1962
Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring (1962) was the first book to provoke widespread concern about the impact that chemical pesticides can have on Nature and human health. By combining solid science with an emotional warning of the potential ill effects of humanity’s interference with natural ecosystems, Carson was instrumental in bringing the science of ecology and the serious issue of environmental damage to the top of the international agenda. In so doing she helped to kick-start the modern environmental movement.
Carson opens Silent Spring with the image of a country town in harmony with Nature, until it is suddenly brought to ruin when its citizens thoughtlessly use dangerous pesticides on their farms, homes and gardens. The book’s title was chosen to evoke the image of a spring where no birds sing, because they have all been poisoned by pesticides; it thus echoes the lines from Keats’s poem ‘La Belle Dame sans Merci’: ‘The sedge is wither’d from the lake,/And no birds sing.’ Carson herself writes: ‘Over increasingly large areas of the United States spring now comes unheralded by the return of the birds, and the early mornings are strangely silent where once they were filled with the beauty of bird song.’
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 of orchards where, in spring, white clouds of bloom drifted above the green fields … The countryside was famous for the abundance and variety of its bird life, and when the flood of migrants was pouring through in spring and fall people traveled from great distances to observe them …
Then a strange blight crept over the area and everything began to change … There was a strange stillness. The birds, for example – where had they gone? Many people spoke of them, puzzled and disturbed … The few birds seen anywhere were moribund; they trembled violently and could not fly. It was a spring without voices. On the mornings 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 …
No witchcraft, no enemy action had silenced the rebirth of new life in this stricken world. The people had done it themselves.
SILENT SPRING, CHAPTER 1, ‘A FABLE FOR TOMORROW’, 1962
In Silent Spring Carson traces the huge and rapid increase in chemical pesticides, such as DDT, since the Second World War. Many people at the time thought such pesticides delivered nothing but good: they increased agricultural production, made food cheaper, helped to reduce poverty, and also killed disease carriers such as lice (which spread diseases such as typhus) and mosquitoes (which spread many diseases, notably malaria). But Carson points out that DDT concentrates higher up in the food chain, interfering with the ability of insect-eating birds to breed; birds of prey that feed on these birds are even more vulnerable.
In a chapter entitled ‘Elixirs of Death’ Carson introduces the organic chemistry of chlorinated hydrocarbons such as DDT and other synthetic pesticides, and shows how such chemicals are absorbed by plants and animals, accumulate in adrenal glands, testes, the liver and kidneys, and enter the human food chain. Citing eminent scientists and public-health leaders, she outlines ways in which these compounds may be causes of cancer.
The book questions whether studies of the effects of these powerful poisons on rats have given regulators enough reliable information to set safety thresholds for their use, given their potential long-term effects and the way that several chemicals may have a combined impact on the human body. Carson predicts a rise in cancers and diseases of the nervous system if the widespread use of such pesticides continues.
Silent Spring chronicles a saddening array of cases where these poisons have already had devastating effects on wildlife. Campaigns to eradicate gypsy moths and fire ants, for example, decimated bird and animal life, although infestations of the pests remained as bad the year after the aerial spraying as before. Throughout, Carson suggests natural alternatives to synthetic chemicals, using ecology to defeat unwanted pests. She also puts academic entomologists under the microscope, pointing out that their research is compromised by the funding they receive from the chemical industry to undertake insecticide testing; they are thus biased against biological or ecological methods of pest control.
The book’s concluding chapter, ‘The Other Road’, sketches the many alternatives to saturating the earth with poisons. Nature, Carson says, exists for more than man’s convenience.
Silent Spring was serialized in the New Yorker magazine before appearing in book form in 1962, at the end of an era of postwar complacency and conformism. Multinational chemical giants were building plants and creating jobs, agricultural crop yields were booming, and there was little thought about the costs of this material progress. In 1962 the public was not used to questioning the authority or integrity of corporate executives, government officials, scientists or farmers. Carson was taking on an entrenched power structure.
This challenge won her widespread acclaim within the nascent environmentalist movement, just as well-publicized environmental hazards were beginning to open the public mind. Silent Spring quickly became a bestseller in both the United States and Britain. Carson knew which buttons to press to get the public on her side. One year, she points out, an application of pesticides had made the nation’s cranberry crop too dangerous to serve, an almost unthinkable absence from the American Thanksgiving feast. However, Carson knew that to have any chance of winning the scientific argument, she would need not only to trade on her credibility as a popular science writer, but also to ground her claims about pesticides in the academic and technical literature. She spent over four years researching Silent Spring, and listed fifty pages of sources at the end.
In any case, Carson’s background was that of a serious scientist: she had a master’s degree in zoology from Johns Hopkins University and had also spent time at the Woods Hole Marine Biology Institute in Massachusetts. From 1936 until 1952 she worked as a government scientist with the United States Fish and Wildlife Service, latterly serving as the agency’s editor-in-chief. She published Under the Sea-Wind in 1941, and her second book, The Sea Around Us (1951), another study of the ocean, won the US National Book Award and became an international bestseller. After this success, her reputation enabled her to leave her job and take up writing full time.
Within two years of publishing Silent Spring Rachel Carson died of cancer, aged 56. After her premature death, a number of public-interest pressure groups came into being to promote reform in the USA, including the Environmental Defense Fund and the Natural Resources Defense Council. Others, such as the National Audubon Society (America’s leading wildlife conservation organization), began to campaign against pollution.
Silent Spring pioneered a new genre of popular-science books that weave together scientific evidence and emotive appeals in order to arouse public concern and raise awareness of the environmental risks of industrial technology. Campaigning environmentalism as we know it received its start in life from Carson’s book.