Hey farmer, farmer
Put away that DDT now
Give me spots on my apples
But leave me the birds and the bees
Please!
Olga Huckins was angry. On January 29, 1958, she wrote a letter to the Boston Herald.
The previous summer—in an effort to kill growing numbers of gypsy moths, tent caterpillars, and mosquitoes—state authorities had sprayed DDT over large areas of Pennsylvania, New York, and New England. Huckins, who lived near a bird sanctuary in Duxbury, Massachusetts, was horrified by what happened next. “We picked up three dead [robins] the next morning,” she wrote. “They were birds that had lived close to us, trusted us, and built their nests in our trees year after year…All these birds died horribly and in the same way. Their bills were gaping open, and their splayed claws were drawn up to their breasts in agony.”
Huckins wasn’t alone in her anger. Many residents had written letters, sickened by the aftermath of the spraying. Health officials were unbowed. But Olga Huckins refused to be ignored. She sent a copy of her Boston Herald letter to her friend, Rachel Carson. Four years later, Carson published a book about it. Called Silent Spring, it became an international best seller, alerting the world to the dangers of pesticides, landing Carson on national television programs and in front of congressional hearings, winning praise from people as diverse as President John F. Kennedy, Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas, and singer-songwriter Joni Mitchell, and making Carson one of the most famous and most influential women in the United States. Unfortunately, Rachel Carson had made one tragic mistake.
RACHEL LOUISE CARSON was born on May 27, 1907, in Springdale, Pennsylvania, the third of three children. Her father, Robert, was variously an electrician, an insurance salesman, and a night watchman. Her mother, Maria, gave up teaching to raise the children.
Although Springdale was a hardscrabble town known for its glue factory, drab streets, and blue-collar workers. Maria filled Rachel’s childhood with the wonders of nature. Walking hand in hand through the nearby woods, orchards, and fields, or strolling along the banks of the Allegheny River, Maria described in vivid detail the wealth of life around them. So devoted was Maria to her youngest child that, with the exception of a few years in college, she never left her side. More than anything else, Maria encouraged Rachel to write.
In 1922, when she was 15 years old, Rachel wrote an article for St. Nicholas magazine that offered a glimpse into her future. Accompanied by her dog, Pal, Carson described woods where the “majestic silence [was] interrupted only by the rustling breeze, and the cheery, ‘witch, witchery’ of the Maryland yellow throat.” She lovingly described the music of orioles, bobwhites, cuckoos, and hummingbirds, and a nest “containing four jewel-like eggs.” Carson had found a utopia far from the grimy streets of Springdale. Another world. An Eden. A place where she could immerse herself in the intricacies of nature. A place where the man-made stench of Springdale’s glue factory had faded into the distance.
AFTER GRADUATING from high school in 1925, Carson attended the Pennsylvania College for Women (now Chatham College) in Pittsburgh. Maria visited her almost every weekend. Although Carson entered as an English major, she fell in love with science, taking courses in botany, zoology, histology, microbiology, and embryology. In 1929, she graduated magna cum laude. That summer, Rachel earned a scholarship to the prestigious Marine Biological Laboratory at Woods Hole, Massachusetts. Here, she fell in love with the sea. Encountering young mullet fish at night, she wrote, “I stood knee deep in that racing water, and could barely see those darting silver bits of life for my tears. That was when I first began to let my imagination go down under the water.”
In the fall of 1929, Carson attended Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, determined to earn a Ph.D. degree. It wasn’t to be. Although Rachel submitted a thesis for her master’s degree in 1932—about kidney development in catfish—her professors didn’t believe she had what it took to be a scientist. Abandoned by her mentors, she never performed another scientific experiment—and never received her Ph.D.
During the next few years, Carson contributed articles to the Baltimore Sun and the Richmond Times about tuna fishing off Nova Scotia, oyster farming in the Chesapeake Bay, starlings overwintering in Baltimore, and eels migrating to the Sargasso Sea. She also wrote about how certain species were becoming dangerously depleted, like elk, heath hens, salmon, shad, canvasback ducks, pronghorn antelope, mountain goats, moose, and bears. Carson’s writing had taken a darker turn, now focusing almost exclusively on scarcity and extinction.
In 1935, Rachel Carson dropped out of Johns Hopkins to work as a field aide for the U.S. Bureau of Fisheries in College Park, Maryland. Her job was to write pamphlets and press releases. The following year, she was appointed to a full-time position at the bureau as a junior aquatic biologist. There, she wrote short scripts for a radio program called “Romance Under the Waters.” Two years later, she burst onto the American scene.
In September 1937, Carson published an article in the Atlantic Monthly titled “Undersea.” “The conquest of Mt. Everest has passed into history,” she wrote. “But although the flags of explorers have waved on the highest peaks of the world and fluttered on the frozen rims of the continents, a vast unknown remains: the world of waters.” Inspired by Jules Verne’s Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, she continued: “The ocean is a place of paradoxes. It is the home of the great white shark, 2,000-pound killer of the seas, and the 100-foot blue whale, the largest animal that ever lived. It is also home of living things so small that your two hands might scoop up as many of them as there are stars in the Milky Way.” Carson signed it “R. L. Carson,” certain that no one would read a scientific article if they knew a woman had written it.
Editors from Simon & Schuster read “Undersea” and loved it. They wanted Carson to write a book. On November 1, 1941, Rachel Carson published Under the Sea-Wind, this time using her full name. Although written for adults, the book had a childlike sense of wonder. Under the Sea-Wind told the story of Silverbar, a sanderling that migrated from the Arctic Circle to Argentina; Scomber, a mackerel that traveled from New England to the continental shelf; and Anguilla, an American eel that journeyed to the Sargasso Sea, joining thousands of other eels that had come to spawn. “There is poetry here,” said one reviewer.
More reviews followed. The New York Times called it “a beautiful and unusual book; a breathtaking canvas of the fierce struggle for life.” The New Yorker, Christian Science Monitor, New York Herald Tribune, and New York Times Book Review also sang its praises, unequivocally. But the timing wasn’t right. One month later, the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor and Americans turned their attention to war. By June 1942, fewer than 1,200 books had been sold; Carson’s royalties amounted to $689.17. “The world received the book with superb indifference,” she lamented.
Carson didn’t blame World War II for poor sales. She blamed her publicists at Simon & Schuster, whom she believed had failed to adequately promote her book. She asked out of her contract, never publishing with them again. Despite this personal setback, Carson’s stock at the Bureau of Fisheries, which was now called the Fisheries and Wildlife Service, continued to rise. By 1949 she was editor in chief of all scientific publications.
ON JULY 2, 1951, Oxford University Press published Carson’s second book, The Sea Around Us. One month before publication, excerpts were printed in the New Yorker. The response was overwhelming; more letters were written to the magazine than at any time in its history. Carson became an instant celebrity. Even Walter Winchell, the acerbic radio pundit, commented on how much he was looking forward to reading Carson’s new book.
The opening of The Sea Around Us read like the beginning of Genesis: “Imagine a whole continent of naked rock, across which no covering mantle of green had been drawn…Imagine a land of stone, a silent land, except for the sounds of the rains and winds that swept across it. For there was no living voice and nothing moved over its surface except the shadows of the clouds.”
The New York Herald Tribune called The Sea Around Us “one of the most beautiful books of our time.” Teddy Roosevelt’s daughter said it was the best thing she’d ever read. Three weeks after publication, The Sea Around Us was #5 on the New York Times best-seller list behind only Thor Heyerdahl’s Kon-Tiki, Herman Wouk’s Caine Mutiny, James Jones’s From Here to Eternity, and J. D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye. In September, The Sea Around Us was #1, where it stayed for 39 weeks—a record. By November, 100,000 copies had been sold, by March, 200,000. The Book-of-the-Month Club selected it and Reader’s Digest condensed it. Four thousand copies were selling every week. When the dust settled, The Sea Around Us had sold more than 1.3 million copies and had been translated into 32 languages.
Then Hollywood stepped in, making The Sea Around Us into a movie. Directed by the “master of disaster,” Irwin Allen—best known for movies and TV series such as The Towering Inferno, The Poseidon Adventure, The Swarm, Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea, and Lost in Space—The Sea Around Us won an Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature. Carson hated the movie. And hated all the tinsel and cardboard publicity that came with it. When Jacques Cousteau offered to take her on a voyage on his Calypso, she refused.
Despite Carson’s disdain for the spotlight, the awards and recognitions kept coming, including the National Book Award, arguably the single most coveted book prize in the United States. Editors of the nation’s leading newspapers voted Carson “Woman of the Year.”
Fortune followed fame. Before The Sea Around Us was published, Oxford University Press gave Carson a $1,000 advance. Later, she collected $7,200 from the New Yorker for its serialization, $10,000 from Reader’s Digest for its condensation, $20,000 in royalties for continued sales, and another $20,000 from RKO for the movie rights, all of which added up to more than four times her annual salary. Financially secure, Carson quit her job at the Fisheries and Wildlife Service to devote herself full-time to writing. Despite the enormous financial success of The Sea Around Us, Carson still wasn’t satisfied, believing that Oxford—which had taken out full-page ads in the New York Times, New York Herald Tribune, and Chicago Tribune—hadn’t done enough to promote her book.
Rachel Carson’s fame, sadly, would be short-lived. During the writing of The Sea Around Us, when she was 43 years old, Carson had two small lumps removed from her breast. The pathologist labeled them benign—a diagnosis that would later be called into question.
IN OCTOBER 1955, Rachel Carson published her next book, The Edge of the Sea, a tour guide for the casual adventurer. Again the New Yorker serialized it; the critics praised it, (“Carson has done it again in this wise and wonderful book”); the public bought it (more than 70,000 copies sold as it rocketed to #4 on the New York Times best-seller list); and Carson lamented it, claiming that Houghton Mifflin—the next up in her string of publishers—hadn’t adequately promoted it even though they had spent more than $20,000 on advertising.
Although she didn’t have a Ph.D. or an institutional affiliation, by the early 1960s, just before she published her next book, Rachel Carson was America’s most famous science writer. The public loved her, the media trusted her, and the government turned to her.
In 1962, Rachel Carson published Silent Spring, an angry, raging, no-holds-barred polemic against pesticides—especially one called DDT. From the first page—a quote from E. B. White—Silent Spring made it clear that this was not a subject for equivocation. “I am pessimistic about the human race,” wrote White, “because it is too ingenious for its own good. Our approach to nature is to beat it into submission. We would stand a better chance of survival if we accommodated ourselves to this planet and viewed it appreciatively instead of skeptically and dictatorially.”
The first chapter, titled “A Fable for Tomorrow,” began innocently: “There was once a town in the heart of America where all life seemed to live in harmony with its surroundings.” A town with “prosperous farms, with fields of grain, and hillsides of orchards.” A town where “white clouds of bloom drifted above the green fields.” A town “famous for the abundance and variety of its bird life.” But a dark cloud was hovering in the distance. “Then a strange blight crept over the area and everything began to change…Mysterious maladies swept the flocks of chickens…the cattle and sheep sickened and died…roadsides…were now lined with browned and withered vegetation as though swept by fire…streams were lifeless…everywhere there was the shadow of death.” Birds, especially, had fallen victim to this strange evil. “The birds…where had they gone? Feeding stations in the backyard were deserted [and] the few birds seen anywhere were moribund; they trembled violently and could not fly.” In a town that had once “throbbed with the dawn chorus of robins, catbirds, doves, jays, wrens, and scores of other bird voices there was now no sound, only silence.” A silent spring. Birds weren’t alone in their suffering. According to Carson, an increasing number of children were suffering from birth defects, liver disease, and leukemia. And women were suffering from infertility. “There had been several sudden and unexplained deaths,” wrote Carson, “not only among adults but even among children, who would be stricken suddenly while at play and die within a few hours.”
Carson had made it clear from the start that she wasn’t talking about something that might happen—she was talking about something that had happened. “Many real communities have already suffered,” she wrote. “A grim specter has crept upon us almost unnoticed.” Silent Spring was a book about pesticides—a book that read like stories from the Brothers Grimm. Worse, despite all our efforts, the insects were fighting back, now stronger and more voracious than ever. Our response, it seemed, was simply to make more chemicals; between 1947 and 1960, production of synthetic pesticides increased from 124 million pounds to 638 million pounds. According to Rachel Carson, our war against nature had become a war against ourselves.
Although the U.S. Department of Agriculture had placed some restrictions on DDT a few years before the publication of Silent Spring (because of stream pollution), Carson’s book ignited a movement that would eventually eliminate the pesticide from the face of the earth.
ON AUGUST 29, 1962, one month before Silent Spring was published, President John F. Kennedy appeared at a press conference. One reporter asked, “Mr. President, there appears to be a growing concern among scientists as to the possibility of dangerous long-range side effects from the widespread use of DDT and other pesticides. Have you considered asking the Department of Agriculture or the Public Health Service to take a closer look at this?” “Yes,” replied Kennedy. “And I know that they already are. I think, particularly, of course, since Miss Carson’s book, they are examining the issue.” Carson’s book was already having an impact. And it hadn’t even been published yet. Kennedy learned about it from three excerpts that had been serialized in the New Yorker that summer.
President Kennedy wasn’t the only one who had taken notice. Just before publication, scores of newspapers and magazines had reviewed the book, virtually all favorably. Walter Sullivan, a science reporter and editor wrote, “In her new book, [Rachel Carson] tries to scare the living daylights out of us and, in large measure, succeeds.”
Two weeks after publication, Silent Spring sold 65,000 copies.
Two weeks after that, in October 1962, the Book of the Month Club sold 150,000 more copies, helped in no small part by an endorsement from U.S. Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas, who called it “the most important chronicle of this century for the human race.”
By Christmas, Silent Spring was #1 on the New York Times best-seller list, where it remained for 31 weeks. Sales weren’t limited to the United States. Translated into 22 languages, Silent Spring became an international best seller, described as “one of the most influential books in the modern world.” Later, the New York Times and New York Public Library listed Silent Spring as one of the 100 most important books of the 20th century.
Carson had become an environmental guru. One month after publication of Silent Spring, a journalist named Jane Howard profiled Carson in a Life magazine article titled “The Gentle Storm Center: A Calm Appraisal of Silent Spring,” Howard called Carson “a formidable adversary” and painted her as the leader of a powerful new movement. Carson didn’t see it that way. “I have no wish to start a Carrie Nation crusade,” said Carson, referring to a prominent leader in America’s temperance movement. “I wrote the book because I think there is a great danger that the next generation will have no chance to know nature as we do—if we don’t preserve it, the damage will be irreversible.” Howard also tried to portray Carson as an early feminist. Again, Carson resisted. “I’m not interested in things done by women or men,” she said, “but in things done by people.”
Two months after publication, Eric Sevareid interviewed Rachel Carson for his popular television program CBS Reports, the precursor to 60 Minutes. For two days in November 1962, Sevareid talked with Carson, who was now suffering from metastatic breast cancer, a disease that would take her life 17 months later. Thin, haggard, and wearing a heavy black wig to hide the hair loss she had suffered following radiation therapy, Carson marshaled on. But her illness was evident. At the end of the interview, knowing that it would be months before the show aired, Sevareid turned to his producer, Jay McMullen, and said, “Jay, you’ve got a dead leading lady.”
On April 3, 1963, one year before Rachel Carson died from metastatic breast cancer, CBS Reports aired “The Silent Spring of Rachel Carson.” The show pitted Carson against an established scientist named Robert H. White-Stevens. Most Americans watching the show assumed that Carson, with her “poison book” in hand, would be strident, sensational, and wild-eyed, while White-Stevens, who wore a lab coat, would be the level-headed male voice of reason. This was, after all, the early 1960s; women scientists were virtually nonexistent. It didn’t work out that way. “If man were to faithfully follow the teachings of Miss Carson,” said White-Stevens, with a flourish of hyperbole, “we would return to the Dark Ages, and the insects and diseases and vermin would once again inherit the earth.”
Carson, on the other hand, was patient and calm. “We’ve heard the benefits of pesticides,” she said. “We have heard a great deal about their safety, but very little about their hazards, very little about their failures, their inefficiencies. And yet the public was being asked to accept these chemicals, was being asked to acquiesce in their use, and did not have the whole picture. So I set about to remedy the balance there.” Carson, not White-Stevens, was given the last word. “We still talk in terms of conquest,” she said. “We still haven’t become mature enough to think of ourselves as only a tiny part of a vast and incredible universe. 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.” Fifteen million Americans watched CBS Reports. Rachel Carson had become a phenomenon. A few weeks later, Carson appeared on the Today Show, yet another opportunity to warn millions of Americans about the dangers of pesticides.
The day after CBS Reports aired, Senator Hubert Humphrey (D-MN) asked the Committee on Government Operations to conduct a congressional review of environmental hazards, including pesticides. On May 15, 1963, Rachel Carson appeared as the star witness. At issue was not whether there would be broader federal oversight of pesticide use, but rather which agency would do it. Jostling for control were the Food and Drug Administration, the U.S. Department of Agriculture, the Department of the Interior, and the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare. When Carson sat down in front of the microphone, Senator Abraham Ribicoff (D-CT), the chair of the committee, enthused, “You’re the lady who started it all!” After Carson finished testifying, Senator Ernest Gruening (D-AK) predicted that Silent Spring would “change the course of history.” Two days after the Ribicoff committee meeting, Carson appeared before the Department of Commerce and asked for a “Pesticide Commission” to oversee the use of pesticides. Ten years later, Carson’s “Pesticide Commission” became the Environmental Protection Agency.
Rachel Carson had become so famous, so well known, and so sought after that a typical day included being the subject of a Peanuts cartoon in the morning and a call to the White House in the afternoon. (In the Peanuts cartoon, Lucy is talking to Schroeder, the little boy who plays the piano. “Rachel Carson says that when our moon was born, there were not oceans on Earth,” says Lucy. “Rachel Carson! Rachel Carson! Rachel Carson!” shrieks Schroeder. “You’re always talking about Rachel Carson!” “We girls need our heroines,” Lucy replies.)
In the year and a half between the publication of Silent Spring and her death, Rachel Carson received the Conservation Award from the Izaak Walton League of America, the Audubon Medal from the National Audubon Society, the Cullum Geographical Medal from the American Geographical Society, the Schweitzer Medal from the Animal Welfare Institute, the Woman of Conscience Award from the Women’s National Book Association, and the Conservationist of the Year Award from the National Wildlife Federation. Later, she became one of only four women elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters, linking her to literature’s immortals.
Rachel Carson’s influence continued long after her death in 1964. Seventeen years later, in 1981, she won the Presidential Medal of Freedom. Two decades after that, Al Gore, who would ignite another firestorm with his movie about global warming titled An Inconvenient Truth, paid tribute to “the mother of the environmental movement.” “Silent Spring came as a cry in the wilderness,” said Gore, “a deeply felt, thoroughly researched, and brilliantly written argument that changed the course of history. Without this book, the environmental movement might have been long delayed or never have developed at all.”
Today, most people under the age of 40 have probably never heard of Rachel Carson. But in the early 1960s, almost every American knew her name.
WHAT HARRIET BEECHER STOWE’S Uncle Tom’s Cabin did for civil rights legislation, and Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle did for food and drug legislation, Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring did for environmental legislation.
On January 1, 1970—six years after Rachel Carson had died—President Richard Nixon signed the National Environmental Policy Act into law, declaring that, “the environmental decade was at hand.” In quick succession, legislators created the Council on Environmental Quality; the Environmental Protection Agency; the Occupational Safety and Health Administration; the Clear Air Act; the Clean Water Act; the Federal Insecticide, Fungicide, and Rodenticide Act; the Safe Drinking Water Act; the Environmental Pesticides Control Act; the Toxic Substances Control Act; and the Endangered Species Act.
On April 22, 1970, millions of Americans and tens of millions more around the world celebrated the first Earth Day. Conservationism had become environmentalism. Groups like the Sierra Club (founded in 1892), the National Audubon Society (founded in 1905), the World Wildlife Fund (founded in 1947), and the Nature Conservancy (founded in 1951) were conservationists, intent on protecting natural resources and improving national parks. These new environmental groups, like Clean Water Action and the Natural Resources Defense Council, were different: more passionate, more confrontational, and less forgiving. Now the focus was on protesting pollution and cleaning the air and water. Now there were the good guys and the bad guys. And the bad guys, like the chemical industry, weren’t going to be allowed to get away with it any longer. Born of Rachel Carson’s book, these new groups scared the older ones. None of the conservation societies participated in the first Earth Day.
When the dust settled, Rachel Carson was a hero, the unquestioned goddess of a movement that has only gained momentum in the 50 years since publication of her game-changing book. “The Rachel Carson we think of as the author of Silent Spring,” wrote one acolyte, “[was the] birth mother of modern environmentalism: messenger of a story that rocked the world. The real Rachel Carson never met her…She didn’t live long enough to become acquainted with the Carson we know, that towering figure whose light illuminated our sense of the world forever.”
ALTHOUGH RACHEL CARSON’S Silent Spring shined a long-overdue light on our indiscriminate use of pesticides, it had its flaws. Not everyone loved Silent Spring.
Some of the criticism came from writers. Time magazine decried Carson’s penchant for overstatement: “Scientists, physicians and other technically informed people will also be shocked by Silent Spring—but for a different reason. They recognize Miss Carson’s skill in building her frightening case; but they consider that case unfair, one-sided, and hysterically overemphatic. Many of the scary generalizations—and there are lots of them—are patently unsound.”
Other criticisms came, not unexpectedly, from the chemical industry. Velsicol, at the time one of the world’s leading manufacturers of pesticides such as chlordane, heptachlor, and endrin, threatened to sue Houghton Mifflin, the publisher of Silent Spring, for libel. A few months later, however, Velsicol’s attention was diverted when five million fish turned belly up in the lower Mississippi River, a consequence of a massive endrin contamination from one of its treatment plants.
None of these criticisms or threats was surprising. One criticism, however, was. It came from Luther Terry, the surgeon general of the United States. Terry was worried that by making DDT synonymous with poison, the world was about to lose a powerful weapon in the fight against some of its biggest killers. He had reason for concern.
DDT HAS A LONG and rich history.
In 1874, Othmar Zeidler, a graduate student at the University of Strasbourg in Germany, was looking to create a new substance for his thesis. He combined chloral hydrate with chlorobenzene in the presence of sulfuric acid. The result was DDT (dichlorodiphenyltrichloroethane). Zeidler didn’t study DDT’s properties. He didn’t care about its properties. He just wanted to create a new substance so he could graduate. As a consequence, DDT sat on the shelf for 65 years.
In 1939, Paul Müller, an employee of the J. R. Geigy Company in Basel, Switzerland, was working on a method to kill clothes moths without damaging clothes. Müller stumbled upon Zeidler’s formula. What he found surprised him. Not only did DDT kill the moths, it also killed flies, mosquitoes, lice, and ticks—insects responsible for transmitting some of the world’s deadliest diseases. Better still, DDT’s killing power seemed to last for months.
AT THE START OF WWII, knowing that wars spread disease, J. R. Geigy released its formula for DDT to the Germans and the Allies. The Germans ignored it; the Americans and Brits didn’t. In America, the Cincinnati Chemical Works was the first to mass-produce it. Soon, 14 other American companies and several British companies joined in. Production couldn’t have come at a better time. The reason: typhus.
Typhus is a bacterium spread by the body louse. The bacterium (Rickettsia prowazekii) is named for the two researchers who discovered it—Howard Ricketts and Stanislaus von Prowazek, both of whom died from the disease. The lice deposit their feces, which contain the typhus bacteria, onto the skin. The intense itching that invariably follows allows bacteria to penetrate the skin and enter the bloodstream, causing chills, fever, headache, rash, coma, and death. During WWII, more people died from typhus than from combat.
In January 1944, DDT made its debut in Naples, Italy, a city in the midst of a massive typhus epidemic. After setting up delousing stations, the Allies sprayed DDT onto 72,000 Italian citizens every day—more than 1.3 million people in all. Within three weeks, the outbreak was under control. By the end of 1944, factories were producing more than a million pounds of DDT every month. With their new weapon in hand, health officials dusted millions of soldiers, fogged military barracks, and sprayed whole islands to protect the Marines before they landed. By 1945, DDT production had reached 36 million pounds a year. Because neither the Germans nor the Japanese used it, some have argued that DDT helped the Allies win the war.
DDT was also used to delouse concentration camp survivors. One dramatic story involved the prison camp at Bergen-Belsen. At the time of liberation, in 1945, typhus had infected more than 20,000 camp prisoners. When the British soldiers who liberated the camp first started spraying survivors, most of the prisoners were skeptical. “After two to three days at the hospital,” recalled one, “we have our first encounter with the pesticide DDT. When the English soldiers enter the hospital room with sprayers filled with this product, we all look at them with contemptuous superiority. They’re planning on using this puny white powder to destroy all these millions of lice?! Yet, right in front of our eyes, something close to a miracle starts to happen. Slowly, the incessant itching, so painful on our pus-infected, ulcerated skin, starts to vanish, and this great relief finally convinces us that we really have been liberated.” (Liberation came too late for one Bergen-Belsen prisoner, Anne Frank, who died from typhus.)
In 1948, for his work demonstrating DDT’s benefits to public health, Paul Müller won the Nobel Prize in medicine and physiology.
ALTHOUGH TYPHUS was a killer, it paled in comparison to the infection that has killed—and continues to kill—more people than any other: malaria. Spread by the bite of the anopheles mosquito, the malaria parasite infects the liver and blood, causing high fever, shaking chills, bleeding, disorientation, and death. In 1962, when Rachel Carson published Silent Spring, the best weapon to control malaria wasn’t drugs like quinine and chloroquine, or environmental measures like mosquito nets or swamp drainage. Arguably, the best, cheapest, and most effective weapon in the fight against malaria was DDT. Following a spraying program in South Africa, the number of malaria cases decreased from 1,177 cases in 1945 to 61 cases in 1951; in Taiwan, from more than a million cases in the mid-1940s to 9 cases in 1969; and, in Sardinia, from 75,000 cases in 1946 to 5 cases in 1951.
Malaria also hit close to home. In the early 1900s, more than a million Americans were infected with malaria every year. Although improvements in housing, better standards of living, and control of mosquito breeding sites had clearly lessened the incidence of the disease, DDT spraying was enormously beneficial, especially in rural areas. Between January 1945 and September 1947—as part of a program run by the MCWA (Malaria Control in War Areas)—more than three million houses were sprayed in the Southeast. In 1952, the United States was finally declared free of malaria. (Located in Atlanta, Georgia, the MCWA later changed its name to the Centers for Disease Control.)
In 1955, the World Health Assembly directed the World Health Organization to launch a global malaria elimination program with DDT as its centerpiece. By 1959, when the program swung into operation, more than 300 million people had already been saved by DDT. By 1960, malaria had been eliminated from 11 countries. As malaria rates went down, life expectancies went up, as did crop production, land values, and relative wealth. Probably no country benefited more from the WHO program than Nepal, where spraying began in 1960. At the time, more than two million Nepalese, mostly children, suffered from malaria. By 1968, the number was reduced to 2,500. Before the malaria control program, life expectancy in Nepal was 28 years; by 1970, it was 42 years.
MALARIA WASN’T THE ONLY disease transmitted by the bite of a mosquito. DDT also dramatically reduced the incidence of yellow fever and dengue. Furthermore, DDT killed fleas, like the ones that lived on rats that transmitted murine typhus, and the ones that lived on prairie dogs and ground squirrels and transmitted Yersinia pestis, the plague. Considering the virtual elimination of all of these diseases in many countries, the National Academy of Sciences estimated in 1970 that DDT had saved the lives of 500 million people. One could argue reasonably that DDT has saved more lives than any other chemical in history.
ENVIRONMENTALISTS DIDN’T SEE IT that way. Inspired by Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring, they targeted DDT for elimination. In 1969, Wisconsin and Arizona banned DDT; so did Michigan, which published a formal obituary in a local newspaper: “Died. DDT, age 95: a persistent pesticide and onetime humanitarian. Considered to be one of World War II’s greatest heroes, DDT saw its reputation fade after it was charged with murder by author Rachel Carson. Death came on June 27 in Michigan after a lingering illness. Survived by dieldrin, aldrin, endrin, chlordane, heptachlor, lindane, and toxaphene. Please omit flowers.” Ironically, every one of these surviving chemicals was far more dangerous to human health than DDT.
Sensing the public’s fear of pesticides, President Richard Nixon promised to ban DDT from the United States by the end of 1970, even though the Department of Agriculture didn’t believe an adequate substitute was available. In 1972, William Ruckelshaus, head of the newly created Environmental Protection Agency—against strong opposition from the Pan American Health Organization, the World Health Organization, and many public health advocates in the United States—banned DDT from use in the United States. Other countries followed. Public health officials, sensing the disaster that was about to unfold, urged countries that made DDT to continue to make it. But it was too late. By the mid-1970s, under pressure from environmental groups, support for international DDT programs had dried up.
Those inspired by Silent Spring had spared mosquitoes from the killing effects of DDT. But they hadn’t spared children from the killing effects of mosquitoes.
USING DDT AS A LADDER, the United States had climbed out of the cesspool—ridding itself of anopheles mosquitoes; no longer would its citizens have to suffer malaria. Then, in the name of environmentalism, Americans pulled the ladder up behind them, leaving developing world countries the options of using biological strategies that didn’t work or antimalarial drugs they couldn’t afford.
Since 1972, when the Environmental Protection Agency banned DDT from the United States, about 50 million people have died from malaria: Most have been children less than five years old.
Examples of the impact of Silent Spring abound:
In India, between 1952 and 1962, DDT spraying caused a decrease in annual malaria cases from 100 million to 60,000. By the late 1970s, no longer able to use the pesticide, the number of cases increased to 6 million.
In Sri Lanka, before the use of DDT, 2.8 million people suffered from malaria. When the spraying stopped in 1964, only 17 people suffered from the disease. Then, between 1968 and 1970, no longer able to use DDT, Sri Lanka suffered a massive malaria epidemic—1.5 million people were infected by the parasite.
In South Africa, where DDT use was banned in 1997, the number of malaria cases increased from 8,500 to 42,000 and malaria deaths from 22 people to 320.
In the end, 99 countries eliminated malaria; most used DDT to do it. “Banning DDT is one of the most disgraceful episodes in twentieth century America,” wrote author Michael Crichton. “We knew better and we did it anyway and we let people around the world die, and we didn’t give a damn.”
ENVIRONMENTALISTS HAVE ARGUED that when it came to DDT, it was pick your poison. If DDT was banned, more people would die from malaria. But if DDT wasn’t banned, then people would suffer and die from a variety of other diseases, not the least of which were leukemia and other cancers. There was one problem with this line of reasoning: Despite Carson’s warnings in Silent Spring, studies in Europe, Canada, and the United States showed that DDT didn’t cause liver disease, premature births, congenital defects, leukemia, or any of the other diseases she had claimed. Indeed, the only type of cancer that had increased in the United States during the DDT era was lung cancer, which was caused by cigarette smoking. DDT was arguably the safest insect repellent ever invented—far safer than many of the other pesticides that have since taken its place.
Still, environmentalists argued that we aren’t alone on this planet. We share it with many other species. Aren’t we responsible for them, too? The final irony of Silent Spring was that Rachel Carson hadn’t only overstated DDT’s effects on human health; she had overstated its effects on animal health.
RACHEL CARSON ORIGINALLY called her book, Man Against Nature. But her agent, Marie Rodell, didn’t think that was poetic enough. So she presented Carson with a line from the English Romantic poet John Keats’s “La Belle Dame Sans Merci” (“The Beautiful Lady Without Mercy”): “The sedge is withered from the lake / and no birds sing.” Silent Spring was born. Carson’s prose was unequivocal; DDT was killing birds.
But the evidence wasn’t clearly on her side.
Every winter, the National Audubon Society performs its Christmas bird counts. Between 1941, before DDT, and 1960, after DDT had been used for at least a decade, 26 different kinds of birds had been counted. All had increased in number. In Silent Spring, Carson focused on specific instances where DDT had damaged starlings, robins, meadowlarks, and cardinals. But, at least according to the Christmas counts, populations of each of these birds had actually increased about fivefold.
Another bird targeted by DDT—a symbol of America’s strength and freedom—was the eagle. “Like the robin,” wrote Carson, “another American bird appears to be on the verge of extinction. This is the national symbol: the eagle. Its population has dwindled alarmingly with the past decade.” As proof, Carson cited the findings of Charles Broley, a retired banker who lived on Florida’s west coast who had noticed that the number of bald eagle nests between Tampa and Fort Myers had declined. What Carson had failed to mention was that this decline had occurred before DDT was used (prior to 1940), and was due to habitat destruction and killing by hunters, either for sport or to protect livestock. In fact, between 1939 and 1961, during the time of heaviest DDT use, the Christmas counts had shown an increase in eagle populations. The reason: the Eagle Protection Act of 1940, which prohibited the hunting, capturing, and killing of the birds. During the ten years before DDT was banned, the number of bald eagle nesting pairs had doubled.
That bird populations were actually increasing during the period of heaviest use of DDT wasn’t a coincidence. DDT was beneficial in that it protected birds from a broad range of insect-borne diseases such as malaria, Newcastle disease, encephalitis, rickettsialpox, and bronchitis, and—because DDT lessened the harmful effects of pests on crops—it made more seeds and fruits available for birds to eat.
Rachel Carson wasn’t only a member of the National Audubon Society; she had also participated in its annual Christmas bird counts. So she must have known about the bird population data; still, she had chosen to ignore them. In Silent Spring, Rachel Carson never mentioned habitat destruction, egg collection, or hunting as reasons for why bird populations might have dwindled. It was a pesticide witch hunt. “Readers of Silent Spring, in the 1960s and even now, are impressed by its poetic language and imagery, but it did not escape the notice of scientists that while the book was heavy on prose it was light on science,” wrote Donald Roberts and colleagues in The Excellent Powder: DDT’s Political and Scientific History. “It seems certain that scientists and students of chemistry and the natural world could not have guessed how Silent Spring would pave the way for science to be sidelined in the development of laws, policies, and global strategies for disease control.”
WHEN THE EPA banned DDT in the early 1970s, much of the information about whether it had caused human disease or affected wildlife was already available. This information came to light at a public hearing forced by the Environmental Defense Fund (EDF). EDF officials wanted the public, the press, and politicians to hear just how harmful DDT could be. So they called a variety of environmentalists to testify on their behalf. Health officials, however, didn’t take this attempt at a public flogging lying down. They called their own experts in the fields of chemistry, toxicology, agriculture, and environmental health.
The hearing lasted eight months, included 125 witnesses and 365 exhibits, and generated a transcript that was 9,312 pages long. When it was over, Edward Sweeney, the hearing examiner, rendered his verdict: “DDT is not mutagenic [causing cancer] or teratogenic [causing birth defects] to man,” he wrote. “The uses of DDT under the registration involved here do not have a deleterious effect on freshwater fish, estuarine organisms, wild birds or other wildlife. The [EDF has] not fully met the burden of proof. There is a present need for the continued use of DDT for the essential uses defined in this case.” William Ruckelshaus, head of the newly formed Environmental Protection Agency, never attended the meeting. When it was over, he never read the report. Rather, on June 2, 1972, Ruckelshaus unilaterally banned DDT. It was a political decision, yielding to public sentiment. And it ignited an international firestorm against DDT that resulted in it being banned from the world.
The chemical industry seemed not to care. DDT was just one of many pesticides used in agriculture. And the agricultural market was far more lucrative than the public health market. Now, DDT could be replaced with drugs that were not only more expensive, but far more harmful to people.
IN MANY WAYS, Rachel Carson had sounded an important alarm. She was the first to say that we needed to be more attentive to our impact on the environment. (Indeed, climate change has been a direct consequence of man-made activities.) She was the first to warn us that DDT could accumulate in the environment. (Even after the spraying stopped, DDT and its by-products were still present throughout the ecosystem.) And she was right in her prediction that biological insect controls might eventually be of value. (Decades after publication of Silent Spring, the bacterium Bacillus thuringiensis israelensis [Bti], which kills mosquito larvae, was included in malaria eradication efforts.) Unfortunately, Rachel Carson had taken one step too far. By claiming that DDT caused diseases like leukemia in children—or by claiming that children could be fine one minute and dead a few hours later—she had scared the hell out of the American public. In the end, Rachel Carson wasn’t the scientist she had claimed to be. She was a polemicist, willing to stretch the truth to fit her bias.
SILENT SPRING WAS SUCCESSFUL because it was lyrical, compelling, and dramatic. But there was another reason it had had such an enormous impact: Silent Spring was biblical, appealing to our notion that we had sinned against our creator.
The book begins in Eden. “There was once a town in the heart of America where all life seemed to live in harmony with its surroundings.” Man, however, had eaten from the tree of knowledge, worshipping the false god of economic progress while destroying paradise. As a consequence, “a shadow of death had fallen on the people and the land.” And so man was to be cast out of Eden, forced to toil on a scorched earth while suffering all manner of illnesses.
In truth, Rachel Carson’s Eden never existed. And nature has never been in balance. It’s been in constant flux, arguably in chaos. Because the simple truth is that Mother Nature isn’t much of a mother: She can kill us, and unless we fight back, she will. “[Carson] 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,” wrote one scientist. “But the picture she paints is illusory. [T]he 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 hundred born, by mothers dead in their twenties from childbed fever and tuberculosis, by frequent famines crushing isolated peoples through long, dark, frozen winters following the failure of a basic crop the previous summer, [and] by vermin and filth infesting their homes…Surely she cannot be so naïve as to contemplate turning our clocks back to the years when man was indeed immersed in Nature’s balance and barely holding his own.”
William Cronon, an environmental scientist and the author of Changes in the Land, took Carson’s argument to its illogical end: “It is not hard to reach the conclusion that the only way human beings can hope to live naturally on the earth is to follow the hunter-gatherers back into a wilderness Eden and abandon virtually everything that civilization has given us. If nature dies because we enter it, then the only way to save nature is to kill ourselves.” Biologist I. L. Baldwin sounded a similar theme: “Modern agriculture and modern public health, indeed, modern civilization could not exist without a relentless war against the return of a true balance of nature.” Carson never saw it that way, insisting on a world that had never existed: “Under primitive agricultural conditions the farmer had few insect problems,” she wrote, ignoring that fact that early farming societies were riddled with insect-borne diseases and insect-induced famines.
IN 2006, the World Health Organization, realizing its mistake, changed its position on DDT, no longer bowing to political pressures to ban the product. On September 15, Dr. Arata Kochi, director of the Global Malaria Programme, announced the new policy: “I asked my staff. I asked malaria experts around the world, ‘Are we using every possible weapon to fight this disease?’ It became apparent that we were not. One powerful weapon against malaria was not being deployed. In a battle to save the lives of nearly one million children a year—most of them in Africa—the world was reluctant to spray the inside of houses and huts with insecticides; especially with the highly effective insecticide known as dichlorodiphenyltrichloroethane or DDT.” The Sierra Club backed Kochi; the Pesticide Action Network didn’t.
For more than 30 years, countries where malaria epidemics were common had been denied this lifesaving chemical. Although there were alternatives, and some of those alternatives were used, no chemical was as cheap, long lasting, or effective as DDT. As a result, millions of people, mostly children, died needlessly.
Carson’s supporters have heard the criticisms. They’ve argued that, had she lived longer, she would never have promoted a ban on DDT. Indeed, in Silent Spring, Carson wrote, “It is not my contention that chemical pesticides never be used.” But it was her contention that DDT had caused leukemia, liver disease, birth defects, premature births, and a whole range of chronic illnesses. An influential author cannot, on the one hand, claim that DDT causes leukemia (which, in 1962, was a death sentence) and then, on the other hand, expect that anything less than a total ban on the chemical would be the result.
“THE QUESTION IS WHETHER any civilization can wage relentless war on life without destroying itself, and without losing the right to be called civilized,” wrote Rachel Carson in Silent Spring. Roger Meiners, co-author of Silent Spring at 50: The False Crises of Rachel Carson, countered, “This rhetorical question suggests another: whether any civilization that hobbles new technology that could reduce hunger and disease, on the chance that the new technology might have negative consequences—essentially giving up a real bird in hand for a hypothetical bird in the bush—should lose the right to be called civilized.”
THE LESSON FROM RACHEL CARSON and the banning of DDT reprises an earlier theme—it’s all about the data—as well as suggesting two new ones.
When officials at the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) were deciding whether to ban DDT, they had two sets of data from which to choose. One was a 9,000-page report generated by more than a hundred experts in the fields of chemistry, toxicology, agriculture, and environmental health that included hundreds of graphs and figures. DDT, the report concluded, wasn’t killing birds, wasn’t killing fish, and wasn’t causing chronic diseases in people. Although numbingly boring, the report was accurate.
The other source of evidence was a book: Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring—a beautifully written, heart-pounding tale with biblical overtones. Unlike the expert report, however, it was short on data and long on anecdotes. For example, to prove that eagles were dying from DDT, Carson had relied on the observations of a retired banker from Florida whose hobby was bird-watching. In the end, the EPA’s decision to ban DDT wasn’t based on data; it was based on fear and misinformation.
Carson’s story provides another lesson. In the 16th century Paracelsus, a Swiss physician and philosopher said, “the dose makes the poison.” When Rachel Carson wrote Silent Spring, she appealed to a 1960s, back-to-nature mentality supported by young, energetic, community-minded activists. Carson’s basic premise—that man-made activities were destroying the environment—was correct. Thanks to Rachel Carson, we are now far more attentive to our impact on the planet. Unfortunately, Carson also gave birth to the notion of zero tolerance—the assumption that any substance found harmful at any concentration or dosage should be banned absolutely. If large quantities of DDT (like those used in agriculture) were potentially harmful, then even small quantities (like those used to prevent mosquitoes from biting) should be avoided. In a sense, Rachel Carson was an early proponent of the precautionary principle. But, as we’ll see in the final chapter with cancer-screening programs, we should be cautious about being cautious.