On a Farther Shore

by William Souder

  In October 1958, Life magazine ran a story about the prospect of controlling insect pests with “juvenile hormones” that would inhibit sexual maturation. Carson was already corresponding with several experts on this idea—including Edward O. Wilson at Harvard and Howard Schneiderman at Cornell, who would one day pioneer the development of genetically modified crops as head of research for the Monsanto Company. Encouraged about the prospects of developing pesticides based on hormones, the scientists believed these could theoretically be formulated to affect only targeted species—but they also urged caution.

  Schneiderman said it was still unknown how “higher animals” would respond if exposed to hormones that seemed to have no obvious function outside the insect world. And getting an answer to that question would take time. Schneiderman thought it might take five or ten years to develop a safe hormone-based pesticide. Carson told Spock she thought the article in Life made some exaggerated claims, but that it was “one straw that shows that the wind is beginning to veer away from chemicals as now used.” Carson also said she was amused to learn that the USDA was starting to look into such biological controls, and she wondered whether Secretary of Agriculture Ezra Taft Benson’s “right hand knows what his left hand is doing.” Benson had been named as a defendant in the Long Island lawsuit.

  It would be hard to overstate Carson’s labors in her effort to get a handle on the “spraying picture,” as Marjorie Spock called it. Her usual method—library research and a protracted back-and-forth shuttle of letters between herself and a long list of experts—produced a sea of paper. Carson sometimes employed a secretary to help her with the correspondence, but even so the threads of the story went in so many directions that it was dizzying. Carson filled file folders with scientific studies and reports, and kept card catalogs indexing hundreds of the latest findings.

  The contamination of food and the environment by pesticides suggested similarities with the issues surrounding radioactive fallout and the explosive development of chemical products and medicines—which, like pesticides, were promoted as safe, effective, economical, and the latest in scientific ingenuity. The marketing slogan “Better Living Through Chemistry”—widely appropriated from the DuPont Corporation’s long-standing catchphrase “Better Things for Better Living … Through Chemistry”—seemed to be everywhere. One common compound that had found its way into surprising corners of the environment was penicillin—the antibiotic whose curative powers had caused a great boom in its use.

  Penicillin was first used in the United States in 1942, when some twenty-nine pounds of the drug were produced here. By 1956, the annual U.S. production of penicillin approached five hundred thousand tons. Like DDT, penicillin had multiple uses. It had wide clinical applications in the treatment of human illnesses and infections. It could be formulated in different ways—as ointments, powders, sprays, tablets, and injectable liquids—and saved tens of thousands of lives and cured millions of nonlife-threatening conditions. But there were problems. About 10 percent of the population turned out to be allergic to penicillin—either on first contact with the drug or in the course of repeated dosings. And while it wasn’t fully realized at the time, bacteria develop resistance to antibiotics, and the more widely they were used the less effective they became. But new applications were being found for penicillin and other antibiotics in the control of livestock and plant diseases, and as an after-processing preservative for meats, poultry, and fish. This provided another route of human exposure to penicillin through food. A 1957 report from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration minimized the risk from antibiotic contaminants in the food supply—though it did so in a way that was not comforting:

  It should be emphasized that the problem of contamination with antibiotics in our foods and particularly in milk is a small one compared to our other current food safety problems which have arisen in large part as a result of technologic progress in food production, processing, and distribution. In the processing of food, preservatives, antioxidants, colors, bleaches, flavors, coatings, drying agents, moistening agents, thickening agents, sequestering agents, “aging” agents, stabilizers, emulsifiers, neutralizers, acidifiers, and sweeteners are used.

  The FDA left out DDT and other pesticide residues—but these were, of course, known food contaminants as well. Time magazine reported that although food contamination was supposedly regulated, there were growing amounts of “subtle new pollutants” in the American food supply that posed a danger to human health. Time said the food supply contained “illegal quantities” of DDT, penicillin, and hormones “either by accident or by design.” The story cited the example of milk—which was supposed to be thrown out for three days following the administration of penicillin or other antibiotics to a dairy herd. And yet penicillin turned up in milk with worrisome frequency anyway.

  Early in 1958, Carson learned that Reader’s Digest had a story in the works that was going to be friendly to pesticides. Carson wrote a long letter to the editor warning him of mounting scientific consensus that synthetic pesticides were unsafe. She said she felt sure that “a publication with the Digest’s enormous power to influence public thinking all over the country would not wish to put its seal of approval on something so potentially hazardous to public welfare.” Having been turned down by Reader’s Digest on numerous story proposals—including her 1945 idea for a piece on DDT—Carson was probably less interested in protecting the magazine than she was in projecting her own views on pesticides.

  It worked. Carson got an immediate answer from Reader’s Digest—where there had to be chagrin at being second-guessed by the esteemed Rachel Carson on an unpublished story—thanking her for her insight and assuring her that the magazine would “weigh all the facts” as it proceeded. Evidently the facts brought the piece around to Carson’s point of view, as the story when it finally appeared in June 1959 was titled “Backfire in the War Against Insects,” and Carson thought it well done. She wrote to the author, Robert Strother, saying as much and informing him that she was at work on a book about pesticides. Carson asked Strother—who had been flooded with letters from people with stories to tell about bad experiences with pesticides—if he might share some of the responses with her, which he graciously agreed to do.

  In the spring of 1959, the U.S. Department of Defense and the Atomic Energy Commission admitted that they had overestimated how long radionuclides from nuclear weapons testing would remain aloft in the atmosphere. Their original calculation predicted that such radioactive debris would stay high in the stratosphere for as long as seven years, during which time it would decay and disperse and gradually come back to earth as minimally radioactive fallout distributed uniformly across the globe. Now the officials couldn’t agree on how much shorter this cycle really was—but said it might be as little as two years. This meant that nuclear testing debris not only came down sooner and radioactively hotter as fallout, but it also fell over a more concentrated area. In fact, with respect to at least one radionuclide of special concern—strontium 90—the most contaminated area on earth was the United States. Given the steady pace of testing in the western part of the country, and the normal patterns of weather movement from west to east, a reasonable person could have wondered if a lot of radioactive debris stayed in the air for more than a few days, let alone a few years.

  Strontium 90, which has chemical properties similar to calcium, is absorbed into bone tissue and had been linked to leukemia. Government officials were getting worried that even though the immediate risks to humans from nuclear testing appeared slight, there might be long-term consequences. And there were a number of radionuclides of concern, including iodine 131, which, like ordinary iodine, is readily stored in the thyroid gland. All of these substances had entered the human food supply—mostly in milk. Wherever these isotopes ended up in the body, they bombarded the surrounding tissue with radiation.

  Some were longer lived than others. Iodine 131 has a half-life of just eight days—that is, the amount of radioactivity it emi
ts is reduced by 50 percent every eight days, continuously. But its supply was also being replenished every time another bomb sent a radioactive cloud into the sky. Strontium 90 has a half-life of more than twenty-eight years and so it came down in fallout with nearly the same level of radioactivity as it acquired in the explosion and stayed that way for a long time. Scientists believed exposure to such continuous low-level radiation would lead to an increased incidence of cancer—and that over much longer periods, subtle genetic mutations induced by radiation would cause a steady increase in birth defects.

  In 1958, a group called the Greater St. Louis Citizens Committee for Nuclear Information committed itself to a project that would measure the effects of exposure to radiation—by collecting baby teeth. Like calcium, strontium 90 also concentrates in teeth, and the plan was to compile data on strontium 90 levels in the baby teeth of children growing up during the period of atmospheric testing so it could be correlated with health issues many years after. A half century later, in 2010, a preliminary study of men who died of cancer in middle age showed that their baby teeth had contained more than twice the amount of strontium 90 as had been measured in men from the same area who were still alive.

  The government took the position that radiation in fallout was far below the normal background level of radiation from natural sources—cosmic radiation and radioactive elements in the earth’s crust—and that it was difficult to demonstrate any direct effects from such scant exposure. Still, the government admitted that the available evidence suggested that any amount of radiation might be harmful and that it was “virtually certain that genetic effects can be produced by even the lowest doses. These effects in the children of exposed parents and all future generations may be of many kinds, ranging from minor defects too small to be noticed to severe disease and death.”

  In 1958, California Institute of Technology chemistry professor Linus Pauling, who had won the Nobel Prize in chemistry in 1954 for his work on the chemical bond and the nature of complex biological structures—and who would win the Nobel Peace Prize in 1962 for his campaign against nuclear warfare—presented the United Nations with a petition signed by more than eleven thousand scientists from forty-nine countries asking for an end to nuclear weapons testing. The scientists pointed out that radiation from natural sources regularly does cause genetic mutations in human beings, some of which lead to birth defects. Adding even a small amount of extra radioactive exposure could only compound this.

  One radionuclide that especially worried Pauling was carbon 14, which has a half-life of eight thousand years and would therefore work its slow changes on the human genome over the course of many millennia. Pauling and the cosigners of the petition told the United Nations that only an immediate halt to nuclear testing could minimize whatever damage had already been done: “Each nuclear bomb test spreads an added burden of radioactive elements over every part of the world. Each added amount of radiation causes damage to the health of human beings all over the world and causes damage to the pool of human germ plasm such as to lead to an increase in the number of seriously defective children that will be born in future generations.”

  In March 1958, the Soviet Union declared a halt to further atmospheric testing of nuclear weapons—on the condition that the Western nuclear powers do the same. A few months later, President Eisenhower announced that the United States would impose its own one-year moratorium. A year after that, the United States extended its moratorium for another twelve months. As the second moratorium period came to a conclusion, Eisenhower told the Soviets that the United States would again feel free to resume testing at its discretion—but would not do so without advance notice. There the matter rested.

  Carson had been friends with the popular and prolific nature writer Edwin Way Teale for many years. Teale and his wife had visited Carson at her cottage on Southport Island—Teale said he would never forget seeing the perfect reflection of the Milky Way on the glassy waters of Sheepscot Bay at midnight. The Teales also shared Carson’s love of cats, and the two writers often compared notes on both their pets and the writing business. Carson urged Teale to find a way to serialize his work in magazines. In May 1958, just as Carson had begun work on “The Control of Nature,” Teale wrote to encourage her to examine the parallels between pesticides and radioactive fallout. He told her about a friend who’d recently set off an alarm meant to intercept smugglers of radioactive materials at Idlewild Airport some six months after he’d visited Las Vegas:

  I don’t care about Las Vegas. It couldn’t happen to a better town—but it indicates what the future holds as this dangerous material is not discarded and continues on and on piling up.

  If the world isn’t populated by a race of monsters it won’t be the fault of those who are barging ahead.

  Paul Brooks shared this view. In his internal memo outlining “The Control of Nature” for other executives at Houghton Mifflin, Brooks explained that while the subject of pesticide use might seem “rather specialized,” plenty of readers were already concerned about the increasing use of chemical poisons and that their ubiquitous and invisible presence in the environment offered “a clear parallel to the problem of nuclear fallout.” In both cases—radiation and pesticides—Brooks said the risks were cumulative and involved potential interference with the genetic regulation of life, including human life.

  From her earliest thinking about the book, Carson had been careful to make an important distinction between radioactive fallout and the use of pesticides. The former was a by-product of warfare and, as such, arguably something humanity would prefer to forgo—if only theoretically. There was no rational argument for exploding nuclear weapons in the atmosphere, apart from the tortured idea that doing so would prevent the same thing from happening in anger and on a massive scale. But Carson felt that she could not take an absolute stand against the use of pesticides—which she felt were sometimes useful and advisable if applied sparingly and with care. This was an important point, as she would later be accused of calling for the total elimination of chemical poisons—as part of a concerted campaign to discredit her, even though she had repeatedly said something different. When Paul Brooks asked Carson about a mosquito spraying program in his own neighborhood outside of Boston, she offered careful advice. Brooks said the town was using helicopters to “spot spray” areas where mosquitoes bred. Carson agreed with him that this was preferable to more widespread spraying that had gone on in the past.

  “I hate to advise you on your helicopter problem,” Carson wrote. “Of course it is better than airplane spraying, and I know it is not realistic to take a flat position against any spraying at all. I am afraid there have to be compromises, much as I hate any part of it.”

  Sometime in early 1959, “The Control of Nature” acquired a broader and even less graceful new working title—“Man Against the Earth.” Carson again felt only lukewarm about the new title, which she perhaps unconsciously realized still said exactly the wrong thing. Both titles suggested a separation between human beings and nature that was contrary to one of the book’s premises—that we are part of nature, and that what is poisonous to one organism is likely to be poisonous to another. The idea of balancing human interests against those of the natural world was scientifically nonsensical. In May, Brooks told Carson he wanted to list “Man Against the Earth” in Houghton Mifflin’s publishing schedule as a February 1960 release. This assumed not only that she was almost done, but that they could also get the New Yorker serialization ready in time for the articles to run just before the book came out. Brooks said he needed Carson to be honest with him about whether she could meet such a deadline. Carson wrote back to assure him she would finish soon, that a February publication date would work, and that the new title was growing on her.

  When the Houghton Mifflin list came out in June, Carson and Marie Rodell were alarmed by a flurry of press reports hinting that the author of several pleasant books about the ocean would soon publish a depressing book on pesticides. Carson wrote to
the publicity department at Houghton Mifflin warning that future press releases about the book would need to be carefully worded to avoid any tinge of sensationalism, as the subject was already enmeshed in “violent controversies.” She said she wanted to make sure she had a say in anything further that came out ahead of the book. In the meantime, she promised to send the publicity department a description of the book that would better prepare them to explain what it was about when the time came. Carson admitted that it was a hard book to characterize. “Even I find it so,” she said.

  Filed away alongside Carson’s voluminous scientific research, however, was a page of notes—mostly handwritten—in which she had outlined the “basic themes” of the book, which were several. Carson thought that pesticide spraying was an example of applied entomology that amounted to “Stone Age science” in its clumsy disregard for unintended damage to the environment but which had at its disposal a formidable arsenal of chemical weapons “possessing all the deadliness of the Atomic Age.” Working against nature, rather than with it, Carson wrote, made the whole concept of spraying a “negative force.” She believed the economic case for pesticide use was unsound, and that the claims for the safety of chemical poisons was not only a “big lie” but assumed a level of public gullibility she found offensive. Carson also thought—as she had for some time—that science itself had gone astray, and that chemical pesticides were only one example of technology that had been developed and deployed without proper consideration of the consequences. Engineers, she said, were “practical technicians” who could find a way to do almost anything but never stopped to ask whether something should be done. Finally—and standing apart from the other ideas—was her desire to show how pesticides and radiation were two halves of the same problem.

  Carson did not make the kind of progress on the book over the summer of 1959 that she had imagined she would when she told Paul Brooks to announce it as a February 1960 release. Both Carson and Roger were laid low by illnesses while they were at Southport Island—Roger was actually hospitalized for a week with a respiratory infection. Carson did make time to let Houghton Mifflin know of her displeasure at finding The Edge of the Sea out of stock at the bookstore in Boothbay Harbor. Months of frustration were capped off in September when, as Carson and Roger were driving from Maine back to Silver Spring, their car was hit by a truck near Baltimore. Nobody was hurt, but settling the insurance and arranging for repairs were another distraction from work.