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    Silent Spring
    Silent Spring
    Silent Spring
    Ebook439 pages7 hours

    Silent Spring

    By Rachel Carson

    4/5

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    • Environmental Pollution

    • Insecticides

    • Environmentalism

    • Pesticides

    • Biological Control

    • Man Vs. Nature

    • Butterfly Effect

    • Dystopian Society

    • Poisoned Chalice

    • Unintended Consequences

    • Unseen Danger

    • Ecological Disaster

    • Unintended Consequence

    • Reluctant Hero

    • Power of Knowledge

    • Nature

    • Public Health

    • Pollution

    • Chemicals

    • Environmental Degradation

    About this ebook

    THE CLASSIC THAT LAUNCHED THE ENVIRONMENTAL MOVEMENT

    FEATURED ON NETFLIX'S 3 BODY PROBLEM

    “Rachel Carson is a pivotal figure of the twentieth century…people who thought one way before her essential 1962 book Silent Spring thought another way after it.”—Margaret Atwood

    Rarely does a single book alter the course of history, but Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring did exactly that. The outcry that followed its publication in 1962 forced the banning of DDT and spurred revolutionary changes in the laws affecting our air, land, and water. Carson’s passionate concern for the future of our planet reverberated powerfully throughout the world. As Carson reminds us, "In nature, nothing exists alone.” 

    The introduction by the acclaimed biographer Linda Lear, author of Rachel Carson: Witness for Nature, tells the story of Carson’s courageous defense of her truths in the face of a ruthless assault form the chemical industry following the publication of Silent Spring and before her untimely death.

    “Wonder and humility are just some of the gifts of Silent Spring. They remind us that we, like all other living creatures, are part of the vast ecosystems of the earth of the earth…this is a book to relish: not for the dark side of human nature, but for the promise of life’s possibility.” —from the Introduction

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherHarperCollins
    Release dateOct 22, 2002
    ISBN9780547527628
    Author

    Rachel Carson

    Rachel Carson (1907–1964) spent most of her professional life as a marine biologist with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. By the late 1950s, she had written three lyrical, popular books about the sea, including the best-selling The Sea Around Us, and had become the most respected science writer in America. She completed Silent Spring against formidable personal odds, and with it shaped a powerful social movement that has altered the course of history.

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    Reviews for Silent Spring

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    • 5/5
      Maybe This Can Help You
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    • 5/5
      Important book. Many of the behaviors that she revealed over 60 years ago are still going on. The book is easy to read, interesting and appalling on every page.
    • 5/5
      I wish the book had lost all of its relevance and ended up on a dusty shelf somewhere, and people would look at it and say "Can you believe people used to live like that?" Unfortunately, that's not going to be the case. I found the part where regular citizens noticed that there were no birds singing on spring particularly disturbing. As I read, I googled various chemicals, insecticides, etc. and was shocked to see how many are still just as big a part of society now as then, in some cases worse.
    • 3/5
      A huge eye opener provided by Rachel Carson’s The Silent Spring. Many times Carson slips into technical language that slows the flow of the nonfiction. After reading this book published over fifty years ago, I marvel that the whole population of living things has not perished due to all the harmful ingredients dropped onto the earth. In our quest for perfect yards and the elimination of insects, we have endangered our existence. Carson plows through the landscape and educates the readers on all the dangers of insecticide, and then falls victim to the dangers herself.

      1 person found this helpful

    • 4/5
      One of the most important books of the 20c. Because I had a science background, friends would ask me if it was real, and of course I said yes. It only seemed overwrought at the time because we as a society had not yet realized all the damage we were doing to our home.
    • 5/5
      I'm so proud of myself for finally reading this book after all this time. Written in the 1960's, it was a huge impetus in the US that led to the creation of the Environmental Protection Agency and spurred public mobilization to limit indiscriminate and blanket use of pesticides. The following decade would see protection of endangered species, inclusive of both plants and animals. A good deal of the effects of the new toxins in circulation were still unknown in the 1960's because science has made great advances since then. As a consequence, some of the questions posed by the author have since been answered, and, indeed, the content of one or two chapters are now ubiquitous. Some of the content can be skimmed, but that's not to say I think the book isn't worth reading.

      I found it hugely educational, especially since for me it's history, given I wasn't yet born for a couple more decades after the book was published. It was enlightening and infuriating to read how the Department of Agriculture ran roughshod over anything and everything with toxic chemicals without first doing the most basic of due diligence. The author never states it, but, reading between the lines, I thought to myself, "Profits over public interest. Some things never change."

      This book is now considered a classic, and I wish it were required reading. One of my favorite passages from the book:

      “The choice, after all, is ours to make. If, having endured much, we have at last asserted our “right to know,” and if, knowing, we have concluded that we are being asked to take senseless and frightening risks, then we should no longer accept the counsel of those who tell us that we must fill our world with poisonous chemicals; we should look about and see what other course is open to us.”

      1 person found this helpful

    • 5/5
      A good edition of this excellent book, with an introduction by Linda Lear and an afterword by E.O. Wilson. I finally decided it was time to sit and take time to read Carson's work, and used an unexpectedly pleasant spring day to do it, mostly in one sitting. It's brilliant and powerful and there should be more like it.
    • 4/5
      A legendary book from the 1960s that I had never read until now.
      Carson tells the story of the (mis)application of toxic chemicals intended as insect pest controls. As she vividly points out in the book, the pesticides failed signally in their objective, and caused untold (until she wrote) collateral damage to wildlife and humans.
      The author writes beauftiful text - the sense flows effortlessly off the page. While she was clearly as mad as hell, she restrains herself in the writing, and makes every effort to present facts dispassionately - this was not the twitter era.
      I read in the afterword that she was ferociously attacked by vested interests following publication of the book. But, she won - she was right, they were wrong, and she roused such a public reaction that the toxic chemical industry was forced to buckle under some governmental constraints - not a perfect ending, but quite a vindication for a brave author.

      1 person found this helpful

    • 5/5
      Scariest book I've ever read! (sorry Stephen King!)
    • 5/5
      I first read this in the l960s and remember well the furor around it. It helped me early on to see the dark stain in humanity. Yes, it was widely applauded, then we went back to business as usual painting ourselves in a corner.
    • 4/5
      Great!! This is a classic of the environmental movement, and I’d recommend it to anybody interested in the topic. Carson is a bit repetitive at times, and her wording can be confusing, but for the most part she does a great job at describing the situation and reasons to pressure change in the way we interact with our environment. This book is written about the chemicals we put into the world, but the mindset it pushes can be extended far beyond that.

      1 person found this helpful

    • 4/5
      In today’s world, environmentalism is still controversial, although it’s becoming more popular (witness the growth of the Green Party in Europe’s recent elections). Environmentalism and economics are often counterposed against each other as if one loses when the other wins.

      In 1962, Rachel Carson wrote this book that brought environmental concerns to the fore. She contended that taking care of the plants and animals around us is a worthwhile project. For the most part, smart environmental planning helps financials as the beauty of the natural world tends to sell itself through overall health.

      Reading this book fifty-some-odd years later, I still find her first chapter quite moving. She imagines a world in which nature is disrupted and in which there is no natural equilibrium anymore. Human wastes have won the day. Although this future was not realized in the 1960s as much as it’s not real today, the rapid pace of environmental change (quick and massive) threatened to make it real. Broad-spectrum insecticides and herbicides were in vogue, and they threatened all of the biosphere with ill effects like cancer in humans, high toxin counts in species’ livers, and contaminated sources of water.

      Much of her evidence, of course, is dated from the year 1962 or before. One can pass over much of this book’s middle chapters with rapidity because the history of science passes quickly. Nonetheless, the beginnings and endings are relevant today through Carson’s vibrant voice. Those inclined towards a greener planet should pay attention as well as those interested, for or against, in the so-called Green New Deal. Indeed, Carson’s brains can inspire us to lead ourselves out of conflict into a smarter future.
    • 4/5
      Five stars for what it did in creating alarm about pesticides and indiscriminate spraying. 31/2 stars for the actual read. A dry read especially when dealing with the chemical breakdowns and dealing with those aspects of this story. I can see how this book opened the eyes of many people not familiar with what was happening with pesticides and farming, Many interesting facts in this book.
    • 3/5
      My first read of this classic. It wasn't at all what I had expected. Based on environmental books that are popular today, I had expected lyrical descriptive nature writing. No. There's a little of that, but this is more like a compendium of dozens and dozens of investigative reports like you might find in the NY Times or Washington Post. All about chemical poisoning. That can be tedious, but it is also scary how regulation fails and can be suborned. I should probably start eating organic vegetables. Carson advocates strongly for importing insects to combat invasive insects, and she touts as a success when one introduced species is firmly established as a bulwark against an invasive species. As a non-expert, I'm not sure this perspective stands up well to time. Carson makes a good case for paying attention to the bigger picture, and not just going with the flow.
    • 5/5
      “Silent Spring” by Rachel Carson is a passionate book. It is a superb book. It is a book that arrived at a good point in history.

      Rachel Carson blended science with a deep concern for the environment to produce a book of breathtaking beauty.

      There is a strangely lyrical quality to her writing. I read the book almost through in one sitting.

      When I read about the reactions that followed the publication of this book, I can only stand back and admire her courage. I wish we had such people in India.
    • 5/5
      Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring launched the conservation movement that has continued to impact people’s lives all over the world. All life is interrelated and interdependent. Nature is what we see, hear, touch, smell, and experience in diverse ways. But still mankind has a lot to learn about how nature works. Publicly leaders have attempted to alter the face of nature for its convenience, health, and profit. But nature has laws by which it functions that can’t be broken without serious consequences.
      Entrepreneurs have developed an industrial society, and are pouring tons of carbon emissions in the atmosphere. For years there have been the uses of spraying on land and by air that have killed pests, an abundance of trees, wildlife, and animals alike. These poisons have the effect of disrupting the metabolism in humans so many of people are dying from cancer. Our world is armed with atomic bombs, and the radioactive fallout in some cases has poisoned our water supply. Yet some decision leaders persist in making decisions that are harmful to human life.
      So nature has always fought back with a resurgent of pests, death, and deformities of millions and millions of species – animals, reptiles, birds, fishes, trees, and shrubs. Many living species die immediately from the onslaught of poison, others linger, showing signs of malignancies, and there have even been noticeable effects on the weather. Humankind is still to learn how to live with nature in acceptable ways because it always retaliates with doomsday scenarios. Living well with nature has become an imperative that people can’t afford to ignore. It’s for our own well-being, safety, health, and doing what’s right for the preservation of future generations. Happily there have been some scientific developments that are making use of other techniques that have promise in dealing with these problems in more humane ways.
    • 4/5
      A 1962 expose on the long-term costs of humanity’s abuse of the environment. Rachel Carson worked for the U.S. Department of Agriculture and she saw firsthand what pesticides, herbicides, and invasive insects were doing to animals, humans, and the ecosystem.

      This book was also for the book club I run for zoo volunteers. We had a very good discussion about it. The statistics and anecdotes were very shocking, though 57 years later none of us were exactly sure where society stands on any of the specific cases Carson discussed. Many of our current environmental problems are ones she could not have imagined – there’s no way to know what she would have thought of GMOs or organic panic or plastic vs. paper straws. Some of the solutions Carson proposed seem shockingly nearsighted to me, such as introducing invasive non-native predators to areas with invasive non-native pests. Noooooo! But it was still fascinating to read the origin of so much of our current knowledge about the environment.
    • 4/5
      This is an amazing book: it really makes you think about what you can do to sustain our natural resources.
    • 4/5
      Given my interests and the timing of this book being published, one would think I would have read this book decades ago. It was certainly well known already when I was deep into my higher education pursuits so many years ago. I had always assumed it would be rather dated and much overshadowed by more modern research, if I were to read it now. Plus, I don't recall the last time the title of this book and DDT were not directly connected in comments I read about one or the other of the two. As it turns out, the book is startling in its applicability to today's world, especially one in which environmental protections are exuberantly being stripped off like so many layers of skin on a human being by a stunningly misguided government administration. (Can someone please pass a law requiring all candidates be able to read?) True, DDT is not much in the news now, but this book speaks directly and fluently about the very same issues that face the world now as to those it faced back in 1962. I have read other books that were more adept at stating their case about the intricacies of trying to manage our environment, but this book does a fine job of it and is well worth the read even now.
    • 4/5
      Reading this book so long after it was published makes clear that we have won little in the battle against the poisoning of the world. I come away from this book realizing that we need a new strategy in order to stop the living world from being destroyed by corporations.
    • 5/5
      As expected, the science is a bit dated since this book is now ~50 years old. However, Carson's main points are still valid and powerfully put. She helped create the environmental movement which many now take for granted. While I am pleased to know that some of the threats she described have been reversed or avoided (such as the recovery of many bird & fish species from the effects of DDT), I was still appalled by the hazards that pesticides & herbicides posed then & probably still do. I was also left with a strong feeling that the USDA and other governmental agencies of the 1940-60 period were rife with corruption -- I don't know if this was ever investigated but I sure hope that there is more oversight on these agencies now!

      Carson does an amazing job of giving explanations of some basic biology as well as the plentiful descriptions of case studies. Well worth reading.
    • 3/5
      Anniversary addition of the classic if controversial work. This includes a new introduction with a helpful brief biography of Rachel Carson and an afterword by Edward O. Wilson.
    • 5/5
      This is a truly awesome book that had significant impact on policy in the US regarding the use of pesticides. This was well researched and well written. The points off the book are clear and accurate. The data are not to be ignored.
    • 5/5
      The scary thing about reading this book at a fifty year remove, is not that one learns of new threats to our ecosphere, or even that many of the dangers highlighted are still in existence, it is that the corporate powers had to be dragged, screaming and kicking, into an admission of each threat. We have no reason to presume that this reluctance has passed into history and so, all that the last fifty years has accomplished is that the apologists have learned more subtle ways to gain-say the danger.

      In 1962, the poison producers simply brushed aside the concerns of the people, nowadays, they cry their best crocodile tears and promise that they are moving mountains to reverse the situation whilst, in reality, they blithely ignore the issues, as before.

      Back to the book, history has proved Carson correct on almost every fear that she expressed. Admittedly, the planet still exists but, it would be interesting to know how many deaths might have been avoided had the "progressives" accepted the flaws in their approach: indeed, had they so done, maybe the knee jerk reaction to genetic engineering and fracking would not be so universally negative. If the general public could have any belief that safeguards were in place, I am sure that a far greater number would be willing to allow this research, without attempts to disrupt.

      You may feel that this review is at a tangent to the book but, these are the areas which Ms. Carson would, I am sure, be tackling, were she to be writing now. The issues have changed, the response has not. The evidence of current misdemeanour's is kept from us, it is only by reminding ourselves of the historical position that we can see how to proceed now.
    • 1/5
      I can't say I read this book, because I didn't finish it. I discovered my inner environmentalist in elementary school, and when I learned about Rachel Carson, I was enamored. Perhaps I was simply too young for this book, and maybe my complaint about it only serves to illustrate the fact: it was boring. To give it a fair review, I should at least finish it, but I wanted to mark it down because I remember it so vividly. It was a disappointment.
    • 4/5
      I first read this book around 35 or 40 years ago. I will say there is a good reason it is a classic. A pivotal book that was treated unkindly in the 60's but has endured all these years. It now seems to be the most oft quoted book regarding the environment and the birth of the environmental movement.
    • 3/5
      This is one of those books I've been meaning to read for a while. It's written in an accessible, yet authoritative style and sets out the stark truths about the dangers of putting human-made chemicals which deal out death into the environment. It's obvious why this was such an influential work when it came out.

      I got a bit tired around the mid-way mark of reading about chemically-induced disasters and found myself skimming over some of those middle chapters, but I'm glad to have finally got around to reading the book.
    • 4/5
      I'm glad I read this book -- as Al Gore said in his intro to this edition, it really kicked off the environmental movement. I was impressed by Rachel Carson's writing ability and the way she created effective analogies to help a non-scientist like me understand how toxic insecticides threaten our world and our health. "Silent Spring" was also a scary book to read -- although chemicals like DDT have been banned, I couldn't help thinking about all the chemical and substances in modern life that could still be contaminating our water, earth, and sky and hurting us. And although the more biological solutions that Carson suggested made sense, it also made me wonder about the possible dangers of "playing God" and changing our natural environment. But a powerful, pursuasive read -- I can understand why it was so effective when it came out in 1962.
    • 5/5
      As we pass another vernal equinox in March of 2013, my mind wandered back to 1965 when I read Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring. This classic work, which became, in the words of Peter Matthiessen, “The cornerstone of the new environmentalism” has writing as beautiful as a perfect Spring day.

      Carson was born in 1907 and served many years as a marine biologist with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. Three previous works on the environment of the oceans firmly fixed her as an eminent writer on nature. She died less than two years after the publication of Silent Spring. Her work set in motion profound changes in environmental laws to protect the air we breathe, the water we drink, and the land on which we live and grow our food.

      Carson’s study focuses on the indiscriminate use of the pesticide DDT, which was banned shortly after the book caused a world-wide sensation. Predictably, much opposition arose from opponents of the idea we need to protect our environment. Detractors in government and the then multimillion dollar chemical industry attacked Carson, because – as Linda Lear who wrote a biography of Carson wrote in the Introduction to my anniversary edition – they “were not about to allow a former government editor, a female scientist without a Ph.D. or an institutional affiliation, known only for her lyrical books on the sea, to undermine public confidence in its products or to question its integrity” (xvii). Those chemical companies now have profits in the billions. Lear continues, when this book “caught the attention of President Kennedy, federal and state investigations were launched into the validity of Carson’s claims” (xvii).

      The chapters then focus on various parts of the environment, the chemicals which were sprayed or dumped into each one, and the effects these chemicals had. The title “Silent Spring” reflects numerous reports of the death of thousands of song birds and other creatures following widespread use of DDT and other pesticides. I remember as a child watching trucks drive down our street spraying a white fog to kill mosquitoes. Sometimes the city issued warnings and other times not. My mother always made my sisters and me stay inside “until the smell went away.” However, I remember seeing children running and playing in the fog.

      Carson writes about the hundreds of new chemicals which find their way into use every year. In the mid-40s alone “over 200 chemicals were invented to kill insects, weeds, rodents, and other organisms described in the modern vernacular as ‘pests’” (7). Carson asks, “Can anyone believe it is possible to lay down such a barrage of poisons on the surface of the earth without making it unfit for all life? They should not be called ‘insecticides,’ but ‘biocides’” (8). Yet today, attacks continue on the EPA. A most worthy read for anyone concerned about the environment. 5 stars

      --Jim, 2/15/13
    • 5/5
      the first real book about protecting the environment, Rachel goes into what she and others did to remove poison from the earth and our food. she is one of the big reasons why DDT was banned. Anybody who cares about the earth and what you eat should read this

    Book preview

    Silent Spring - Rachel Carson

    First Mariner Books edition 2002

    Copyright © 1962 by Rachel L. Carson

    Copyright © renewed 1990 by Roger Christie

    Introduction copyright © 2002 by Linda Lear

    Afterword copyright © 2002 by Edward O. Wilson

    All rights reserved

    For information about permission to reproduce selections from this book, write to trade.permissions@hmhco.com or to Permissions, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company, 3 Park Avenue, 19th Floor, New York, New York 10016.

    hmhbooks.com

    Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available.

    ISBN 0-618-25305-x

    ISBN 0-618-24906-0 (pbk.)

    Drawings by Lois and Louis Darling

    Portions of this book were first published as a series of articles in The New Yorker.

    eISBN 978-0-547-52762-8

    v14.0719

    To Albert Schweitzer

    who said

    "Man has lost the capacity to foresee and to forestall.

    He will end by destroying the earth."

    The sedge is wither’d from the lake,

       And no birds sing.

    KEATS

    ✦ ✦ ✦

    I am pessimistic about the human race 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.

    E. B. WHITE

    Author’s Note

    I HAVE NOT WISHED to burden the text with footnotes but I realize that many of my readers will wish to pursue some of the subjects discussed. I have therefore included a list of my principal sources of information, arranged by chapter and page, in an appendix which will be found at the back of the book.

    R.C.

    Acknowledgments

    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. I then realized I must write this book.

    During the years since then I have received help and encouragement from so many people that it is not possible to name them all here. Those who have freely shared with me the fruits of many years’ experience and study represent a wide variety of government agencies in this and other countries, many universities and research institutions, and many professions. To all of them I express my deepest thanks for time and thought so generously given.

    In addition my special gratitude goes to those who took time to read portions of the manuscript and to offer comment and criticism based on their own expert knowledge. Although the final responsibility for the accuracy and validity of the text is mine, I could not have completed the book without the generous help of these specialists: L. G. Bartholomew, M.D., of the Mayo Clinic, John J. Biesele of the University of Texas, A.W.A. Brown of the University of Western Ontario, Morton S. Biskind, M.D., of Westport, Connecticut, C. J. Briejèr of the Plant Protection Service in Holland, Clarence Cottam of the Rob and Bessie Welder Wildlife Foundation, George Crile, Jr., M.D., of the Cleveland Clinic, Frank Egler of Norfolk, Connecticut, Malcolm M. Hargraves, M.D., of the Mayo Clinic, W. C. Hueper, M.D., of the National Cancer Institute, C. J. Kerswill of the Fisheries Research Board of Canada, Olaus Murie of the Wilderness Society, A. D. Pickett of the Canada Department of Agriculture, Thomas G. Scott of the Illinois Natural History Survey, Charence Tarzwell of the Taft Sanitary Engineering Center, and George J. Wallace of Michigan State University.

    Every writer of a book based on many diverse facts owes much to the skill and helpfulness of librarians. I owe such a debt to many, but especially to Ida K. Johnston of the Department of the Interior Library and to Thelma Robinson of the Library of the National Institutes of Health.

    As my editor, Paul Brooks has given steadfast encouragement over the years and has cheerfully accommodated his plans to postponements and delays. For this, and for his skilled editorial judgment, I am everlastingly grateful.

    I have had capable and devoted assistance in the enormous task of library research from Dorothy Algire, Jeanne Davis, and Bette Haney Duff. And I could not possibly have completed the task, under circumstances sometimes difficult, except for the faithful help of my housekeeper, Ida Sprow.

    Finally, I must acknowledge our vast indebtedness to a host of people, many of them unknown to me personally, who have nevertheless made the writing of this book seem worthwhile. These are the people who first spoke out against the reckless and irresponsible poisoning of the world that man shares with all other creatures, and who are even now fighting the thousands of small battles that in the end will bring victory for sanity and common sense in our accommodation to the world that surrounds us.

    RACHEL CARSON

    Introduction

    by Linda Lear

    Headlines in the New York Times in July 1962 captured the national sentiment: "Silent Spring is now noisy summer." In the few months between the New Yorker’s serialization of Silent Spring in June and its publication in book form that September, Rachel Carson’s alarm touched off a national debate on the use of chemical pesticides, the responsibility of science, and the limits of technological progress. When Carson died barely eighteen months later in the spring of 1964, at the age of fifty-six, she had set in motion a course of events that would result in a ban on the domestic production of DDT and the creation of a grass-roots movement demanding protection of the environment through state and federal regulation. Carson’s writing initiated a transformation in the relationship between humans and the natural world and stirred an awakening of public environmental consciousness.

    It is hard to remember the cultural climate that greeted Silent Spring and to understand the fury that was launched against its quietly determined author. Carson’s thesis that we were subjecting ourselves to slow poisoning by the misuse of chemical pesticides that polluted the environment may seem like common currency now, but in 1962 Silent Spring contained the kernel of social revolution. Carson wrote at a time of new affluence and intense social conformity. The cold war, with its climate of suspicion and intolerance, was at its zenith. The chemical industry, one of the chief beneficiaries of postwar technology, was also one of the chief authors of the nation’s prosperity. DDT enabled the conquest of insect pests in agriculture and of ancient insect-borne disease just as surely as the atomic bomb destroyed America’s military enemies and dramatically altered the balance of power between humans and nature. The public endowed chemists, at work in their starched white coats in remote laboratories, with almost divine wisdom. The results of their labors were gilded with the presumption of beneficence. In postwar America, science was god, and science was male.

    Carson was an outsider who had never been part of the scientific establishment, first because she was a woman but also because her chosen field, biology, was held in low esteem in the nuclear age. Her career path was nontraditional; she had no academic affiliation, no institutional voice. She deliberately wrote for the public rather than for a narrow scientific audience. For anyone else, such independence would have been an enormous detriment. But by the time Silent Spring was published, Carson’s outsider status had become a distinct advantage. As the science establishment would discover, it was impossible to dismiss her.

    Rachel Carson first discovered nature in the company of her mother, a devotee of the nature study movement. She wandered the banks of the Allegheny River in the pristine village of Springdale, Pennsylvania, just north of Pittsburgh, observing the wildlife and plants around her and particularly curious about the habits of birds.

    Her childhood, though isolated by poverty and family turmoil, was not lonely. She loved to read and displayed an obvious talent for writing, publishing her first story in a children’s literary magazine at the age of ten. By the time she entered Pennsylvania College for Women (now Chatham College), she had read widely in the English Romantic tradition and had articulated a personal sense of mission, her vision splendid. A dynamic female zoology professor expanded her intellectual horizons by urging her to take the daring step of majoring in biology rather than English. In doing so, Carson discovered that science not only engaged her mind but gave her something to write about. She decided to pursue a career in science, aware that in the 1930s there were few opportunities for women.

    Scholarships allowed her to study at Woods Hole Biological Laboratory, where she fell in love with the sea, and at Johns Hopkins University, where she was isolated, one of a handful of women in marine biology. She had no mentors and no money to continue in graduate school after completing an M.A. in zoology in 1932. Along the way she worked as a laboratory assistant in the school of public health, where she was lucky enough to receive some training in experimental genetics. As employment opportunities in science dwindled, she began writing articles about the natural history of Chesapeake Bay for the Baltimore Sun. Although these were years of financial and emotional struggle, Carson realized that she did not have to choose between science and writing, that she had the talent to do both.

    From childhood on, Carson was interested in the long history of the earth, in its patterns and rhythms, its ancient seas, its evolving life forms. She was an ecologist—fascinated by intersections and connections but always aware of the whole—before that perspective was accorded scholarly legitimacy. A fossil shell she found while digging in the hills above the Allegheny as a little girl prompted questions about the creatures of the oceans that had once covered the area. At Johns Hopkins, an experiment with changes in the salinity of water in an eel tank prompted her to study the life cycle of those ancient fish that migrate from continental rivers to the Sargasso Sea. The desire to understand the sea from a nonhuman perspective led to her first book, Under the Sea-Wind, which featured a common sea bird, the sanderling, whose life cycle, driven by ancestral instincts, the rhythms of the tides, and the search for food, involves an arduous journey from Patagonia to the Arctic Circle. From the outset Carson acknowledged her kinship with other forms of life and always wrote to impress that relationship on her readers.

    Carson was confronted with the problem of environmental pollution at a formative period in her life. During her adolescence the second wave of the industrial revolution was turning the Pittsburgh area into the iron and steel capital of the Western world. The little town of Springdale, sandwiched between two huge coal-fired electric plants, was transformed into a grimy wasteland, its air fouled by chemical emissions, its river polluted by industrial waste. Carson could not wait to escape. She observed that the captains of industry took no notice of the defilement of her hometown and no responsibility for it. The experience made her forever suspicious of promises of better living through chemistry and of claims that technology would create a progressively brighter future.

    In 1936 Carson landed a job as a part-time writer of radio scripts on ocean life for the federal Bureau of Fisheries in Baltimore. By night she wrote freelance articles for the Sun describing the pollution of the oyster beds of the Chesapeake by industrial runoff; she urged changes in oyster seeding and dredging practices and political regulation of the effluents pouring into the bay. She signed her articles R. L. Carson, hoping that readers would assume that the writer was male and thus take her science seriously.

    A year later Carson became a junior aquatic biologist for the Bureau of Fisheries, one of only two professional women there, and began a slow but steady advance through the ranks of the agency, which became the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service in 1939. Her literary talents were quickly recognized, and she was assigned to edit other scientists’ field reports, a task she turned into an opportunity to broaden her scientific knowledge, deepen her connection with nature, and observe the making of science policy. By 1949 Carson was editor in chief of all the agency’s publications, writing her own distinguished series on the new U.S wildlife refuge system and participating in interagency conferences on the latest developments in science and technology.

    Her government responsibilities slowed the pace of her own writing. It took her ten years to synthesize the latest research on oceanography, but her perseverance paid off. She became an overnight literary celebrity when The Sea Around Us was first serialized in The New Yorker in 1951. The book won many awards, including the National Book Award for nonfiction, and Carson was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters. She was lauded not only for her scientific expertise and synthesis of wide-ranging material but also for her lyrical, poetic voice. The Sea Around Us and its best-selling successor, The Edge of the Sea, made Rachel Carson the foremost science writer in America. She understood that there was a deep need for writers who could report on and interpret the natural world. Readers around the world found comfort in her clear explanations of complex science, her description of the creation of the seas, and her obvious love of the wonders of nature. Hers was a trusted voice in a world riddled by uncertainty.

    Whenever she spoke in public, however, she took notice of ominous new trends. Intoxicated with a sense of his own power, she wrote, [mankind] seems to be going farther and farther into more experiments for the destruction of himself and his world. Technology, she feared, was moving on a faster trajectory than mankind’s sense of moral responsibility. In 1945 she tried to interest Reader’s Digest in the alarming evidence of environmental damage from the widespread use of the new synthetic chemical DDT and other long-lasting agricultural pesticides. By 1957 Carson believed that these chemicals were potentially harmful to the long-term health of the whole biota. The pollution of the environment by the profligate use of toxic chemicals was the ultimate act of human hubris, a product of ignorance and greed that she felt compelled to bear witness against. She insisted that what science conceived and technology made possible must first be judged for its safety and benefit to the whole stream of life. There would be no peace for me, she wrote to a friend, if I kept silent.

    Silent Spring, the product of her unrest, deliberately challenged the wisdom of a government that allowed toxic chemicals to be put into the environment before knowing the long-term consequences of their use. Writing in language that everyone could understand and cleverly using the public’s knowledge of atomic fallout as a reference point, Carson described how chlorinated hydrocarbons and organic phosphorus insecticides altered the cellular processes of plants, animals, and, by implication, humans. Science and technology, she charged, had become the handmaidens of the chemical industry’s rush for profits and control of markets. Rather than protecting the public from potential harm, the government not only gave its approval to these new products but did so without establishing any mechanism of accountability. Carson questioned the moral right of government to leave its citizens unprotected from substances they could neither physically avoid nor publicly question. Such callous arrogance could end only in the destruction of the living world. Can anyone believe it is possible to lay down such a barrage of poisons on the surface of the earth without making it unfit for all life? she asked. They should not be called ‘insecticides’ but ‘biocides.’

    In Silent Spring, and later in testimony before a congressional committee, Carson asserted that one of the most basic human rights must surely be the right of the citizen to be secure in his own home against the intrusion of poisons applied by other persons. Through ignorance, greed, and negligence, government had allowed poisonous and biologically potent chemicals to fall indiscriminately into the hands of persons largely or wholly ignorant of their potentials for harm. When the public protested, it was fed little tranquillizing pills of half-truth by a government that refused to take responsibility for or acknowledge evidence of damage. Carson challenged such moral vacuity. The obligation to endure, she wrote, gives us the right to know.

    In Carson’s view, the postwar culture of science that arrogantly claimed dominion over nature was the philosophic root of the problem. Human beings, she insisted, were not in control of nature but simply one of its parts: the survival of one part depended upon the health of all. She protested the contamination of man’s total environment with substances that accumulate in the tissues of plants, animals, and humans and have the potential to alter the genetic structure of organisms.

    Carson argued that the human body was permeable and, as such, vulnerable to toxic substances in the environment. Levels of exposure could not be controlled, and scientists could not accurately predict the long-term effects of bioaccumulation in the cells or the impact of such a mixture of chemicals on human health. She categorically rejected the notion proposed by industry that there were human thresholds for such poisons, as well as its corollary, that the human body had assimilative capacities that rendered the poisons harmless. In one of the most controversial parts of her book, Carson presented evidence that some human cancers were linked to pesticide exposure. That evidence and its subsequent elaboration by many other researchers continue to fuel one of the most challenging and acrimonious debates within the scientific and environmental communities.

    Carson’s concept of the ecology of the human body was a major departure in our thinking about the relationship between humans and the natural environment. It had enormous consequences for our understanding of human health as well as our attitudes toward environmental risk. Silent Spring proved that our bodies are not boundaries. Chemical corruption of the globe affects us from conception to death. Like the rest of nature, we are vulnerable to pesticides; we too are permeable. All forms of life are more alike than different.

    Carson believed that human health would ultimately reflect the environment’s ills. Inevitably this idea has changed our response to nature, to science, and to the technologies that devise and deliver contamination. Although the scientific community has been slow to acknowledge this aspect of Carson’s work, her concept of the ecology of the human body may well prove to be one of her most lasting contributions.

    In 1962, however, the multimillion-dollar industrial chemical industry was not about to allow a former government editor, a female scientist without a Ph.D. or an institutional affiliation, known only for her lyrical books on the sea, to undermine public confidence in its products or to question its integrity. It was clear to the industry that Rachel Carson was a hysterical woman whose alarming view of the future could be ignored or, if necessary, suppressed. She was a bird and bunny lover, a woman who kept cats and was therefore clearly suspect. She was a romantic spinster who was simply overwrought about genetics. In short, Carson was a woman out of control. She had overstepped the bounds of her gender and her science. But just in case her claims did gain an audience, the industry spent a quarter of a million dollars to discredit her research and malign her character. In the end, the worst they could say was that she had told only one side of the story and had based her argument on unverifiable case studies.

    There is another, private side to the controversy over Silent Spring. Unbeknown to her detractors in government and industry, Carson was fighting a far more powerful enemy than corporate outrage: a rapidly metastasizing breast cancer. The miracle is that she lived to complete the book at all, enduring a catalogue of illnesses, as she called it. She was immune to the chemical industry’s efforts to malign her; rather, her energies were focused on the challenge of survival in order to bear witness to the truth as she saw it. She intended to disturb and disrupt, and she did so with dignity and deliberation.

    After Silent Spring caught the attention of President John F. Kennedy, federal and state investigations were launched into the validity of Carson’s claims. Communities that had been subjected to aerial spraying of pesticides against their wishes began to organize on a grass-roots level against the continuation of toxic pollution. Legislation was readied at all governmental levels to defend against a new kind of invisible fallout. The scientists who had claimed a holy grail of knowledge were forced to admit a vast ignorance. While Carson knew that one book could not alter the dynamic of the capitalist system, an environmental movement grew from her challenge, led by a public that demanded that science and government be held accountable. Carson remains an example of what one committed individual can do to change the direction of society. She was a revolutionary spokesperson for the rights of all life. She dared to speak out and confront the issue of the destruction of nature and to frame it as a debate over the quality of all life.

    Rachel Carson knew before she died that her work had made a difference. She was honored by medals and awards, and posthumously received the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1981. But she also knew that the issues she had raised would not be solved quickly or easily and that affluent societies are slow to sacrifice for the good of the whole. It was not until six years after Carson’s death that concerned Americans celebrated the first Earth Day and that Congress passed the National Environmental Policy Act establishing the Environmental Protection Agency as a buffer against our own handiwork. The domestic production of DDT was banned, but not its export, ensuring that the pollution of the earth’s atmosphere, oceans, streams, and wildlife would continue unabated. DDT is found in the livers of birds and fish on every oceanic island on the planet and in the breast milk of every mother. In spite of decades of environmental protest and awareness, and in spite of Rachel Carson’s apocalyptic call alerting Americans to the problem of toxic chemicals, reduction of the use of pesticides has been one of the major policy failures of the environmental era. Global contamination is a fact of modern life.

    Silent Spring compels each generation to reevaluate its relationship to the natural world. We are a nation still debating the questions it raised, still unresolved as to how to act for the common good, how to achieve environmental justice. In arguing that public health and the environment, human and natural, are inseparable, Rachel Carson insisted that the role of the expert had to be limited by democratic access and must include public debate about the risks of hazardous technologies. She knew then, as we have learned since, that scientific evidence by its very nature is incomplete and scientists will inevitably disagree on what constitutes certain proof of harm. It is difficult to make public policy in such cases when government’s obligation to protect is mitigated by the nature of science itself.

    Rachel Carson left us a legacy that not only embraces the future of life, in which she believed so fervently, but sustains the human spirit. She confronted us with the chemical corruption of the globe and called on us to regulate our appetites—a truly revolutionary stance—for our self-preservation. It seems reasonable to believe, she wrote, that the more clearly we can focus our attention on the wonders and realities of the universe about us, the less taste we shall have for the destruction of our race. Wonder and humility are wholesome emotions, and they do not exist side by side with a lust for destruction.

    Wonder and humility are just some of the gifts of Silent Spring. They remind us that we, like all other living creatures, are part of the vast ecosystems of the earth, part of the whole stream of life. This is a book to relish: not for the dark side of human nature, but for the promise of life’s possibility.

    1

    A Fable for Tomorrow

    There was once a town in the heart of America where all life seemed to live in harmony with its surroundings. The town lay in the midst of a checkerboard of prosperous farms, with fields of grain and hillsides of orchards where, in spring, white clouds of bloom drifted above the green fields. In autumn, oak and maple and birch set up a blaze of color that flamed and flickered across a backdrop of pines. Then foxes barked in the hills and deer silently crossed the fields, half hidden in the mists of the fall mornings.

    Along the roads, laurel, viburnum and alder, great ferns and wildflowers delighted the traveler’s eye through much of the year. Even in winter the roadsides were places of beauty, where countless birds came to feed on the berries and on the seed heads of the dried weeds rising above the snow. The countryside was, in fact, 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. Others came to fish the streams, which flowed clear and cold out of the hills and contained shady pools where trout lay. So it had been from the days many years ago when the first settlers raised their houses, sank their wells, and built their barns.

    Then a strange blight crept over the area and everything began to change. Some evil spell had settled on the community: mysterious maladies swept the flocks of chickens; the cattle and sheep sickened and died. Everywhere was a shadow of death. The farmers spoke of much illness among their families. In the town the doctors had become more and more puzzled by new kinds of sickness appearing among their patients. There had been several sudden and unexplained deaths, not only among adults but even among children, who would be stricken suddenly while at play and die within a few hours.

    There was a strange stillness. The birds, for example—where had they gone? Many people spoke of them, puzzled and disturbed. The feeding stations in the backyards were deserted. 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; only silence lay over the fields and woods and marsh.

    On the farms the hens brooded, but no chicks hatched. The farmers complained that they were unable to raise any pigs—the litters were small and the young survived only a few days. The apple trees were coming into bloom but no bees droned among the blossoms, so there was no pollination and there would be no fruit.

    The roadsides, once so attractive, were now lined with browned and withered vegetation as though swept by fire. These, too, were silent, deserted by all living things. Even the streams were now lifeless. Anglers no longer visited them, for all the fish had died.

    In the gutters under the eaves and between the shingles of the roofs, a white granular powder still showed a few patches; some weeks before it had fallen like snow upon the roofs and the lawns, the fields and streams.

    No witchcraft, no enemy action had silenced the rebirth of new life in this stricken world. The people had done it themselves.

    This town does not actually exist, but it might easily have a thousand counterparts in America or elsewhere in the world. I know of no community that has experienced all the misfortunes I describe. Yet every one of these disasters has actually happened somewhere, and many real communities have already suffered a substantial number of them. A grim specter has crept upon us almost unnoticed, and this imagined tragedy may easily become a stark reality we all shall know.

    What has already silenced the voices of spring in countless towns in America? This book is an attempt to explain.

    2

    The Obligation to Endure

    The history of life on earth has been a history of interaction between living things and their surroundings. To a large extent, the physical form and the habits of the earth’s vegetation and its animal life have been molded by the environment. Considering the whole span of earthly time, the opposite effect, in which life actually modifies its surroundings, has been relatively slight. Only within the moment of time represented by the present century has one species—man—acquired significant power to alter the nature of his world.

    During the past quarter century this power has not only increased to one of disturbing magnitude but it has changed in character. The most alarming of all man’s assaults upon the environment is the contamination of air, earth, rivers, and sea with dangerous and even lethal materials. This pollution is for the most part irrecoverable; the chain of evil it initiates not only in the world that must support life but in living tissues is for the most part irreversible. In this now universal contamination of the environment, chemicals are the sinister and little-recognized partners of radiation in changing the very nature of the world—the very nature of its life. Strontium 90, released through nuclear explosions into the air, comes to earth in rain or drifts down as fallout, lodges in soil, enters into the grass or corn or wheat grown there, and in time takes up its abode in the bones of a human being, there to remain until his death. Similarly, chemicals sprayed on croplands or forests or gardens lie long in soil, entering into living organisms, passing from one to another in a chain of poisoning and death. Or they pass mysteriously by underground streams until they emerge and, through the alchemy of air and sunlight, combine into new forms that kill vegetation, sicken cattle, and work unknown harm on those who drink from once pure wells. As Albert Schweitzer has said, Man can hardly even recognize the devils of his own creation.

    It took hundreds of millions of years to produce the life that now inhabits the earth—eons of time in which that developing and evolving and diversifying life reached a state of adjustment and balance with its surroundings. The environment, rigorously shaping and directing the life it supported, contained elements that were hostile as well as supporting. Certain rocks gave out dangerous radiation; even within the light of the sun, from which all life draws its energy, there were short-wave radiations with power to injure. Given time—time not in years but in millennia—life adjusts, and a balance has been reached. For time is the essential ingredient; but in the modern world there is no time.

    The rapidity of change and the speed with which new situations are created follow the impetuous and heedless pace of man rather than the deliberate pace of nature. Radiation is no longer merely the background radiation of rocks, the bombardment of cosmic rays, the ultraviolet of the sun that have existed before there was any life on earth; radiation is now the unnatural creation of man’s tampering with the atom. The chemicals to which life is asked to make its adjustment are no longer merely the calcium and silica and copper and all the rest of the minerals washed out of the rocks and carried in rivers to the sea; they are the synthetic creations of man’s inventive mind, brewed in his laboratories, and having no counterparts in nature.

    To adjust to these chemicals would require time on the scale that is nature’s; it would require not merely the years of a man’s life but the life of generations. And even this, were it by some miracle possible, would be futile, for the new chemicals come from our laboratories in an endless stream; almost five hundred annually find their way into actual use in the United States alone. The figure is staggering and its implications are not easily grasped—500 new chemicals to which the bodies of men and animals are required somehow to adapt each year, chemicals totally outside the limits of biologic experience.

    Among them are many that are used in man’s war against nature. Since the mid-1940’s over 200 basic chemicals have been created for use in killing insects, weeds, rodents, and other organisms described in the modern vernacular as pests; and they are sold under several thousand different brand names.

    These sprays, dusts, and aerosols are now applied almost universally to farms, gardens, forests, and homes—nonselective chemicals that have the power to kill every insect, the good and the bad, to still

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