In December 1959, Carson wrote a long, plaintive letter to Brooks—it was part apology, part promise of better things to come. She told him how grateful she was for his patience—and that she knew how sorely she tried it. She said that what kept her going even though she’d failed in her promise to deliver the manuscript—most recently by the end of the year—was her certainty that the work she was doing was necessary, that it would give the book an “unshakable foundation.” Carson felt that people who criticized pesticide use without fully understanding the science did more harm than good and ended up as “targets” of those whose interests involved the continued use of chemical poisons. She assured Brooks that while she might be attacked for what she was writing, she would have the weight of evidence on her side. She said she knew that he understood all this, but that in the end she alone could comprehend the immensity of the task she had set for herself. That it took so long was almost unbearably frustrating. On a positive note, Carson told Brooks that she’d recently hired a wonderfully competent new assistant—her name was Jeanne Davis—who had a college degree, was married to a doctor, had worked at several medical schools, and had experience reading the kinds of scientific literature that was piled high in Carson’s study.
Carson also apologized for the piecemeal approach she was taking—working on chapters or sometimes just parts of chapters in a seemingly random order. She really couldn’t explain why, but that it was the only way she could handle the material and it wasn’t going to change. She promised to send him another almost completed chapter soon. While Brooks took a genuine interest in all of this, she knew that what he really needed to know was when she might finish the book. Carson admitted that she didn’t know, but if things went “reasonably well,” she might be done by February—a hopeful thought so lacking in conviction that Brooks probably discounted it out of hand. Carson said she and Roger had both been feeling better lately, though she had developed some sort of thyroid condition that caused brutal headaches and sometimes cost her hours or even an entire day of work.
Brooks wrote back just before the holidays to wish Carson—not unselfishly, he said—a happy and creative New Year.
Carson was aware that other writers were looking into the issue of pesticides—and that there had been a general concern about contamination of the food supply for some time, even before the development of synthetic pesticides. All the way back in 1933, Arthur Kallet and F. J. Schlink had published a book called 100,000,000 Guinea Pigs arguing that Americans were the unwitting participants in a vast, uncontrolled experiment involving the adulteration of food, drugs, and cosmetics with a growing assortment of chemical additives. Kallet and Schlink accused the FDA of complicity in what amounted to mass poisoning. They placed a special emphasis on the use of lead arsenate as an insecticide on fruit and vegetable crops.
Lead arsenate, they explained, leaves a toxic residue on produce that can easily be removed by the grower with a mild solution of hydrochloric acid—but which cannot be washed off with a simple rinse under a faucet in someone’s kitchen. The consumption of lead arsenate subjects a person to not one but two poisons—lead and arsenic. The government had set a low tolerance limit for arsenic residues in food—and prohibited any residual lead—but Kallet and Schlink claimed the FDA made no serious attempt to police the situation. Farmers, not knowing better or not caring—or both—overused lead arsenate and rarely succeeded in removing it from their crops before delivering them to market. Kallet and Schlink said that lead arsenate was probably more poisonous than anyone realized, as the investigation of arsenic toxicity at low concentrations had only recently come under study. Lead, meanwhile, presented a different concern:
Lead, the other metallic residue of lead arsenate spray, is certainly far more dangerous. But here we find a curious situation. Lead is a cumulative poison. Part of the lead taken into the body is stored and may become dangerous to the point of disaster when enough of the metal has collected. The amount necessary to cause noticeable symptoms depends on the health, ruggedness, or personal peculiarities, of the individual concerned. The Food and Drug Administration admits this hazard and states that no residue of lead whatever is permitted on fruits and vegetables coming to market. Despite this, there is not the slightest evidence that any effort is being made to enforce this drastic dictum.
This, of course, was an argument familiar to Carson—as were many of the assertions in a more recent and still more alarming book, William Longgood’s Poisons in Your Food, which her former publisher, Simon and Schuster, brought out in the early spring of 1960. Like Kallet and Schlink, Longgood concerned himself not only with chemical pesticides, but with the whole toxic smorgasbord of synthetic additives and adulterants present in the food supply, especially in the dairy case, where the “milk you give your children to make them grow and have strong bones” was laden with strontium 90 from fallout, plus an assortment of other poisons, antibiotics, and insecticides. Longgood, whose prose was blunt and ungraceful, was particularly attentive to toxicity testing that was either insufficient or that suggested the seriousness of a particular residue ending up eaten or drunk by an unsuspecting consumer. One especially ghoulish test involved Carson’s bête noire:
One factor that makes DDT so effective as an insecticide also makes it so treacherous for man—its amazing persistence. In an extraordinary feeding demonstration, researchers applied DDT to hay growing in the field, fed the hay to beef animals, slaughtered the cows and fed their flesh to pigs, which in turn were slaughtered and analyzed; after these two complete digestions the DDT was found to remain intact.
Longgood—an experienced newspaper reporter who’d previously covered international affairs and written a book about the Suez Canal—got roughed up in the press over The Poisons in Your Food, which many found over the top. John Osmundsen, reviewing Long-good’s book for the New York Times, caught the flavor of the criticism. Osmundsen accused Longgood of ignoring the demands of modern agriculture, which was dependent upon fertilizers and pesticides, and of overlooking research indicating that many food additives had been found safe at low concentrations. Worse, Osmundsen wrote, was an absence of balance and perspective that should have come naturally to a seasoned journalist. Osmundsen said the book was a “selectively documented, sometimes inaccurate, frequently hysterical tract against the use of any chemicals in foods.” He thought the book “scientifically indefensible,” but conceded that Longgood might have made a few good points worthy of further consideration, including concerns about the use of pesticides on crops and livestock—a seemingly central issue Osmundsen chose to mention as almost an afterthought.
Carson was aware of the controversy around The Poisons in Your Food, which she’d made a conscious decision not to read lest it influence her own book. Although she’d once referred to her book as a “crusade” in a letter to Dorothy Freeman, Carson was worried that what had happened to Longgood could happen to her. Her main hope, she told Marjorie Spock, lay in the careful consideration of the science that would not just support her case but make the argument without any interpretation on her part. This was a daunting task, one that caused her doubts and anxiety and seemed so unlike anything she had done before. She wrote:
It is a great problem to know how to penetrate the barrier of public indifference and unwillingness to look at unpleasant facts that might have to be dealt with if one recognized their existence. I have no idea whether I shall be able to do so or not, but knowing what I do, I have no choice but to set it down to be read by those who will. I guess my own principal reliance is in marshalling all the facts and letting them largely speak for themselves.
It’s not clear why Carson believed the public was indifferent to the hazards of pesticide use—and, in fact, the recent “cranberry scare” offered evidence to the contrary. In early November 1959, cranberries grown in Washington and Oregon were found to be contaminated with a weed killer called aminotriazole—which was known to cause thyroid cancer in laboratory rats. Although the risk to humans re
mained unknown and the cranberry crops in the major producing states of Wisconsin, Massachusetts, and New Jersey were thought to be uncontaminated, the government advised consumers not to buy or consume cranberries unless they knew where they had been grown. Panic ensued. Grocers across the country pulled cranberries off their shelves, restaurants stopped selling menu items containing cranberries, and millions of families started getting ready for a Thanksgiving feast without one of its essential ingredients. Angry cranberry growers feared their record $50 million crop was likely to turn into a substantial loss and called for the resignation of Arthur Fleming, the secretary of health, education, and welfare, who had made the original announcement of the contamination. The general manager of Ocean Spray Cranberries, Inc.—a cooperative that marketed about three-fourths of the U.S. cranberry crop—accused the government of overzealousness and said the public should instead be told that there was “not a shred of evidence” that any person had ever suffered ill effects by eating contaminated cranberries.
Aminotriazole had initially been tried as a weed control in cranberry bogs in 1957—prior to its approval by the U.S. Department of Agriculture. About three million pounds of cranberries from that experiment were later destroyed, and the following year the government decided to permit the use of aminotriazole on cranberry bogs only after the harvest was in. But in early 1959, one of the principal manufacturers of aminotriazole submitted its safety testing on the pesticide, which included its connection with cancer in rats. The company insisted these findings could not be used to interpret human risk, but the FDA banned the use of aminotriazole on food crops anyway.
Efforts mounted to reassure the public about the safety of cranberries. In Massachusetts, a crowd of nearly ten thousand people drank a thousand gallons of cranberry juice in a stunt organized by a local radio station. Cranberries figured in the developing presidential campaign, too. In Wisconsin, Senator John F. Kennedy drank a cranberry juice toast in the town of Marshfield. A few days later and just thirty miles away in Wisconsin Rapids, Vice President Richard Nixon ate four helpings of cranberries—despite the advice of Arthur Fleming, who told him not to. Two days after that, the Chicago Board of Health seized a shipment of cranberries from Wisconsin after tests showed it was contaminated with aminotriazole. Cranberry sales were halted in Chicago. The ban spread across communities in every part of the country. The growers continued to argue that the government’s position was a hysterical response to a nonthreat.
In 1959—as now—the regulation of pesticides and other potentially dangerous chemical products defied common sense in an important way: Safety testing is performed not by the regulatory authority, but by the chemical manufacturers. The government specifies which tests are required and how they are to be conducted, then carefully reviews the findings that the companies submit. The party with a vested financial interest in the data is the same entity that supplies the data—a fact that would likely unnerve the public if many people understood that this is how things are done.
Not surprisingly, agricultural chemicals companies reacted heatedly to what came to be known as the “cranberry scare.” One senior chemical executive complained that it could take as many as five years and perhaps $2 million to bring a new product to market. All pesticides then being sold had been rigorously investigated and could be reliably considered safe, he said, and any further restrictions would make the development of new products prohibitively expensive. The value of this industry—about $278 million in sales in 1959—was not lost on anyone, including politicians eager to choke down tainted produce. In late November the New York Times reported that the cranberry scare was only one problem facing the agricultural chemicals industry. The panic had come at the same time as criticism from “wildlife and conservation groups and from pure food enthusiasts who believe that chemical residues on agricultural products pose a threat to health,” although the Times did not pursue such concerns beyond this brief mention.
For Carson, the cranberry scare was a preview of coming attractions—a glimpse of how a battle would be waged over this evolving general concern for the total environment. Conservationists had long run into trouble with corporations and other vested interests, usually over the allocation of resources and land. But this was different. Any challenge to the safety of a pesticide was a direct threat to somebody’s bottom line. An entire industry—with all its associated business entanglements, shareholders, scientific departments, and political allies—depended on the ever-expanding sale and use of chemical poisons. The suggestion that a company would put expediency and profits ahead of public safety was accusatory on its face, which only inflamed passions on both sides of the issue.
But a fight over pesticides would be not only about safety versus economics, but also about patriotism. “Wildlife and conservation groups and pure food enthusiasts” could easily be characterized as “nature lovers and organic faddists,” and from there it was easy to believe that they must be in league with political extremists—people who were likely to be, on some fundamental level, slightly un-American.
February 1960 came and went. Carson’s progress slowed at least in part because of her pursuit of the complicated link between pesticides and cancer—a topic she once planned as only a small section of one chapter but now intended to devote two whole chapters to. And she was again experiencing a string of health issues. Early in the year she had developed a duodenal ulcer. She told Marie Rodell she’d have to subsist on baby foods for a while. While she was still being treated for it, she came down with a bad case of the flu that progressed to pneumonia. This was followed by another sinus infection—Carson was terribly prone to these.
In March she wrote to Brooks, telling him about all of this and saying that while she continued to make headway on the book she had to ration how much time she spent on it, as only rest would ensure the complete healing of her ulcer. She tried to make light of her health issues, telling Brooks that it would be easy to assume the topic of her book had given her the ulcer, but that that was not the case at all. She said she found the whole subject of pesticides—though of utmost concern—completely fascinating. Carson did sourly allow that any fair-minded ulcer should have waited to strike until she was done with the book. Still, as unsatisfying as her current pace was, she said she truly felt as if the hardest parts of the book were now done.
But there was something else Carson did not tell Brooks—either because she didn’t want to worry him further or because it would be a few days before she discovered it herself—but two masses had developed in her left breast. Within a week of her letter to Brooks, Carson had scheduled surgery to find out what they were. Carson wrote again to Brooks—who had expressed sympathy over her health issues and told her not to worry about the slow progress she was making on the book—and this time she hinted she might be seriously ill. She said she was going to have surgery that she hoped would not be “too complicated,” but admitted that she couldn’t count on it. Enclosed with this disturbing news were Carson’s drafts of the two chapters on cancer for “Man Against the Earth.”
Paul Brooks had begun to sense the extent of the material Carson was trying to manage as she researched the book. He told her that, unlike a historian who could let a story unfold over the course of multiple volumes, she had the harder job of culling and compressing everything into just one book with a “larger and larger background behind it.” He said “Man Against the Earth” would be like an iceberg, and when it was published Houghton Mifflin would do everything it could to let readers know how much of it lay beneath the surface. Carson wrote back to say that she liked this metaphor and that it reminded her of something she wanted to take up with him.
She had been thinking about how best to list the many sources she had relied on and felt sure that nobody wanted to see the book “sprinkled with footnotes.” Instead, she said she wanted to include an appendix listing her principal sources for each chapter—something she thought would be useful to anyone interested in pursuing the subject in more deta
il, and would also refute any suggestion that the book was composed of “ill founded” personal views. She thought—probably correctly—that most readers don’t care about these things and would simply ignore the bibliography.
Carson also told Brooks of her unhappiness with their latest working title—and said Marie Rodell in particular hated it. Rodell thought the title was misleading. Carson said she understood that using the word “earth” not in the usual sense—meaning dirt—but rather to encompass the totality of an interdependent global ecosystem, was problematic and that “non-ecologically minded people” would likely be baffled by it. She thought the word “against” was almost as wrong—it suggested the “horrid concept” of humanity as a kind of overlord, which was, of course, the sort of problematic thinking that the book was meant to point out. She didn’t yet have a better title but thought the best thing would be for everyone to keep an open mind and “pray for inspiration.” She had been thinking about how the problems with pesticides and radiation were similar, and said perhaps this would lead to an answer:
In my flounderings I keep asking myself what I would call it if my theme concerned radiation, having some illogical feeling that that would be easier. As you will have seen in the cancer chapters, I keep hammering away at the parallel. Whether radiation or chemicals are involved, the basic issue is the contamination of the environment. “Poisoning” is of course an accurate term, but a word I think we should avoid as tinging with melodrama a theme that is basically a somber tragedy.
On a Farther Shore Page 32