper. The attractive young woman staring out from her yearbook picture bore little resemblance to the awkward girl of four years before. Early that spring, at Skinker’s urging, Rachel had applied to Johns Hopkins and been awarded a full scholarship. She also learned she had been chosen for a fellowship at the Marine Biological Laboratory in Woods Hole, Massachusetts, for August. Excited, if a bit apprehensive, Rachel left for Baltimore in late July, stopping briefly at Johns Hopkins. Then, limp with the heat, she boarded a bus for Luray, Virginia, where she was joining Miss Skinker at her family’s cabin in the Blue Ridge Mountains.
The two women spent the next three days lost in conversation. They hiked and rode horses, bird-watched and played tennis. But mostly they talked, incessantly, sitting together each night before the crackling fire, warmed by the mutual kinship they felt. Skinker had become the most significant figure in Rachel’s life, both intellectually and emotionally, her mentor as well as a treasured friend. It was a pattern she would repeat throughout her life. Rachel always had one woman to whom she was deeply attached, and on whom she leaned for support and emotional ballast. Independent in so many important ways, Rachel was also often needy. And yet, fiercely protective of her privacy, she wasn’t easy to know. Few were able to get beyond her austere reserve.
The next few years were emotionally fraught. Rachel loved her time at Woods Hole, and, as always, she worked with all her heart. But she was not entirely settled. She struggled in the lab, unsure of what she wanted to study. She felt self-conscious about her training, convinced she was unprepared. Unlike most scientific institutions, WH was welcoming to women, even if they were woefully underrepresented. Though Rachel had never worked in a lab with men, she got on well with them. But seeing their work, she was struck by the superiority of their skills. She felt less clever, a bit lost. It was her first experience of the sea, and she often walked the shoreline, fascinated by the curious marine life she found there. She did her best to be socially outgoing, joining in the impromptu picnics on the beach; the excursions to the scrub islands in the sound; the collecting trips aboard the lab’s dredging boat, which chugged up and down Buzzards Bay. But she was still distressingly aware that she felt more at home in the library than in the lab. It was the first time Rachel had encountered her own limits.
When she got to Hopkins that fall, her sense of being overwhelmed only grew. Her lab research was moving slowly; after months, she still hadn’t produced enough for an original thesis. Though she was working long hours, often fifty a week, she was beginning to slip behind. Since the collapse of the economy, her financial pressures had deepened. The Depression was affecting everyone, but for her own family, all still in Pittsburgh, the hardship was acute. In early 1930, hoping job prospects in Baltimore would be better, she made arrangements for them to join her, renting a house in a rural backwater outside Baltimore. Big and empty, with no central heating, the house did, at least, have indoor plumbing and a fireplace. One by one her family straggled in, her parents first; then in June, when school was out, Marian and her two daughters, Virginia and Marjorie. A friend who visited Rachel during this time recalled that Marian’s two girls “clung to Rachel, talking incessantly until she gave in and read them a story.” Her father sat by the fire, and “looked ill.” Rachel’s reasons for wanting her family closer were, as always, complicated. She didn’t have the money to travel home, or even to pay for a long-distance call. And she missed her mother terribly. It was the longest the two had ever been separated.
In her second year at Hopkins, Rachel cut back her schedule, becoming a half-time student. She found a part-time job as a lab assistant, but it was an extremely tense period. She was now the only one in the family who was steadily employed. A neighbor remembered dropping by the Carsons’ one night and seeing them “seated at the table with only a bowl of apples for dinner.” Weary and stretched thin, her progress in the lab stalled, there seemed little chance that she’d be able to complete the kind of ambitious study she’d envisioned. “I don’t have time to think any more,” she wrote worriedly to a friend. Finally, in June 1932, a year behind schedule, she delivered her master’s thesis in zoology. Barely one hundred pages, it was neither brilliant nor groundbreaking work. But it was enough to secure her degree; in the recommendations that followed, her professors suggested Rachel would make a fine teacher, but they expressed reservations about her ability to do pioneering scientific research.
That summer, Rachel took on two more part-time jobs, both teaching; when fall arrived, determined to move forward, she returned to Hopkins to begin work toward her doctorate. But her father had fallen ill by now, and then her sister became sick too. After a year and a half, with five family members to support, and the economy still in free fall, Rachel, at twenty-eight, dropped out of Hopkins to look for full-time work. At Skinker’s urging, she took the civil service exam; it was soon after that she was hired to write radio scripts. “I’ve never seen a word of yours, but I’m going to take a sporting chance,” her new boss, Elmer Higgins, told her. Later, another boss would remember Rachel as “extremely shy: almost unable to get the words out when she came to him to ask for a writing job.”
IN 1935, THE YEAR CARSON JOINED THE U.S. FISH AND WILDLIFE SERVICE, “conservation” was still a relative term. For the first time in America’s history, however, misuse of the nation’s resources had become a subject of terrible relevance. That summer, for the fifth straight year, severe drought descended upon the Great Plains, scorching the once-loamy topsoil to a powder that the winds hoovered up into howling dust storms that blew steadily east, denuding the land and uprooting hundreds of thousands of people. Some storms were so dense they blotted out the sun; others dumped dust and black rain on cities as far east as Buffalo and Boston. In the winter of 1934–1935, red snow fell on New England. The following spring, on April 14, 1935—Black Sunday—one of the worst storms of the decade roared east across the Plains, carrying away three hundred thousand tons of topsoil, “more dirt than had been dug out to build the Panama Canal.” Five days later, the “swirling murk” arrived in Washington, D.C., blackening the sky and interrupting a Senate hearing on soil erosion. By the close of the month, Congress had passed the Soil Conservation Act. Twenty thousand workers were dispatched to the Great Plains to replant sod. President Roosevelt, convinced that nature could be reengineered on a massive scale, hastily put through a scheme to plant trees from the Canadian border to Texas. The trees, it was hoped, would help anchor the soil and trap rainfall. But the prairie soil and climate proved ill suited to trees. While some 220 million were planted, most either died or were uprooted by farmers once the rains returned and the land could again be cultivated for crops.
Yet even with the absolute and admitted failure of Roosevelt’s grand plan, the hubris behind it lived on, which was that nature could be remade to mankind’s specifications, subdued and then domesticated to serve his ends. It was an idea that hadn’t much changed since the first God-haunted settlers set foot in the new world, and which informed the mission at the Bureau of Fisheries where Rachel now worked, albeit in a slightly more benign form. (“A howling wilderness” would, the Puritans vowed, be reduced to “fruitful subjection.”) In his annual summary, Elmer Higgins pointed out that even when practical applications for marine research weren’t immediately clear, such knowledge made “permanent contributions to social progress.” Knowledge, he wrote, permits nature to be “harnessed, controlled and directed to economic advantage.” It was a polite way of saying that behind the agency’s push to unlock the ocean’s secrets lay the perennial hope that it might be harvested more profitably. Even so, in practice it was an approach to conservation deployed mostly to gentle ends: fish numbers were watched, marine food monitored, hatcheries recommended for restocking species, all in the name of sustaining commercial fishing. If occasionally a marine creature like the starfish, which interferes with oyster harvests, was deemed an antisocial neighbor, and thereby slated for eviction (usually by poison), most of the bureau’s efforts were focused on conducting in-depth research on the high seas rather than on eliminating species.
This was not so for the sister agency to the Bureau of Fisheries, the Bureau of Biological Survey, whose sole charge was to “control” agricultural pests that diminished crop yields, as well as larger predators that preyed on livestock. Here the mission was to actively “rebalance” the natural order, to make nature “more friendly to modern man” by selectively culling certain species, writes William Souder, author of On a Farther Shore, an elegant recent biography of Carson’s life and legacy. For the long list of so-called pests—everything from birds and rodents to wolves and coyotes—it was open season; any means available—shooting, trapping, poisoning with lethal gases—was fair game.
By the beginning of the 1930s, the Bureau of Biological Survey could enthusiastically claim that they had substantially thinned, if not decimated, a multitude of animals in “stock-raising” regions of the country. “For wolves,” they crowed, “the end is in sight.” And great progress was being made on “cougars, lynx and bobcat.” Full eradication—the tacit goal for most of these species—was believed to be “only a matter of time.”
Complicating this mix were the sometimes-competing interests of sportsmen and hunters. As early as 1820, the pioneer and bird artist Audubon, an avid hunter, recognized that the clearing of forests for cropland was decimating the habitats of the many magnificent bird and wildlife species he loved to hunt and then paint. “The greedy mills told the sad tale,” Audubon lamented, “that in a century the noble forests . . . should exist no more.” It was Audubon and other well-born sportsmen, in fact, who were the first to press for some form of wildlife conservation. When Theodore Roosevelt organized the Boone and Crocket Club in 1888, the idea was to “promote manly sport with a rifle.” But it was also to protect America’s untamed frontier. Roosevelt felt that untrammeled wilderness was necessary to sustain the “vigorous manliness” at the core of the national character. In time, Roosevelt would go on to establish the first federal game management areas in America, sowing the seeds of what would eventually become the national park system. But not before the “wanton destruction” of the American bison and other species by market hunters in combination with the government was complete.
It all came down to competing definitions of nature, one from the Enlightenment, the other a preservationist ethos. To the former, nature was the realm of “rational laws and exploitable resources” that could be marshaled for monetary gain; the latter, in the spirit of the great naturalist John Muir and fellow travelers at the Sierra Club, was romantic: nature shouldn’t be subject to human intervention or manipulation. Carson, for whom killing anything was abhorrent, was firmly in the second, conservationist camp, out of step, in many respects, with the government’s positions. But she kept her head down, acutely aware of her need to keep the job.
IN THE SPRING OF 1936, THE RADIO SCRIPTS NEARLY FINISHED, HIGGINS asked Carson to write something “of a general sort,” for a brochure about the sea. Carson would later recall losing herself in the project, claiming “the material rather took charge of the situation.” A few weeks later, she delivered the eleven-page essay to Higgins’s office, sitting with him as he read it.
“I don’t think it will do,” he said flatly, handing it back to her. “Better try again.”
He looked her in the eye, seeming to relish the pause. “But send this one to The Atlantic,” he added, winking now. The essay, he went on to say, was far too eloquent for a government publication; it belonged in a top literary magazine. This was shortly after her sister’s death and Carson didn’t immediately follow up. It would be a full year before she finally sent off the essay. But when at last she did, The Atlantic editors took it immediately, calling the essay “uncommonly eloquent.” The piece, they added, would surely “fire the imagination of the layman.” They asked for a few minor changes, and then sent her a $100 check—to Carson a princely sum.
Carson’s essay, which appeared in the September 1937 issue under the title “Undersea,” would prove life changing. Waiting in her mailbox one morning was a letter from the celebrated author and illustrator Hendrik Willem van Loon, who urged her to come up with a book proposal along the lines of her article. He invited her to visit him in Old Greenwich, Connecticut, so he could introduce her to his editor, Quincy Howe, at Simon and Schuster. From those first four Atlantic pages, Carson would later reflect, “everything else followed.”
Carson’s vision of the sea, from the shoreline to its abysmal depths, was a departure from her earlier work, probing deeper into the unseen machinery of primordial realms than anything she’d ever written. It was also stranger and more experimental in style. In it, she imagined for her readers the look and feel of life underwater, as if they were trekkers on a journey there.
If the underwater traveler might continue to explore the ocean floor, he would traverse miles of level prairie lands; he would ascend the sloping sides of hills; and he would skirt deep and ragged crevasses yawning suddenly at his feet. Through the gathering darkness, he would come at last to the edge of the continental shelf. The ceiling of the ocean would lie a hundred fathoms above him, and his feet would rest upon the brink of a slope that drops precipitously another mile, and then descends more gently into an inky void that is the abyss.
The sea as Carson described it was a savage and storm-tossed place at once beautiful and menacing, a realm teeming with eerie examples of adaptation and survival in which every creature was both predator and prey. It was a place at once perpetually in flux and eternally changeless, a world in which time past and time present were continuously linked in an endless cycling of elements from one generation to the next.
Individual elements are lost to view, only to reappear again and again in different incarnations in a kind of material immortality. Kindred forces to those which, in some period inconceivably remote, gave birth to that primeval bit of protoplasm tossing on the ancient seas continue their mighty and incomprehensible work. Against this cosmic background the life span of a particular plant or animal appears, not as a drama complete in itself, but only as a brief interlude in a panorama of endless change.
These were not the sorts of ideas readers were accustomed to contemplating, and they were riveted. Carson’s picture of a dark and watery world churning with evolutionary wonders, a place at once inconceivably ancient and eternally present, was something new: a different measure by which to think of time. The life of the sea, as Carson explained it, was a “continuum” in which all living organisms were bound.
That January, a nervous but excited Carson took the train to Old Greenwich, Connecticut, where she met Van Loon. True to his word, he took her to see Quincy Howe at Simon and Schuster that same day. The following day, as Van Loon had predicted, she left with a publishing commitment.
RACHEL RETURNED HOME AND BEGAN THE SLOW, PAINSTAKING WORK of making the book real, shoehorning the research into her crowded days, chipping away at the writing as she could: on weekends, nights, vacations. Three years later, the manuscript at last done, she sent it off to Simon and Schuster. It was New Year’s Eve, 1940.
Like all first authors, Rachel had high hopes for the book, which she had titled Under the Sea-Wind. And the early reviews indeed boded well. The Scientific Book Club picked it up as its November selection. “There is poetry here,” the reviewer reflected, “but no false sentimentality.” The New York Times pronounced it “so skillfully written as to read like fiction, but in fact a scientifically accurate account.” Other critics commented on its “lyrical beauty” and “faultless science.” Even the scientific world was respectful, an unusual turn given how dismissive they were of most popularizations of science. But timing in life is everything. Less than a month after publication, on December 7, 1941, Japanese warplanes bombed Pearl Harbor. The world’s eyes turned inexorably to war. Speaking later of the book’s reception, Carson wryly observed that “the world received the event with superb indifference.” Barely two thousand copies of the book were sold.
ON JUNE 5, 1945, A FEDERAL AIRPLANE BUZZED BACK AND FORTH OVER A 117-acre expanse of leafy forest in the Patuxent Research Refuge, a wildlife sanctuary tucked between Baltimore, Maryland, and Washington, D.C. The crop duster swooped low over the treetops, spraying them with a mix of DDT dissolved in fuel oil. As it stitched across the sky, it left a misty trail that wafted down through the trees unevenly. Although the pilot tried to be methodical, the winds were up that day; it was hard for him to see where, exactly, the toxic murk was landing. He made multiple passes over some places; others he missed altogether. Some of the vaporous cloud landed on a mile-long stretch of the Patuxent River, a meandering stream “that was home to twenty odd species of fish.”
In the months that followed, a clutch of federal researchers kept watch on what befell the mammals, birds, frogs, and fish exposed to the DDT. At first glance, the airborne DDT hadn’t appeared to cause appreciable damage. But then ten hours in, dead fish began to bob to the surface on the Patuxent River. Follow-up tests in well-maintained artificial ponds showed that, even in more diluted concentrations than those used in the spray campaign, DDT still caused massive fish kills. In their first report, the researchers cautioned that the initial excitement about DDT should be “tempered by grave concern.”
Further lab studies ensued. It was unclear if the animals that escaped poisoning in the aerial spraying were simply “lucky,” or if somehow they’d avoided exposure to high doses. In the lab, when wildlife was fed DDT directly, every species tested became gravely ill; many of the animals died outright. No one yet understood precisely how DDT worked. But its symptoms—convulsions, twitching, and rigidity—were leading some researchers to liken it to the nerve poison sarin, a chemical-warfare compound that disrupts nerve impulses in the same way. When ingested, sarin causes asphyxiation by disabling the muscles needed in breathing. In their follow-up report, the researchers noted that the symptoms of DDT poisoning, no matter which animal was tested, seemed to be the same: “excessive nervousness, loss of appetite, tremors, muscular twitching, and persistent rigidity of the leg muscles, the last continuing through death.” Though they didn’t say it outright, the implications for humans weren’t good. Quietly, the laboratory studies continued.
But the growing market for insecticides wasn’t waiting for long-term studies. The chemical companies had a surfeit of product at the end of the war, which they were eager to turn to peacetime uses. They saw a robust new market for DDT among American consumers, a host of commercial possibilities. Soon DDT was being touted as a “must-have” for every American household, a low-cost, easy-to-use domestic product that would banish insect pests forever. Attractive and convenient, it was marketed in shelf paper, “white or tinted to match one’s color scheme.” It was added to soap products and lotions, floor wax and furniture polish, sprays for application to clothing and skin. One could purchase strips “impregnated” with the stuff to hang inside closets and clothing bags. It could be had in “pocket-sized” dispensers perfect for a lady’s purse, or beach and golfing gear. The local hardware store sold special fogging gadgets that attached to the muffler of any lawn mower. While the lawn was being groomed, a mist of lethal poison spewed from the fogger, killing insects on contact. And its utility didn’t stop there. DDT rapidly won acceptance as an effective agricultural and institutional fumigant as well, thanks to aggressive marketing efforts. It was sprayed from airplanes over giant tracts of woodland to control gypsy moths and other problem pests; it was used to douse the walls of hospitals, restaurants, and school kitchens; it was sprayed on suburban neighborhoods where insects were killing trees. In the South, children chased behind the DDT fogging trucks, playing in the white drifts of poison that trailed behind. Airplanes were deployed to spray football stadiums before concerts and big games, to rid them of mosquitoes. DDT could be dispensed as a powder or a liquid spray, through an “electric vaporizing device” or as an aerosol “bomb” that a housewife could release in her own kitchen.
DDT’s status as a miracle compound had been cemented during the war, when it was mass-produced to fight deadly human diseases. In the furious push to prevail against the Axis powers, any questions about its long-term impact on health or the environment were ignored. Now, with the war over, the applications for the poison were expanding more rapidly than science could keep pace. Though tests on DDT’s safety to humans had barely begun, few in government were paying much attention. America in the 1950s was a buoyant and triumphant nation, its citizens at home, if not in bed, with an advanced industrial society. The economy was booming, focused again on consumer goods. The “infallibility of material ingenuity,” as the scientist E. O. Wilson has written, was all but assumed: “An ethic of limitless progress prevailed.” Highways were being built to connect newly minted suburbs to jobs in the city. Farmland was being plowed under to make way for vast housing developments in places like Levittown on Long Island, and the San Fernando Valley outside L.A., where “acres of tract houses . . . almost compensated for the absence of individual character.” It was the dawn of the organization man, the “team player,” the bland GM conservative; the age of household convenience. Science and big business were king, and the spinmeisters of Madison Avenue their spokesmen. The new front, according to the popular press (and the Mad Men with their come-hither sells), was the ongoing battle against insect pests, which, thanks to the almighty reach of technology, could now be won. One ad even went so far as to “place Adolf Hitler’s head onto the body of a beetle.” In July 1945, Time magazine had showcased pictures of the first atomic bomb explosions in Alamogordo, New Mexico, alongside an article extolling the benefits of DDT as the equivalent weapon in the “war on insects.” DDT, like the bomb, was a new technology for a new age, yet another exterminating agent born of the miraculous powers of science. It too could eliminate the enemy almost instantly. But DDT’s powers would be a benefit to mankind, the press suggested, rather than a terrifying agent of its destruction like the bomb.
The war had changed women’s status as well, albeit temporarily. In the heat of the conflict, women working in heavy industry had been a patriotic necessity. Females became pipe fitters and mechanics, welders and carpenters—jobs “previously unthinkable for their sex”—enjoying a dose of economic independence that would be difficult to give up. Ladies’ Home Journal even went so far as to put a woman combat pilot on its cover. Eight million women had joined the workforce in the course of the war, many of them going into relatively skilled factory positions. Two months after the conflict subsided, eight hundred thousand of them were fired from the aircraft industry, and the same went for jobs in the auto industry. J. Edgar Hoover, the director of the FBI, pronounced paid work inappropriate for mothers in any instance. “A mother,” he proclaimed, “already has her war job . . . Her patriotic duty is not on the factory front. It is on the home front!”
Madison Avenue’s postwar message to women, if slightly more covert, was no less constraining. Their pitch was crafted to glamorize consumption. A perfect homemaker was a savvy shopper, the message went, discriminating in her choice of washing machine and toaster, floor wax and tweezers. Her satisfaction would be found in perfectly polished floors and artfully applied makeup, an immaculate house and well-mannered kids. Some “experts” even suggested that a woman’s most important role was to “rebuild her husband’s self-esteem,” which was surely damaged by the discovery that she had successfully held down the fort while he was away.
Carson, for whom work was an economic necessity, was free of some of these pressures. But as an unmarried female scientist, her future was equally limited by the cultural biases and shifts taking place in the wake of the war. High-tech was the way of the future. Obsessed with the remarkable triumphs of the molecular revolution, the scientific community held chemistry and physics in the highest esteem. Conservation biology, by contrast, was barely a blip on the cultural agenda. “To a populace whose forebears had within living memory colonized the interior of a vast continent and whose country had never lost a war, arguments for limit and constraint seemed almost unpatriotic,” writes E. O. Wilson. Though Carson had been steadily promoted, rising seamlessly through the government bureaucracy, she was feeling stuck. Sleep deprived and frequently ill, worn out by her nocturnal writing schedule, she was at a crossroads, trapped in a job to which she was well suited, but which kept her from greater things. “I’m definitely in the mood to make a change of some sort, preferably to something that will give me more time for my own writing,” she confided to a friend. “At this stage that seems the prime necessity.” She wanted to give everything to her own writing, she added, but she knew she couldn’t risk it. Money was still a grinding pressure, and her job paid the bills. She admitted that her life wasn’t “well ordered” and that she didn’t “know where she was going.”
A close, discerning reader, Carson was always on the lookout for ideas she could turn into salable magazine pieces, which by now she was producing at least once a month. Discouragingly, most of what crossed her desk for editing seemed ill suited to the popular press: dry, technical, and achingly dull. Many reports required a complete rewrite, their syntax brutally scrambled, at times almost unintelligible. An organized and purposeful editor, Carson could turn even the most intractable prose into crisp, clean sentences. This was not to say, however, that such travesties against the English language went unremarked. Though tactful with clumsy writers, Carson’s private views “were often more pungent,” a friend, Shirley Briggs, recalled. Briggs and another woman, Kay Howe, were both graphic designers and recent hires, the only other females in the agency. They shared the office next to Rachel’s, and though a decade younger, they soon became her friends, nicknaming her “Ray.” At lunchtime and over “illicit” tea brewed on a hot plate Rachel kept hidden in her closet, the troika of women would huddle over brown bag lunches in Carson’s office, poking fun at the day’s editorial fare. Examples of particularly atrocious prose were read aloud and gleefully dissected, helping to relieve the monotony. “Nothing could pass the wry scrutiny of that gathering and still seem insurmountable . . . ,” Briggs would later recall. “Intransigent official ways, small stupidities, and inept pronouncements were changed from annoyances into sources of merriment.” Briggs said that Rachel always made the best of what was often a bore: “her qualities of zest and humor made even dull stretches of bureaucratic procedure a matter of quiet fun,” she added. It was a side of Carson that few people saw.
Despite the tedium of her duties, occasionally a report crossed Rachel’s desk that snapped her to attention. This was her response the day she began reading the Patuxent reports, which like so many important studies, came to her office for editing. Troubled by what she was reading, Carson immediately issued several press releases warning of DDT’s potential health hazards, the first to the operators of fish-processing facilities, where the pesticide was routinely used for insect control. Recent studies, she warned ominously, suggest that DDT is toxic to humans when ingested, and could contaminate food products with “serious consequences.” A few weeks later, as more findings from Patuxent trickled in, she followed up with a second, more detailed alert. New experiments indicated that DDT killed birds as well as fish, even in diluted concentrations, she reported. DDT “could conceivably do more damage than good.”
Unable to stop thinking about the Patuxent studies, that July Carson proposed a story to Reader’s Digest, explaining that she was in a position to cover the progress of the tests “first hand” and write a “timely” story. “Practically at my backdoor here in Maryland, an experiment of more than ordinary interest and importance is going on,” she wrote. “We have all heard a lot about what DDT will soon do for us by wiping out insect pests. The experiments at Patuxent have been planned to show what other effect DDT may have if applied to wide areas.”
At issue, as she saw it, was not just the elimination of a few species; it was the possibility of disrupting the entire web of life. But in July 1945, Carson was a voice crying in the wilderness. Reader’s Digest, never keen on downbeat stories, politely declined. Though Carson continued to worry about DDT, her attention turned elsewhere.
IN THE SPRING OF 1946, ITCHING TO GET OUT IN THE FIELD, CARSON initiated a series of conservation booklets. The idea was to describe the federal wildlife preserves—and to make a compelling case for their importance. At the time, natural resource conservation was still anathema to many Americans. In some quarters, local residents were actively hostile to the idea of preserves, which they saw as impinging upon their hunting rights. It was Rachel’s hope to change that sentiment. While others would contribute to the series, Rachel did the bulk of the writing, Shirley Briggs and Kay Howe the illustrations, which meant that one or the other traveled with her for the fieldwork. It was the beginning of an interlude Rachel would later remember as more carefree and satisfying than any she had known.
The conservation booklets were extremely popular, their beauty and narrative sweep an anomaly in the world of government publications. The fifth in the series, titled “Guarding Our Wildlife Resources,” was different from the others, however; rather than spotlighting a single sanctuary, as Rachel had done in the earlier booklets, it was an appraisal of the overall state of wildlife conservation in the nation. Rachel framed it as a “serial tragedy,” writes Souder. It was presented as a tale of plenitude “repeatedly squandered,” habitat and species losses differing only in the degree and magnitude of their devastation. Yet even with all this, she assured readers, small gains were beginning to appear: species on the verge of extinction were coming back. These hopeful developments, she added, were due to a rising awareness that problems in nature couldn’t be tackled “in isolation.” Whether this was actually so was debatable; certainly it was Carson’s hope. But it fed into her deeper purpose, which was to emphasize the interconnectedness that undergirded the living world. Conservation, she gently explained, was not only a safety net for endangered species, it served the entirety of existence: “Wildlife, water, forests, grasslands—all are parts of man’s essential environment; the conservation and effective use of one is impossible except as the others are also concerned.” Already prophetic in her ecological approach, Rachel’s thinking was a subtle departure from the guiding tenets of conservation up until then, which had been forged to serve the interests of commerce and the hunting fraternity. Rachel was already speaking to the future, to a movement that was still to coalesce.
IT HAS BEEN SAID THAT REVOLUTIONS DON’T TAKE PLACE IN A VACUUM, that certain ideas in the air seem to surface in multiple places during times of critical change. Coincidental or not, in 1948, the same year Carson published “Guarding Our Wildlife Resources,” another seminal figure in the still-embryonic environmental movement, a writer named Aldo Leopold, learned that the book he’d been chipping away at for seven long years had finally found a publisher. A former U.S. Forest Service employee, Leopold was a gentle, Thoreau-like character, a naturalist and sometime hermit who had been teaching at the University of Wisconsin for some years. His book, penned while he lived alone for stretches in a shack he kept in the Wisconsin woods, was a record of his reflections on the natural world. Though Leopold died barely a week after receiving the good news, he would live on in legend as one of the great heroes of the sixties counterculture, his book, later titled A Sand County Almanac, becoming a bible of the environmental movement when it was reissued in 1966.
In one of the book’s essays, Leopold introduced an idea that echoed Carson’s own. Humankind’s place in the world was not as a “conqueror of the land community,” he suggested, but as a “plain member and citizen of it.” All organisms in nature were part of “a biotic community,” which depended on the totality of the earth’s creatures for its stability. It was a mistake, he believed, to reduce conservation to a tool that served economic ends; it should be undertaken to serve the entirety of existence. “A thing is right,” he wrote, “when it tends to preserve the integrity, stability and beauty of the biotic community. It is wrong when it tends otherwise.” Leopold’s point, like Carson’s, was that nature “was in charge of humanity and not the other way around.” “We fancy that industry supports us, forgetting what supports industry.” Both were arguing for a broader and more holistic vision of preservation. Conservation, they insisted, couldn’t be confined to a narrow swath of the natural world, but was “of necessity” about the preservation of the elaborate relationships that made up the larger community. Protecting nature was protecting our own interests, since humankind was not apart from nature but of it. It was a markedly different view of where humankind stood in nature’s pecking order. Leopold, like Carson, was seeing the world from an ecological point of view. “We are only fellow-voyageurs with other creatures in the odyssey of evolution,” Leopold observed, “but for one difference—technology had given man the whip hand over nature.” Like Carson, he felt the whole idea of undesirable species was “entirely synthetic.”
BY 1948, CARSON WAS STARTING TO THINK ABOUT A NEW BOOK, ONE that would probe mankind’s dependence on the ocean, which she felt was growing in urgency as modern civilization plundered more of the land. Her regret over the commercial failure of her first book was fading, and she was intrigued by the oceanographic knowledge that had been surfacing in the years since the war, eager to be inside a big project again. Though she revealed little to friends, many at the office suspected she was working on something. The librarian at the Department of the Interior noted her requests each morning for a bewildering array of books and articles. Another colleague remembers seeing piles of technical volumes burying the back seat of her car.
Rachel’s perseverance was by now legendary. Bob Hines, who illustrated many of her books, recalls Rachel working in Maine, standing in the tide pools through an entire tidal cycle. She would grow so cold and numb in the icy water that she couldn’t feel her feet or walk back over the rocks. Bob would have to wade in and carry her to the shore, where her mother would be waiting with a blanket to wrap her in. Once warm again, however, she’d wade back into the water and resume her work.
Rachel plowed through exceedingly technical papers with the same kind of obsessive determination, corresponding with scientists and oceanographers throughout the world. For all her social reticence, she was never shy about approaching scientific experts, no matter how eminent, if in the service of her work. Graciously, unobtrusively, she solicited the information she needed, often asking those same specialists to read and review her work later for its accuracy. Wise about cultivating alliances, gentle in her approach, she came off as earnest and unthreatening, exceedingly respectful of others’ expertise, which in the competitive world of science was no doubt disarming. Rachel asked each new scientist she interviewed for an introduction to the next, in this way building a vast and loyal network of people to whom she could turn. Unafraid to express her gratitude, secure enough to let herself be small, she always gave credit where credit was due. In some respects, hers was a very “female” style. Rather than competing, she worked to foster connections with those to whom she spoke. She was unashamed to be, in some senses, reliant.
Sometime during this period, during a birding expedition, Rachel and Shirley Briggs came upon the celebrated nature writer Louis Halle. Overcoming her normal reticence, Rachel approached Halle, expressing her appreciation for his work. Halle, who had no idea whom he was talking to, later remembered her as quiet and diffident, wholly without affectation. There was “something about her of the nineteenth century,” he said. “She had dignity; she was serious.” She gave him no hint that she was considering another book, but “put herself in the role of the pupil,” not a fellow practitioner. He remembered her as being “always attentive, always listening, always wanting to know.” She could not have “got away from being a simple human being,” he felt. It was not until the enormous success of her next book, The Sea Around Us, that Halle realized, with some embarrassment, that he been giving advice to one of the most famous nature writers of their time.
BY THE FALL OF 1948, RACHEL HAD COMPLETED WHAT SHE HOPED WAS A solid first chapter for the new book. A friend recommended she find a literary agent, and after interviewing several, she settled on a former editor and mystery writer named Marie Rodell, who was opening her own agency. Although they couldn’t have been more different, the two women took to each other immediately when they met for lunch at the Algonquin Hotel in New York. Rodell was a shameless extrovert—urbane, quick-witted, flamboyant, a chain-smoker with a raucous laugh and a penchant for strappy heels. She was a sharp negotiator, but had a reputation for integrity. Rachel signed on as her first client.
That November Rachel received shattering news. Mary Scott Skinker was dying of cancer. Skinker, who had been teaching in Chicago, was found collapsed in her apartment and rushed to the hospital. She gave Rachel’s name as the person to contact. Rachel left immediately for Chicago, where she stayed with her friend until she lost consciousness. Three weeks later, Skinker was dead. Rachel was devastated. Mary Scott Skinker had fired her imagination and seeded her “ecological consciousness,” Lear notes, encouraged her ambitions and been a model for what an unmarried female scientist could achieve. Beyond her mother, Rachel had loved her former teacher more profoundly than anyone else she knew, remaining in touch despite the geographical distance between them. With Skinker’s death, she lost her most beloved friend.
By July, Rachel needed a break. She and her mother drove to Boothbay Harbor, Maine, where they rented a cottage on the shore of a saltwater estuary of the Sheepscot River. Surrounded by birch and spruce, the house was so close to the water, Rachel told Briggs, “that if you jumped out the windows on one side, you would fall in.” There were no other cottages in sight, she added, the only sounds the “sharp, staccato cries of the gulls” and the sluice of water against the rocks. “The gulls go so high,” they looked like “stars.” Rachel spent the week bird-watching and wading through the tide pools near the shore. Every evening she watched the herrings’ twilight arrival in the cove: “Suddenly the silken sheet would be dimpled by a thousand little noses pushing against the water film. It would be streaked by a thousand little ripples moving eagerly toward the shore . . . Then the herring would begin flipping into the air . . . They looked like silvery coins skipped along the surface.” Overwhelmed by the beauty, Rachel wrote that if she could only figure out a way to do it, she would gladly spend the rest of her life in Maine.
RACHEL HAD BEEN WORKING ON THE NEW BOOK FOR ALMOST A YEAR when Rodell called to say that Oxford was interested. Rachel was elated, as she had been writing without any guarantee of a publisher. The advance was small, but Oxford was highly reputable. Within weeks a contract was signed, and by July, she had made plans for a helmet dive in Florida, asking Shirley Briggs to come along. The trip was a bust, though it would become a legendary feature of Rachel’s biography. The winds were up that week, turning the seas choppy; the skies were brooding. Every time Rachel ventured out, she had to turn back. To kill time, she and Shirley walked the beach and lunched at the local Howard Johnson’s. Finally, near the end of the trip, Rachel suited up in her helmet diving gear—a glass-fronted metal helmet hitched to an air hose attached to a pump—and in a protected area that was barely eight feet deep, climbed unsteadily down a ladder that almost touched the sand. A weak swimmer anyway, she clung to the ladder in a state of semiterror, and for a few minutes peered out of her faceplate, discombobulated by the “whooshing sounds of the pump” pushing air down the hose and into her helmet. She sighted a few colorful fish and then, heart pounding, struggled back up the ladder. Writing to an acquaintance later, she referred expansively to her “diving experiences,” claiming that the difference between having dived and not dived was “tremendous.” It was a rare instance of overstatement, amusing, no doubt, even to her.
All that winter Rachel pushed hard. She’d taken a month’s leave from work, but was so behind now that she was bringing her office work home at night, defeating the purpose. Her niece Marjorie had been ill and the family had to move. Writing to Rodell, she tried to strike an optimistic tone about her progress. “Despite everything it begins to seem as though the book might some day be finished—that never has seemed possible to me until now.”
By mid-February 1950, the pressure had become grueling: “None of the present or future is very favorable for the last desperate push but I am grimly determined to finish somehow. I feel now that I’d die if this went on much longer!”
A month later, still having to take office work home at night and on weekends: “Not a single walk, and spring almost gone! I am really upset about it, but don’t seem to have the energy to tuck that in too.” She mentioned the push she and others at the office were making to get the work there to the printers: “Then we shall all quietly relapse into a sanitarium, if I am not there already owing to the added strain of my own literary affairs.”
Finally, in July 1950, she handed in the manuscript. She was surprised by how bereft she felt: “Oddly enough, I am less relieved at being delivered of my book than I expected,” she told a friend.
Money worries, meanwhile, worsened. The second installment of her Oxford advance arrived, but it fell short of her expenses. She had hoped Rodell would be able to sell chapters as she completed them. But so far, of the twenty or so magazines Rodell approached, all had politely declined, even The Atlantic, who sat on the chapters Rodell sent for a full three months before finally saying no. “I don’t like Miss Carson’s writing at all,” responded an editor at Town & Country. Rachel tried not to feel dejected. She was thinking about a new title, The Sea Around Us, still polishing sections she thought needed reworking.
Then something gave. Science Digest made an offer of $50 for a condensed version of one of Carson’s chapters. Rodell was on the verge of saying yes when word arrived from a more unexpected quarter. She heard from Edith Oliver, a young, up-and-coming editor at The New Yorker. Oliver had written radio quiz shows before joining the ranks of The New Yorker, where she read submissions and, when she could, contributed droll pieces for the “Talk of the Town.” A high-spirited character with an original voice, she was a discerning reader; eventually she would serve as the magazine’s drama critic for thirty years. Oliver told Rodell that she was impressed with Carson’s excerpt from The Sea Around Us; she wondered if she could see more.
Rachel tried to keep her hopes in check. She was aware that the smart and sophisticated magazine held the power to change a writer’s life. Oliver continued to express interest in seeing more chapters. By the middle of the summer, she had read five and asked for another eight, each time sending them on to William Shawn, The New Yorker’s editor-in-chief, with her recommendation. Rachel, who assumed the magazine was deliberating over which chapter to take, tried to be patient. Finally, in mid-August Rodell got word that The New Yorker was not interested in publishing a chapter from The Sea Around Us; they wanted to excerpt most of the book, a highly unusual turn, even then. Carson was stunned and, of course, elated. Shawn would do the condensation, as well as the editing.
More good news followed. Rachel had already begun planning her next project, a seashore guide, which Paul Brooks at Houghton Mifflin now signed on to publish. She applied for a Guggenheim grant and got it. Up until then she had been broke, unable to come up with the $150 she needed to buy back the rights to her first book, which was now out of print. She hoped to find a publisher to reissue it, preferably as soon as The Sea Around Us came out. In May, when The New Yorker check for $5,200 arrived, Rachel couldn’t believe it; it was equal to a year of her government salary. Feeling the wind at her back, she decided to apply for a year’s leave without pay from the FWS. She told Rodell she hoped the book would do well enough to tide her over for a few years. “If I’m not solidly established as a full time writer by that time I ought to be shot anyway,” she added.
The only ripple in all this bright news was a small matter. Four weeks after hearing from The New Yorker, Rachel told Rodell she would be in the hospital for a few days. She explained she was going to have a “small cyst or tumor” removed from her left breast. The surgery was minor, she assured Rodell. “The operation will probably turn out to be so trivial that any dope could do it,” she added. “But of course there is, in such cases, always the possibility that a much more drastic procedure will prove necessary.” She would be in excellent hands, she said. She was going to “get it over with next week.”
The mass removed from Carson’s breast was benign and she quickly put the event behind her.
THE SERIALIZATION OF THE SEA AROUND US APPEARED IN THE NEW Yorker over three consecutive weeks in June 1951. It ran as a profile, a legendary corner of the magazine that had always been reserved for portraits of people. The first piece in the series ran for an astonishing fifty-nine pages, and readers were enthralled, writing in at once to express their admiration for its author, who had made the sea come beguilingly to life. Alice Longworth, President Theodore Roosevelt’s daughter and a woman of considerable influence in her own right, phoned Rachel in a state of breathless excitement. She had spent the night reading the profile—finished at 5 A.M.—then read it a second time. She said it was “the most marvelous thing she had ever read!”
The critics were equally enchanted. When the full book arrived two weeks later, they were unstinting in their praise, lavishing it with superlatives. Newsweek called its lyrical style “hypnotic.” Others remarked on its “biblical sweep.” There was consensus that it was “one of the most beautiful books of our time.” A critic for the Atlantic Monthly marveled that a marine biologist could “write what is a first-rate scientific tract with the charm of an elegant novelist and the lyric persuasiveness of a poet.” The Buffalo Evening News described it as “half-way between the Thoreau of the Journal and the Darwin of the Beagle,” calling it “a superb book.”
It was inevitable, perhaps, given the era’s general view of women as second-class citizens, that some of the enormous praise heaped on Carson sounded vaguely patronizing. Male readers expressed surprise that a woman had written such a rigorous book, the suggestion being that the difficulties of science and the physical dangers of the sea should have made the subject inaccessible to her. One reader addressed his fan letter to “Miss RC,” but began it with “Dear Sir,” explaining that the salutation was because “he had always been convinced that males possess the supreme intellectual powers of the world, and he could not bring himself to reverse the conviction.” The Boston Post described Carson as “both bold and feminine,” as if such qualities were rarely paired. Perhaps, the Post conjectured, she was a mermaid. “Apparently there are few photographs of Miss Carson . . . but we have worked this out. Rachel is probably no lady scientist at all, but an enchantress who lives in a cave under the sea and there the light is awfully bad for pictures of authors.” Even John Leonard, in his glowing review for the New York Times, allowed that it was a “pity that the book’s publishers did not print on its jacket a photograph of Miss Carson. It would be pleasant to know what a woman looks like who can write about an exacting science with such beauty and precision.”
Within weeks, to Rachel’s confusion, she was a household name, the subject of profiles in scores of publications. Everyone wondered who this woman was who had written so eloquently about the wind and the waves and the birth of islands, the sweep of the tides and the origin of storms. Carson told interviewers that the “backbone” of her book was “just plain hard slogging,” searching through the “exceedingly technical papers of scientists for the kernels of fact to weld into my profile of the sea.” In truth, it went far beyond this modest explanation. Carson’s genius was a rare sort of alchemy: the ability to transform dry, seemingly lifeless concepts about biology, physics, and geology into beautiful and animated stories—stories so enchanting that few could put her book down. What drew readers to Carson’s writing was its gentle explanations of large and complex things. But also to something else: Carson’s book, as Lear notes, touched a deeper yearning that many at that moment were feeling.
It was 1951 and Americans were terrified of nuclear Armageddon, worried about sending their sons to a war in Korea they didn’t believe in, haunted by Joseph McCarthy’s witch hunt for domestic Communists. As William Styron wrote, theirs was a generation traumatized not only by the “almost unimaginable presence of the bomb, but by the realization that the entire mess was not finished after all: there was now the Cold War to face, and its clammy presence oozed into our nights and days.” Carson’s book, by focusing on time’s eternal cycles, the birth and death of continents and seas, gave readers another perspective on the pressures they were feeling, a longer yardstick by which to measure time and man-made problems. Carson was giving readers another way of seeing, a temporary lift from life’s anxieties and dissonances, which was deeply reassuring.
The Sea Around Us made the New York Times bestseller list on July 22, 1951, where it remained for the next eighty-six weeks. By November 8, sales had reached one hundred thousand; by Christmas it was flying out of bookstores at a rate of four thousand copies a day, and had climbed to number 1. Carson was in fine company that season. Also on the bestseller list were Herman Wouk’s The Caine Mutiny, James Jones’s From Here to Eternity, and a powerful little novel by J. D. Salinger called The Catcher in the Rye. The Sea would eventually appear in thirty-two languages.
CARSON WAS FEELING INCREASINGLY AMBUSHED BY ALL THE ATTENTION. Wary of the public eye, unaccustomed to being a subject of scrutiny, she found the crush of publicity unnerving, the invasions of her privacy hard to understand. While thrilled by the glowing reviews, and cheered, of course, by book sales, she was less comfortable with the attention directed at her private life. The Saturday Review had run a long biographical profile of her in its July 7 issue, in addition to a review, putting her picture on the cover, which she found unsettling. “I’m pleased to have people say nice things about the book,” she told a friend, “but all this stuff about me seems odd, to say the least.” Shy at heart, uncomfortable speaking off the cuff, she dreaded the personal exposure that came with her sudden renown. In this, she was a curious combination. While she craved the rewards that attended her success, especially the financial security it brought, she would always shun the limelight, feeling it was enough to write her books and send them out into the world. No matter how often she had to appear in public, she never got over her wariness. When she gave speeches, and she would deliver many over the next several years, she never digressed from her prepared text, which she wrote out on three-by-five note cards. Nor did she modulate her voice, which was steady but flat, never imbued with the incandescence that lit up her books. Rodell was continually reprimanding her for refusing interview requests. She urged Rachel to put in more public appearances, to go to cocktail parties, agree to more book signings. Rachel politely declined, claiming her work couldn’t go forward this way. What distressed her most, she said, was how easily people violated her privacy. Once, she told Paul Brooks, she was in a beauty parlor, in a strange town, when she was summoned from under the hair dryer by someone who wanted to meet her: “I admit I felt hardly at my best, with a towel around my neck and my hair in pin curls.” Another time, a knock came at the door of her motel and a determined woman pushed past her mother to find a drowsy Rachel still in bed. Insistent nonetheless, the woman presented two books for her to autograph, which Rachel found unbelievable. She was barely able to hide her annoyance.
In early January, Carson was stunned to learn she’d won the prestigious National Book Award. The award ceremony took place at the Commodore Hotel in New York a few weeks later. Dressed in a demure silk dress and a fashionable feathered toque, an exceedingly nervous Carson shared the head table with the poet Marianne Moore, who was bedecked, as always, in her trademark tricornered black hat.
Her speech that evening was pithy. Rising to speak to the overflow audience, Carson sounded a theme she had been thinking about for some time: the growing elitism and insularity of science, a worrisome trend in the culture, she felt. “We live in a scientific age; yet we assume that knowledge of science is a prerogative of only a small number of human beings, isolated and priestlike in their laboratories,” she said. This is not true, she insisted. “The materials of science were the materials of life itself.” It is impossible to understand man “without understanding his environment and the forces that had molded him physically and mentally”—forces that had been at work for billions of years. Viewed this way, she suggested, human follies appear in a far different light. “Perhaps if we reversed the telescope and looked at man down these long vistas, we should find less time and inclination to plan for our own destruction,” she added, in a barely veiled reference to the horrors of the nuclear age.
It was a subject Rachel would return to again and again, mankind’s increasing disconnection from the natural world. “Mankind has gone very far into an artificial world of his own creation,” she observed in a later speech to more than a thousand women journalists. “He has sought to insulate himself,” with “steel and concrete, from the realities of earth and water” and the growing seed. “Intoxicated with his own power, he seems to be going farther and farther into experiments for the destruction of himself and his world,” she added, referring again to the nuclear peril. The answer, she suggested, was that “the more clearly we can focus our attention on the wonders and realities of the universe about us, the less taste we shall have for destruction.”
IN THE SUMMER OF 1952, FINANCIALLY SECURE FOR THE FIRST TIME IN her life, Carson quit her job and bought some land in Maine. It was on Southport Island, near Boothbay Harbor, a tiny lot just 350 feet deep. But it had everything she wanted: shoreline frontage, a spruce and fir wood, tide pools teeming with sea creatures, what was almost a beach. Rachel ordered a kit house that could be assembled by the following summer. It would have a writing studio and a long deck with white railings, a red brick fireplace and walls of knotty pine.
Southport was a slow-moving, old-fashioned place. Many of its long-standing residents, including Dorothy and Stan Freeman, had been summering there for years. The summer before, the Freemans’ children had given them a copy of The Sea Around Us, which they’d both loved. When Dorothy learned that its celebrated author had bought land so close to them on Southport, she decided to send a welcome note, mailing it to Rachel’s publisher, with no expectation that she would hear back. Rachel, however, was delighted. She wrote back immediately, thanking Dorothy for her “charming and thoughtful” greeting. She added that she hoped Dorothy and Stan would stop by and introduce themselves in June.
They didn’t make it until July 12, 1953, calling on Rachel just after supper. Rachel found them warm and genial. Stan was tall and lanky, an avid sailor and a passionate photographer. Dorothy had a spirit and vitality Rachel instantly liked. They were older than Carson, but they shared her love of the Maine coast. Rachel insisted they come back in a few weeks for a collecting expedition, when the tides would be lower on her beach. That visit was convivial too. The little party collected shreds of algae and clots of mud in small specimen bottles. Then, back at the cottage, after tea by the fire, they looked through Carson’s microscope at what they’d collected. Dorothy expressed surprise that Rachel seemed so unimposing, so natural. She seemed “tiny” and wore a “wistful expression.” She sensed in Rachel a deep, buried sadness. She wondered if she’d been overwhelmed by her sudden celebrity. On Rachel’s end, she was sorry to learn the Freemans were leaving so soon. She wrote to Dorothy to say good-bye, suggesting that they henceforth call each other by their first names. Dorothy wrote back immediately, expressing her worry that she might be interfering with Rachel’s work. Rachel assured her she was not, that she welcomed Dorothy’s letters. Writing, she confided, was often a difficult and lonely endeavor. She urged Dorothy to keep writing letters and not to worry about interrupting her work.
A flurry of letters now passed between them, multiple mailings a week, becoming more open and descriptive with each exchange. Rachel said she was having trouble getting started on a new chapter; perhaps, she mused, it might be easier if she typed the words “Dear Dorothy” on the first page. She hadn’t realized she was lonely, she said. In passing she mentioned she would be in Boston at the end of the year for a scientific meeting. She wondered if Dorothy would meet her for lunch. Dorothy wrote back to suggest that rather than just meeting for lunch, Rachel should come visit them in West Bridgewater, so they could spend the whole afternoon and evening together before she caught the train back to Maryland. Rachel’s return letter barely hid her “disappointment” at not having time alone with Dorothy. She told Dorothy she liked to imagine arriving in Boston and “stepping off the train into your arms,” even though she knew this was impossible. She said she was struggling with the book, “going mad.” She wrote at length about her favorite authors. She wanted Dorothy to know them, she explained, to share everything she loved. She had never been so unguarded, so magnetically drawn to another person. It was the beginning of what for both women would be a profound and startling connection.
Rachel’s lecture in Boston went well. She filled it with emerging science, with thoughts about evolution and ecology, the delicate balance between living creatures and the fragile ecosystem that sustained all life. As she approached the auditorium door to leave, she was amazed to see Dorothy standing there. Rachel impulsively kissed her. “We didn’t plan it this way did we?” she whispered. They went back to Rachel’s hotel room and sat together on the bed, smiling shyly at each other, unsure of what to do. Driving back to Dorothy’s house in West Bridgewater, they stopped the car a moment, both women aware they wanted to say something, though neither daring. Whatever it was that was happening, they couldn’t stop it, nor did either want to. On the train home that evening, Rachel referred in a letter to being able to feel “the sweet tenderness” of Dorothy’s presence. She felt sure “Dorothy had sensed the same thing about her after she was gone.” Later Rachel and Dorothy would refer to this time as “the thirteen hours” when a “little oasis of peace” entered their lives. Rachel felt it had been “truly perfect.” There was “not a single thing” she would change about Dorothy, she said. From that moment forward, they began to call each other “Darling” and, in their letters, to openly express their love.
Both women now worried that Stan and Rachel’s mother might be hurt by things they shared with each other in their letters, that the “craziness” between them might be misconstrued. Given the number of letters flying between them, and the length of some, it seemed awkward to read aloud just one paragraph. Rachel said they needn’t discuss it further, that they both understood. What they should do, she suggested, was to write two letters, one “general and newsy,” the other for their eyes only, which could be folded inside the general letter. They called these private notes “apples.” Whenever one or the other felt something she’d written should remain confidential, she said it should be “put in the strongbox.” Months now passed and the letters grew longer and more demonstrative, sometimes arriving one a day. At one point Dorothy suggested they stop until the seashore book was finished, imagining it would help Rachel’s concentration. Rachel wouldn’t hear of it. In a letter unlike any she had ever written, she told Dorothy she’d been in love with her even before she and Stan had left Maine the summer before. She said she needed to have Dorothy in her life, comparing their love to the parable in which a man said that if he had only two pennies, he would spend one on bread and the other to buy a “white hyacinth for his soul.” Dorothy was her “white hyacinth,” Rachel wrote. Without her, life was now unimaginable. From that moment forward, the two always referred to Carson’s avowal as “the Hyacinth Letter.” The flower itself became an emblem of all they felt for each other.
The seashore book, which Carson and Brooks had envisioned as a “field guide,” was now years behind schedule. Carson traveled to the Florida Keys, exploring its reefs and mangrove swamps; to Myrtle Beach, South Carolina, to collect sensory impressions; to St. Simons Island, Georgia, to wade the vast tidal flats. She returned to Woods Hole, to use their world-class science library. When she updated Brooks, she claimed to be making progress. But privately she knew she was stuck. She wrote to tell him she was taking a short break, that she thought she was “over-concentrating.” But it was more than that: Rachel was blocked. How ironic, she told herself, that with nothing to impede her travel or her work, no full-time job requiring her to limit her writing time only to nights, that she should find herself at such a standstill. This had never happened before—her time had always been too pressed for such a luxury—and eventually, once she got some distance, she realized the problem: the book wanted to be something else, not a simple field guide, with sketches of individual creatures, but a story with an “overarching narrative.” What she needed, in effect, was to start over: to describe the shoreline as a web of living communities, played upon by a collision of shifting forces, much as she’d done for the ocean’s depths in The Sea Around Us. In short, she needed to take an ecological point of view, to approach her subject more holistically. “As I write of it,” she told Brooks, “it sounds so very easy; why is it such agony to put on paper?”
Rachel returned to work, but her involvement with Dorothy continued to deepen. She regretted “having taken so long to put into words” what she felt for Dorothy, she wrote. “How blind I was not to realize sooner that I should say it!” What they were experiencing, she said, was a process of “discovery” in which “each progressive stage of getting to know each other led to still more urgent feelings.” She found herself continuously fighting the temptation to drop her work to go and see Dorothy. “But, oh darling, I want to be with you so terribly that it hurts!” she confessed. They had discovered that sometimes there was an eerie and marvelous synchronicity between them: the same thought would occur to each at the same moment. They called these inexplicable occurrences “stardust.”
Rachel began her rewrite, determined to resist all distractions. But in mid-May 1954, a moment presented itself that she couldn’t let pass. Stan Freeman was away on a business trip. She and Dorothy decided to travel up to Maine together, eager to spend the time in the place they most loved. Their brief idyll passed as if in a dream. They filled their days with drowsy breakfasts, with bird sightings and walks in the pine-scented woods. Sometimes they read aloud from the books they loved: The Wind in the Willows, E. B. White’s Charlotte’s Web. They stayed at Rachel’s mostly, taking their dinners late, lounging before the fire long into the night, reveling in their hours together, the tenderness and the incessant talk, never wanting it to end. Afterward, Dorothy likened their visit to a “symphony.” Rachel dubbed it “the Hundred Hours.” Both would refer to it later as their “Maytime.”
Rachel and Dorothy gathered their memories, slowly and carefully, like sea glass from the beach, quietly building their private world. They returned to them in reverie, savoring the comforts and pleasures of their shared affinities. But such interludes, though they would slowly accumulate as the years passed, were in fact rare. Much of what passed between them took place not in person, but from afar, in the day-to-day moments of reflection they exchanged in their letters. At bottom, theirs would always be a long-distance love, with all the longings and excitements and idealizations this entailed. In the long months that followed each summer’s leave-taking, it was their mutual passion for the natural world that bound them, a love that ran deep as an underground river. Rachel wrote to Dorothy of lilac skies and the sleighlike chorus of spring peepers, of the thrill she felt at the arrival of the spring tides. Dorothy answered with her own impressions of the wild places they loved, the beauty of nature, and the rugged Maine coastline.
Dorothy’s devotion to Stan was unwavering, which she knew Rachel understood. There was nothing between them they felt they couldn’t say. She once wrote Rachel a beautiful and melancholic letter explaining the meaning she attached to her marriage. She felt lucky, she said, to have lived such a rich and feeling life. And yet, there was a part of her that belonged to Rachel alone. “Darling,” she wrote, “you and I on our Island are looking at a light so bright—invisible to others—a glorious, miraculous light that has brought to me . . . untold happiness.”
But their circumstances would never be comparable, which on some level they must have known. For Rachel, Dorothy was the “one great love of her life,” although her world would always be her writing. Dorothy was happily married with a large and close-knit family. She cherished the time she shared with Rachel, but her life would have been rich and full even without it.
RACHEL AND DOROTHY REVELED IN THE RITUALS OF CHRISTMAS. IT WAS always a time of taking stock: looking back at the shared moments they treasured, looking forward in anticipation of the times ahead. For the Christmas holidays of 1954, they were planning a few days alone in New York. They would stay at either the St. Moritz or the Barbizon-Plaza, somewhere, said Rachel, “out of range.” Rachel worried that were they both to arrive at the hotel at the same moment, they would be unable to contain their feelings until they reached their room. Dorothy felt sure they could feign an offhand air.
Rachel and Dorothy passed two nights together in New York. Afterward, Dorothy wrote to say that she had “no regrets” about any of it “thus far.” Oddly, Rachel’s response was unusually reticent. She said she could now return to her writing with new energy, and that it had been “a lovely interlude.” Had intimacies passed between them that they now wished to disclaim? “Sex seems not to have been part of their relationship, or at least not an essential feature of it,” Souder ventures. “Their surviving correspondence describes a transcendent, romantic friendship that existed in a realm above ordinary physical love and desire.” As they were rarely together, he adds, their relationship seems to have “existed mainly on paper and in their own hearts and minds.”
CARSON DELIVERED THE FINISHED MANUSCRIPT OF THE EDGE OF THE Sea on March 15, 1955. It was three years behind schedule, but everyone at Houghton Mifflin was pleased, convinced that they had another bestseller on their hands. This book was by far Rachel’s most personal, the only one written in the first person, and the only one drawn almost entirely from her own fieldwork. Like its predecessor, it was filled with uncommon beauty, a lyric sweep even more seductive than the earlier book, which had now sold more than a million copies. Once again it was serialized in The New Yorker, and widely lauded by the critics, praised for its “lucid yet poetic force and simplicity,” its “direct crystal clear prose.” Four weeks after its publication on October 26, 1955, The Edge of the Sea climbed onto the bestseller list. By early December it had stepped up to number 4. Carson was elated. She was now the most popular nature writer in America.
All that remaining winter, Rachel felt happy and fulfilled. She and Dorothy were bursting with plans and the book continued to do well. And then quite abruptly family troubles intruded. One morning in October 1956, Maria Carson “toppled over like a felled tree” on the kitchen floor; it was clear to Rachel that she could no longer leave her mother untended. Three months later, her young niece Marjorie fell ill and was hospitalized for pneumonia and severe anemia; she seemed for a while to be getting better. But something went terribly wrong during her convalescence. Within weeks of returning home, Marjorie died at age thirty-one. Maria Carson was now eighty-eight; Rachel was just shy of her fiftieth birthday. There was no choice but to adopt Marjorie’s five-year-old son, Roger, who was now Rachel’s charge. Marjorie’s sister, Virginia, wanted no part of raising a child; Rachel’s brother, Robert, was “openly hostile” to the boy.
IN THE SUMMER OF 1957, A WOMAN NAMED OLGA HUCKINS LOOKED ON helplessly as a federal crop duster flew overhead, dousing her Duxbury, Massachusetts, property with a rain of DDT mixed with fuel oil. The aerial spraying, which went on intermittently all summer, was part of a massive, three-state government campaign to rid the Northeast of mosquitoes, tent caterpillars, and gypsy moths. The first time it occurred, Huckins watched as the supposed “harmless shower” of poison killed seven songbirds in her yard outright. By the next morning, there were three more corpses at her back door, and others scattered around her birdbath. She saw a robin drop suddenly from a branch. When she padded over to investigate, she noted that the beaks of the lifeless birds were open and “gaping”; their “splayed claws were drawn up to their breasts in agony.” Yet all summer, she observed, the mosquitoes were more “voracious” than ever, while grasshoppers, bees, and other harmless insects were all but gone.
In January, infuriated by a glib letter in the Boston Herald claiming there had been no wildlife loss linked to the spraying, Huckins, who was a former writer for the Boston Post, responded with a letter of her own, enumerating all she had seen. “The testers must have used black glasses,” she remarked acidly. “And the trout that did not feel the poison were super-fish.” Calling the government spraying “undemocratic and probably unconstitutional,” she closed with a plea to halt the aerial spraying program immediately. Then, pulling the letter from her typewriter, she sent it to the Herald, where it appeared a few days later. She also mailed a copy to Rachel Carson, a casual friend, whose book she had once reviewed, hoping she might know people in Washington who could help.
Huckins’s attempt to enlist Carson was perfectly directed. Rachel had never stopped thinking about the dangers of DDT since 1945, when she had tried to interest Reader’s Digest in an article. Now, with Huckins’s letter—and with two massive federal spray campaigns in progress, each with the unconditional support of the pesticide industry—she was returned again to the urgency of the problem.
Recently, and perhaps not so coincidentally, Rachel had learned of a group of fourteen Long Island residents who were suing the government over just this issue. Led by an energetic woman named Marjorie Spock, the plaintiffs were seeking a permanent halt to all government spraying of DDT over private land. The trial was coming up soon. Spock was the eccentric younger sister of the celebrated pediatrician and later antiwar activist Benjamin Spock. Buoyant and audacious, seemingly tireless, she had forsaken Smith College to study abroad with Rudolf Steiner, a quasi-mystical philosopher who advocated a variant of organic agriculture called “biodynamic gardening.” Upon her return, Spock and her live-in partner, Mary Richards, “a digestive invalid,” had put in an organic garden to help with Mary’s health. It was onto this garden that federal crop dusters had repeatedly showered DDT throughout the summer of 1957, as part of the same spray program that Huckins described to Rachel in her letter.
Rachel didn’t see herself as an investigative reporter. But she did feel it was critical that a seasoned journalist cover the suit, so she wrote The New Yorker’s E. B. White, urging him to take it on. White, also the author of the beloved children’s classic Charlotte’s Web, had been one of the first to sound the alarm about the potential dangers of DDT, writing a piece for the magazine soon after the war. Like Rachel, he owned a house in Maine, a state rumored to be included in the summer’s spray campaign; the subject, she reasoned, would touch him personally. White wrote back immediately to say he couldn’t do it. But he agreed the issue was of “utmost concern.” He would pass on her letter to Shawn, he promised, with a suggestion that he find a reporter for the story. Perhaps, he added gently, Carson should consider writing the piece herself.
RACHEL’S INITIAL RESERVATIONS ABOUT TAKING ON THE PROJECT WERE complicated. With Marjorie’s death the year before, her life was changed. At six Roger was a handful. He had a short attention span and could be distressingly energetic. In a letter to Rodell, Rachel described him as “lively as 17 crickets.” At moments, she said, she was the only person who could “hold him down.” He was also physically fragile, vulnerable to respiratory problems. Rachel was attached to her grandnephew, but she was also painfully aware of the burden he represented. Dorothy had offered to take him soon after Marjorie’s death, but Rachel had declined. Better to keep him close, part of a household that now included one aging mother, one active child, and a beleaguered author who felt blocked and entangled in domestic commitments beyond her control.
Carson was also suffering an existential crisis of sorts. Troubled by the coming of the Atomic Age, she suspected the reason she was having difficulty getting down to her work was the idea that humankind had discovered the means to irrevocably alter the world. She had become increasingly alarmed that the dumping of radioactive waste in the seas endangered not only the oceans, but also life itself. She told Dorothy it was hard to think about and “harder still” to put into words. “But I have been mentally blocked for a long time . . . for a reason difficult to explain . . . Some of the thoughts that came were so unattractive to me that I rejected them completely, for the old ideas die hard, especially when they are emotionally as well as intellectually dear to one. It was pleasant to believe, for example, that much of Nature was forever beyond the tampering reach of man . . . that the stream of life would flow on through time . . . without interference by one of the drops of the stream—man. And to suppose that, however the physical environment might mold Life, that Life could never assume the power to change drastically—or even destroy—the physical world.”
Ultimately, Rachel overrode her reservations. By the time White’s letter reached her, she’d already committed herself to doing some sort of book project on the pesticide issue for Paul Brooks at Houghton Mifflin. She’d also conferred with William Shawn at The New Yorker, who indicated he wanted to run a two-part piece by her on the pesticide problem. However grim the subject—in private Rachel was calling it “the poison book”—she knew The New Yorker would ensure her a large block of readers, even if the book itself bombed.
The project quickly ballooned. Rachel worked feverishly throughout the summer and fall of 1958, sifting through a mountain of technical reports. All that summer, Spock had been forwarding Carson materials from the Long Island trial, which that February the group lost on a technicality. Though disappointing—the judge suggested they didn’t trust Spock’s “experts” because they were into “organics”—the damning evidence she was sending was proving enormously helpful. “You are my chief clipping service,” Rachel wrote Spock. A “surprise witness” from the Mayo Clinic in Minnesota, Dr. Malcolm Hargraves, had testified on behalf of Spock’s group. Hargraves, who specialized in blood diseases, told the assembled he was “convinced” there was a link between DDT and the development of leukemia and lymphoma. While it was a position the Mayo Clinic didn’t yet formally espouse, most of the doctors there believed it was the case. The more they were learning about the effects of DDT and other chlorinated hydrocarbon pesticides on human health, he added, the more perilous they appeared; the situation was analogous to the conclusions they were drawing about human exposure to atomic radiation.
Equally jarring was another set of findings Spock sent—this by an ornithologist at Michigan State University named George J. Wallace. Since 1954, the campus had been sprayed with DDT every spring to kill off Dutch elm disease. Wallace and his team had been monitoring the effects of the DDT on bird populations, with a special eye on robins. Every year, after the spraying, all the robins in the treated area died. But the picture was actually much worse: the number of dead or dying robins they retrieved far exceeded the number that had been present in the spring, well before the spraying began. This meant that robins living outside the sprayed areas who happened to swoop in after the treatments were being poisoned by DDT residues lingering in the environment.
More ominous still, there followed a long-term decline in the overall robin population. This, Wallace surmised, was because of reproductive issues. The robins built nests, but they didn’t lay eggs in them; and those few eggs that were laid didn’t hatch. Ongoing tissue analysis indicated DDT loads in the birds’ “testes and ovaries.”
The conclusions Wallace was coming to were grim: DDT had entered the food chain. Heavy spraying had killed off the bark beetles that transmit Dutch elm disease. But the tree foliage was still coated with DDT. In the fall, when the leaves drifted to the ground, they were eaten by earthworms that feed on leaf litter. Some of the worms died outright, but those that survived took in “a heavy body burden of DDT,” which they stored through the winter. In the spring the robins returned and ate the toxic worms, dying of “poison used in the previous year’s spray program.”
The most insidious property of DDT, then, was that it persisted in the environment, where it became concentrated in food sources far beyond its intended target. DDT was both lethal and long lasting, and it was hidden from view, a chilling combination. For Carson the nagging question was, if this “rain of death” produced so disastrous an effect on birds, “what of other lives, including our own?”
Rachel’s research was going well. By the time she, her mother, and Roger returned from Maine, she was corresponding with an army of specialists—geneticists, entomologists, doctors, cellular biologists, botanists, agronomists—each of whom was providing her with new perspectives on the problem. Carson still had a number of friends from her government days, some who had been promoted and now held key federal posts, others who had joined private research institutes. Everyone she approached expressed an eagerness to help. Many were willing to pass on confidential information, trusting her discretion, putting their reputations, and even their jobs, at risk. It was an enormous vote of confidence.
Rachel’s deepest worry now was her mother. Marie was eighty-nine and her health was failing. She had slept through much of the summer, often in a wheelchair just outside Rachel’s study so Rachel could keep an eye on her. Then, just before Thanksgiving, Maria suffered a minor stroke, which turned into pneumonia. Rachel had an oxygen tent delivered to the house in Silver Spring, hiring a full-time nurse to help. But Maria continued to grow weaker, and finally, on November 30, she lost consciousness. Rachel sat up all night beside her mother’s bed, her hand tucked under the border of the oxygen tent. At 6:05 A.M. Maria Carson slipped away, Rachel’s hand still clutching hers.
Privately devastated, Rachel, as was her wont, hid her grief from all but a few. Writing to a friend, she spoke of her concern for Roger: “Poor little fellow, this is a new blow for him . . . it is obviously recalling to him all the memories of the loss of his mother, less than two years ago. It is good for me, I’m sure, that I am forced to think of him.” In truth, it was the saddest Christmas she had ever spent.
By the middle of January, though still grieving, Rachel had returned to the Library of Medicine at the National Institutes of Health. She was resolved to resume work, if only for her mother, knowing how fiercely Maria had believed in the book. She wrote Brooks, telling him it was becoming increasingly clear to her that the book’s heart was really how pesticides threatened human health. What she found curious, she added, was how contradictory many of the official recommendations seemed. “It is an amusing fact that although the AMA, when asked to take a stand, are rather on the fence, their various published statements constitute quite an indictment.”
DDT, as Carson well knew, had now been available to consumers for nearly fifteen years. Not only had sales of the popular pesticide skyrocketed, there had been a deluge of new and even deadlier chemicals flooding the market in its wake. There were now two hundred registered synthetic pesticides—not just insecticides, but herbicides, rodent killers, fungicides. In addition, there were at least six hundred other products formulated with the same active ingredients. Annual production of pesticides had increased 700 percent since before the war; sales had ballooned to nearly “a quarter of a billion dollars” a year. Pesticides were now big business.
Yet even with these staggering numbers, Rachel was finding it oddly challenging to get definitive information about how these poisons affected human health. What little hard data she could dig up was scattered and highly technical, siloed in separate fields. And a lot of it was still circumstantial.
Typical was the case of Detroit, Michigan. After planes hovered low over the city, dropping pesticide pellets on bugs, animals, and residents alike—showers of supposedly “harmless” poison descending on “people shopping or going to work and on children out from school”—city authorities were barraged with calls from worried citizens, at one point more than eight hundred in a single hour. Though the callers were assured that the rain of pesticide dust was “harmless to humans and will not hurt plants or pets,” they already suspected otherwise. Their house pets were suddenly stricken with illness. Local veterinarians reported their offices filling up with dogs and cats with “severe diarrhea, vomiting and convulsions.” The local health department was besieged with citizens’ calls complaining of severe throat and chest irritations. One Detroit internist reported that an hour after the planes circled, he was summoned to treat four patients with similar symptoms: “nausea, vomiting, chills, fever, extreme fatigue and coughing.” Yet city officials insisted that these problems must have been due “to something else.”
The American Medical Association, meanwhile, had been quietly collecting cases of pesticide poisoning since the early fifties. An illiterate, thirty-eight-year-old farmer had sprayed his tobacco crop with parathion. Unaware of instructions regarding its proper use, he stood so close to the sprayer that he was “soaked from head to toe.” He died fifteen hours later. A thirty-one-year-old university entomologist, working with parathion and other pesticides for months, one day forgot to wear his mask and protective clothing. After several hours, he felt nauseated. He went home, and died soon after. A child found a whiskey bottle in the crotch of a tree. Curious, he took a few swigs. The liquid wasn’t whiskey, it was TEPP, an insecticide similar to parathion. The child started to foam at the mouth and died fifteen minutes later.
The stories went on and on. But these, the AMA insisted, were instances of acute poisonings, shocking of course, but not typical. To Carson they demonstrated how little those who handled these compounds understood their hazards. Equally troubling, she felt, was the lack of consensus about the day-to-day risks of small-scale exposures to these poisons. The real threat, she told Brooks, was the “slow, cumulative and hard-to-identify long-term effects.” While no one was sure what a lifetime exposure for humankind might mean, it was known that “every child born today carried his load of poison even at birth, for studies proved that these chemicals passed through the placenta.” Both a mother’s breast milk and dairy products “showed some content of DDT or other synthetic pesticides.” There is “also scattered evidence indicating that some of these chemicals may interfere with normal cell division and may actually disturb the hereditary pattern,” she told Brooks. Still, like that of the officials in Detroit, Michigan, the government’s stated policy remained that DDT was safe.
Rachel was by now convinced, she told Brooks, that there was a “psychological angle to all this: that people, especially professional men, are uncomfortable about coming out against something, especially if they haven’t absolute proof the ‘something’ is wrong, but only a good suspicion. So they will go along with a program about which they privately have acute misgivings. So I think it is most important to build up the positive alternatives.” In this, Carson, as a lowly female scientist, was up against more than entrenched federal policies about pesticide use; she faced a male-dominated culture still steeped in militaristic values, a top-down corporate order accustomed to strict hierarchies. In the competitive, hypermasculine playbook of the 1950s, to show uncertainty was a sign of weakness. It was never a good idea to stick out one’s neck, especially when so many people were drinking from the corporate trough.
RACHEL WAS WORKING EXTREMELY HARD, BUT SHE HAD LAPSED INTO A kind of melancholy. There were certain realms that she felt were sacrosanct. In 1957, when the Soviets launched Sputnik (which was followed shortly after by a second Russian satellite), she was uneasy. She wrote to Dorothy, saying that everyone now faced a “strange future,” admitting that it “made her feel ill.” This was partly her concern about the uses of space for nuclear warfare. But partly something more that she couldn’t completely put her finger on, although it had something to do with becoming disconnected from the biological cycles that shaped the living world. Despite her belief in science, she was feeling increasingly out of step with her own time, wary of modernity and resistant to change. While thrilled by the technologies that had opened the ocean’s depths to the human eye, she was more circumspect about other efficiencies of the twentieth century: the gadgetry and time-saving conveniences, the push into space and the sprouting of highways. The spread of “man-made ugliness” and the “trend toward a perilously artificial world,” she said, portended the “destruction of beauty and the suppression of human individuality in hundreds of suburban real estate developments where the first act is to cut down the trees and the next is to build an infinitude of little houses, each like its neighbor.” There were worrisome signs everywhere, she felt: threats even to the restorative calm of urban sanctuaries such as Washington’s Rock Creek Park, near her home, where planners were now proposing to build a six-lane highway; “commercial schemes” proposed for the national parks. “Beauty—and all the values that derive from beauty”—shouldn’t be “measured and evaluated in terms of the dollar,” she insisted. In 1953, she had written a letter to the Washington Post protesting the firing of the director of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, a steadfast conservationist, to make way for a pro-business nonprofessional. She had used the occasion to undercut the anti-Communist rhetoric: “It is one of the ironies of our time,” she observed, “that while concentrating on the defense of our country against enemies from without, we should be so heedless of those who would destroy it from within.” Haunted by the misuse of science and technology, worried by mankind’s tendency to go “farther and farther into experiments for the destruction of himself and his world,” she wondered where humans would take these things. It was all, she wrote Dorothy, “deeply disturbing.”
IN THE SPRING OF 1959, AS RACHEL WAS MIDWAY INTO THE BOOK, THE U.S. Department of Defense admitted that its calculations about how long radioactive debris lingered in the upper atmosphere after testing were wrong. Originally they had assured the public that the waste remained aloft for close to seven years, during which time it would decay, scatter, and gradually drop as “minimally radioactive fallout” spread evenly across the globe. Now officials admitted that it could be “as little as two years.” This meant that the radioactive fallout was hotter, more lethal, fell sooner, and “over a more concentrated area.” The public also learned that the U.S. showed higher concentrations of strontium 90—which is absorbed into bone tissue, and was being implicated in cases of leukemia—than anywhere else in the world.
Public alarm immediately spiked. Though nuclear testing had been temporarily suspended in 1958, after the Soviets promised they would halt testing for a year, provided the West did the same, radioactivity levels in the atmosphere remained high. Researchers at Washington University in St. Louis had lately discovered strontium 90 in babies’ teeth. Then Consumer Reports disclosed there were detectable levels of strontium 90 in cow’s milk. That September, the Saturday Evening Post ran a story called “Fallout: The Silent Killer,” in which scientists warned of leukemia, bone cancer, and long-term genetic alterations. Doctors claimed that continuous low-level exposure to radiation further magnified the risk of cancer—and that over much longer periods, “subtle genetic mutations induced by radiation would cause steady increase in birth defects.” The government insisted there was little reason for worry. The radiation from fallout, it reported, “was far below the normal background level of radiation from natural sources,” which included cosmic radiation and radioactive elements in the earth’s crust. But the public was unconvinced. By the close of 1959, the nation was in the throes of a massive fallout scare.
UNSEEN BUT OMNIPRESENT, UNTRACEABLE EXCEPT WITH SPECIAL INSTRUMENTS, radioactive fallout was “a strange and chilling thing,” writes Souder, a poison that carried acute hazards to human health that might not be seen or felt for years. Though still an abstraction for most Americans, it had been swirling unseen about the globe since the close of World War II, the eerie spawn of an escalating arms race that seemed without end. As the Cold War ramped up during the 1950s, a handful of countries, but most particularly the U.S. and the Soviets, had been conducting nuclear tests of one kind or another almost continually. Between 1951 and 1955, the U.S. carried out forty-nine aboveground nuclear tests in Nevada alone. Some were small, dispersing little radiation. But others were two to three times as powerful as the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima in 1945 (which had incinerated tens of thousands of people in a single horrifying blast). Wherever the site, whether in Britain or France, Nevada or New Mexico, USSR or the South Pacific, the mushroom clouds rose to the sky with breathtaking regularity, steadily pumping radioactive debris into the upper atmosphere, where it joined similar menacing clouds of radioactive material coming from other places. All would ultimately fall to the earth, though no one quite understood the gravity of this yet.
For some time, the U.S. had been working secretly on a weapon—a hydrogen device—that would be even more devastating than the atomic bombs periodically exploded at Bikini, a fragile atoll in the Pacific Ocean’s Marshall Islands chain, beginning with the first in 1946. Finally, in 1954, again choosing as its site Bikini, the government decided to explode one. The hydrogen bomb test, which was officially called “Castle Bravo,” didn’t go as anticipated. Not only was the blast twice as powerful as expected, flattening several islands in the atoll, a sudden shift in the wind sent the huge cloud of radioactive “fallout” catapulting through the upper atmosphere in an unexpected direction, where, a few hours later, it began raining down on a hapless Japanese fishing trawler called the Lucky Dragon.
The Lucky Dragon had been decidedly unlucky since the start of her trip. The captain was ill, there was persistent engine trouble, and the catch was consistently lousy. Hoping to salvage what was beginning to look like a five-week rout, the captain had switched course and moved into waters he didn’t normally trawl.
On March 1, just before dawn, the Dragon was floating about eighty-seven miles east of Bikini. Unable to sleep, a young seaman arose and walked the deck. Suddenly a blinding white light flashed at the horizon, turning ocher and then an eerie blood orange. Mesmerized, the disoriented seaman began shouting to his shipmates below, “The sun is rising in the west! The sun is rising in the west!” as the sleep-disheveled crew clambered up the stairs to see. One by one they froze. The unearthly light was racing up the western sky, a sickly flare of illumination unlike anything they had ever seen. And then there came a seismic shock that convulsed the sea, shaking the vessel in a momentary blur of chaos, followed by two enormous, concussive blasts. The crew was thrown to the deck. Almost immediately the radioman began to calculate the speed of the sound. He looked up, frowned. They were eighty-seven miles from the explosive event, he told the others. His face went white. “It’s an atomic bomb,” he said quietly. The crew fell silent.
The men started working immediately, hauling in the immense fishing line, fifty-odd miles of it. As soon as it was in, they could leave. The work was slow, abrading to the hands. It was extremely humid that day, and their skin burned. Then, two hours in, a dense fog descended, followed by a light drizzle. But it was not the kind of rain the seamen knew. It looked like snow, only it was gray and granular, gritty like sand. It landed in their hair, stung their eyes; it was sticky to the touch. Several of the men tasted it, wondering if it was salt. That afternoon no one had any appetite; several men were nauseated. The next morning many could barely open their eyes, which oozed a gluelike discharge. By the third day, many men looked like they had bad sunburns. The radioman was feverish, and his skin had turned black.
When the crew reached port, they were immediately hospitalized, first locally and then at the University of Tokyo, where they would remain for a year. By now most were losing their hair. Their charred skin had turned yellow and many were suffering from other symptoms: “bleeding gums, falling white blood cell counts, compromised bone marrow,” sperm counts that bottomed out to zero. But none was as sick as the radioman. All that summer his health declined. Then, on September 23, he died of liver failure.
The papers initially downplayed the issue. American authorities told journalists that the cause was “hepatitis.” But the story wouldn’t go away. Two more Japanese fishing trawlers were found with critical levels of radioactive contamination soon after the return of the Lucky Dragon. Both had been fishing in areas considerably east of the Marshall Islands, one in waters more than 780 miles from the test site. The New York Times revealed that the catch from the Lucky Dragon was “sufficiently radioactive as to pose a threat to human life.” Worried Japanese housewives stopped buying fish. The American ambassador to Japan offered a public apology to the radioman’s family on behalf of the “American government and people.” Quietly, he followed up with a check made out to the radioman’s widow for a million yen.
In truth, as President Eisenhower acknowledged at a press conference a few weeks later, no one had anticipated an explosion of such force, not even the scientists involved. A decade earlier, during the first tests for the Manhattan Project, scientists had believed that the devastation from a nuclear device would be caused by the scorching heat and radiation close to the blast, followed by the accompanying shock wave that would rumble outward, covering a larger area. Little thought was given to the “secondary contamination” of far-flung places from radioactive waste carried high in the stratosphere. But such “fallout,” as it would be called, “was to become the great fear of the atomic age,” writes Souder. It turned out that the mushroom clouds of radioactive dust and debris produced by a nuclear explosion didn’t drop straight down, as was initially believed. Instead, the radioactive fallout rode the “upper-level wind currents” for years, where it sailed over land and seas, eventually merging with larger weather patterns and falling back to earth as rain or snow wherever it had blown.
Americans were rightly alarmed to learn that strontium 90 was now in their milk and even their children’s teeth. But few understood how or why this had happened. They read about incidents like that of the Lucky Dragon, which was reported in American papers, and they knew about the Nevada tests. Like it or not, they were accustomed to living uneasily with the specter of nuclear war, which they hoped, of course, would never happen. But it was harder to imagine this new, more insidious threat, which they couldn’t see, but which now they were being told was everywhere. It was harder still to believe that what happened half a world away, in a remote pocket of the Pacific, could have an immediate impact on their lives in Kansas or Vermont. No one really understood the extent to which fallout could travel, though they were beginning to get a sense.
In late January 1951, tracking planes monitoring a nuclear test in Nevada had followed the giant mushroom cloud as it rose and blew east, where at some point it merged with an incoming storm. Three days after the blast, radioactive snow fell in New York City’s Central Park.
THE PARALLELS BETWEEN PESTICIDES AND RADIOACTIVE FALLOUT were becoming increasingly clear to Carson. In both cases, the hazards were cumulative and carried the same risks of genetic damage. And yet, the public had been left in the dark about these chemical poisons. It was a disquieting example of technology outpacing knowledge. These toxic agents had been developed and sold to the public with no oversight and no understanding of their long-term effects.
Carson was feeling disquiet for other reasons. The book was terribly behind schedule. Her summer on Southport Island hadn’t gone as planned. Roger was hospitalized for a week with a respiratory infection, and then she herself was ill. In a letter to Brooks in December 1959, she apologized for having failed in her promise to deliver the manuscript by then. She thanked him for his forbearance, admitting that it was almost “unbearably frustrating” to be so far behind. The one thing she could promise, however, was that the book would have an “unshakable foundation,” which she felt was especially important given the “violent controversies” that surrounded the subject. Those with a stake in pesticide sales were sure to attack the book, she added, so it was critical she have the “weight of evidence” on her side. She said she hoped she might be done by February, but that she couldn’t promise. In closing, she mentioned that she and Roger had been feeling better, though she had developed “some sort of thyroid condition” that left her with sharp headaches, which sometimes robbed her of hours, or even a day, of work.
Rachel’s health issues continued to interfere. Shortly after New Year’s, she learned she had a duodenal ulcer. She told Rodell that until it healed she would be living on baby foods. Then she was stricken with the flu, which grew into pneumonia, followed soon after by a sinus infection. Her immune system was clearly overtaxed. As February, the deadline she’d set for herself, came and went, she fought off the hopelessness she was feeling. “Sometimes I wonder whether the Author even exists anymore,” she wrote Dorothy. In March Rachel finally wrote to Brooks, sharing the details of her various illnesses, and admitting it had been a rough few months. She was still hard at work on the cancer chapters, she told him, but she had to carefully apportion her time, as only sleep and calm would aid the healing of her ulcer. She assured Brooks that while it might appear that the book had given her the ulcer, this was in no way the case. She found the entire subject of pesticides, however sobering, “quite fascinating.” Any decent ulcer, she joked, might have waited to strike until the book was finished. In closing, she told Brooks that she thought that “by far the most difficult part [was] done.”
What she didn’t tell Brooks, perhaps for fear of worrying him, was that two cysts had developed in her left breast—the same breast from which she’d had the cyst removed a decade before. Rachel immediately scheduled surgery to investigate what they were. Writing Brooks again, she alluded to a new health concern, though she tried to downplay it. She was going to have surgery that she hoped would not be “too complicated,” she said, although she did allow that she couldn’t be sure. Somewhat ironically, in addition to her letter, she enclosed the two chapters on cancer she had just completed.
As Rachel braced for her upcoming surgery, she and Brooks exchanged a flurry of correspondence. The operation was now scheduled for the following Sunday, Rachel wrote. She expected to be back at work by Wednesday, adding gloomily, “otherwise at the end of the week.”
But the operation didn’t go as she’d hoped. The doctors found two tumors in her left breast, one that was benign, the other “suspicious enough to require a radical mastectomy.” The operation was brutal and she was in a great deal of pain. Rachel asked her doctor pointedly if the pathology report showed any malignancy, and was led to believe that the mastectomy had been “a precautionary measure.” He told her no further treatment was needed, and she let the matter lie.
Anxious about leaving Roger, Rachel “talked her way out” of the hospital barely six days after the operation. She wrote to Marjorie Spock, saying that her “hospital adventure” had ruined her work schedule for the spring, but that she was thankful the cancer had been found so early, and that her prognosis was good. “There need be no apprehension for the future,” she said.
Her chief concern now was in guarding her privacy. She feared her critics would use her cancer diagnosis against her, claiming that her illness was the rationale for her conclusions about the links between pesticides and cancer. She told Spock she was only sharing the details of her ordeal with “special friends” like her. “I suppose it’s a futile effort to keep one’s private affairs private. Somehow I have no wish to read of my ailments in literary gossip columns. Too much comfort to the chemical companies.”
Brooks, who didn’t yet know the reason for Rachel’s surgery, wrote to commend her on the cancer chapters, which he felt were excellent: clear and convincing and beautifully composed. He remarked that the recent news about fallout and cancer was working in their favor. “In a sense, all this publicity about fallout gives you a head start in awakening people to the dangers of chemicals,” he said.
RACHEL’S PROGRESS CONTINUED TO BE DISAPPOINTING, JUST AS SHE’D feared. When she got to Southport that summer, she was still weak and in considerable pain; it was hard to concentrate on much beyond looking after Roger, however much she tried. Even so, she hid her distress. By December Brooks was anxious for a progress report. It was only then that he got the sobering news. Rachel was sick again. She had discovered “a curious, hard swelling” near her sternum, which X-rays confirmed was cancer. Rachel, clearly caught off guard, was now in the midst of radiation treatments. She told Dorothy that it was hard to face all this “after being so sure the previous spring that her surgery had solved everything.” Now it appeared she couldn’t be sure that she would ever get well. It was especially cruel given the time pressure she felt because of the book. Writing to Brooks, Rachel admitted she was angry that she’d been misled: “I know now that I was not told the truth last spring at the time of my operation. The tumor was malignant, and there was at the time evidence that it had metastasized . . . But I was told none of this, even though I asked directly.” Rachel’s situation was in fact not unusual. Medical conventions for female patients in the 1950s and 1960s were still extremely paternalistic. If a woman was married, she herself was never told she had a malignancy; only her husband, if he asked, was given a full account. For a single woman like Rachel, the same must have held true, only with no husband to deliver the news, she was left in the dark. In Rachel’s case this was especially disturbing, as she was more than capable of understanding the science behind anything the doctor said. That she was not given the choice of being fully apprised of her treatment options was unconscionable, if not demeaning. She was still fifty-two, and had she known, the outcome might have been different.
Rachel was so sick after the first two radiation treatments that she couldn’t leave her bed. When the nausea at last lifted, she decided she had been too hasty in her decisions the previous spring. It was time to seek a second opinion. She left for the Cleveland Clinic in the middle of a blinding snowstorm, waiting on a windy corner for an hour before she was able to flag down a cab to the airport. Dr. George Crile Jr. was one of the foremost cancer experts in the country. He confirmed Rachel’s worst fears—that her cancer had metastasized to other lymph nodes—but he recommended a different course, saying they should target only the affected site with radiation. In her letter to Crile afterward, Rachel thanked him for his respect and his absolute candor. “I have a great deal more peace of mind when I feel I know the facts, even though I might wish they were different.”
In January, Rachel’s ulcer flared up again, triggered by her radiation treatments. But the good news was that the mass was shrinking. Dorothy, daring to imagine that she and Rachel might still have more summers, sat down on the bed where Rachel had napped on her first visit, and wrote Rachel a long letter, reflecting on the richness of the times they had spent together over the past seven years. “You spoke of the moonlight shining in your room—how many happy memories that evokes. If we had only moonlight, shared, to remember, our storehouse would be unusually rich. But there are the Sea, the Shore, the Woods, the Gardens, the Marshes, Phosphorescence, Wind, Sun, Sand, Scents—oh, my Darling . . . For me it has meant more than I can tell you to have your love enfold me—love that was your arms around me in dark hours.”
By the time Dorothy’s letter reached her, Rachel was bedridden again. In January of 1961, she had developed a staph infection that progressed to severe phlebitis, settling into her knees and ankles. Unable to walk or stand, she was now confined to either a wheelchair or her bed. She wrote to Brooks, telling him she had “never been sicker in her life,” which must have shaken him, given what he already knew. Rachel was taken to the hospital, which she tried to make light of, though she admitted to Dorothy that she had been “devastated” seeing Roger, who was just eight, “slumped and sobbing” as the medics slid her into the ambulance for the short trip.
As April neared, Rachel wrote Brooks to say she was finally writing again, albeit cautiously. She apologized for having burdened him with so many details of her health, but wanted him to know so he could understand why progress on the book had been so agonizingly slow. The only positive side to all this, she added, was the fresh perspective she’d gained in being pulled away from it. She now wanted to make the narrative leaner, to free it of all excess detail.
Rachel pushed on throughout the spring, continuing to converse with a number of experts about technical questions, winning allies with each new exchange. By June 1961, a jubilant Rodell was able to tell Brooks that it looked like Carson would be finished in a few months. “I am working late at night most of the time now,” Rachel wrote Brooks. “If I can fight off the desire to go to bed around 11:30, I seem to get my second wind and be able to go on.” In early January 1962, though Carson still had one remaining chapter to complete, the rest of the manuscript was in the hands of both The New Yorker and Brooks. One night the phone rang. As Rachel picked it up, the quiet voice of the caller said, “This is William Shawn.”
Shawn described what she had done as “a brilliant achievement.” He told her she had made the difficult subject of pesticides into “literature, full of beauty and loveliness and depth of feeling.” As she hung up the phone, Rachel felt a surge of happiness. For the first time, she allowed herself to believe she had succeeded in what she’d set out to do, that now the book would have a life of its own, no matter what happened to her. She padded into her study, put on a Beethoven violin concerto, and allowed herself a good cathartic cry.
ALL EYES NOW TURNED TO HOW HOUGHTON MIFFLIN SHOULD HANDLE PREPUBLICITY for the book. Brooks knew that many of Carson’s assertions would be explosive. He feared—rightly, it turned out—that the chemical companies might try to interfere with its publication. Better not to send out advance copies until after the public had read The New Yorker serialization, which was set for June 1962 and would appear in three consecutive issues. This way, any perception that Carson was leading a crusade against big business would be blunted by the public’s reception, which he judged would be good.
Rachel, though normally outspoken about these issues, was preoccupied with more private matters. She was still undergoing radiation treatments. On hospital days, though desperate to begin revisions, she was often too sick to work beyond midday. She had discovered a new mass in her armpit and was anxious, as it was outside the treatment area. The mass was cancer, she learned. But the pain near her neck was only a side effect of the radiation, which was some relief. The real agony of cancer, she told Dorothy, was the loss of any trust in one’s own body. “Every perfectly ordinary little ailment looks like a hobgoblin,” she said.
The state of the world was also on her mind. In the summer of 1961, the Soviets had announced they were resuming nuclear testing. Over the next three months, they exploded thirty-one nuclear devices, one more than three thousand times the size of the bomb that had irradiated Hiroshima. Fearful the Soviets were getting a leg up, President John F. Kennedy, who had campaigned on a promise to secure a permanent ban on testing, “reluctantly restarted” America’s program as well. Tensions between the East and the West had escalated in response to the construction of the Berlin Wall, followed by the Bay of Pigs debacle. The botched invasion, an embarrassment for Kennedy, had led to a worrisome new trade pact between the USSR and Fidel Castro, Cuba’s brash new Communist leader, fanning fears of a nuclear incident. There were rumors that the Soviets were shipping offensive weapons to the island, which was only ninety miles away. Meanwhile, tests of milk from Minnesota, a major dairy state, were showing high levels of iodine 131, a component of radioactive fallout linked to leukemia. No one should have been surprised: the amount of fallout swirling about the globe had “doubled” in a matter of months. Unwilling to shut down dairy suppliers whose milk surpassed radiation thresholds, the government decided instead to revise the guidelines upward. It was a response that only heightened public anxiety.
THE NEW YORKER RAN THE FIRST EXCERPT OF SILENT SPRING ON JUNE 16, 1962. It opened with a brief, eerie fable in which Carson described a nameless town “in the heart of America where all life seemed to live in harmony with its surroundings.” Fertile farm fields encircled the town and the hillsides were stippled with orchards. Birds chirped amidst the trees, which blazed amber and gold in the fall. The trout streams ran cold and clear, the wildlife was abundant. And then a “strange blight” descended on the area. Inexplicable illnesses began to appear. Farm animals sickened and eggs didn’t hatch. Pig litters were so stunted they died within days. The wildflowers by the road turned brown, “as though swept by fire”; the townspeople were stricken with diseases the doctors couldn’t treat. No one understood what had happened. Though on the roofs and gathered in the gutters, a mysterious white power still lingered, which weeks before had “fallen like snow” upon the houses and lawns, the farmland and fields. Everywhere there was a ghostly quiet, a “strange stillness,” as if all living things had leaked from the world.
In three short, chilling paragraphs, Carson had described an archetypal town that she was certain her readers would recognize, for it was a portrait of where they lived—and all they feared. Though her subject was the new and invisible threat of pesticides, Carson’s images of death and devastation couldn’t help but call up for readers all the stark terrors of the nuclear age, right down to the white flakes of poison falling from the sky, reminding them again of the Lucky Dragon incident, and, by extension, all their fears of nuclear fallout and the specter of annihilation. “No witchcraft, no enemy action had silenced the rebirth of new life in this stricken world,” Carson wrote. “The people had done it to themselves.”
THE THREE-PART SERIALIZATION CREATED AN IMMEDIATE FUROR, DRAWING more letters of response than any piece in the magazine’s history. Scores of readers wrote in to share their outrage at the chemical industry’s shocking indifference to human health and the environment; many expressed their gratitude to Carson for having brought these abuses to light. But unlike the nearly unanimous applause for her earlier books, a number of the letters were also dismissive. One peevish writer suggested that Carson’s characterization of the pesticide manufacturers reflected “Communist sympathies,” and that she was probably a “peace-nut too.” Anyone could “live without birds and animals,” he said, “but not without business,” adding that as long as we had the H-bomb, everything would be okay. Executives from chemical companies accused Carson of one-sidedness, saying she had failed to consider the economic benefits of pesticide use in food production. One pesticide manufacturer, the Velsicol Chemical Corporation of Chicago, threatened to sue, insisting that Houghton Mifflin stop publication of the book or take out all references to its products. Houghton Mifflin refused, and the matter was left hanging, though no one was certain if a lawsuit was imminent. Perhaps the most unjust charge against Carson was that she was trying to derail the global campaign against malaria, which relied on DDT for its mission. It was a misrepresentation of Carson’s position that she continued to face. The truth was, at no time did she advocate a complete ban on chemical insecticides. Even later, testifying before a Senate subcommittee, Carson allowed that the use of potent chemical poisons was sometimes necessary, particularly in crises to combat human disease. What she objected to was the indiscriminate and “heedless overuse” of these poisons by persons “wholly ignorant of their potentials for harm.”
Carson and Roger left for Maine toward the end of June 1962, as the first reactions to The New Yorker pieces were still coming in. Despite the spate of cranky letters she’d received, the advance press so far was overwhelmingly positive, which she found heartening. The Times ran a strong editorial in support of her positions, predicting that she would be branded an alarmist, despite the strength and balance of her arguments. Within days, it was followed by an even more stunning endorsement by a young investigative reporter named Robert A. Caro, who wrote a five-part series, which began that August, for the Long Island daily Newsday. Caro, who years later would be celebrated for The Power Broker, his magnificent biography of New York urban planning czar Robert Moses, was a brilliant and hard-hitting reporter who didn’t mince words.
Scientists, he reported, had long been aware of the links between pesticides and human diseases such as cancer, leukemia, and abnormal gene development, yet the government, in collusion with the chemical companies, had for years systematically suppressed the damning evidence, allowing corporate profits to take precedence over threats to the environment and human health. The truth about these chemicals, he wrote, was being whitewashed by an ongoing public relations campaign orchestrated by an eight-hundred-million-dollar industry that touted pesticide safety and effectiveness in order to keep the wheels of commerce churning. The problem was compounded by the USDA, he added, which “leaped aboard the pesticide bandwagon as soon as DDT was introduced,” and continued to mount “vast” spraying programs of its own, despite evidence of grave damage to wildlife species. Now, thanks to “famed biologist and author” Rachel Carson’s New Yorker series, a flood of angry letters was finally reaching the USDA, he reported. And so his argument continued, never letting up on his stinging indictment of the government and the chemical industry for their heedless indifference to the perils of pesticide use—nor his admiration for Carson and her still-unpublished book.
THE GOVERNMENT WAS SCRAMBLING, UNCERTAIN HOW TO HANDLE THE controversy. Shirley Briggs warned Carson of rumors that the Department of Agriculture was scouring The New Yorker pieces for evidence of libel, or even errors, anything they could use to discredit her claims. Others insisted the controversy would blow over; better to soft-pedal the problem, they counseled, than to overreact. Either way, staff members were told to start brainstorming for ways to weaken Carson’s position, should fighting her become official policy. The secretary of agriculture, worn down by the recent milk scare in the Midwest, assured a reporter that there was no reason for “panic and hysteria,” insisting that on balance, “pesticides provided more benefit than harm.” Another official promised that his agency was fully on top of the pesticide issue. The government, he said, was engaged in “nationwide surveillance” of all “pollutants and contaminants in the environment.” Behind the scenes, there was less consensus. Internally it was acknowledged that the FDA couldn’t possibly “keep pace” with the pesticide industry in setting guidelines for residues in food when the number of different pesticide products had mushroomed to forty-five thousand. Officials were instructed to stop “blanket” denials that pesticides posed no perils. The chemical companies, meanwhile, were circling the wagons, amassing an enormous war chest in anticipation of the coming battle. Word went out to certain publications that a positive review of Carson’s book might result in canceled ads. The FBI was quietly launching an investigation, looking into whom Carson had been speaking with on the phone, if and when she had been in contact with foreigners, searching, one can only suppose, for Communist sympathies. Not surprisingly, they found nothing.
RACHEL AWAITED THE BOOK’S PUBLICATION FROM HER PERCH IN MAINE, trying to keep a cool head. She was overwhelmed by the fan mail pouring in each day, spending hours trying to acknowledge what she could. To date, the letter she most treasured was from E. B. White, who said he believed her articles were “the most valuable” the magazine had ever published, expressing his admiration for the courage she showed in going after “this formidable opponent.” He predicted her book would be “the sort that will help turn the tide,” and the work that ultimately she would be proudest of. “I’m unable adequately to express my gratitude,” he added.
Rachel had worried that the public would forget her book between its June appearance in The New Yorker and its September publication. But a telling incident that summer dispelled such notions. In mid-July, in the wake of The New Yorker series, a news story broke that jolted the nation, reminding it of the ways that science and business could ride roughshod over the public interest: Americans learned that U.S. drug companies had attempted to market the drug thalidomide, which had been linked to horrifying birth defects in western Europe. The drug, which caused severely deformed limbs, had been routinely prescribed to pregnant women as an antidote to morning sickness. Though the FDA had failed to approve thalidomide for use in the U.S., it had been widely sold abroad. The controversy, which shocked American consumers, was just breaking out as Silent Spring was heading to press. Approached by the press for her thoughts, Rachel didn’t flinch. It was “all of a piece,” she responded. “Thalidomide and pesticides—they represent our willingness to rush ahead and use something new without knowing what the results are going to be.”
SILENT SPRING CAME OUT ON SEPTEMBER 27, 1962, AND WAS AN ALMOST immediate bestseller, in part because of its appearance in The New Yorker that summer. Within days, bookstores were struggling to keep it in stock. Newspapers everywhere reviewed it, and many published excerpts. Over seventy newspapers ran editorials, the majority of which were overwhelmingly positive.
Brooks Atkinson, writing for the New York Times, praised Carson’s thoroughness, reporting that the book came with fifty-five pages of references and source citations. He called Carson “a realist as well as a biologist and writer.” Her contention that chemical pest control was an act of arrogance, a misconception of mankind’s place in the natural order, was well taken, he said. “The basic fallacy—or perhaps the original sin—is the assumption that man can control nature.” Another reviewer compared Silent Spring to Uncle Tom’s Cabin, calling it “timely,” certain to stir the nation. The Book-of-the-Month Club chose it as its October selection, with an endorsement from Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas, who called Silent Spring “the most important chronicle of this century for the human race.” Carson was swamped with requests for appearances and speeches, most of which she declined. She did, though, agree to an exclusive interview with CBS News for an hour-long segment on pesticides hosted by Eric Sevareid. Perhaps most surprising was President Kennedy’s mention of Silent Spring at an August press conference. After the president had fielded several tense questions about the recent escalation of Soviet shipping traffic to Cuba, a reporter asked about the “dangerous, long-term side effects” of pesticide use. He was aware of the problem, Kennedy said, as if he’d anticipated the question. He was directing his science adviser, Jerome Wiesner, to launch an investigation, adding that he knew of “Miss Carson’s book.”
But the attacks on Carson’s book rained down just as quickly, a storm of vitriol more caustic and personal than anyone had anticipated. Carson was accused of being subversive and antibusiness, a crackpot and a Communist sympathizer, a “fanatic” determined to threaten the food supply. A letter from Velsicol’s lawyer insinuated that she was under the influence of “sinister parties” who intended to reduce the West’s use of agricultural chemicals so that food stocks would be depleted to “east-curtain parity.” “America’s food supply had never been safer,” proclaimed a shill for a trade group called the Nutrition Foundation. Silent Spring, he added, was “obviously the rantings of a poorly informed and probably deranged person.” (The group’s members, Carson later learned, were some of the nation’s most profitable food-processing concerns.) Carson was “a journalist cherry picking the facts,” her critics alleged. Her writing was “unfair, one-sided and hysterically overemphatic.” She was not “a professional scientist,” but an overwrought female, a generalist without title or credentials. It was a charge leveled at Carson again and again: that her scientific credibility was compromised because she wrote for the general public; that she had only a master’s degree in zoology, and had never worked as a scientist; that she wasn’t “published in peer-reviewed journals” and had “no academic appointments.” And then there was the problem of her sex: Carson was a woman who kept cats, a “bird and bunny lover,” proof, certainly, that sentiment would always trump reason. She was a “spinster,” as if this alone was evidence of an unsound mind. What was really going on was something else: with a poet’s eye, a scientific mind, and a powerful sense of mission, Carson had invaded what had heretofore been a man’s world, writes Linda Lear. “In short, [she] was a woman out of control.” Carson had “overstepped the bounds of her gender and her science.”
And so the campaign of misinformation roared on, driven by an army of well-paid, fast-talking PR men. “I don’t know of a housewife today who will buy the type of wormy apples we had before pesticides,” ventured one industry insider, who was quoted in the Washington Daily News. Another warned darkly that Carson’s book would have “a catastrophic effect” on the nation’s food supply and economy.
But the multimillion-dollar chemical industry and its allies in government and big agriculture misjudged the public mood. The readers to whom Carson appealed weren’t troubled by corporate bottom lines or downticks in the food economy. They were everyday citizens, many of them housewives, whose first concern was the safety of their children, and they were finding Carson’s arguments profoundly unsettling. Women and women’s groups were a demographic that hadn’t been much considered until then. They were consumers to appeal to, of course, but hardly a threat to the status quo. But this was changing, and Carson knew her audience. In 1961, women across the country had organized to protest the tainting of the milk supply by strontium 90. Few could forget the cranberry scare of late 1959, in which cranberries grown in the Pacific Northwest were found to be tainted by the weed killer aminotriazole, a known cause of thyroid cancer in lab rats. Already rattled by a host of contamination issues—from radioactive fallout; to what Time magazine was calling “illegal quantities of penicillin and hormones” in the food supply; to health problems associated with artificial preservatives, colors, bleaches, coatings, thickening agents, and emulsifiers used in food processing—women at that moment were primed to hear Carson’s message. It was no accident that Carson’s most political and hard-hitting answers to her critics would come when she spoke before women’s groups.
Carson’s critique was at once simple and complex: pesticides, she argued, posed a threat to the “shared biology of all living things.” Mankind, she insisted, was not the overlord of nature, but simply one of its citizens. As such, humans were deluded in believing they could control nature through chemistry, allegedly in the name of progress. Technological meddling, she reflected, could “easily and irrevocably” disrupt the entire web of life. Nature was a fabric on the one hand “delicate and destructible,” on the other “capable of striking back in unexpected ways.” To ignore this would be at humankind’s own peril.
Carson built her case brick by brick: she explained how pesticides poisoned soil and water; how they accumulated in human and animal tissues; how their residues made their way into cow’s milk and the milk of human mothers; and how their use often backfired when the very insects that had been targeted became resistant. Science and technology, she argued, had become the pawns of a chemical industry indifferent to all but its own profits. Humans were now subjected to dangerous chemicals “from the moment of conception until death.”
Using the era’s fears about radiation to focus her readers’ attention, Carson ticked off the “exact and inescapable” parallels between nuclear fallout and pesticides again and again. The effects of exposure to synthetic pesticides—like exposure to radiation—were especially burdensome to children, she warned, carrying the potential to alter our hereditary makeup. “We are rightly appalled by the genetic effects of radiation,” she asserted. “How then, can we be indifferent to the same effect in chemicals that we disseminate widely in our environment?” Our bodies had their own ecologies, she insisted, which could easily and irrevocably be knocked out of balance. At stake was nothing less than “our genetic heritage, our link with past and future.”
Carson felt it was arrogant to believe that nature existed to serve mankind’s needs. “The control of nature,” she wrote, was a “phrase conceived in arrogance, born of the Neanderthal age of biology and philosophy.” Human health, she asserted, would ultimately be a victim of the environment’s degradation. “Can anyone believe it is possible to lay down such a barrage of poisons on the surface of the earth without making it unfit for all life?” “The question is whether any civilization can wage relentless war on life without destroying itself and without losing the right to be called civilized.”
Carson repeatedly described a world in which “nothing must get in the way of the man with the spray gun.” She deplored the deceptions routinely practiced by a government that refused to acknowledge evidence of pesticides’ damage. The system as it stood was one in which government officials permitted the poisoning of the food supply and then “blithely claimed” to police the results. “Lulled by the soft sell and the hidden persuader,” she said, the average citizen was “seldom aware of the lethal chemicals” with which he was surrounded. When the public tried to hold the government accountable, it was “fed little tranquillizing pills of half-truth.”
“Man has lost the capacity to foresee and to forestall,” she warned, quoting Albert Schweitzer. “He will end up destroying the earth.”
Carson never let up, or softened, her message. Her arguments were sharp and insistent throughout. Yet it was her appeal to readers’ hearts that gave Silent Spring its stunning power. Much of the incandescence of her book, which weighed in at a modest 294 pages, was Carson’s ability to humanize a harrowing subject, to buttress the hard science with real-life stories. Sad and senseless, at moments horrifying, the tales ran through her narrative like a gallery of horrors, each a human face on an otherwise abstract problem, each a piece of the larger story.
Carson was a persuasive writer. She walked her readers through her subject as a scientist, but also as a poet, imbuing Silent Spring with a lyricism unusual to such a polemic. All of the elements of her earlier, softer books were here: her long view of time, her luminous observations of the natural world, her focus on systems and processes and the interconnectedness of the living world. But added to this mix was a new moral urgency, a sharpness to her warnings that was laced with fury. Describing a dying squirrel unintentionally caught in a spraying incident, she asked readers to consider the implications: “The head and neck were outstretched and the mouth often contained dirt, suggesting that the dying animal had been biting the ground,” she wrote. “By acquiescing in an act that can cause such suffering to a living creature, who among us is not diminished as a human being?”
“And what of human beings?” she went on to ask, describing a series of similarly grisly accidental poisonings. In each of these situations, “one turns away to ponder the question: who has made the decision that sets in motion these chains of poisonings. Who has decided—who had the right to decide—for the countless legions of people who were not consulted . . . ?”
Carson was in effect making it “personal,” a problem that touched “everyday people.” She was giving her readers both more responsibility and more agency by saying, “You can understand the science. You can change things.” She was also exposing the perils “of not speaking out,” underscoring “how one kind of silence breeds another, how the secrecies of government and big business beget a weirdly quiet and lifeless world,” writes ecologist Sandra Steingraber. This was something new in an era of intense social conformity, a departure for a culture unaccustomed to challenging authority. Carson was debunking the idea that only the “experts” could stand in judgment on such matters.
Much of the research Carson collected wasn’t new; scientists and doctors had been aware of aspects of her findings for some time. But most knew only what was relevant to their particular expertise. Carson was the first to translate the science into laymen’s language, to piece it all together into a story that ordinary readers could follow. In so doing, she was able to stir a population just emerging from the Cold War to action in a way that no writer before her had. Carson not only alerted people to the dangers of pesticides, she awakened them to their power to press for sweeping changes. Armed with the facts, she believed, the public would demand accountability from both the government and the chemical manufacturers; they would insist on a search for alternatives. In the end, the choice was between “working with or working against nature,” she insisted. “Every once in a while in the history of mankind, a book has appeared which has substantially altered the course of history,” said Senator Ernest Gruening. “Silent Spring was such a book.” In sounding the call to arms, Carson, the mild-mannered nature writer, unwittingly sparked a revolution. She changed the way people saw the world. We are a part of nature, she showed readers, and not separate from it. As such, we are equally vulnerable.
Silent Spring was more than a polemic about the perils of synthetic pesticides; it was a critique of the values of the 1950s: its love affair with technology, its deference to big business, its scientific elitism, its mania for national security, its increasing disconnection from nature. Technology had spurred a “golden age” of economic growth, supplying the nation with a pleasure box of consumer products from washing machines to weed killers, Cadillacs to tract houses. Technology had won the war, made the world safe for democracy. It would keep the red menace at bay. Or so the official script went. “No man who owns his house and lot can be a Communist,” quipped developer William J. Levitt. “He has too much to do.” Levitt had brought Ford’s idea of mass production to housing; McDonald’s had followed suit with mechanized food production. Now everyone could have a home and a little square of turf free of crabgrass; everyone could dine out on fast, assembly-line food. That the experience was homogenized seemed a small price to pay. The only shadow to all this was the Cold War: omnipresent, terrifying, a chill to honest debate.
It was an odd time for Americans, who teetered uneasily between untold affluence and fears of annihilation, optimism and quiet despair; a risky time, many said, to be idiosyncratic or outspoken. Eager to blend in, people looked inward to home and family, diverted themselves with easy pleasures, turned a blind eye to social and racial injustices. When Adlai Stevenson voiced questions about nuclear testing in the 1956 presidential campaign, he was viewed as an extreme, beyond-the-fringe liberal, far from the safe center; obviously he wasn’t a serious contender. The “legislative monument” of the era was the interstate highway system, its justification the speed with which it could whiz the new class of gray-suited businessmen from shiny new suburbs to jobs in the city. But also, more gravely, the ability to move weapons and material into the cities and people out, should nuclear war break out. “These have been years of conformity and depression,” wrote Norman Mailer in 1957 in “The White Negro.” “A stench of fear has come out of every pore of American life, and we suffer from a collective failure of nerve.” It was a time, in Mailer’s words, “when one could hardly maintain the courage to be an individual, to speak with one’s own voice.” But Rachel Carson was doing just that, in open defiance of cultural norms, especially as they applied to women, who were expected to serve up coffee and not social critiques, to be seen but not heard. Carson was calling attention to the shadow side of unchecked technological progress, the irresponsibility of both industry and science toward the “long-term health of the whole biota.” She was questioning the supremacy of science when it was used to alter the natural processes of the living world.
Carson had always been an outsider, and never more so than in the scientific world of the 1950s, first because she was a woman, which by definition made her a second-class citizen, but also because her field of interest, biology, carried no weight or prestige in the nuclear age, where chemists in white lab coats were king. But if her lowly station as a woman and a popular science writer consigned her to a measure of obscurity within the scientific establishment, it also accorded her enormous freedom and intellectual latitude. Carson had no academic affiliation or institutional voice to defend. She could follow the evidence she found, wherever it led her, free of institutional bias or the prerogatives of cronyism. And by the time Silent Spring appeared, her outsider status had become a valuable asset. The culture was changing.
Silent Spring came out at a moment when trust in the government and the corporate status quo was eroding everywhere, but most notably among the young. A new generation of Americans was coming of age. They were more open and optimistic than their parents had been, more willing to question authority, less sure that an exploding economy was the only measure of happiness or human achievement. Wary of the expansion of what Eisenhower had called “the military industrial complex,” skeptical of the “vain chase for satisfaction through mass consumption,” uninterested in the hierarchies of wealth and status that preoccupied their parents, this emerging generation was not so sure but that affluence and corporate indifference were corrupting to the human spirit. Uneasy with a world in thrall to the artificial and the mechanistic, the hectic, striving, industrialized life, they could see that greater material well-being was being traded for freedom and individuality, that the system as it stood not only disenfranchised people, but also laid waste to the land—all in the name of mammon. This gathering demographic, the first wave of a youth culture just beginning to coalesce, dreamed of an America in which every individual got a fair shot, a society where nature and natural systems were respected, where community rights might trump business rights. Brash and impatient, eager to shed the manacles of convention, it was a cohort that felt a new willingness to stand against the tide, a fresh and quixotic sense of possibility. And in Carson they found an affirmation of much of what they felt.
One age was passing into another. In voicing her unease about the increasingly technocratic focus of American life, Carson was raising many of the questions that the younger generation was beginning to ask about the trade-offs between material progress and the more ephemeral, sensory, and aesthetic qualities of life; she was setting the stage for the moral call to arms that would coalesce in the counterculture sixties, when the health of the earth became a live and pressing issue.
Silent Spring sold more than one hundred thousand copies in the first two weeks it was out. By Christmas 1962, it was number 1 on the bestseller list. In February 1963, it appeared in England, followed soon after by editions in France, Germany, and Sweden, where it also proved stunningly successful. The English edition opened with an introduction by Lord Shackleton, the son of the famous Antarctic explorer Ernest, who wryly told the House of Lords that cannibals in the South Pacific now preferred the flesh of Englishmen over Americans—as Americans had higher body burdens of DDT. He added that his comments were strictly “in the interest of the export trade.”
IN LATE OCTOBER 1962, CARSON HAD A PREMONITION THAT THINGS were not good. According to her latest X-rays, her cancer seemed to be under control, but she told Dorothy she felt “a menacing shadow.” By now the chemical industry’s smear campaign was in high gear. To blunt their attacks (which were becoming increasingly personal), Carson was doing more publicity than usual, speaking to garden clubs and conservation groups worried about the pesticide issue. In a speech to the Women’s National Press Club in December, Carson told her audience that she found it breathtaking that so many who disparaged her book hadn’t read it. Her critics had deployed “all the well-known devices” for weakening an argument, she said, including claims the book “said things it did not.” One especially exasperating mode of attack, she added, was to undermine the credibility of the person behind the book. She allowed with some amusement that she had been labeled “a bird lover, a cat lover, and—heavens—‘a high priestess of nature,’” although most charges were much sharper. Too often scientific truths were compromised to “serve the gods of profit,” Carson went on to say. Many academic researchers were funded by the chemical industry for studies that reflected favorably on pesticides’ safety, she reported. “When the scientific organization speaks,” Carson asked, “whose voice do we hear, that of science or of the sustaining industry?”
Carson’s speech went well. But by the next afternoon, she was doubled over with pain. She went to the doctor for X-rays of her back, and was relieved to hear that her spine showed no discernible masses. But when the pain hadn’t lifted by Christmas, the doctor recommended another round of radiation treatments, as pain sometimes occurred in the vertebrae before cancer showed up on X-rays. However discouraged she felt, Rachel tried to feign normalcy for Roger’s sake, reminding herself that no cancer had been found. Perhaps her back pain had nothing to do with a malignancy. And then a new worry arose. It was just before Christmas, and she was shopping in Chevy Chase for a gift for Roger. Without warning, she collapsed over a table of records. Terribly shaken, having never fainted before, Rachel thought she was okay. Her doctor wasn’t so sure. Her symptoms indicated angina, he thought, which would mean considerable adjustments. A hospital bed was brought to the house and she was told to do minimal walking, no stairs, and to cancel any further speaking engagements until her chest pains eased up. Except for seeing Roger off to school, Rachel now stayed in bed. She felt terribly alone.
“It has been such a mixed year for us,” Rachel admitted in a letter to Dorothy. “Joy and fulfillment,” but also “the shadows of ill health. For me, either would have been a solitary experience without you.” She told Dorothy that the past ten years—the time they had known each other—had been “crowded” with sorrows, tragedies, and problems, but also, she suspected, with everything she would be remembered for. She said she couldn’t imagine those years without Dorothy: “Because of you there has been far more joy in the happy things, and the hard spots have been more bearable. And so it will be in the time to come.”
But Rachel was feeling less sure than her letter indicated. Two weeks later, she got more dispiriting news. There were two new tumors, one above her collarbone, the other in her neck; the cancer had entered her bones. She told Dorothy she couldn’t pretend to be “light-hearted” about this, but she was trying hard not to think about it. Her chest pains had sharpened, and she was fearful of doing even silly things, like pulling up the blinds. But she was determined not to be a burden, and, as always, concerned about her privacy. She admitted to Dorothy that she wasn’t getting help because she’d told almost no one about her cancer. She was determined not to live “an invalid’s life,” she added. “The main things I want to say, dear, is that we are not going to get bogged down in unhappiness about all this. We are going to be happy, go on enjoying all the lovely things that give life meaning—sunrise and sunset, moonlight on the bay, music and good books . . . the wild cries of the geese.”
HOUGHTON MIFFLIN HAD BEEN MAKING PLANS FOR RACHEL’S INTERVIEW on CBS Reports. The publicity people were filled with tips: she should wear no lipstick, as it would look “black on black-and-white film”; it was important that she not look “too stern,” as her message itself was sobering; she should smile occasionally, as it would “relax” her face, keep it from looking too grim. They wanted her “gentle nature” to come through, her thoughtfulness and her modesty. Her mastery of the science would be obvious, they reminded her; they were confident her message would speak for itself.
But privately everyone was beginning to worry. Rachel’s interview came and went and seemed to go well. But CBS continued to postpone the date for when it would air. Houghton Mifflin worried that the delays might mean that the program was tilting toward the pesticide industry, which they knew CBS was also interviewing. Jay McMullen, the producer, was known for being cautious and methodical. Paul Brooks hoped that “their friends in the chemical business” hadn’t made too strong a case for pesticides. He had learned that the network had received more than a thousand pro-industry letters, all of them mimeographed, clearly a letter-writing campaign orchestrated by the chemical lobby. Then, two days before the broadcast, three of the five commercial sponsors pulled out. Everyone knew Carson’s views were politically vulnerable.
By early March 1963, both Rachel and Dorothy were aware that the sand in the hourglass was slipping away. Rachel admitted to having excruciating pain in her back and ribs, and said her nausea made it nearly impossible to do anything. One night, convinced the end was near, she wrote out her last words to Dorothy, explaining that the pain that night had been terrible, but even more agonizing, she realized, was the thought that if she didn’t make it past the night, she might not get to say good-bye. And so she was writing her something now, hoping it might make it “a little easier for you if there were some message.”
She told Dorothy that she should have no regrets on her behalf. “I have had a rich life, full of rewards and satisfactions that come to few, and if it must end now, I can feel that I have achieved most of what I wished to do.” She said this wouldn’t have been so two years ago, when she first realized her time was short, “and I am so grateful to have had this extra time. My regrets, darling, are for your sadness, leaving Roger, when I so wanted to see him through to manhood.” What she wanted to write, she said, was of the “joy and fun and gladness” they had shared, for these were the things she wanted Dorothy to remember. But then, having made it through the night, the moment passed, and she put the letter aside.
Carson’s appearance on CBS Reports finally aired on April 3, 1963. It was the same evening that the popular astronaut Gordon Cooper was orbiting the earth in the second Project Mercury space capsule, vying for viewers’ attentions. Dressed in a sage green suit, Carson sat in her office chair, answering every question with calm deliberation, never sounding anything but thoughtful throughout. It was a brilliant performance, made all the more so by its juxtaposition with her chief adversary, the wild-eyed and hyperbolic Robert H. White-Stevens, who spoke on behalf of the chemical industry. Wearing a white lab coat and black glasses, and sounding more like a mad scientist than an evenhanded researcher, White-Stevens began with a prepared statement describing a world beset by hunger and pestilence, as hordes of rasping insects denuded forests and ravaged croplands, leaving humans prey to every scourge imaginable. “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,” he warned.
White-Stevens went on to claim that registered pesticides, used correctly, “posed no hazard” to humans or wildlife, a statement so obviously distorted that even the other pesticide proponents Sevareid questioned had to disagree, undermining the credibility of everything else White-Stevens said.
CBS had opened the program with shots of pesticides being sprayed over cropland and through neighborhoods where children scampered happily behind fogging trucks. Then it cut back to Sevareid, who proceeded to recite statistics about pesticide use, including a mind-numbing tally of new products on the market for home, farm, and gardeners’ use—a sum that sounded so over-the-top scary that it must have given pause to even the most jaded viewer.
Between Carson, who read selected passages from Silent Spring, including many that highlighted her most worrisome findings, and the creepy White-Stevens, came a string of government experts, whose answers were generally vague, as if trying to gracefully sidestep the pesticide problem. By the end, viewers were left with the clear impression that Carson was correct: none of the people who were supposedly in charge knew all that much about the safety or long-term effects of pesticide use. It was a troubling thought.
Sevareid closed on a philosophical note, allowing Carson to share her view of mankind’s place in the ecological balance. “We still talk in terms of conquest,” she said. “We still haven’t become mature enough to think of ourselves as only a very tiny part of a vast and incredible universe. Now I truly believe that we in this generation must come to terms with nature,” she added. “And I think we’re challenged as mankind has never been challenged before to prove our maturity and our mastery not of nature, but of ourselves.”
The program was an unqualified success and both Carson and her publisher were pleased. The network estimated the audience that night numbered ten to fifteen million, a large portion of whom hadn’t read Carson’s book, but were roused by what they heard, writing in afterward to say how grateful they were to CBS for presenting such an “important” topic. Rachel’s on-camera appearance was especially devastating to her critics. Any notions that she was a zealot or a Communist operative had been roundly dispelled by her manner that evening, which was intelligent, measured, and poised throughout. She came off as a responsible citizen-scientist armed with what sounded like the truth.
On May 15, Silent Spring got another boost. The president’s pesticide committee released its report, which more than vindicated Carson’s claims—this despite rumors that political pressure had been brought to bear to water down its findings. In a follow-up broadcast, Sevareid called Silent Spring “the most controversial book of the year,” reporting that it had now sold more than five hundred thousand copies and started “a national quarrel.” Dorothy wrote to Rachel telling her that May 15, 1963, would “go down in history as Rachel’s triumph.” She predicted her name would be remembered long after Gordon Cooper’s—the Project Mercury astronaut still orbiting the earth.
Rachel was feeling optimistic enough to buy a new car. It had a radio and seat belts—the latter still a novelty. In early May 1963, she wrote Dorothy, telling her she was desperate to see her in person. There were “things I need to say to you, but they should be said with my arms around you.” At the back of her mind was the worry that she wouldn’t be able to make it to Maine that summer. Though she was feeling better, her angina was back and her spine was now riddled with compression fractures, making it more painful to walk. She had accepted an invitation to testify in Washington before Connecticut senator Abraham Ribicoff’s subcommittee on pesticides on June 4. It was the one last thing she needed to do.
CAPITOL HILL WAS BUSTLING THAT DAY. THE WINDOWLESS HEARING room was already packed when she got there. Television cameras were trained on the dais. Soundmen and recording equipment crowded the aisles; cables snarled the floor, every square inch of available space taken. Rachel was dressed in a green suit. Her gait was unsteady and she walked with a cane as she hobbled to her seat. To conceal her baldness, she wore a brown wig.
She sat and waited calmly, speaking to no one, a still point amidst the tumult. On the table before her lay her note cards, a neat stack that was large and typewritten: her testimony for the upcoming hearing. She felt no nervousness, no reservations about being there. She had known for some time what she wanted to say.
Finally Senator Ribicoff stood, and the room fell silent as he introduced his lead witness. “You are the lady who started all this,” he said, turning to Carson. “We welcome you here.” Graciously she returned his thanks, taking a moment to acknowledge what he’d said. Then, putting on her black-rimmed glasses, she began to read, her voice calm and low, surprisingly strong.
Rachel’s prepared statement went on for forty minutes. She called for more research, and less aerial spraying, especially of pesticides that left long-lived residues. She argued that citizens should have the “right” to be secure in their own homes against the imposition of poisons applied by other persons, and that greater restrictions on the sale and use of pesticides were needed. “Our heedless and destructive acts enter into the vast cycles of the earth and in time return to bring hazards to ourselves,” she told the committee. “I speak not as a lawyer but as a biologist and a human being.” Asked if she believed there should be a total ban on pesticide use, she said no, she did not, stressing that this had been a false charge leveled at Silent Spring from the beginning. Later Ribicoff would recall that one of the reasons Carson’s testimony that day was so impressive was that she believed so strongly in her vision. No one who heard her presentation “could have questioned her integrity.” She was that “rare person who was passionately committed when few others believed very much in anything.” No one that day knew how close Carson was to death.
Rachel left immediately for Maine, despite her precarious health, arriving just in time for ten-year-old Roger to begin summer camp. Her doctors had warned that any kind of fall could have serious consequences; she needed to limit her walking. Still, she was sorely tempted. She sent a note to Dorothy: “Would you help me search for a fairy cave on an August moon and a low, low tide. I would love to try it once more, for the memories are precious.”
They didn’t go, but one day in early September 1963, they drove to the end of Southport Island, to a lovely inn, where they lunched together and then sat on a bench overlooking a field of goldenrod. It was a blue-skied day, clear and crystalline, the air still soft and warm. They listened to the wind in the pines and the lap of the sea against the rocks. Suddenly, flickering through the air, came a drift of monarch butterflies, all moving in the same direction, as if “drawn by some invisible force.” As they watched, they spoke of the butterflies’ mysterious life cycle, how they traveled thousands of miles in a single year, several generations living and dying in the course of that journey, both aware that none of the monarchs they were seeing on that slow, dreamy afternoon would return.
When Rachel returned to Maryland a few days later, she wrote to Dorothy, telling her what a joyful memory it was. “It occurred to me . . . that it had been a happy spectacle, that we had felt no sadness when we spoke of the fact that there would be no return.” Carson offered that it was because they both knew that every living thing must come to the last of its days, which was as it should be. The monarch’s life cycle is measured in months, she added. “For ourselves, the measure is something else, the span of which we cannot know . . . when that intangible cycle has run its course it is a natural and not unhappy thing that a life has come to its end.”
Leaving Maine this time had been especially wrenching. On the actual morning, a friend had had to carry Rachel to the car. The cancer was advancing quickly now. There were new lesions on the left side of her pelvis, bringing new pain, more difficulty in walking. Dorothy tried to cheer her up with daily letters describing her days at Southport: the birds and the seals, the crisp autumn days, the walks through the piney woods. “I’ve been x-rayed practically from chin to ankles,” Rachel wrote back. In October she began a cycle of testosterone and phosphorus treatments, which her doctors hoped would make walking less difficult. She hoped she could somehow make it to San Francisco for an upcoming speech at the Kaiser Medical Center. She was beginning to fear, however, that it wasn’t to be. The pain was now moving from one part of her body to the next, with no apparent pattern. There were days, she told Dorothy, when she couldn’t walk at all.
Somehow she managed to go, though for most of the trip she was confined to a wheelchair, even for the short visit she made to see the redwood forest at Muir Woods. A local newspaper, covering her lecture, which had packed the auditorium, described her as a “middle-aged, arthritis-crippled spinster.” When she got home, Rachel admitted she was “as sick as she had ever been.” Now, to get through the nights she was taking sleeping pills. Much of her time was spent in bed, though some days she felt strong enough to hobble through the house with a walker. She wasn’t in constant pain, she assured Dorothy. And some days were better than others. What she didn’t say was there were times when she had trouble writing because of numbness in her hands.
That November Rachel began going through her papers, which she had decided to donate to Yale. She told Dorothy she was surprised by how much comfort this brought. She remembered herself again as a young writer: tireless and filled with ideas, with still so much time ahead. She recalled her first days in Maine, meeting Dorothy, the amazement of having found a kindred soul. But even this interlude of peace was abruptly shattered when, on November 22, 1963, she learned that President Kennedy had been assassinated in Dallas. It was unbearably sad; she was unable to think of much else, she said. She wrote Dorothy she felt as if she’d lost a family member, that his killing had filled her with “shock, dismay, and revulsion at the black aspects of our national life—the bigotry, intolerance and hatred preached by so many.”
The awards continued to pour in. Although Rachel now had unremitting pain, and the compression in her spine sometimes made it difficult to work her hands, she decided to go to New York in early December to accept the award from the American Geographical Society. Dorothy and Stan joined her in the city for the event, which went flawlessly. Afterward, Dorothy admitted in a letter that she had never expected she would see Rachel “out of bed again after she’d left Maine that fall.” Seeing her up on the dais, looking so “lovely,” had made her tear up.
When Rachel returned home she began another series of radiation treatments. Her doctor had found more cancer at the base of her skull, which he believed was the cause of her numb hands. Writing to Dorothy on the winter solstice, she alluded to the upcoming summer in Southport, saying she intended to plant roses. “I had not, until recently, allowed my thoughts to range so far into the future,” she said. “Now I do.” They would yet build more memories, she added.
Dorothy came to Silver Spring for a four-day visit after Christmas. After she left, Rachel wrote to apologize for having talked too much about her illness, and how little time she probably had left. There was stabbing pain in her head now, and she had lost all sense of smell and taste. Her doctor reminded her that it had already been three years since her cancer diagnosis. She was already “something of a miracle.” What he didn’t say, though Rachel inferred it, was that she shouldn’t expect too much more. Even so, she hoped for one more reprieve so that she might make it back to Maine.
And then Dorothy’s husband died quite suddenly of a heart attack. Rachel was devastated. She reproached herself for having burdened Dorothy with her own health issues. It was now her turn, she told Dorothy, to take care of her dear friend. Rachel flew to West Bridgewater for the funeral. It was a sad visit, but she was glad she could be there. Dorothy’s son drove Rachel and her wheelchair to the airport, helping her to board.
Dorothy and Rachel spoke often in the months that followed, hoping to arrange a visit. By early spring Rachel’s cancer had advanced to her liver. At the advice of her doctor, she returned to the Cleveland Clinic, where, near death, she was hospitalized for several weeks. At some point while there, she had an out-of-body experience, which she described as feeling suddenly surrounded by “a brilliant white light” and then being lifted up. Rachel told Dorothy it had been like being in the swirling fog near their houses in Maine. When she could, Rachel dictated letters to friends from her bed, but she hid the gravity of her situation from most, saying that she was in the hospital for arthritis, and would soon be leaving. In early April, though terribly weak, Rachel finally went home. Dorothy immediately flew to Maryland for a visit. Rachel was only partially aware during many of their hours together, but she was overjoyed to see her friend. When Dorothy got home a few days later, she told Rachel how happy she was to be able to now imagine her days. On April 14, she wrote again, saying how lovely it was that Rachel could hear the birds outside her window each morning. That same afternoon, Rachel’s heart stopped. She died before sunset.