Pests are simply living organisms distinguished from many other forms of life only by the fact that they have acquired the great displeasure of one of their chief competitors, man . . . Man has annihilated whole armies of his own species, Homo sapiens. Civilizations have come and gone. But it is doubtful if man has ever exterminated, except in local areas, a single one of those competing species he calls pests.
—George C. Decker, prominent scientist and critic of Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring, 1962488
The chemical war is never won, and all life is caught in its violent crossfire.
—Rachel Carson, 1962447
Titles are the doorway that either obstruct entry or invite readers in. Many potential titles in addition to “Man against the Earth” competed in Carson’s mind for the book cover. These included “Man against Nature,” “How to Balance Nature,” “The Control of Nature,” and “Dissent in Favor of Man,” the last of which referred to Justice William O. Douglas’s dissent of the Supreme Court ruling against Long Island residents who fought aerial spraying of DDT.425,466 All these would have limited the book’s audience, so Carson searched for a better title. Houghton Mifflin’s editor in chief, Paul Brooks, had recommended “Silent Spring” as the name for the chapter on birds, and later expanded that suggestion to the book title.471 Her literary agent, Marie Rodell, recommended to Carson the two lines from the poet John Keats for the front of the book: “The sedge is wither’d from the lake, And no birds sing.”489
Carson’s previous books were beautiful, celebratory, and lyrical works that took the reader along the seacoast and under the waves, but they were not controversial. Controversy, however, lit up Silent Spring well before it was published in the fall of 1962. Brooks anticipated its impact, telling Carson when she began writing the book, “One thing you can be sure of: the world is waiting for it.”466 This was due in part to the scale of the problem; by 1962, chemical companies had already registered for the US marketplace about 500 chemical compounds used in 54,000 pesticide formulations, and US insecticide use alone that year amounted to an astonishing 350 million pounds distributed over 90 million acres.490
Knowing that the book would face a fierce industrial backlash, Carson vetted all facts with noted experts, and lawyers for Houghton Mifflin assured her that nothing was libelous.466,471 Carson’s team sent prepublication copies to congressional leaders, US government administrators, political organizations, and garden and conservation societies.467 Battle lines were already drawn by the time the New Yorker published a condensed version of the book in June, and New Yorker readers submitted a greater volume of letters than any previous piece in the magazine’s history had generated.474 The New Yorker boasted a circulation of 430,000 readers, giving Silent Spring a strong opening salvo.466 The New Yorker’s editor, William Shawn, who had played a key role in editing the book, noted, “We don’t usually think of the New Yorker as changing the world, but this is one time it might.”466 The New York Times declared “‘Silent Spring’ Is Now Noisy Summer.”491 The New Yorker’s series was one that “few will read without a chill, no matter how hot the weather.”492
The New York Times accurately predicted the effect the book would have, though it was still only in serialized form. “Miss Carson will be accused of alarmism, or lack of objectivity, of showing only the bad side of pesticides while ignoring their benefits. But this, we suspect, is her purpose as well as her method. We do not combat highway carelessness by reciting statistics only of the millions of motorists who return safely to their garages.”492
On Carson’s side stood many prominent figures, including Agnes E. Meyer, who owned the Washington Post, and the heads of such women’s groups as the League of Women Voters, the National Council of Jewish Women, and the American Association of University Women.467 She also enjoyed the support of prominent conservation leaders, scientists, and public figures, including Justice William O. Douglas and secretary of the interior Stewart Udall. Douglas declared that Silent Spring was “the most revolutionary book since Uncle Tom’s Cabin.”493 He was quoted on the book’s back cover as stating the book to be “the most important chronicle of this century for the human race.” The New York Times wrote, “If her series helps arouse enough public concern to immunize Government agencies against the blandishments of the hucksters and enforces adequate controls, the author will be as deserving of the Nobel Prize as was the inventor of DDT.”492
Commercial success of the book seemed guaranteed. It was selected by Book-of-the-Month Club as the October read, excerpts were due to be published in magazines, Consumers’ Union contracted for a special edition for its membership, and CBS Reports planned a TV episode on the book.320, 471
Balancing out these positive signs, attacks on Carson and her book rained in well before it was published in September.467 Velsicol Chemical Company, which produced the insecticides heptachlor and chlordane, threated to sue the New Yorker if it continued to print the condensed book.466,471 The New Yorker did not retreat. Velsicol then threatened to sue Houghton Mifflin if it proceeded with publication. Velsicol’s letter to Houghton Mifflin stated, “Unfortunately, in addition to the sincere opinions by natural food faddists, Audubon groups and others, members of the chemical industry in this country and in western Europe must deal with sinister influences, whose attacks on the chemical industry have a dual purpose: (1) to create the false impression that all business is grasping and immoral, and (2) to reduce the use of agricultural chemicals in this country and in the countries of western Europe, so that our supply of food will be reduced to east-curtain parity. Many innocent groups are financed and led into attacks on the chemical industry by these sinister parties.”463
Silent Spring opens with “A Fable for Tomorrow”:
There was once a town in the heart of America where all life seemed to live in harmony with its surroundings. The town lay in the midst of a checkerboard of prosperous farms, with fields of grain and hillsides or orchards where, in spring, white clouds of bloom drifted above the green fields. In autumn, oak and maple and birch set up a blaze of color that flamed and flickered across a backdrop of pines. Then foxes barked in the hills and deer silently crossed the fields, half hidden in the mists of the fall mornings . . . Then a strange blight crept over the area and everything began to change. Some evil spell had settled on the community: mysterious maladies swept the flocks of chickens; the cattle and sheep sickened and died. Everywhere was a shadow of death . . . The few birds seen anywhere were moribund; they trembled violently and could not fly. It was a spring without voices . . . only silence lay over the fields and woods and marsh . . . The roadsides, once so attractive, were now lined with browned and withered vegetation as though swept by fire . . . No witchcraft, no enemy action had silenced the rebirth of new life in this stricken world. The people had done it themselves.447
This destruction wrought by the white clouds drifting over green fields echoed the stark observation of the priest who, in crossing Ireland during the potato famine, “beheld with sorrow one wide waste of putrefying vegetation. In many places the wretched people were seated on the fences of their decaying gardens, wringing their hands and wailing bitterly the destruction that had left them foodless.”21 Carson’s fable was also reminiscent of the clouds of chlorine gas blighting the battlefields of Europe during World War I, and could easily invoke everyone’s Cold War fears of nuclear fallout. Indeed, she mentioned strontium-90 in the book before referring to pesticides, and used radiation as a metaphor throughout the book.494 Carson wrote that “the parallel between chemicals and radiation is exact and inescapable.”447 She quoted the 1952 Nobel Peace Prize winner Albert Schweitzer, who said, “Man can hardly even recognize the devils of his own creation.”447 “The question is,” posed Carson, “whether any civilization can wage relentless war on life without destroying itself, and without losing the right to be called civilized.”447
Monsanto Corporation responded with a widely distributed parody entitled “The Desolate Year,” which described a pesticide-free world riddled with disease and hunger.495 “The bugs were everywhere. Unseen. Unheard. Unbelievably universal . . . Beneath the ground, beneath the waters, on and in limbs and twigs and stalks, under rocks, inside trees and animals and other insects—and, yes, inside man.” Due to the lack of pesticides, “the garrote of Nature rampant began to tighten.” The result was that “genus by genus, species by species, sub-species by innumerable sub-species, the insects emerged. Creeping and flying and crawling into the open, beginning in the southern tier of states and progressing northward.” People, “infected by the first onslaught of the host mosquitoes, suffered the fiendish torture of chills and fever and the hellish pain of the world’s greatest scourge.” Malaria was by no means the only agent of man’s suffering. “Then the really notorious villain, Ireland’s awful late blight, took over, and the firm brown ‘spuds’ were gone, turned into black slime.” A repeat of the Irish Potato Famine due to a lack of pesticides led to starving people once again reduced to eating insects. Termites felled buildings and devoured libraries. “Yellow fever hung like a spectre” over the southern United States. “Rats and mice multiplied prodigiously,” a disaster that would lead to outbreaks of typhus and bubonic plague.
Similarly, the American Agriculturist featured a boy and his grandfather eating acorns in the forest. The grandfather explained that a book had come out against the use of chemicals in farming. “So now we live naturally. Your mother died naturally from malaria that mosquitoes gave her; your Dad passed away naturally in that terrible famine when the grasshoppers ate up everything; now we are starving naturally, because the blight killed those potatoes we planted last spring.”471
A host of chemical companies, including Monsanto, DuPont, Dow, Shell Chemical, Goodrich-Gulf, Allied Chemical, and W. R. Grace, collaborated through trade organizations in their criticisms of the book and its author, and some, such as Velsicol and American Cyanamid, had their own representatives mount attacks.466 Silent Spring threatened to undermine the prestige of these companies, carefully cultivated through advertising campaigns such as DuPont’s “Better Living through Chemistry.” Industry also worried that the book would lead to unwanted regulations. Chemical and Engineering News quoted the director of the New Jersey Department of Agriculture: “In any large scale pest control program in this area, we are immediately confronted with the objection of a vociferous, misinformed group of nature-balancing, organic-gardening, bird-loving, unreasonable citizenry.”471 Another magazine concluded, “Her book is more poisonous than the pesticides she condemns.”471 The irony of the industry campaign was revealed by one critic of Carson, who wrote, “They scold emotion emotionally.”496
Carson wrote, “DDT is now so universally used that in most minds the product takes on the harmless aspect of the familiar.”447 Such indiscriminate use of pesticides by government agencies and private parties posed serious ethical issues beyond the effects on nature, and this theme was central to Silent Spring. Ordinary people were exposed to pesticides without their knowledge or consent. By 1950, Americans already averaged over 5 parts per million DDT in their body fat, and women’s breast milk was also contaminated.320 The concentration of DDT and its metabolites in the body fat of the average American adult rose to 12 parts per million by the early 1960s.490 Carson argued that people had a right to know and a role to decide about pesticide use, both of which were denied them. She wrote that we live in “an era dominated by industry, in which the right to make a dollar at whatever cost is seldom challenged. When the public protests, confronted with some obvious evidence of damaging results of pesticide applications, it is fed little tranquilizing pills of half truth . . . It is the public that is being asked to assume the risks that the insect controllers calculate.”447
This risk was extended even into their own homes by their own hands, given the universal availability of pesticides for domestic use, placing the typical household “in little better position than the guests of the Borgias.”447 One industry executive essentially agreed, stating, “The industry deserves a black eye for not educating pesticide users on the proper use of powerful chemicals. One of the big problems we’ve always faced is overestimating the intelligence of users.”466 Carson wrote, “If the Bill of Rights contains no guarantee that a citizen shall be secure against lethal poisons distributed either by private individuals or by public officials, it is surely only because our forefathers, despite their considerable wisdom and foresight, could conceive of no such problem.”447 She also extended such ethical concerns to animals and 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?”447
Silent Spring ends with the paragraph:
The “control of nature” is a phrase conceived in arrogance, born of the Neanderthal age of biology and philosophy, when it was supposed that nature exists for the convenience of man. The concepts and practices of applied entomology for the most part date from that Stone Age of science. It is our alarming misfortune that so primitive a science has armed itself with the most modern and terrible weapons, and that in turning them against the insects it has also turned them against the earth.447
Applied entomologists were thus directly attacked as ignorant and immoral. They and their allies responded in kind. One prominent entomologist wrote that “Silent Spring poses leading questions, on which neither the author nor the average reader is qualified to make decisions. I regard it as science fiction, to be read in the same way that the TV show Twilight Zone is to be watched.”467 An industrial trade journal commented, “For the insecticide industry, this book could turn out to be a serious and costly body blow—even though it did land below the belt.”467
A prominent scientist, who led the Food Protection Committee of the National Academy of Sciences–National Research Council, predicted that Silent Spring would appeal to “the organic gardeners, the antifluoride leaguers, the worshipers of ‘natural foods,’ those who cling to the philosophy of a vital principle, and pseudo-scientists and faddists.”497 He advised that, “in view of her scientific qualifications in contrast to those of our distinguished scientific leaders and statesmen, this book should be ignored . . . It is doubtful that many readers can bear to wade through its high-pitched sequences of anxieties.”497 He warned that the attitude expressed in the book “means the end of all human progress, reversion to a passive social state devoid of technology, scientific medicine, agriculture, sanitation, or education. It means disease, epidemics, starvation, misery, and suffering incomparable and intolerable to modern man.”497
The head of the nutrition program at the Harvard School of Public Health stated:
Miss Carson writes with passion and with beauty, but with very little scientific detachment. Dispassionate scientific evidence and passionate propaganda are two buckets of water that simply can’t be carried on one person’s shoulders. The bucket that springs a leak in Miss Carson’s case is the scientific evidence . . . Unfortunately, Miss Carson implicitly accuses the scientific community of disparaging human values. In doing so, she abandons scientific proof and truth and combats them with exaggeration and unscientific deductive reasoning based on axioms of her own making . . . Miss Carson is a literary luminary—and one of splendid accomplishment. That is no mean feat. Miss Carson could have written a book which would have helped bridge the gap between science and the public, instead of one which widens the gulf.498
The president of Montrose Chemical Corporation, which was the largest DDT producer in the United States, accused Carson of being “a fanatic defender of the cult of the balance of nature.”491 Many others jumped on this theme, such as a government official who said, “At one time this country was supporting about 1,000,000 Indians and some wildlife, and things were in balance.”499 A trade organization called the National Agricultural Chemicals Association funded a $250,000 public relations campaign attacking Carson.474 A former secretary of agriculture asked “why a spinster with no children was so concerned about genetics?” His answer was that Carson was “probably a Communist.”467
The most visible critic was Robert White-Stevens of American Cyanamid. He wrote, “We often find that a false statement takes off like an ICBM [intercontinental ballistic missile] and explodes in TV, radio, newspapers, magazines, and even in books, before a measured estimate of the facts in the matter can be assessed and presented objectively.”500 White-Stevens admired Carson’s writing, but not her intent:
Miss Rachel Carson . . . is a writer on biological subjects with an extraordinary, vivid touch and elegance of expression. She paints a nostalgic picture of Elysian life in an imaginary American village of former years, where all was in harmonious balance with Nature and happiness and contentment reigned interminably, until sickness, death, and corruption was spread over the face of the landscape in the form of insecticides and other agricultural chemicals. But the picture she paints is illusory, and she as a biologist must know that the rural Utopia she describes was rudely punctuated by a longevity among its residents of perhaps thirty-five years, by an infant mortality of upwards of twenty children dead by the age of five of every 100 born, by mothers dead in their twenties from childbed fever and tuberculosis, by frequent famines crushing the isolated peoples through long dark, frozen winters following the failure of a basic crop the previous summer, by vermin and filth infesting their homes, their stored foods and their bodies, both inside and out.500
Criticism did not limit itself to the pen of entomologists and industrialists. Many media outlets joined the fray. The Economist reduced Carson’s “angry, shrill tract” to “propaganda written in white-hot anger with words tumbling and stumbling all over the page.”474 Time magazine’s science journalist charged that in her “emotional and inaccurate outburst,” “Miss Carson has taken up her pen in alarm and anger, putting literary skill second to the task of frightening and arousing her readers,” leading to a position that was “unfair, one-sided, and hysterically overemphatic.”501 Carson wrote, “These insecticides are not selective poisons; they do not single out the one species of which we desire to be rid. Each of them is used for the simple reason that it is a deadly poison. It therefore poisons all life with which it comes in contact.”447 The Time journalist responded, “Any housewife who has sprayed flies with a bug bomb and managed to survive without poisoning should spot at least part of the error in that statement.”501 This journalist and others drew upon the experience of convicts who were fed DDT by the US Public Health Service and were found to be as healthy as a control group of convicts fed the same diet minus DDT.502
Natural History magazine provided a mixed review, though the author defended Carson’s advocacy: “She has been accused of being ‘one-sided,’ as though this were a fault. I have never heard` St. Paul criticized for not giving Satan his due, though he is obviously a devilishly engaging fellow.”503 The secretary of the interior, Stewart Udall, defended Carson along these same lines: “Silent Spring was called a one-sided book. And so it was. She did not pause to state the case for the use of poisons on pests, for her antagonists were riding roughshod over the landscape. They had not bothered to state the case for nature. The engines of industry were in action; the benefits of pest control were known—and the case for caution needed dramatic statement if alternatives to misuse were to be pursued.”504
Edwin Diamond, the science editor of Newsweek, initially was contracted by Houghton Mifflin to cowrite the book with Carson, but Carson decided the collaboration would only hurt the book and so removed him from the project early on.466 Diamond ended up writing one of the most scathing reviews.487 “Thanks to a woman named Rachel Carson,” he wrote, “a big fuss has been stirred up to scare the American public out of its wits.” Noting that Carson was not married, Diamond asked, “What, finally, is Silent Spring’s game? . . . this is an era of stereotyped thinking, scattershot charges, shrill voices and double standards of behavior.” Carson’s tactics, Diamond wrote, were reminiscent of those employed by Senator Joseph McCarthy in his Great Communist Hunt. “The record shows that the nation, once down from its McCarthyite orbit, was able to deal with subversion without dismantling its noble mansion of constitutional law and civil rights. Similarly, I think the pesticide ‘problem’ can be handled without going back to a dark age of plague and epidemic.”
The controversy fell in part along gender lines, with men doing the criticizing and employing sexist stereotypes, and women (and men) providing critical support, although also often in a gender-biased manner. Carson was compared to Carrie Nation, the hatchet-wielding activist against alcohol.505 The journal Archives of Internal Medicine published an editorial stating, “Silent Spring, which I read word for word with some trauma, kept reminding me of trying to win an argument with a woman. It can not be done.”496 Although this author found the book, as science, to be “so much hogwash,” he also expressed a view that some positive changes were likely to result from it. “I found in it much cantankerous enthusiasm and much concern for the state of man. I got through it, realizing that it will not advance the cause of science, of learning, or of Rachel Carson. On the other hand, if enough people read it and begin to think about the implications of some of the things of which it gives only a biased view, not only the country, but even scientists working on the problems the book assails, must surely gain.”496
Gender stereotypes also colored public perceptions. The New York Times wrote, “Gentle, soft-voiced Rachel Louise Carson appears an unlikely candidate for the role of avenging angel. She is shy and very feminine, and refuses to be drawn into retaliatory comments against those who have attacked her book . . . Miss Carson is a small-boned woman with gradually graying, dark-brown hair. Her eyes are grayish brown and her complexion is pale.”506 Another friendly reviewer wrote, “Miss Carson is a quiet-spoken spinster, now 55 years old, who lives in suburban Silver Springs, Md., near Washington. She is renowned for her prize-winning 1951 work on marine biology, ‘The Sea Around Us,’ dealing with the flora and fauna of the sea. In her latest books she comes ashore, with a vengeance.”499 But Carson dismissed any role for gender in the point of her book; her interest was not in “things done by women or men, but in things done by people.”467
In perhaps the only serious criticism by a woman, Virginia Kraft wrote in Sports Illustrated, “Wildlife populations all over the nation are bigger and healthier than ever, not in spite of pesticides, but in many cases because of them . . . The prosperity in the wildlife of today is a direct result of man’s—particularly American man’s—increased ability to control his own environment . . . The single most effective tool in bringing about these improvements has been chemical pesticides.”507 Kraft wrote that Silent Spring made Nevil Shute’s nuclear apocalypse novel On the Beach “seem almost euphoric by comparison.”507 She continued, “The wise and discreet use of chemical pesticides is assuring us not of a silent spring, but of seasons filled with all the rich, new sounds of animal and human prosperity.”507
In summing up the criticism originating from so many quarters, Paul Brooks compared the reaction to that faced by Charles Darwin a century earlier with the publication of On the Origin of Species; not since then “had a single book been more bitterly attacked by those who felt their interests threatened.”471 Even some of the language used to criticize Darwin rang familiar in 1962. Louis Agassiz wrote that Darwin’s transmutation theory is “a scientific mistake, untrue in its facts, unscientific in its method, and mischievous in its tendency.”508 Comparing Silent Spring to Thomas Paine’s Rights of Man,509 a critic for the New York Times noted, “From the panic of the chemical industries and the soothing officialese of Government bulletins, you would think that Rachel Carson had advocated a return to the wooden plow.”510
All this controversy stimulated sales of the book and thereby worked against the critics. Within two months of publication, the book had sold 100,000 copies, topped the bestseller list, and featured in headline news; indeed, the book caught the attention of President Kennedy even before it was published.467 It was translated into twenty-two languages, and half a million hardcover books were sold before Houghton Mifflin released the paperback edition.467,474 Sales occurred in pulses with each new event, whether it was the airing of CBS Reports, or press coverage of government hearings. A Houghton Mifflin executive noted this unprecedented situation for one of its titles, and stated, “The only parallel I can think of is a book as evil as Rachel’s is benign. Mein Kampf used to have a new wave of sales whenever Hitler invaded a new country. People were trying to see who would suffer next.”466 Sensitive to the charges of a communist conspiracy, Carson and her agent decided not to sell literary rights to communist countries “because the book is too easily twisted to anti-U.S. propaganda.”466
Too ill to do much, Carson agreed to only a handful of events and interviews.467 She wrote to her doctor, “I still believe in the old Churchillian determination to fight each battle as it comes, and I think a determination to win may well postpone the final battle.”463 One opportunity for battle that she found irresistible was an interview with CBS Reports, which, due to its popularity and prime-time slot, would gain a wide audience for her views. Since Carson was limited in mobility because of her cancer, the show’s host and his crew conducted the interview in her home. CBS constructed the show through eight months of filming.425 Opposing Carson, CBS Reports featured White-Stevens as the representative of the chemical companies. Several government leaders were also featured: the surgeon general, the commissioner of the Food and Drug Administration, and the secretary of agriculture. The controversial nature of the content led three major corporations to withdraw their advertisements.
The show aired on April 3, 1963, and vindicated Carson as the calm adult in the room, not as the hysterical communist spinster. Carson’s voice opened the program: “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? They should not be called ‘insecticides’ but ‘biocides.’”511 White-Stevens responded, “The major claims in Miss Rachel Carson’s book Silent Spring are gross distortions of the actual facts, completely unsupported by scientific experimental evidence and general practical experience in the field . . . 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.” White-Stevens continued, “Miss Carson maintains that the balance of nature is a major force in the survival of man whereas the modern chemist, the modern biologist, the modern scientist believes that man is steadily controlling nature.” Carson retorted, “Now to these people apparently the balance of nature was something that was repealed as soon as man came on the scene. Well you might just as well assume that you could repeal the law of gravity . . . Man is part of nature and his war against nature is inevitably a war against himself.” Carson ended the show by saying, “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 show drew an audience of 10 million viewers.474 The day after the show aired, Senator Abraham Ribicoff of Connecticut declared that his Government Operations Subcommittee would hold hearings on the dangers of pesticides.467 The hearings began on May 15, and Carson, the most anticipated witness called to testify, appeared on June 4. Ribicoff said, “Miss Carson, you are the lady who started all this.”474 His comment was reminiscent of Abraham Lincoln’s question to Harriet Beecher Stowe, the author of Uncle Tom’s Cabin. According to the family lore of Stowe’s descendants, Lincoln said when he met her, “Is this the little woman who made this great war?”512 In her testimony, Carson stated, “Since our problems of pest control are numerous and varied, we must search, not for one superweapon that will solve all our problems, but for a great diversity of armaments, each precisely adjusted to its task.”463 Carson advocated restrictions on aerial spraying and persistent pesticides, the creation of a government body responsible for testing and control, and the incorporation of public input so that people would be secure from poisoning in their homes. Carson added that scientists had just discovered pesticides in remote regions of the globe far from their point of application. The problem of pesticide applicators indiscriminately spraying without the knowledge or consent of the public therefore extended to communities that might not even have heard of the countries where the pesticides originated. A consultant for the Shell Chemical Company countered her testimony and stated, “These peddlers of fear are going to feast on the famine of the world.”463
The same day that the Ribicoff hearings began, the President’s Science Advisory Committee reported about the benefits and risks of pesticides. The report noted, “Efficient agricultural production, protection of health, and elimination of nuisances are now required and expected by modern man.”490 An example of many positive developments was that “sweet corn, potatoes, cabbage, apples, and tomatoes are all available unmarred, and the American housewife is accustomed to blemish-free products.”490 But the report also noted the problem of resistance, and stated, “Until the publication of ‘Silent Spring’ by Rachel Carson, people were generally unaware of the toxicity of pesticides.”490 Carson felt relieved by the content of the report, which concluded, “Elimination of the use of persistent toxic pesticides should be the goal.”490 Two days later, she testified before the Senate Committee on Commerce, which was debating pesticide regulations.471 Carson’s recommendation was the creation of a cabinet-level agency for environmental regulations that would be independent of chemical industry influence.
The Science Advisory report turned the tide on public discourse in her favor, with headlines reading “Rachel Carson Stands Vindicated,” and some critics in the media admitting that perhaps she was right.463 CBS Reports broadcast a follow-up program entitled “The Verdict on the Silent Spring of Rachel Carson.”466 Lord Shackleton, the son of the Antarctic explorer, wrote the introduction to the British edition of Silent Spring. He stated in the House of Lords that Polynesian cannibals would no longer eat Americans “because their fat is contaminated with chlorinated hydrocarbons.”471 Data on DDT concentrations showed, said Lord Shackleton, that “we [British] are rather more edible than Americans.” Britain’s response to the book was to expand pesticide regulations.
Newsworthy events also vindicated Carson. At the end of 1963, 5 million fish in the Mississippi River died in the midst of convulsions and hemorrhaging.463 Scientists traced the mortality to releases of the pesticide endrin by a pesticide plant operated by Velsicol, the chemical company that had first developed endrin and that had threatened to sue over the release of Silent Spring. Carson wrote that wildlife mortality due to pesticide exposure did not end with the publication of her book. “The problem of pesticides is not merely the dream of an avaricious author, out to pile up royalties by frightening the public,” she wrote, “it is very much with us, here and now.”513 That DDT progressed from mankind’s savior in World War II to one of humanity’s greatest toxic burdens thirty years later demonstrates the wild swings in public perception and the chaotic regulatory environment surrounding pesticides.
A series of awards in 1963 marked the end of Carson’s career.471 At the beginning of the year, the Animal Welfare Institute gave her the Albert Schweitzer medal. Many other awards followed, along with her election to the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Academy membership was restricted to fifty artists, musicians, and writers; as a new member, Carson joined the company of just three other women, and no other writers of nonfiction. The academy citation summarized Carson’s contribution: “A scientist in the grand literary style of Galileo and Buffon, she has used her scientific knowledge and moral feeling to deepen our consciousness of living nature and to alert us to the calamitous possibility that our short-sighted technological conquests might destroy the very sources of our being.”471 In a speech to the Women’s National Book Association, Carson explained why she felt compelled to write the book. “If I had not written the book,” she said, “I am sure the ideas would have found another outlet. But knowing the facts as I did, I could not rest until I had brought them to public attention.”463
Carson dedicated Silent Spring to Albert Schweitzer. Schweitzer wrote to a beekeeper, “I am aware of some of the tragic repercussions of the chemical fight against insects taking place in France and elsewhere, and I deplore them. Modern man no longer knows how to foresee and forestall. He will end by destroying the earth from which he and other living creatures draw their food. Poor bees, poor birds, poor men.”514 From this statement sprang Carson’s dedication to Schweitzer: “Man has lost the capacity to foresee and to forestall. He will end by destroying the earth.”447 Following the publication of Silent Spring, Schweitzer wrote a letter of thanks to Carson, and included his photograph, which became Carson’s most cherished possession.493
Knowing that she would soon die, Carson requested that a passage from The Edge of the Sea be read at her funeral:471 “What is the meaning of so tiny a being as the transparent wisp of protoplasm that is a sea lace, existing for some reason inscrutable to us—a reason that demands its presence by the trillion amid the rocks and weeds of the shore? The meaning haunts and ever eludes us, and in its very pursuit we approach the ultimate mystery of Life itself.”475
Carson died on April 14, 1964, at the age of fifty-six.471 Her pallbearers included Secretary of the Interior Udall and Senator Ribicoff. Ribicoff paid tribute on the floor of the Senate to “this gentle lady who aroused people everywhere to be concerned with one of the most significant problems of mid-twentieth century life—man’s contamination of his environment.”463 Paul Brooks and his wife raised her orphaned grandnephew, and Brooks published a book devoted to her writing.466,471 In it, he wrote of Carson’s strength in completing Silent Spring as her health failed. Brooks wrote, “She managed to make this book about death a celebration of life.”471
“Rachel Carson is dead,” wrote E. B. White, “but the sea is still around us, the edge of the sea still supports life in almost unbelievable variety, and the manufacturers of pesticides are enjoying their usual spring up-surge in sales.”515 A year after her death, the chemical company Velsicol stated, “In case you haven’t noticed, trees leafed, birds sang, squirrels reconnoitered, fish leaped—1965 was a normal spring, not the ‘silent type’ of the late Miss Carson’s nightmares.”463
With the publication of Silent Spring, Rachel Carson joined a long list of accomplished American authors published by Houghton Mifflin.466 These included Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Henry David Thoreau, and Mark Twain. The publishing house was also the American publisher for such English greats as Alfred, Lord Tennyson; Charles Dickens; and Winston Churchill. Like the works of these great authors, Silent Spring became a classic, a book that marked a shift in public awareness throughout the world about the environment, about governmental accountability, about democracy, and about animal and human rights. “Who has decided,” Carson asked, “who has the right to decide—for the countless legions of people who were not consulted that the supreme value is a world without insects, even though it be also a sterile world ungraced by the curving wing of a bird in flight? The decision is that of the authoritarian temporarily entrusted with power; he has made it during a moment of inattention by millions to whom beauty and the ordered world of nature still have a meaning that is deep and imperative.”447
Perhaps Carson’s message was best foreshadowed by President Eisenhower, who said in his farewell speech to the nation, “As we peer into society’s future, we—you and I, and our Government—must avoid the impulse to live only for today, plundering, for our own ease and convenience, the precious resources of tomorrow. We cannot mortgage the material assets of our grandchildren without risking the loss also of their political and spiritual heritage. We want democracy to survive for all generations to come, not to become the insolvent phantom of tomorrow.”485