Rachel Carson had become so famous, so well known, and so sought after that a typical day included being the subject of a Peanuts cartoon in the morning and a call to the White House in the afternoon. (In the Peanuts cartoon, Lucy is talking to Schroeder, the little boy who plays the piano. “Rachel Carson says that when our moon was born, there were not oceans on Earth,” says Lucy. “Rachel Carson! Rachel Carson! Rachel Carson!” shrieks Schroeder. “You’re always talking about Rachel Carson!” “We girls need our heroines,” Lucy replies.)
In the year and a half between the publication of Silent Spring and her death, Rachel Carson received the Conservation Award from the Izaak Walton League of America, the Audubon Medal from the National Audubon Society, the Cullum Geographical Medal from the American Geographical Society, the Schweitzer Medal from the Animal Welfare Institute, the Woman of Conscience Award from the Women’s National Book Association, and the Conservationist of the Year Award from the National Wildlife Federation. Later, she became one of only four women elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters, linking her to literature’s immortals.
Rachel Carson’s influence continued long after her death in 1964. Seventeen years later, in 1981, she won the Presidential Medal of Freedom. Two decades after that, Al Gore, who would ignite another firestorm with his movie about global warming titled An Inconvenient Truth, paid tribute to “the mother of the environmental movement.” “Silent Spring came as a cry in the wilderness,” said Gore, “a deeply felt, thoroughly researched, and brilliantly written argument that changed the course of history. Without this book, the environmental movement might have been long delayed or never have developed at all.”
Today, most people under the age of 40 have probably never heard of Rachel Carson. But in the early 1960s, almost every American knew her name.
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WHAT HARRIET BEECHER STOWE’S Uncle Tom’s Cabin did for civil rights legislation, and Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle did for food and drug legislation, Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring did for environmental legislation.
On January 1, 1970—six years after Rachel Carson had died—President Richard Nixon signed the National Environmental Policy Act into law, declaring that, “the environmental decade was at hand.” In quick succession, legislators created the Council on Environmental Quality; the Environmental Protection Agency; the Occupational Safety and Health Administration; the Clear Air Act; the Clean Water Act; the Federal Insecticide, Fungicide, and Rodenticide Act; the Safe Drinking Water Act; the Environmental Pesticides Control Act; the Toxic Substances Control Act; and the Endangered Species Act.
On April 22, 1970, millions of Americans and tens of millions more around the world celebrated the first Earth Day. Conservationism had become environmentalism. Groups like the Sierra Club (founded in 1892), the National Audubon Society (founded in 1905), the World Wildlife Fund (founded in 1947), and the Nature Conservancy (founded in 1951) were conservationists, intent on protecting natural resources and improving national parks. These new environmental groups, like Clean Water Action and the Natural Resources Defense Council, were different: more passionate, more confrontational, and less forgiving. Now the focus was on protesting pollution and cleaning the air and water. Now there were the good guys and the bad guys. And the bad guys, like the chemical industry, weren’t going to be allowed to get away with it any longer. Born of Rachel Carson’s book, these new groups scared the older ones. None of the conservation societies participated in the first Earth Day.
When the dust settled, Rachel Carson was a hero, the unquestioned goddess of a movement that has only gained momentum in the 50 years since publication of her game-changing book. “The Rachel Carson we think of as the author of Silent Spring,” wrote one acolyte, “[was the] birth mother of modern environmentalism: messenger of a story that rocked the world. The real Rachel Carson never met her…She didn’t live long enough to become acquainted with the Carson we know, that towering figure whose light illuminated our sense of the world forever.”
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ALTHOUGH RACHEL CARSON’S Silent Spring shined a long-overdue light on our indiscriminate use of pesticides, it had its flaws. Not everyone loved Silent Spring.
Some of the criticism came from writers. Time magazine decried Carson’s penchant for overstatement: “Scientists, physicians and other technically informed people will also be shocked by Silent Spring—but for a different reason. They recognize Miss Carson’s skill in building her frightening case; but they consider that case unfair, one-sided, and hysterically overemphatic. Many of the scary generalizations—and there are lots of them—are patently unsound.”
Other criticisms came, not unexpectedly, from the chemical industry. Velsicol, at the time one of the world’s leading manufacturers of pesticides such as chlordane, heptachlor, and endrin, threatened to sue Houghton Mifflin, the publisher of Silent Spring, for libel. A few months later, however, Velsicol’s attention was diverted when five million fish turned belly up in the lower Mississippi River, a consequence of a massive endrin contamination from one of its treatment plants.
None of these criticisms or threats was surprising. One criticism, however, was. It came from Luther Terry, the surgeon general of the United States. Terry was worried that by making DDT synonymous with poison, the world was about to lose a powerful weapon in the fight against some of its biggest killers. He had reason for concern.
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DDT HAS A LONG and rich history.
In 1874, Othmar Zeidler, a graduate student at the University of Strasbourg in Germany, was looking to create a new substance for his thesis. He combined chloral hydrate with chlorobenzene in the presence of sulfuric acid. The result was DDT (dichlorodiphenyltrichloroethane). Zeidler didn’t study DDT’s properties. He didn’t care about its properties. He just wanted to create a new substance so he could graduate. As a consequence, DDT sat on the shelf for 65 years.
In 1939, Paul Müller, an employee of the J. R. Geigy Company in Basel, Switzerland, was working on a method to kill clothes moths without damaging clothes. Müller stumbled upon Zeidler’s formula. What he found surprised him. Not only did DDT kill the moths, it also killed flies, mosquitoes, lice, and ticks—insects responsible for transmitting some of the world’s deadliest diseases. Better still, DDT’s killing power seemed to last for months.
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AT THE START OF WWII, knowing that wars spread disease, J. R. Geigy released its formula for DDT to the Germans and the Allies. The Germans ignored it; the Americans and Brits didn’t. In America, the Cincinnati Chemical Works was the first to mass-produce it. Soon, 14 other American companies and several British companies joined in. Production couldn’t have come at a better time. The reason: typhus.
Typhus is a bacterium spread by the body louse. The bacterium (Rickettsia prowazekii) is named for the two researchers who discovered it—Howard Ricketts and Stanislaus von Prowazek, both of whom died from the disease. The lice deposit their feces, which contain the typhus bacteria, onto the skin. The intense itching that invariably follows allows bacteria to penetrate the skin and enter the bloodstream, causing chills, fever, headache, rash, coma, and death. During WWII, more people died from typhus than from combat.
In January 1944, DDT made its debut in Naples, Italy, a city in the midst of a massive typhus epidemic. After setting up delousing stations, the Allies sprayed DDT onto 72,000 Italian citizens every day—more than 1.3 million people in all. Within three weeks, the outbreak was under control. By the end of 1944, factories were producing more than a million pounds of DDT every month. With their new weapon in hand, health officials dusted millions of soldiers, fogged military barracks, and sprayed whole islands to protect the Marines before they landed. By 1945, DDT production had reached 36 million pounds a year. Because neither the Germans nor the Japanese used it, some have argued that DDT helped the Allies win the war.
DDT was also used to delouse concentration camp survivors. One dramatic story involved the prison camp at Bergen-Belsen.
At the time of liberation, in 1945, typhus had infected more than 20,000 camp prisoners. When the British soldiers who liberated the camp first started spraying survivors, most of the prisoners were skeptical. “After two to three days at the hospital,” recalled one, “we have our first encounter with the pesticide DDT. When the English soldiers enter the hospital room with sprayers filled with this product, we all look at them with contemptuous superiority. They’re planning on using this puny white powder to destroy all these millions of lice?! Yet, right in front of our eyes, something close to a miracle starts to happen. Slowly, the incessant itching, so painful on our pus-infected, ulcerated skin, starts to vanish, and this great relief finally convinces us that we really have been liberated.” (Liberation came too late for one Bergen-Belsen prisoner, Anne Frank, who died from typhus.)
In 1948, for his work demonstrating DDT’s benefits to public health, Paul Müller won the Nobel Prize in medicine and physiology.
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ALTHOUGH TYPHUS was a killer, it paled in comparison to the infection that has killed—and continues to kill—more people than any other: malaria. Spread by the bite of the anopheles mosquito, the malaria parasite infects the liver and blood, causing high fever, shaking chills, bleeding, disorientation, and death. In 1962, when Rachel Carson published Silent Spring, the best weapon to control malaria wasn’t drugs like quinine and chloroquine, or environmental measures like mosquito nets or swamp drainage. Arguably, the best, cheapest, and most effective weapon in the fight against malaria was DDT. Following a spraying program in South Africa, the number of malaria cases decreased from 1,177 cases in 1945 to 61 cases in 1951; in Taiwan, from more than a million cases in the mid-1940s to 9 cases in 1969; and, in Sardinia, from 75,000 cases in 1946 to 5 cases in 1951.
Malaria also hit close to home. In the early 1900s, more than a million Americans were infected with malaria every year. Although improvements in housing, better standards of living, and control of mosquito breeding sites had clearly lessened the incidence of the disease, DDT spraying was enormously beneficial, especially in rural areas. Between January 1945 and September 1947—as part of a program run by the MCWA (Malaria Control in War Areas)—more than three million houses were sprayed in the Southeast. In 1952, the United States was finally declared free of malaria. (Located in Atlanta, Georgia, the MCWA later changed its name to the Centers for Disease Control.)
In 1955, the World Health Assembly directed the World Health Organization to launch a global malaria elimination program with DDT as its centerpiece. By 1959, when the program swung into operation, more than 300 million people had already been saved by DDT. By 1960, malaria had been eliminated from 11 countries. As malaria rates went down, life expectancies went up, as did crop production, land values, and relative wealth. Probably no country benefited more from the WHO program than Nepal, where spraying began in 1960. At the time, more than two million Nepalese, mostly children, suffered from malaria. By 1968, the number was reduced to 2,500. Before the malaria control program, life expectancy in Nepal was 28 years; by 1970, it was 42 years.
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MALARIA WASN’T THE ONLY disease transmitted by the bite of a mosquito. DDT also dramatically reduced the incidence of yellow fever and dengue. Furthermore, DDT killed fleas, like the ones that lived on rats that transmitted murine typhus, and the ones that lived on prairie dogs and ground squirrels and transmitted Yersinia pestis, the plague. Considering the virtual elimination of all of these diseases in many countries, the National Academy of Sciences estimated in 1970 that DDT had saved the lives of 500 million people. One could argue reasonably that DDT has saved more lives than any other chemical in history.
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ENVIRONMENTALISTS DIDN’T SEE IT that way. Inspired by Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring, they targeted DDT for elimination. In 1969, Wisconsin and Arizona banned DDT; so did Michigan, which published a formal obituary in a local newspaper: “Died. DDT, age 95: a persistent pesticide and onetime humanitarian. Considered to be one of World War II’s greatest heroes, DDT saw its reputation fade after it was charged with murder by author Rachel Carson. Death came on June 27 in Michigan after a lingering illness. Survived by dieldrin, aldrin, endrin, chlordane, heptachlor, lindane, and toxaphene. Please omit flowers.” Ironically, every one of these surviving chemicals was far more dangerous to human health than DDT.
Sensing the public’s fear of pesticides, President Richard Nixon promised to ban DDT from the United States by the end of 1970, even though the Department of Agriculture didn’t believe an adequate substitute was available. In 1972, William Ruckelshaus, head of the newly created Environmental Protection Agency—against strong opposition from the Pan American Health Organization, the World Health Organization, and many public health advocates in the United States—banned DDT from use in the United States. Other countries followed. Public health officials, sensing the disaster that was about to unfold, urged countries that made DDT to continue to make it. But it was too late. By the mid-1970s, under pressure from environmental groups, support for international DDT programs had dried up.
Those inspired by Silent Spring had spared mosquitoes from the killing effects of DDT. But they hadn’t spared children from the killing effects of mosquitoes.
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USING DDT AS A LADDER, the United States had climbed out of the cesspool—ridding itself of anopheles mosquitoes; no longer would its citizens have to suffer malaria. Then, in the name of environmentalism, Americans pulled the ladder up behind them, leaving developing world countries the options of using biological strategies that didn’t work or antimalarial drugs they couldn’t afford.
Since 1972, when the Environmental Protection Agency banned DDT from the United States, about 50 million people have died from malaria: Most have been children less than five years old.
Examples of the impact of Silent Spring abound:
In India, between 1952 and 1962, DDT spraying caused a decrease in annual malaria cases from 100 million to 60,000. By the late 1970s, no longer able to use the pesticide, the number of cases increased to 6 million.
In Sri Lanka, before the use of DDT, 2.8 million people suffered from malaria. When the spraying stopped in 1964, only 17 people suffered from the disease. Then, between 1968 and 1970, no longer able to use DDT, Sri Lanka suffered a massive malaria epidemic—1.5 million people were infected by the parasite.
In South Africa, where DDT use was banned in 1997, the number of malaria cases increased from 8,500 to 42,000 and malaria deaths from 22 people to 320.
In the end, 99 countries eliminated malaria; most used DDT to do it. “Banning DDT is one of the most disgraceful episodes in twentieth century America,” wrote author Michael Crichton. “We knew better and we did it anyway and we let people around the world die, and we didn’t give a damn.”
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ENVIRONMENTALISTS HAVE ARGUED that when it came to DDT, it was pick your poison. If DDT was banned, more people would die from malaria. But if DDT wasn’t banned, then people would suffer and die from a variety of other diseases, not the least of which were leukemia and other cancers. There was one problem with this line of reasoning: Despite Carson’s warnings in Silent Spring, studies in Europe, Canada, and the United States showed that DDT didn’t cause liver disease, premature births, congenital defects, leukemia, or any of the other diseases she had claimed. Indeed, the only type of cancer that had increased in the United States during the DDT era was lung cancer, which was caused by cigarette smoking. DDT was arguably the safest insect repellent ever invented—far safer than many of the other pesticides that have since taken its place.
Still, environmentalists argued that we aren’t alone on this planet. We share it with many other species. Aren’t we responsible for them, too? The final irony of Silent Spring was that Rachel Carson hadn’t only overstated DDT’s effects on human health; she had overstated its effects on animal health.
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RACHEL CARSON ORIGINALLY called her book, Man Against Nature. But her agent, Mari
e Rodell, didn’t think that was poetic enough. So she presented Carson with a line from the English Romantic poet John Keats’s “La Belle Dame Sans Merci” (“The Beautiful Lady Without Mercy”): “The sedge is withered from the lake / and no birds sing.” Silent Spring was born. Carson’s prose was unequivocal; DDT was killing birds.
But the evidence wasn’t clearly on her side.
Every winter, the National Audubon Society performs its Christmas bird counts. Between 1941, before DDT, and 1960, after DDT had been used for at least a decade, 26 different kinds of birds had been counted. All had increased in number. In Silent Spring, Carson focused on specific instances where DDT had damaged starlings, robins, meadowlarks, and cardinals. But, at least according to the Christmas counts, populations of each of these birds had actually increased about fivefold.
Another bird targeted by DDT—a symbol of America’s strength and freedom—was the eagle. “Like the robin,” wrote Carson, “another American bird appears to be on the verge of extinction. This is the national symbol: the eagle. Its population has dwindled alarmingly with the past decade.” As proof, Carson cited the findings of Charles Broley, a retired banker who lived on Florida’s west coast who had noticed that the number of bald eagle nests between Tampa and Fort Myers had declined. What Carson had failed to mention was that this decline had occurred before DDT was used (prior to 1940), and was due to habitat destruction and killing by hunters, either for sport or to protect livestock. In fact, between 1939 and 1961, during the time of heaviest DDT use, the Christmas counts had shown an increase in eagle populations. The reason: the Eagle Protection Act of 1940, which prohibited the hunting, capturing, and killing of the birds. During the ten years before DDT was banned, the number of bald eagle nesting pairs had doubled.
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