In early 1958, Carson learned that Reader’s Digest planned a favorable article about the use of aerial DDT spraying for gypsy moths—and she wrote to the magazine’s editor warning him there was another side to the story. About that same time, she also heard about a group of landowners on Long Island who were suing the state of New York to halt a gypsy moth control effort in which their homes and property were being aerially sprayed with DDT. Carson, disinclined toward journalism, tried to persuade the New Yorker’s E. B. White—author of the classic children’s books Stuart Little and Charlotte’s Web—to cover the trial. He suggested instead that she write something. By spring, Carson had signed a contract with her publisher, Houghton Mifflin, for a book about pesticides tentatively titled “The Control of Nature” that would also appear in installments in the New Yorker.
In 1945, as the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service began discovering the danger to wildlife from DDT, the United States exploded three nuclear devices—one at Alamogordo, New Mexico, in the test of a bomb called “Trinity,” and two in Japan, where the cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki were leveled and somewhere between 150,000 and 250,000 people died. During the Cold War of the 1950s and early ’60s, a number of countries—but principally the United States and the Soviet Union—continued to conduct atmospheric tests of nuclear weapons. A moratorium was agreed to in 1958, and such tests were suspended until the summer of 1961, when the Soviet Union announced it would resume its atmospheric program.
Over the course of the next three months, the Russians exploded thirty-one nuclear devices, including one 3,300 times more powerful than “Little Boy,” which had been dropped on Hiroshima. Fearful of the Soviets gaining an advantage and under pressure from Congress and the public, President Kennedy, who had campaigned on a pledge to enact a permanent ban on testing, reluctantly restarted American tests. Between April and November 1962, at sites in the Marshall Islands in the South Pacific, the United States exploded thirty-five nuclear devices in the atmosphere—approximately one every five days. When a comprehensive ban ended the era of atmospheric testing in August 1963, more than five hundred nuclear devices had been exploded aboveground—about two hundred of them by the United States.
A by-product of these tests was the debris carried on high-altitude winds that eventually returned to earth as radioactive fallout—notably the isotopes strontium 90 and iodine 131. High concentrations came down in the central United States, where people, especially children, were exposed through the consumption of milk from cows that were pastured in areas where fallout landed. Radiation exposure was understood to be a potential health hazard, but for years there was no scientific agreement as to how serious it might be. In 1957 a group of prominent scientists who believed radioactive fallout had as yet done little harm to humans nonetheless urged the United Nations to seek an international limit on atmospheric testing. The U.S. Atomic Energy Commission disagreed. The government’s position was that atmospheric testing could continue as it had for decades without—in the words of the New York Times—“posing any danger to mankind.” Then came the spate of testing in 1962, and by the following spring strontium 90 levels in milk had doubled in some areas.
Invisible and ubiquitous, undetectable without special instruments, radioactive fallout was a strange and terrifying thing—a poison whose effects might not be experienced for years or even decades following exposure. The same held true for DDT, which was also discovered in milk. Carson recognized an “exact and inescapable” parallel between pesticides and radioactive fallout that had profound implications. Our species, Carson reasoned, having evolved over thousands of millennia, was well adapted to the natural world but was biologically defenseless in an unnaturally altered one. Pesticides and radiation, apart from their acute toxicities, were also mutagenic—capable of damaging the genetic material that guides the machinery of living cells and provides the blueprint for each succeeding generation. Carson believed that widely dispersed and persistent substances such as DDT and radioactive fallout—which contaminated the environment not in isolated, specific places, but throughout the global ecosystem—were the inevitable and potentially lethal developments of the modern age, each one a consequence, as she put it bluntly in Silent Spring, of the “impetuous and heedless pace of man rather than the deliberate pace of nature.”
The furor over Silent Spring began at once. In the weeks following publication of the first excerpts in the New Yorker, moody stories expressing shock and outrage began appearing in newspapers across the country. Some compared the book to Uncle Tom’s Cabin and predicted an earthquake of change in the way pesticides were used. Most reports nervously welcomed Carson’s dire warning about chemical contamination of the environment, although many also acknowledged a rapidly building counterattack from trade groups and a chemicals industry that decried Carson’s book as unscientific and one-sided, arguing that she took no account of the economic and health benefits achieved through the use of pesticides.
Some of Carson’s detractors imagined her in league with a lunatic fringe that included food faddists, anti-fluoridationists, organic farmers, and soft-headed nature lovers. A major pesticide manufacturer threatened Carson’s publisher, Houghton Mifflin, with a lawsuit if Silent Spring was issued without changes, saying they believed and would attempt to prove that Carson was a front for “sinister influences” in the Soviet Union and its Eastern European satellites that were intent on undermining America. The U.S. Department of Agriculture meanwhile told the New York Times it was being deluged with letters from citizens expressing “horror and amazement” that the agency permitted the wide use of such deadly poisons. The Book-of-the-Month Club announced that Silent Spring would be its main selection for October 1962, proof that Carson was still expected to be popular even though she’d hit a nerve. A newspaper in London reported that “a 55-year old spinster has written a book that is causing more heart-searching in America than any book since Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle forced Chicago to clean up its abattoirs.”
Everyone remarked on the sharp and fatalistic tone of Silent Spring—including, as Carson enjoyed noting, people who had not read it. From its opening pages the book was a harrowing excursion through a chemically strangled world. Carson made no attempt to soften her vision of the future. At stake in the unrestrained use of chemical pesticides was nothing less than human existence itself:
Along with the possibility of the extinction of mankind by nuclear war, the central problem of our age has therefore become the contamination of man’s total environment with such substances of incredible potential for harm—substances that accumulate in the tissues of plants and animals and even penetrate the germ cells to shatter or alter the very material of heredity upon which the shape of the future depends.
Silent Spring arrived at a time when there was already unease about the unanticipated ways that science and medicine could betray the public welfare. In 1959, just days before Thanksgiving, the government had abruptly halted the sale of cranberries after discovering that the crop was contaminated with residues of an herbicide known to cause cancer. The “cranberry scare” caused economic hardship for cranberry growers and created a never-before-seen loss of consumer confidence in the safety of the American food supply. Then, in 1961, came devastating news from Great Britain—where some seven thousand babies had been born with appalling deformities. The birth defects were caused by the sedative thalidomide, which had been prescribed for pregnant women to alleviate morning sickness. Thalidomide was thought to be safe even for expectant mothers and it was—except, as was learned after the damage had been done, for a sixteen-day period during pregnancy. Many women who consumed even a single dose during that fateful window of time gave birth to babies with abnormalities, including a condition called phocomelia, in which the long bones of the arms, and sometimes both the arms and legs, were drastically shortened, so that stubby hands and feet appeared to grow directly out of the torso—like the flippers on a seal. The U.S. maker of thalidomide had asked permission to market it
in this country and had been prevented from doing so only through the perseverance of a lone scientist at the Food and Drug Administration who had reservations and had managed to stall an approval until the problems with the drug were discovered. When a reporter questioned Carson about thalidomide she unhesitatingly connected it to the pesticide issue. “It’s all of a piece,” Carson said. “Thalidomide and pesticides—they represent our willingness to rush ahead and use something new without knowing what the results will be.”
As Silent Spring was being set into type, everyone’s attention had turned back to the overriding fear of the times: the prospect of nuclear war and the unknown dangers of the fallout raining from the skies as the United States and the Soviet Union waged dueling programs in the perfection of mass destruction. When President Kennedy responded at his press conference to a question about the possible “long range” risks of pesticide use, many listeners felt an uncomfortable prickle, as the term was more commonly used to describe the intercontinental ballistic missiles that America and Russia had arrayed against each other—Armageddon at the push of a button.
In October 1962, just after Silent Spring arrived in bookstores, American intelligence discovered that the Soviet ships recently traveling to Cuba in large numbers were delivering missiles, launch equipment, and the personnel needed for construction of a base capable of initiating a nuclear strike against the United States from only ninety miles away. By the time Silent Spring had made it to number one on the New York Times bestseller list on October 28, Cuba was under a naval blockade and the United States and the Soviet Union were on the brink of war. Eventually the Soviets backed down in the face of U.S. resolve and removed the weapons from Cuba—but public anxiety about the nuclear age remained high, joined now by a new worry about chemicals contaminating the environment.
President Kennedy’s announcement that the government would look into the pesticide issue was reassuring—but it hid a more complicated reaction to Silent Spring forming behind the scenes in Washington and all along the web of connections that linked the government to agricultural and industrial interests. The day after his press conference, Kennedy appointed a special commission, headed by his science adviser Jerome Wiesner, to conduct a thorough review of pesticide use. It also came to light that the DDT studies begun in the mid-1940s at Patuxent had continued at a cost that had risen to $3 million a year, despite little public attention and scant changes in the way pesticides were used. Joining the Wiesner panel to evaluate pesticide safety would be representatives from several federal agencies that were themselves heavy users of DDT and other pesticides, and whose lack of regard for the consequences had been pitilessly described in Silent Spring. Meanwhile, the FBI did what the FBI usually did in such cases and quietly launched an investigation of Carson that just happened to coincide with the accusation that she was a Communist front.
Elsewhere within the administration a simmering hostility toward Rachel Carson and Silent Spring was shaping a different side to the government’s response. Immediately following the New Yorker serialization, Secretary of Agriculture Orville Freeman ordered his inner circle to begin developing plans for attacking the articles, apparently on the reflexive assumption that his job was to oppose anything inimical to the interests of farmers and agrichemical companies. But Freeman wavered. Beleaguered over what to do about the milk supply in his home state of Minnesota, where strontium 90 contamination was approaching unsafe levels, Freeman simultaneously suggested that, as an alternative to fighting with Carson, the agency could consider how it might explain to the public the benefits of pesticide use and the steps the government was taking to head off the kind of long-term environmental problems she predicted. Freeman apparently did not contemplate what to do if it simply turned out that Carson was right.
And so the terms of the long, partisan struggle to come were established. They stand to this day. On one side were the voices raised in the name of science and the defense of nature. On the other was the unbreakable coalition of government and industry, the massed might of the establishment.
Aware of the controversy swirling around her, Carson remained unfazed by it. What did surprise her was how well Silent Spring was selling—some 65,000 copies in just the first two weeks. And the Book-of-the-Month Club edition, with an initial printing of 150,000 copies, was coming with an urgent endorsement from U.S. Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas, who thought the book tremendously important. As with her previous books, Carson was swamped with fan mail that she found gratifying and overwhelming. She answered mainly with form letters, but she often took time to make personal responses to students who wrote asking for help with assignments or debates.
Carson complained of “drowning,” as she put it, in clippings from newspapers running pieces on Silent Spring. A steady flow of speaking requests also arrived—most of which she turned down—as she routinely did with inquiries from reporters offering to do stories on her. Carson did say yes to a few of these, however. One notable request she initially rejected came from Life magazine, which proposed a portrait in words and photographs. Carson hated the idea. She knew all about Life profiles, she said, and didn’t care for their “tone,” which amounted to an invasion of privacy. But Carson relented—after having it pointed out to her that the chemicals industry would never turn down a chance at such high-profile publicity—though only after extracting a promise that the piece would focus on the writing of Silent Spring and not on “silly personal details.”
Carson never specified exactly what kind of information was too personal for public consumption. She was used to the grudging acceptance accorded a woman writing knowingly and well about the challenging subjects she chose. And she was accustomed to, if not happy about, being identified in print as a “spinster.” Carson had no problem with being famous. It was something she relished, since for as long as she could remember no title had ever seemed more worthy to her than “author.”
But Carson was hiding one specific piece of information from everyone but a handful of her most intimate friends. In early 1960, while in the middle of writing Silent Spring, Carson had suffered through a succession of illnesses. First, it was a duodenal ulcer. She had barely recovered from that when she contracted pneumonia and had to stop working for a time. Then in the spring, just as she was finishing up two chapters on the link between pesticides and cancer, Carson discovered two masses in her left breast, which she was advised to have taken out. She thought these would be like a cyst she’d had removed in a minor procedure ten years earlier. They weren’t. Carson required a radical mastectomy, though she was led to believe afterward that it had been done mainly as a precaution because of an ambiguous pathology report. At the time, no further treatment had been recommended.
Carson eventually discovered this was all a lie—that not only was one of the masses in her breast malignant, but it had already metastasized at least as far as her lymph nodes. Over the next two years, as she struggled to finish Silent Spring, Carson endured the cancer’s steady spread and a series of brutal radiation treatments that at times seemed to slow but could not halt the progress of the disease. When the Life magazine piece came out in early October 1962, Carson, who had never been sturdy looking, appeared haggard and elderly. Life glossed over this, describing her look as “gentle.”
Earlier that year Carson had been approached about appearing on CBS Reports, a popular and highly regarded hour-long TV newsmagazine devoted to in-depth reporting on significant issues. The program had caused a sensation two years previously with an installment by Edward R. Murrow called “Harvest of Shame,” which exposed the slavelike conditions of migrant farmworkers. CBS wanted to make Silent Spring and its author—along with some of her supporters and critics—the focus of an episode. The on-air reporter for the show was going to be the debonair former war correspondent Eric Sevareid. Carson and Houghton Mifflin thought this was a great idea, but delays and postponements throughout the summer had them worried that whoever had been found to represent the chem
icals industry in the program’s pro-and-con format was spending time sharpening their criticism of Silent Spring. When a producer and cameraman finally arrived at Carson’s cottage on Southport Island in September to shoot background scenes of her in Maine, they were the ones who became concerned. Carson appeared seriously ill and seemed impatient to get on with the actual interview.
In late November 1962, after Carson had returned to Silver Spring, Sevareid and a film crew visited Carson’s home and began interview sessions that lasted for two days. Carson looked terrible. Seated before the camera in an armchair, she wore a frumpy dark suit. On a shelf behind her were a typewriter and a starfish—a graceful touch in an otherwise inert, slightly claustrophobic setting. A heavy black wig hiding the hair loss caused by her radiation therapy made Carson vaguely resemble Lady Bird Johnson. Visibly uncomfortable—the long sessions seated under the lights must have been agony—Carson rolled her head slowly from side to side, sometimes resting it on an upraised hand, as if she were weary beyond words.
But all of that went away when she spoke. Her voice steady and precise, Carson’s flat mid-Atlantic accent suited her chilling message, which could only be described as relentlessly rational and at odds with the character assassinations that had branded her a kook. Carson’s virtuoso performance was more forceful for seeming anything but a performance. Afterward, Sevareid confided to his producer that he hoped they’d get the story on the air while their leading lady was still alive.
A few days later, Carson wrote to her friend Dorothy Freeman. Carson had already told Freeman that she felt she’d never had any choice but to write Silent Spring, that it had been an obligation of the kind Abraham Lincoln meant when he’d said that “to sin by silence when they should protest makes cowards of men.” Now that it was done, she told Dorothy, she felt a mixture of pride and an indescribably heavy exhaustion, as if she had come to the end of a long and difficult road.
On a Farther Shore Page 2