In 2010, the prestigious President’s Cancer Panel furthered promoted alarm in Reducing Environmental Cancer Risk: What We Can Do Now. The press release heralding the report noted “the growing body of evidence linking environmental exposures to cancer in recent years” and asserted that “the true burden of environmentally-induced cancer is greatly underestimated.” By environmental exposures, the two-member panel, consisting of Howard University surgeon Dr. LaSalle D. Leffall Jr. and MD Anderson Cancer Center immunologist Margaret Kripke, largely meant man-made chemicals like plastics and pesticides.
The panel’s report additionally asserted, “With nearly 80,000 chemicals on the market in the United States, many of which are used by millions of Americans in their daily lives and are un- or understudied and largely unregulated, exposure to potential environmental carcinogens is widespread.” In a statement Leffall also declared, “The increasing number of known or suspected environmental carcinogens compels us to action, even though we may currently lack irrefutable proof of harm.” Leffall was doing nothing less than invoking the precautionary principle. In other words, we don’t know, but let’s ban something anyway.
The panelists are not alone in their alarm. In the prominent journal The Proceedings of the Royal Society B in 2013, Paul and Anne Ehrlich warned, “Another possible threat to the continuation of civilization is global toxification. Adverse symptoms of exposure to synthetic chemicals are making some scientists increasingly nervous about effects on the human population.” The Ehrlichs added that the danger of global toxification “has been clear since the days of Carson, exposing the human population to myriad subtle poisons.”
Given advocacy and reports like these, is it any wonder that a 2007 American Cancer Society poll found that seven out ten Americans believed that the risk of dying of cancer is going up?
No Growing Cancer Epidemic
There’s only one problem—there is no growing cancer epidemic. As the number of man-made chemicals has proliferated, your chances of dying of the disease have been dropping for more than four decades. In fact, not only have cancer death rates been declining significantly, age-adjusted cancer incidence rates have been falling for nearly two decades. That is, of the number of Americans in nearly any age group, fewer are actually coming down with cancer. It is good news that modern medicine has increased the five-year survival rates of cancer patients from 50 percent in the 1970s to 68 percent today. What is more remarkable is that the incidence of cancer has been falling about 0.6 percent per year since 1994. That may not sound like much, but as Dr. John Seffrin, CEO of the American Cancer Society, explains, “Because the rate continues to drop, it means that in recent years, about 100,000 people each year who would have died had cancer rates not declined are living to celebrate another birthday.” Director of the National Cancer Institute Harold Varmus also noted, “It is gratifying to see the continued steady decline in overall cancer incidence and death rates in the United States—the result of improved methods for preventing, detecting, and treating several types of cancer.”
How did it come to be the conventional wisdom that man-made chemicals are especially toxic and the chief sources of a modern cancer epidemic? It all began with the Carson mentioned by the Ehrlichs in 2013—that is, Rachel Carson, the author of Silent Spring.
Rachel Carson Launches Modern Political Environmentalism
The modern environmentalist movement was launched at the beginning of June 1962 when The New Yorker published excerpts from what would become Carson’s all-out attack on synthetic chemicals, especially the pesticide DDT. “Without this book, the environmental movement might have been long delayed or never have developed at all,” declared then Vice President Al Gore in his introduction to the 1994 edition. The foreword to the twenty-fifth anniversary edition accurately declared that this book “led to environmental legislation at every level of government.”
In 1999 Time named Carson one of the 100 People of the Century. Seven years earlier, a panel of distinguished Americans had selected Silent Spring as the most influential book of the previous fifty years. “She was the very first person to knock some of the shine off of modernity,” asserted environmentalist Bill McKibben in a New York Times Magazine article celebrating the book’s fiftieth anniversary.
In Silent Spring, Carson crafted an ardent denunciation of modern technology that drives environmentalist ideology today. At its heart is this belief: Nature is beneficent, stable, and even a source of moral good; humanity is arrogant, heedless, and often the source of moral evil. Rachel Carson, more than any other person, is responsible for the politicization of science that afflicts our public policy debates today.
Carson worked for years at the US Fish and Wildlife Service, eventually becoming the chief editor of that agency’s publications. She achieved financial independence in the 1950s with the publication of her popular celebrations of marine ecosystems, The Sea Around Us and The Edge of the Sea. Rereading Silent Spring reminds one that the book’s effectiveness was due mainly to Carson’s passionate, poetic language describing the alleged horrors that modern synthetic chemicals visit upon defenseless nature and hapless humanity. Carson was moved to write Silent Spring by her increasing concern about the effects of pesticides on wildlife. Her chief villain was the pesticide DDT.
Today, the Pesticide Action Network explains, “Carson used DDT to tell the broader story of the disastrous consequences of the overuse of insecticides, and raised enough concern from her testimony before Congress to trigger the establishment of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA).” As noted previously, fifty years later Carson has many modern disciples who continue to preach that exposure to trace amounts of synthetic chemicals are responsible for an epidemic of cancer.
The 1950s saw the advent of an array of synthetic pesticides that were hailed as modern miracles in the war against pests and weeds. First and foremost of these pest control chemicals was DDT. DDT’s insecticidal properties were discovered in the late 1930s by Paul Müller, a chemist at the Swiss chemical firm J. R. Geigy. The American military started testing it in 1942, and soon the insecticide was being sprayed in war zones to protect American troops against insect-borne diseases such as typhus and malaria. In 1943 DDT famously stopped a typhus epidemic in Naples in its tracks shortly after the Allies invaded Italy. DDT was hailed as the “wonder insecticide of World War II.”
After the war, American consumers and farmers quickly adopted the wonder insecticide, replacing the old-fashioned arsenic-based pesticides, which were truly nasty. Testing by the US Public Health Service and the Food and Drug Administration’s Division of Pharmacology found no serious human toxicity problems with DDT. Müller, DDT’s inventor, was awarded the Nobel Prize in 1948.
DDT was soon widely deployed by public health officials, who banished malaria from the southern United States with its help. The World Health Organization credits DDT with saving 50 million to 100 million lives by preventing malaria. In 1943 Venezuela had 8,171,115 cases of malaria; by 1958, after the use of DDT, the number was down to 800. India, which had over 10 million cases of malaria in 1935, had 285,962 in 1969. In Italy the number of malaria cases dropped from 411,602 in 1945 to only 37 in 1968. In 1970, a report by the National Academy of Sciences stated that “to only a few chemicals does man owe as great a debt as to DDT.”
Chemical Agriculture
The tone of a Scientific American article by Francis Joseph Weiss celebrating the advent of “Chemical Agriculture” was typical of much of the reporting in the early 1950s. While “[i]n 1820 about 72 per cent of the population worked in agriculture, the proportion in 1950 was only about 15 per cent,” reported Weiss. “Chemical agriculture, still in its infancy, should eventually advance our agricultural efficiency at least as much as machines have in the past 150 years.” This improvement in agricultural efficiency would happen because “farming is being revolutionized by new fertilizers, insecticides, fungicides, weed killers, leaf removers, soil conditioners, plant hormones, trace minerals, ant
ibiotics and synthetic milk for pigs.”
In 1952 insects, weeds, and disease cost farmers $13 billion ($115 billion in today’s dollars) in crops annually. Since gross annual agricultural output at that time totaled $31 billion ($276 billion in today’s dollars), it was estimated that preventing this damage by using pesticides would boost food and fiber production by 42 percent. Agricultural productivity in the United States, spurred by improvements in farming practices and technologies, has continued its exponential increase. In the second decade of the twenty-first century, US crop yield was 360 percent higher and farmers produced 262 percent more food using 2 percent less inputs like labor, seeds, fertilizer, and feed than they did in 1950. As a result, the percentage of Americans living and working on farms has dropped from 15 percent in 1950 to under 2 percent today.
But DDT and other pesticides had a dark side. They not only killed the pests at which they were aimed but sometimes killed beneficial creatures as well. The scientific controversy over the effects of DDT on wildlife, especially birds, still vexes researchers. In the late 1960s, some researchers concluded that exposure to DDT caused eggshell thinning in some bird species, especially raptors such as eagles and peregrine falcons. Thinner shells meant fewer hatchlings and declining numbers. But researchers also found that other bird species, such as quail, pheasants, and chickens, were unaffected even by large doses of DDT. Carson, the passionate defender of wildlife, was determined to spotlight these harms. Memorably, she painted a scenario in which birds had all been poisoned by insecticides, resulting in a “silent spring” in which “no birds sing.”
First, let’s acknowledge that Carson was right about some of the harms that extensive modern pesticide use could and did cause. Carson was correct that the popular pesticide DDT did disrupt reproduction in some raptor species. It is also the case that insect pests over time do develop resistance to pesticides, making them eventually less useful in preventing the spread of insect-borne diseases and protecting crops. In fact, the first cases of evolving insect resistance were identified in California orchards at the beginning of the twentieth century, when species of scale insects became resistant to the primitive insecticides lime sulfur and hydrogen cyanide. By 1960, 137 species of insects had developed resistance to DDT. To preserve their usefulness, pesticides clearly needed to be more judiciously deployed.
To her discredit, however, Carson largely ignored the great good modern pesticides had done, especially in protecting human health by controlling insect-borne scourges such as typhus and malaria. Barely ten years before the publication of Silent Spring the then-new Centers for Disease Control had finally eradicated malaria in the southeastern region of the United States in 1951. Spraying with DDT to control mosquitoes has been central to the CDC’s success. Unfortunately, Carson’s unwillingness to fairly balance the costs and benefits of new technologies would become a hallmark of the modern environmental movement.
Rachel Carson: Cancer Scaremonger
As a polemicist, Carson realized that tales of empty birds’ nests and warnings about pesticide-resistant bugs and weeds were not enough to spur most people to fear the chemicals she opposed. The 1958 passage by Congress of the Delaney Clause, which forbade the addition of any amount of chemicals suspected of causing cancer to food, likely focused Carson’s attention on that disease.
For the previous half century some researchers had been trying to prove that cancer was caused by chemical contaminants in the environment. Wilhelm Hueper, chief of environmental cancer research at the National Cancer Institute and one of the leading researchers in this area, became the major source for Carson. “Dr. Hueper now gives DDT a definite rating as a ‘chemical carcinogen,’” according to Carson. After reviewing the extensive epidemiological and experimental literature, the highly precautionary International Agency for Research on Cancer has now determined that DDT is as carcinogenic as coffee. Oddly, Hueper was so blinkered by his belief that trace exposures to synthetic chemicals were a major cause of cancer in humans that he largely dismissed the notion that smoking cigarettes increased the risk of cancer.
The assertion that pesticides were dangerous human carcinogens was a stroke of public relations genius. Even people who do not care much about wildlife care a lot about their own health and the health of their children.
In 1955 the American Cancer Society (ACS) predicted that “cancer will strike one in every four Americans rather than the present estimate of one in five.” The ACS straightforwardly attributed the increase to “the growing number of older persons in the population.” The ACS did note that the incidence of lung cancer was increasing very rapidly, rising in the previous two decades by more than 200 percent for women and by 600 percent for men. But the ACS also noted that lung cancer “is the only form of cancer which shows so definite a tendency.” Seven years later, Rachel Carson would cannily entitle her chapter on cancer “One in Four.”
William Souder, author of a new biography of Carson, On a Farther Shore, also notes that Carson’s fight against pesticides became personal. “In 1960, at the halfway point in writing Silent Spring, just as she was exploring the connection between pesticide exposure and human cancer, Carson was herself stricken with breast cancer.” Given the relatively primitive state of medicine in the 1950s, few diseases were scarier than cancer. And deaths from cancer had been rising steeply. Carson cited government statistics showing that cancer deaths had dramatically increased from 4 percent of all deaths in 1900 to 15 percent in 1958.
“The problem that concerns us here is whether any of the chemicals we are using in our attempts to control nature play a direct or indirect role as causes of cancer,” wrote Carson. Her conclusion was that “the evidence is circumstantial” but “nonetheless impressive.” She added the claim that in contrast with disease germs, “man has put the vast majority of carcinogens into the environment.” She noted that the first human exposures to DDT and other pesticides were barely more than a decade in the past. It takes time for cancer to fester, so she ominously warned, “The full maturing of whatever seeds of malignancy have been sown by these chemicals is yet to come.” She further warned that we were “living in a sea of carcinogens.”
Even though Carson vaguely acknowledged the paucity of evidence that man-made chemicals like pesticides were actually causing cancer, she was clearly urging policymakers and the public to take what would now be called precautionary action.
Before the decade of the 1960s was over, activists like population doomster Paul Ehrlich would imaginatively transform and heighten the fears of synthetic chemicals initially spawned by Carson. In his luridly dystopian 1969 “Eco-Catastrophe” article, Ehrlich posited that by 1973 US federal government health officials would estimate “that Americans born since 1946 (when DDT usage began) now had a life expectancy of only 49 years, and predicted that if current patterns continued, this expectancy would reach 42 years by 1980, when it might level out.”
In any case, hinting at cancer doom decades away was not frightening enough. Carson cherry-picked cases in an effort to show that pesticides could wreak their carcinogenic havoc much sooner rather than later. For evidence she cited various anecdotes, including one about a woman “who abhorred spiders” and who sprayed her basement with DDT in mid-August. The woman died of acute leukemia a couple of months later. In another passage, Carson cites a man embarrassed by his roach-infested office who again sprayed DDT and who “within a short time … began to bruise and bleed.” He was within a month of spraying diagnosed with aplastic anemia. Today cancer specialists would dismiss out of hand the implied claims that these patients’ cancers could be traced to such specific pesticide exposures.
To bolster these frightening anecdotes, Carson cited data that deaths from leukemia had increased from 11.1 per 100,000 in 1950 to 14.1 in 1960. Leukemia mortality rose with pesticide use; very suspicious, no? “What does it mean? To what lethal agent or agents, new to our environment, are people now exposed with increasing frequency?” asked Carson. Fifty years late
r the death rate from leukemia is 7.1 per 100,000—half of what Carson cited in Silent Spring. In fact, the incidence rate is now 13 per 100,000.
Carson surely must have known that cancer is a disease in which the risk goes up as people age. And thanks to vaccines and new antibiotics, Americans in the 1950s were living much longer, long enough to get and die of cancer. In 1900 average life expectancy was forty-seven, and the annual death rate was 1,700 out of 100,000 Americans. By 1960, life expectancy had risen to nearly seventy years, and the annual death rate had fallen to 950 per 100,000 people. Currently, life expectancy is more than seventy-eight years, and the annual death rate is 790 per 100,000 people. Today, although only about 13 percent of Americans are over age sixty-five, they account for 53 percent of new cancer diagnoses and 69 percent of cancer deaths. Another way to think about the relationship of cancer incidence to increasing age is to note that the incidence per 100,000 men is 60 for men between ages twenty and thirty-nine, 552 for men between ages forty and sixty-four, and 2,893 for men over age sixty-five. The incidence figures per 100,000 women are 89 for women whose age is between twenty and thirty-nine, 555 for those aged between forty and sixty-four, and 1,707 for women over age sixty-five.
Carson realized that even if people didn’t worry much about their own health, they did really care about that of their kids. So to ratchet up the fear factor even more, she asserted that children were especially vulnerable to the carcinogenic effects of synthetic chemicals. “The situation with respect to children is even more deeply disturbing,” she wrote. “A quarter century ago, cancer in children was considered a medical rarity. Today, more American school children die of cancer than from any other disease [her emphasis].” In support of this claim, Carson reported that “twelve per cent of all deaths in children between the ages of one and fourteen are caused by cancer.”
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