Living Downstream

The very modern Beinecke Library at Yale University is the resting place for Rachel Carson’s papers. The cool, gray archival boxes that contain her correspondence, lecture notes, and personal writings must be requested one at a time from the librarian’s assistant. The special room for viewing them is hushed and spacious. A wall of windows looks out over a green collegiate lawn. One enters after a ritual of giving over all personal possessions to the librarian. No ink is allowed in the viewing room—only pencils or laptop computers.

Alone in this room with the first box I sift slowly through the pages it holds as though I were sorting botanical specimens. It is an automatic reflex, although I have not worked in a botanical herbarium for years. Herbarium sheets, onto which the delicate skeletons of dried plants are pressed, must never be flipped over like pages in a book but rather are to be laid gently in reverse order to the left of the stack one is looking through. When finished, the examiner places the sheaves, one at a time, on top of the stack to the right, and they thus assume their original position. At least, this is the method I was taught. Something about the ceremony of my current task has triggered this old behavior. I can only hope it approximates correct archival technique.

The sight of Rachel Carson’s handwriting is exhilarating. I uncover a note to Carson from Jacqueline Kennedy. Deep in another file is a letter of complaint Carson sent to a music company after receiving an erroneous bill and an inferior record album. The extraordinary and the mundane lie together here.

In a nation where guarantees of free speech are carved into the heart of our legal system, we are very often baffled by those who claim they have been silenced. I myself have never feared my mail would arrive with passages blacked out by a censor’s invisible hand. I have never wondered if the police would stop me on the way to class to announce that the content of my lecture was unacceptable. And yet perhaps we have all witnessed certain subtle codes of silence in operation—an unspoken agreement in the workplace or a family secret that everyone knows but does not discuss.

Rachel Carson was interested in three forms of silence. As a government scientist—she rose through the ranks of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service—Carson became concerned that the noise of important ecological debates carried on within federal agencies seldom reached the public. The long-running quarrel over the claim that pesticides were harmless was one she followed most closely. By virtue of her position, she had access to field reports clearly indicating that attempts to eradicate insect pests through massive chemical spraying programs had many unintended consequences for people and wildlife alike. This view, although denied vociferously by some in the government, was shared by many of Carson’s colleagues. Yet the citizenry heard little of this debate. The problem was not so much that those questioning the wisdom of eradication programs were spirited away in the middle of the night but that much of their data remained soundproofed in internal documents and technical journals, that follow-up research was sorely underfunded, and that government officials turned a deaf ear to bearers of bad news.

By 1952, Carson had become a best-selling author of nature books and was able to retire from government service. However, she continued to follow the pesticide debate as it clamored through the halls of the U.S. Department of Agriculture and the National Academy of Science. In 1958, a gardener named Olga Owens Huckins sent Carson a letter full of painful details about a mosquito control campaign that had resulted in a mass death of songbirds near her home. Those that lay scattered around her DDT-contaminated birdbath had perished in a posture of grotesque convulsion: legs drawn up to their breasts, beaks gaping open.

This letter prompted Carson to begin a comprehensive investigation of pesticides. In letters to friends about this project, she referred often to her need to speak out in defense of the natural world: “Knowing what I do, there would be no future peace for me if I kept silent.” Having documented a cavalcade of problems attributable to pesticides—from blindness in fish to blood disorders in humans—she could find no magazine or periodical willing to publish her work. Carson decided to write a book.

Its title, Silent Spring, refers to the eerier kind of silence: the absence of birdsong in a world poisoned by chemicals. Indeed, Carson argued, pesticidal warfare, waged with reckless disregard, threatens to extinguish a chorus of living voices—those of birds, bees, frogs, crickets, coyotes, and ultimately us. On this level, Silent Spring can be read as an exploration of how one kind of silence breeds another, how the secrecies of government beget a weirdly quiet and lifeless world.

Through this process of silencing, the interconnectedness of all life forms is revealed. Carson studied the failed attempt to prevent the Japanese beetle from invading Iroquois County, Illinois, a rural farming com - munity located due east of my home county. After intense and repeated pesticide bombardments by air during the mid-1950s, many insect species, sickened by the spraying, became easy prey for insect-eating birds and mammals. These creatures became poisoned in turn and, in ever-widening circles of death, went on to sicken and kill those who fed on their flesh, leaving a landscape devoid of animal life—from pheasants to barnyard cats.

Meanwhile, the targeted beetle species continued its westward advance. The protracted war against this enemy had accomplished nothing, but the residues of dieldrin remaining in the water and soil—like landmines left behind by a retreating army—guaranteed further casualties for decades to come. All for the dream of a beetleless world. The ecological tragedy of Iroquois County, said Carson, is narrated by the mute testimony of its dead ground squirrels: found with their mouths full of dirt, they had gnashed at the ground as they died.

The third kind of silence that fascinated Carson was the hushed complicity of many individual scientists who were aware of—if not directly involved in documenting—the hazards created by chemical assaults on the natural world. While dutifully publishing their research, most were reluctant about speaking out publicly, and some refused Carson’s requests for more information. Writing in Silent Spring, Carson acknowledged the constant threat of defunding that hushed many government scientists. But she made clear in her private correspondence that she had little respect for those who knew but did not speak, a combination she saw as cowardice:

The other day I saw a wonderful quote from [Abraham] Lincoln. . . . I told you once that if I kept silent I could never again listen to a veery’s song without overwhelming self-reproach. . . . The quote is “To sin by silence when they should protest makes cowards out of men.”

After Silent Spring was published, Carson turned her attention to the political and economic reasons behind the fearful silence of her colleagues in science. In a speech to the Women’s National Press Club, she questioned the cozy relations between scientific societies and for-profit enterprises, such as chemical companies. When a scientific society acknowledges a trade organization as a “sustaining associate,” Carson asked, whose voice do we hear when that society speaks—that of science or of industry?

Carson was just beginning to develop her ideas on the interlocking economic structures that bound the direction of medicine and science to the interests of industry when she herself was silenced. Leaving behind an adopted son, plans for summer fieldwork, and sketches for two more books, Rachel Carson died of breast cancer on April 14, 1964.

Sheltered from wind and waves, the Rachel Carson National Wildlife Refuge in southern Maine is essentially a salt marsh. It bears little resemblance to the rest of the Maine coastline, where the intense drama of ocean meeting rock prohibits marsh grasses from taking root. It is, therefore, a very different place from the craggy tidal pools and moonlit coves of Rachel Carson’s beloved summer home farther north.

Walking along the paths of the refuge that bears her name, I realize I feel less close to Rachel Carson here than in the climate-controlled sanctum of the Beinecke Library. At the dedication site, a large plaque dutifully lists the titles of her books and then credits her for inspiring millions to greater environmental consciousness. Its brief, abstract sentences remind me how remote a figure Carson became after her death. Like Rosa Parks, Carson is a symbol, a muse, a spark that ignited a social movement, a name to be invoked before a speech. In this, she seems unknowable and unhuman.

Still, my Illinois nerve endings are stirred by the softness of the landscape here. The lay of the land feels familiar, although most of the plant species are not. Salt meadow grass knits together the higher grounds, while the lower sweeps are bound by the taller and stiffer saltwater cordgrass. The sinuous borders between them represent the reach of the tide. The trail guide boasts that these two grasses together can produce as much plant matter per acre per year as a prime midwestern cornfield. I smile. No way.

It is November 1993. I have driven here from Boston with my friend Jeannie Marshall, who patiently endures my lecture on corn productivity and then turns my attention to the weather. “Doesn’t it feel like a different season?” Jeannie asks. On the dry uplands, a rich summery light pours through the oak trees that hang willfully onto their curled leaves. Like a flame, my dog streaks through the understory in pursuit of unseen life forms. Old oak leaves are a distinct shade of brown, which I am accustomed to viewing in hues of light more pale and dilute. We agree it is oddly beautiful to see them cast in such radiance.

The tidal creeks that worm their way through the stands of cordgrass confuse and delight me. I depend on surface water to reveal slope and direction, but poised here at the margin of the sea, these two concepts are subordinated to a larger force. At low tide, the creeks flow into the ocean. At high tide, the ocean flows into the creeks. The streambeds here pulse back and forth, flooding and draining, in a continual exchange of water and salt. There is no clear direction.

Just diagnosed for a second time with a rare cancer of the spinal cord, Jeannie is in between surgery and radiation treatments. She is recovering quickly—getting well in preparation for becoming sick in an attempt to get well. She moves so nimbly along the paths looping through the refuge that I scarcely need to modify my own movements. If not for her cane, we could be mistaken for any two young day-trippers escaping from the city. But we are on an escape of another kind, and I feel protective and scan the path ahead for rocks, roots, and sinkholes.

Although our friendship is a recent one, the many parallels in our lives promote intense conversations whenever we are together. Both of us are writers in our thirties. Both of us became cancer patients in our twenties. Both of us grew up in communities with documented environmental contamination, high cancer rates, and suspicions that these two factors are related to each other. Both of us grew up in families constructed through adoption (Jeannie’s mother was adopted, as I was), and we each have a keen curiosity about the interplay between heredity and environment in our lives.

And we have spoken at length about all of these topics. We have talked about what it means to have cancer as young women and about the relative significance of genealogy and ecology in that context. We have discussed our relationship with our doctors, our families, our hometowns, our writing, our bodies.

The depth and easiness of our talking carry us along today—through the luminous oak groves, out along the boardwalks that float over salt meadow grass, up onto the observation deck that overlooks the confluence of the Mariland River and Branch Brook, whose waters throb back and forth. It seems to me in these moments that Jeannie and I have words for everything. We have rejected the cultural taboos of the past that wrapped the topic of cancer in shrouds of silence, but we have also turned away from the happy cancer chatter that regularly arrives in our mailboxes in the form of brochures and magazines dedicated to the concepts of coping, accommodating, and adjusting to this disease. In its place, we have created a language between us that is compassionate, smart, fearless, open.

What my friend and I do not choose to talk about this afternoon are the dark days that lie ahead for her. Days of lying under the crosshairs of a proton-beam cyclotron. Fatigue, vomiting, blood tests. Continuously handing one’s body over to technicians and doctors in a process that we call becoming medicalized. But between us, we have years of experience with cancer. I have no doubt that when those days arrive we will find a vocabulary for every experience.

We pause to examine some small ponded areas near the brook. These are salt pannes—low spots that hold water when the tide ebbs. Evaporation concentrates the salt to such extraordinary levels that only a few inconspicuous plants can survive. Glassworts. Sea-blite. Life thriving among bitterness.

On average, breast cancer robs the woman it kills of twenty years of life. This means that in the United States, nearly one million years of women’s lives are lost each year. In 1964, Rachel Carson died at age fifty-six—twenty years short of the average life expectancy for U.S. women at that time. Despite all the ways she was extraordinary, as a victim of breast cancer Carson was utterly typical.

Carson was diagnosed in 1960, in the thick of researching and writing Silent Spring. Her tumor spread to her lymph nodes and to her bones, eventually including her spine, pelvis, and shoulder. She continued writing, even though surgery left her exhausted and radiation treatments, nauseated. Other ailments—joint and heart problems that were exacerbated, if not caused, by the radiation—brought crippling and immobility. The tumors in her cervical vertebrae caused her writing hand to go numb.

Carson lived for eighteen months after finishing Silent Spring—long enough to smoke out a hornet’s nest of ridicule and invective from the chemical industry, as well as to receive every imaginable award from the world of arts, letters, and science. Privately, Carson expressed relief and satisfaction at having lived to see Silent Spring complete—a reaction many of Carson’s commentators and colleagues have repeatedly underscored.

But there is another story embedded in the remaining fragments of Carson’s private writings. Far from viewing Silent Spring as her crowning achievement, Carson ached to go on to new projects as well as to seize the opportunities that her success now afforded. She did not go gently or gratefully into any good night. As her letters reveal, she died hoping for another remission, another field season, more time. And in this desire, Carson appears before us again as a typical woman with breast cancer.

From a letter to her dearest friend, Dorothy Freeman, in November 1963:

There is still so much I want to do, and it is hard to accept that in all probability, I must leave most of it undone. And just when I have attained the power to achieve so much I feel is important! Strange, isn’t it?

The winter of 1994 let go of Boston during the second week of March. Over 100 inches of snow had fallen since December, and most of it lay in towering mounds over every inch of grass and concrete that was not a passage for car traffic or an entrance to a building. Now the ice piles were finally melting, and everything that had been lost or abandoned began to surface: mittens, shovels, coat hangers, trash cans, lumber, laundry baskets, entire automobiles. Stratified layers of sand, cat litter, and gravel, which had been trapped at various depths, redeposited themselves in swirling alluvial fans along the sidewalks as rivulets of meltwater streamed toward the storm sewers.

Jeannie and I move through this landscape on our way from the Massachusetts General Hospital to her apartment in the North End. Neither of us speaks. The sound of our boots on the gravelly outwash seems deafening. Jeannie is not using a cane today, and we are walking even faster than we did four months ago at the salt marsh. In my mind’s eye, I am tossing all obstacles out of our way—chunks of ice, orange traffic cones, parked cars, cement barricades. I am aiming a wrecking ball at every building.

Neither of us can believe what we have just heard. After eight miserable weeks of radiation treatments to the tumor in her lower back, the original tumor in her neck—successfully removed and treated six years ago—has returned. “Massive recurrence,” to quote the neurologist who had just received the scans from the radiologist.

In fact, he said these words to us as soon as we walked into his office and closed the door. We were still standing in our winter coats and had not yet found our chairs. “Massive recurrence.” I struggled with my buttons, my scarf, the zipper to my book bag. My hands refused to work correctly. It had become my job in these settings to serve as the scribe and, as such, to provide complete documentation of conversations between patient and doctor.

This ritual could not withstand the current assault. I am a crack note-taker, but my hands did not want to write the words being spoken. All my attention was trained on overriding my desire to lay down the pen. The doctor spoke quickly and relentlessly as he described the tissues that were being “destroyed” or “strangled” by the chordoma’s advance. He was clearly upset but seemed unable to blend his despair with a demonstration of compassion or hope.

Jeannie remained calm. She asked him to conduct a neurological exam; her symptoms, after all, were improving. Her body seemed to be telling a different story. He refused. What would be the point? The scans told the whole story. He asked her to look at them. She refused. They each accused the other of not listening. I focused on writing faster. It was a battle of narrative. Which told the true story? The radiologist’s report? Or Jeannie’s body? Finally, the meeting ended.

On the day of my diagnosis, I was hospitalized and friends from college came to visit. They politely stepped into the hallway when the doctor came in. He gently told me the results of the pathology reports and the treatment plan he had in mind. We sat together for a while. After he left, my friends gingerly reentered the room. They were trying to be appropriate.

But what? I sit down at Jeannie’s kitchen table and begin to review the notes I have taken to make sure they are legible and complete. Were these the words that were really said? Can their meanings be trusted? Perhaps we had simply entered an unfamiliar culture where the phrase “massive recurrence” actually means “Hello, have a seat,” and “don’t shoot the messenger” is a way of saying “So long, take care.”

I think back to the sunlit oak grove and the salt pannes where language was so easy. How sure I was then that I could be depended on to push any situation, no matter how dire, into the bright daylight of human speech. I think back to Rachel Carson. Tumors in her cervical vertebrae caused loss of functioning in her right hand, the writing hand. Jeannie is also right-handed. It is her left hand that is becoming weak.

The former kind was a sort of drapery Rachel periodically pulled between herself and her confidante, Dorothy Freeman. In some of her letters to Dorothy, Rachel described the progress of her disease in detailed medical terms. But in others she spoke only in code, referring elliptically to “menacing shadows.” Rachel often refrained from divulging bad news, downplayed the miseries of treatment, and stated her belief that expression of fearful thoughts would only make them loom larger.

Reading again the collected letters between these two friends, I see an elaborate dance of silence. At times, Dorothy seemed relieved at the abstentions and forbearances, even seeming to encourage Rachel to keep her own counsel. Dorothy did not share her correspondent’s taste for writing about cancer in detached, medical tones. She refers not to Rachel’s radical mastectomy but to her “hurt side.”

And yet at other times, Dorothy seemed to feel shut out by Rachel’s silences. Both correspondents entreated the other not to censor her thoughts or feelings. Both correspondents also admitted they were not fully disclosing their own secret fears, out of a need to protect the other. Rachel sometimes pulled back the curtain and confided a darker story—one that admitted to pain and despair. Sometimes she followed these communications with retractions and apologies. And sometimes the letters containing the dark confessions were, upon request, destroyed.

Confessing and recanting. Withholding and divulging. This mesh of conflicting impulses is part of a familiar script that is enacted again and again between cancer patients and those who love them. And in this familiarity, Carson emerges once more, poignantly, as an ordinary woman.

The second kind of silence was a fortress of secrecy Rachel constructed around her own diagnosis, a secrecy she expected Dorothy to collude with her in maintaining. Rachel strictly forbade any discussion, public or private, about her illness. This decision was intended to retain the appearance of scientific objectivity as she was documenting the human cost of environmental contamination. She wished to yield her enemies in industry no further ground from which to launch their attacks.

Accordingly, Rachel instructed Dorothy to say nothing of her condition to their mutual acquaintances, lest rumors take root. If need be, Dorothy was to lie. “Say you heard from me recently and that I said I was fine,” she told Dorothy to tell her neighbors in Maine. “Say . . . that you never saw me look better. Please say that.”

What personal price each of these women paid for upholding this code of silence is impossible to know. Being sworn to secrecy can be a terrible burden. Anticipating the unintentional slip of the tongue that could ruin one’s career must have been equally crushing. Against this backdrop of agreed-upon silence is the fact that Carson’s state of health should have been obvious to anyone who cared to look at her. But not seeing is another form of silence.

As soon as Silent Spring was published, Carson was thrust into the national spotlight. She spoke in front of Congress, at the National Press Club, and on national television. In the photographs and old film clips documenting these occasions, she looks for all intents and purposes like a woman in treatment for cancer. She wears an unfortunate black wig. Her face and neck exhibit the distorting puffiness characteristic of radiation. She holds herself in the ginger, upright manner of one who has undergone surgery. The alteration in her appearance that followed her cancer diagnosis is dramatic.

The newspaper clippings in the Beinecke Library that trace her various public appearances in the waning days of her life are full of elaborate descriptions of what type of elegant suit Miss Carson chose to wear and how delightfully she comported herself. The accompanying pictures tell a different story. But it is a story read in silence by a woman from a future generation who knows how it will end.

Thanksgiving morning is sunny and mild. Jeannie and I decide to walk to Waterfront Park overlooking Boston Harbor. It is now more than a year since our buoyant walk through the wildlife refuge. Jeannie has just finished another round of radiation treatment, and because her balance has been affected, our pace is much slower. Orange tail swishing, my dog circles patiently, herding us toward the water. Somehow, Jeannie has managed to finish writing two articles, one about the search for cancer genes and another on breast cancer prevention for a British medical text. Feeling triumphant, she is in the mood to talk about cancer—but not her own.

Silent Spring is remembered for the birds. When I ask people to name words, phrases, or images that Rachel Carson’s book evokes for them, “thin eggshells” is among the most frequent responses. Yet this consequence of pesticide exposure—bird eggs so fragile they crush under the airy weight of their own brooding parents—is scarcely mentioned in Silent Spring. Perhaps we like to equate Carson with eggshell thinning because it is a problem that largely fixed itself after DDT and a handful of other pesticides were finally restricted for domestic use. In this way, Carson’s predictions of disaster can be simultaneously viewed as both prophetic and successfully averted. A comfortable reckoning.

Of course, the fate of birds and other innocents caught in the chemical crossfire certainly was a central concern of Silent Spring. As proof of harm, their deaths were starkly visible. Who can deny the ground squirrels’ cold little mouths packed with dirt? Or shrug off the pitiful sight of songbirds writhing in the grass? But Silent Spring makes clear that this kind of evidence, however immediate and tangible, is only one part of a much larger assemblage that also includes human cancer. Even while hiding the image of herself as a cancer patient, Carson provided many others: from farmers with bone marrow degeneration to spray gun- toting housewives stricken with leukemia.

Making visible the links between cancer and environmental contamination was challenging for Carson, and the task continues to be daunting. However agonizing their deaths, cancer patients do not collapse around the birdbath. Decades can transpire between the time of exposure to cancer-causing agents and the first outward symptoms of disease. When birds drop out of the sky in great numbers, we ask why. When someone we love is diagnosed with cancer, questions of cause are often of less immediate relevance than questions about treatment. Questions about the past are subordinated to questions about the suddenly uncertain future.

Based on all the data available to her in 1962, Carson laid out five lines of evidence linking cancer to environmental causes. While any one alone would be insufficient proof, when viewed all together, Carson asserted, a startling picture emerges that we ignore at our peril. First, although some cancer-producing substances—called carcinogens—are naturally occurring and have existed since life began, twentieth-century industrial activities have created countless such substances against which we have no naturally occurring means of protection.

Second, since the arrival of the atomic and chemical age that followed World War II, everyone—not just industrial workers—has been exposed to these carcinogens from the moment of conception until death. Industry manufactures carcinogens in such large quantities and in such diverse array that they are no longer confined to the workplace. They have seeped into the general environment, where we all come into intimate and daily contact with them.

Third, cancer is striking the general population with increasing frequency. At the time of Carson’s writing, the postwar chemical era was less than two decades old—less than the time required for many cancers to manifest themselves. Carson predicted that the full maturation of “whatever seeds of malignancy have been sown” by the new lethal agents of the chemical age would occur in the years to come. She also believed that the first signs of catastrophe were already visible. At the end of the 1950s, death certificates showed that a far greater proportion of people were dying of cancer than had been true at the turn of the century. Most ominously, children’s cancers, once a medical rarity, were becoming commonplace—as revealed both by vital statistics and by doctors’ observations.

Carson’s fourth line of evidence came from animals. Experimental tests were beginning to reveal that low doses of many pesticidal chemicals in common use caused cancer in laboratory mice, rats, and dogs. Moreover, many animals inhabiting contaminated environments develop malignant tumors; Silent Spring not only documents acute poisonings of songbirds but also reports on cases of sheep with nasal tumors. These incidents supported the circumstantial evidence from human populations.

Finally, Carson argued, the unseen inner workings of the cell itself corroborate the story. At the time of Silent Spring’s publication, the mechanisms responsible for basic cellular processes such as energy production and regulation of cell division were just beginning to be elucidated. The role and structure of the twisting DNA molecule had been discovered only recently. From the glimmers she was able to gather from widely scattered studies, Carson spotlighted three properties that she believed would ultimately explain why these new chemicals were associated with cancer: they were able to damage chromosomes and thereby cause genetic mutations (a property shared with radiation, which had already been shown to cause cancer); they were able to mimic and disrupt sex hormones (high estrogen levels were already correlated with high cancer rates); and they were able to alter enzyme-directed processes of metabolism (by which we break apart molecules, including foreign chemicals that are sometimes metabolically converted into carcinogens). Carson predicted that future studies on the mysterious transformation of healthy cells into malignant ones would reveal that the roads leading to the formation of cancer are the same pathways that pesticides and other related chemical contaminants operate along once they enter the interior spaces of the human body.

Like the assembling of a prehistoric animal’s skeleton, this careful piecing together of evidence can never furnish final or absolute answers. There will always be a few missing parts, first because experimenting on human beings is not, thankfully, considered ethically acceptable. Human carcinogens must, therefore, be identified through inference. One set of clues is provided by observations of people who have been inadvertently exposed to substances suspected of having cancer-causing tendencies. But often these people have been exposed to unknown quantities over unknown periods of time. Observations of laboratory animals exposed to known quantities of possible carcinogens supply a second set of clues. But different animal species can vary in their vulnerability to certain kinds of cancers and in their sensitivity to certain kinds of chemicals. Which species can serve as our surrogates in these studies? Rats? Mice? Fish? Dogs? Is there a species whose lymph nodes, bone marrow, brain tissue, prostate glands, bladders, breasts, livers, and spinal cords behave most like those in humans when exposed to particular substances?

Another reason for scientific uncertainty is that the widespread introduction of suspected chemical carcinogens into the human environment is itself a kind of uncontrolled experiment. There remains no unexposed control population to whom the cancer rates of exposed people can be compared. Moreover, the exposures themselves are uncontrolled and multiple. Each of us is exposed repeatedly to minute amounts of many different carcinogens and to any one carcinogen through many different routes. From a scientific point of view, such combinations are especially dangerous because they have the capacity to do great harm while yielding meaningless data. Science loves order, simplicity, the manipulation of a single variable against a background of consistency. The tools of science do not work well when everything is changing all at once.

It is March 1995. Winter and spring have hung together in the air for weeks, neither yielding to the other. On the phone, Jeannie is trying to describe to me a new sensation she feels across the skin of her chest. It is vague and formless. There are no real words for it. I am attempting to understand how this symptom fits together with a few other recent problems she has reported. Morning vertigo. A funny feeling when she swallows. What picture is emerging here? What does her doctor say? She turns back my questions.

Recently, I have become fascinated by the evident reciprocity between environmental activism and Silent Spring. I have come to believe that Carson was as influenced by activism and advocacy as the contemporary environmental movement was influenced—some would say inaugurated—by the publication of Silent Spring.

In her acknowledgments at the beginning of Silent Spring, Carson credits citizen activists as much as scientists for convincing her to speak out. “In a letter written in January 1958, Olga Owens Huckins told me of her own bitter experience of a small world made lifeless and so brought my attention sharply back to a problem with which I had long been concerned,” writes Carson. “I then realized I must write this book.” But Huckins, the letter-writer Carson credits for inspiring her to write Silent Spring, was more than a gardener. As Carson’s biographer, Linda Lear, documents, Huckins was also a member of the Committee Against Mass Poisoning, which sought, through lawsuits and protests, to halt the aerial spraying of pesticides. Throughout 1957, members of this committee, including Huckins, wrote letters to the editors of many New England and Long Island newspapers. These letters did not scientifically document the harm created by the broadcasting of pesticides. Instead, they bore witness to many small tragedies, such as dead birds piling up around backyard birdbaths in the aftermath of a particular spraying episode. These letters were also quite polemical. From one: “Stop the spraying of poisons everywhere until all the evidence, biological and scientific, immediate and long run, of the effects upon wildlife and human beings is known.”

The Committee Against Mass Poisoning took a human rights approach to environmental harm—as contemporary environmental justice advocates continue to do. In the parlance of today’s environmental activists, the introduction of harmful chemicals into air, food, and water (and thereby into our bodies) violates the right to privacy as well as security of person and is referred to as an act of “toxic trespass.” Likewise, Huckins condemned aerial spraying of pesticides as “inhumane, un-democratic, and probably unconstitutional.”

The citizen lawsuit filed by the committee was useful to Carson because, as it wended its way to the Supreme Court, it became a magnet for media attention. Carson was thus able to elicit the interest of The New Yorker. When its editor offered Carson fifty thousand words in the magazine to write about pesticides, she knew she was on her way to a book.