In 1992, a panel of distinguished Americans
declared Rachel Carson's Silent
Spring the most influential book of the past 50 years. This was one of the latest in
a long line of tributes to a woman who almost single- handedly alerted Americans
to the dark side of science in alliance with industrial society. Her measured,
carefully- worded yet passionate prose was all the more damning because she,
herself, was a scientist.
Rachel Carson had long suspected that
increasingly powerful chemical pesticides
were being used carelessly, and she feared their impact on the environment. In
1958, Carson's friends Stuart and Olga Huckins propelled her investigations. The
Huckinses owned a two-acre bird sanctuary near Duxbury, Massachusetts. After
the government doused it with pesticides as part of a mosquito eradication
program, many native songbirds perished, their nesting places, ponds, and
birdbaths contaminated.
For the next four years, Carson consulted
with scientific experts. "The more I
learned about the use of pesticides, the more appalled I became," she later said. "I
realized that here was the material for a book. What I discovered was that
everything which meant most to me as a naturalist was being threatened, and that
nothing I could do would be more important."
Carson concluded that in a natural environment
of interconnected species,
chemicals aimed only at insects or other pests were soon ingested by other
organisms and passed up the food chain. After the city of Detroit sprayed
insecticide on local elm trees, Carson observed, it subsequently collected the dead
bodies of DDT-contaminated robins. The birds had feasted on earthworms that had
in turn ingested fallen leaves from the sprayed trees.
"As few as 11 large earthworms can
transfer a lethal dose of DDT to a robin,"
Carson wrote. "And worms form a small part of a day's rations to a bird that eats 10
to 12 earthworms in as many minutes."
About half of Carson's manuscript appeared
in June 1962 over three consecutive
issues of the New Yorker magazine. The excerpts ignited a national controversy.
The U.S. Department of Agriculture received many letters expressing "horror and
amazement" that DDT and other chemical "elixirs of death" were in common use.
Asked whether the U.S. government was
investigating the use of DDT, President
John F. Kennedy replied, "Yes ... particularly since Miss Carson's book."
Much of the chemical industry saw Silent
Spring as a threat. "Our members are
raising hell," one pesticide trade association divulged. The New York Times
reported that "some chemical concerns have set their scientists to analyze Miss
Carson's work line by line."
But critics could find little factual
error. Criticism focused instead on how Carson
dramatized her concerns and minimized the real benefits of pesticides in assuring
plentiful, affordable food supplies. "She tries to scare the living daylights out of us,"
wrote the New York Times book reviewer of Silent Spring, "and, in large measure,
succeeds."
The publicity stoked public demand for
the book. Silent Spring was published in
complete book form in September 1962, chosen as the Book-of-the-Month Club's
October selection, and quickly emerged as a runaway bestseller.
"Silent Spring" was a pioneering
work in the sense of being the first to incorporate
threats to people, animals and nature into its analysis. It also reflected Carson's
commitment to make the science behind her claims intelligible for a general
audience. As all her earlier works had done, the narrative made it clear that her
sympathy for animals was rooted not simply in scientific knowledge about them but
through emotional connection to them.
This drove Carson's steady contributions
to the animal welfare movement during
the late 1950s and early 1960s, too. During those years, Carson moved within an
animal welfare vanguard that included journalist Ann Cottrell Free and Christine
Stevens of the Animal Welfare Institute. In their animal welfare work, Free, Stevens
and their colleagues sought to cast cruelty to animals as an ethical, political and
environmental question, as well as to situate humane concern within a framework of
scientific advancement.
Within the United States, the legacy of
"Silent Spring" also includes the
Endangered Species Act, the Clean Air and Water Acts, and the creation of the
Environmental Protection Agency. It also spurred the passage of the National
Environmental Policy Act which introduced a requirement for environmental impact
statements for every proposed federal action that could have an effect on the quality
of the human environment.
Carson dedicated "Silent Spring"
to Albert Schweitzer, whose reverence-for-life
philosophy influenced many animal advocates of the mid-twentieth century.
Accepting AWI's Albert Schweitzer Award in 1962, Carson called him "the only truly
great individual our modern times have produced. If, during the coming years, we
are to find our way through the problems that beset us, it will surely be in large part
through a wider understanding and application of his principles."
