Meanwhile, the administration requested a nearly $2 million supplemental budget for fallout monitoring by the Public Health Service, which also planned to investigate better “countermeasures” to use in areas of excessive contamination. Wiesner recommended that the USDA be given a seat on the Federal Radiation Council, a move that was likely to restrain the council in its tendency to set fallout safety guidelines so low as to threaten farm interests—as they already did. In mid-July 1962, Secretary of Agriculture Orville Freeman—who was from Minnesota, one of the places most contaminated with fallout—ordered his staff to make plans in the event milk production had to be halted anywhere.
A month later, having been appointed to the Federal Radiation Council, Freeman warned the president that if contamination levels rose above the federal safety guides things could get politically messy. In Minnesota, milk prices had already been raised, and cows were being “dry fed” off-pasture to reduce iodine 131 contamination in milk. Freeman wasn’t happy about this, and he told Kennedy that nobody on the Federal Radiation Council thought the Minnesota initiative necessary or prudent—that it was likely to make things worse while putting federal officials in a difficult position. Freeman said one possible federal response would be to announce that the Minnesota program was a strictly local, “experimental” effort while at the same time supplying Minnesota dairy operators with dry feed at reduced cost under federal disaster assistance authority. But Freeman equivocated, as launching such a program risked setting a precedent that might spin out of control. If fallout radiation levels went up in other regions, Freeman said, the federal government could find itself with a “vast and expensive” new program on its hands—words that might just as well have described the nuclear testing that caused all the trouble in the first place.
What to do? Freeman said he was working closely with Jerome Wiesner to find a balanced approach that took into account the “political, emotional, and other factors” that made the whole subject of radioactive fallout so “touchy.” Freeman thought the administration’s options were narrow. Downplay the potential health consequences of fallout and they risked “a lot of demagoguery” from political opponents. But too aggressive a response could also undermine public confidence in the administration by “contributing needlessly to widespread concern and alarm” that would end up producing “all kinds of bad results.”
While the president mulled over the secretary’s ambiguous advice, Freeman explored the possibility that the milk-price increases in Minnesota—which had been undertaken simultaneously by several dairy cooperatives—might amount to price fixing and therefore be a violation of federal antitrust statutes. Freeman was briefed on this angle by Minnesota attorney general Walter Mondale—who had been appointed to the job by Freeman himself when he was governor of the state. Mondale reported that public worries over fallout-contaminated milk in Minnesota were being used as a “cover” for the price increase by milk suppliers.
By November 1962, the government had decided to retroactively redefine its own radiation guidelines so as to remove the idea that they had anything to do with public safety. The Federal Radiation Council now torturously maintained that there was no conceivable health risk to people from fallout even at radiation levels many times greater than the guides’ recommendations. In fact, people were advised to henceforth consider the guides not as “a dividing line between safety and danger in actual radiation situations.” Nor did exceeding the guides necessarily mean that protective action was required. Instead, the guides were to be used only as indicators for when “detailed evaluation” of radiation exposure was warranted. The Federal Radiation Council declared itself ready and willing when requested to provide “consultation and technical assistance” in the apparently unlikely event that there was concern about radioactive fallout “in any part of the country”—an astonishing claim given that there was concern about radioactive fallout everywhere in the country.
The growing and pervasive threat from radioactive fallout—and the government’s dodgy response to it—so closely mirrored what was happening with pesticides that Carson decided to make the connection explicit early in Silent Spring. People couldn’t see radiation. Sometimes they couldn’t even see the fallout that carried it across the sky and eventually back to earth. But they could understand the dangers of an invisible poison that was everywhere, and whose effects could last for years or even generations. If one considered the whole long history of life on earth, Carson wrote, it was a story in which all living things responded to and were a product of their environment. Evolution was the steady maintenance of a biosphere in harmony with prevailing conditions. Only recently—within the “moment of time represented by the present century”—had one species managed to turn this agreeable relationship around and begun to effect change in the other direction. Carson thought it a bitter irony that the evolution of life on earth, which had unfolded over eons, could be so shattered as to make its continuation uncertain:
The most alarming of all man’s assaults upon the environment is the contamination of air, earth, rivers, and sea with dangerous and even lethal materials. This pollution is for the most part irrecoverable; the chain of evil it initiates not only in the world that must support life but in living tissues is for the most part irreversible. In this now universal contamination of the environment, chemicals are the sinister and little-recognized partners of radiation in changing the very nature of the world—the very nature of its life. Strontium 90, released through nuclear explosions into the air, comes to earth in rain or drifts down as fallout, lodges in soil, enters into the grass or corn or wheat grown there, and in time takes up its abode in the bones of a human being, there to remain until his death. Similarly, chemicals sprayed on croplands or forests or gardens lie long in the soil, entering into living organisms, passing from one to another in a chain of poisoning and death.
Just as it had done with The Sea Around Us and The Edge of the Sea, the New Yorker’s serialization of Silent Spring generated a tremendous response, and anticipation of the book’s publication in September soared. This time, however, a noticeable portion of the reaction was negative. The Michigan Department of Agriculture took strong exception to Carson’s characterization of its spraying efforts against the Japanese beetle with the insecticide aldrin. The campaign had been carried out over some twenty-seven thousand acres, including the suburbs of Detroit, in 1959. Aldrin was dropped from low-flying airplanes, and within days citizens reported finding alarming numbers of dead and dying birds.
Carson had written that the beetle wasn’t a problem in need of such a heavy-handed response and that aldrin, among the most toxic of insecticides, had been chosen mainly because it was cheap. She relied on official information the U.S. Department of Agriculture had put out on the spraying program, and on the firsthand account of a prominent Michigan naturalist named Walter Nickell. In a sarcastic letter to the New Yorker, an official with the Michigan Department of Agriculture said that neither Carson nor Nickell knew what they were talking about—though that was to be expected, as most articles taking a stand against pesticides were crammed with “scientific errors, half truths, oblique and irrelevant references, and in some cases outright falsehoods.” The writer did not offer any proof that Carson was guilty on any of those counts.
The New Yorker got an earful from executives at a number of chemical companies—all complaining of one-sidedness and Carson’s failure to consider the economic benefits of pesticide use, especially in food production. One salty citizen in San Francisco thought Silent Spring reflected Carson’s obvious “Communist sympathies,” which were shared by so many writers “these days.” He said anyone could live “without birds and animals,” but not without business. The whole thing, he thought, must be some kind of sick attempt at humor. Inexplicably, he thought Carson was interested in destroying insects:
As for insects, isn’t it just like a woman to be scared to death of a few little bugs! As long as we have the H-bomb everything will be OK. I sup
pose Miss Carson is one of those “peace nuts” too!
I wish you would print more jokes in your magazine and not so much uninteresting and critical stuff. After all, the New Yorker is supposed to be funny and make us laugh.
Another angry letter writer wondered when the New Yorker was going to run a comparable three-part series by someone competent to “refute the farrage [sic] of half-truths, mis-emphases and out and out misstatements” found in the Silent Spring articles—though he had no illusion that such a follow-up would set the record straight, as “corrections never catch up with the original untruth.” The writer’s specific objection was that Carson had treated pesticide users as soulless technicians with no regard for the preservation of wildlife or the protection of human health.
This seemingly reasonable complaint—that the spray men were people, too—ignored the abundant evidence that technicians were already enlisted in humanity’s global nuclear suicide pact and were practicing their dark arts regularly in the American desert, on the frozen wastes of eastern Asia, and over the tropical lagoons of remote islands in the far Pacific. Living on the verge of annihilation, Carson wrote, was not living. Quoting the ecologist Paul Shepard, Carson wondered, “Who would want to live in a world which is just not quite fatal?”
“Yet such a world is pressed upon us,” Carson continued in her own words. “The crusade to create a chemically sterile, insect-free world seems to have engendered a fanatic zeal on the part of many specialists and most of the so-called control agencies. On every hand there is evidence that those engaged in spraying operations exercise ruthless power.”
From the start, most of Carson’s critics also chose to ignore her insistence that what was needed was not an end to the use of pesticides, but rather an end to their heedless overuse—a distinction that was lost on people whose economic interests were entwined with chemical controls. But Carson made it clear. “It is not my contention that chemical insecticides must never be used,” she wrote. “I do contend that we have put poisonous and biologically potent chemicals indiscriminately into the hands of persons largely or wholly ignorant of their potentials for harm.”
If Carson thought that leaving the door open for the judicious use of pesticides was enough to insulate her from accusations of overreaching, she soon learned otherwise. Even before the second installment of Silent Spring appeared in the New Yorker, Carson was under attack for attempting to undermine a global initiative that had been supported for years by the U.S. Congress and by the Eisenhower and Kennedy administrations.
Since the mid-1950s, the World Health Organization, an arm of the United Nations, had made the eradication of malaria a worldwide priority. Malaria is an ancient plague. Caused by a mosquito-transmitted parasite that is known to have infected humans in Africa for five hundred thousand years, the disease kills hundreds of thousands of people every year and sickens many millions more. In 1958, Congress passed legislation authored by Senators John F. Kennedy and Hubert Humphrey allocating a contribution of $100 million to the WHO malaria project. The campaign relied almost entirely on using DDT against the mosquitoes that carried the disease. The goal was to have houses and huts in regions with malaria treated twice a year.
It was known that some mosquitoes were resistant to DDT and that others would become so—perhaps adapting into a “super race” that not only wasn’t killed by the pesticide but wasn’t even discouraged from inhabiting places where it had been sprayed. And it was also understood that spray teams would never find and treat every domicile in some places with malaria, as there were often no roads, or the people were nomadic. But it was assumed that malaria would disappear from remote, isolated pockets on its own if it could be snuffed out across most of its range—the expectation being that the parasite would follow a classic pattern of decline, then rarity, then extinction, in this case by human design.
The early years of the WHO’s malaria eradication program produced encouraging results. By 1960, malaria had been erased in eleven countries and sharply curtailed in a dozen more. In India, where historically as many as seventy-five million people contracted malaria every year, that number fell below one hundred thousand. As deaths from malaria went down, life expectancies went up in some countries, and so did crop production and land values. But DDT had a side effect that even Rachel Carson hadn’t anticipated: As malaria started to disappear, so did the scientists who studied the disease. What had been a multidisciplinary effort to understand and control a difficult epidemic turned into the one-dimensional chore of spraying DDT wherever the disease was present.
One irate reader wrote to the New Yorker to protest Carson’s indictment of DDT, echoing the accusation that she had made many errors—none more egregious than her claim that the insecticide had had only “limited success” against malaria and in the long run might make things worse as mosquitoes acquired resistance to DDT and the disease flared up again in areas where it was being used. Not so, the letter writer insisted. Malaria could be eradicated in seven to ten years. But this effort took money, he said, which would now be more difficult to raise thanks to Carson’s “mischief.” He suggested the New Yorker’s famous standards for absolute accuracy were in decline, as it would have otherwise learned from any number of experts that Carson was mistaken on this point. Apparently unaware of the distinction between people who study wildlife biology and people who practice nudism, he referred to Carson as a “naturist.”
The writer might have waited for publication of the book to get a fuller sense of Carson’s stand on DDT and malaria. It is true that Silent Spring is a sustained polemic against the use of synthetic pesticides; it is impossible to find so much as a phrase endorsing their general use. Carson never did find anything good to say about pesticides. But she left room for the possibility that they might be a wise choice in situations involving public welfare.
Carson acknowledged that DDT had been essential to the successful suppression of a typhus outbreak in Italy during the Second World War. And she also pointed to its use against malaria-carrying mosquitoes immediately after the war. The problem, she said, was that insects became resistant to DDT, and there was often a rebound of insect-borne diseases in areas where it was used. This, Carson wrote, had to be carefully weighed in fighting diseases and their insect carriers—such as “typhus and body lice, plague and rat fleas, African sleeping sickness and tsetse flies, various fevers and ticks.” But she conceded that these were “important problems that must be met.”
By the time Silent Spring came out, world health officials were arguing with one another over the increasing resistance of mosquitoes to DDT and whether this might defeat the goal of eradicating malaria. It was a question that Carson could have explored but did not in Silent Spring. Had she chosen to, the later claim that she had single-handedly brought about millions of deaths from malaria might not have gained the widespread currency it did. Carson’s intense focus on the downside of pesticide use—like the tunnel vision that permitted her an idiosyncratic reading of “Locksley Hall” and to ignore Henry Williamson’s Nazi sympathies—wasn’t balanced against any upside, even though she conceded there might occasionally be one.
But her decision against exploring the malaria issue more thoroughly could not have been an easy one. In 1962, the U.S. Postal Service issued a commemorative stamp in support of the malaria program, and President Kennedy reaffirmed American commitment to the eradication of the disease. The president said the program was an international effort that proved the people of the world could work together on common objectives—as he had called upon them to do in his inaugural address when he’d said, “Together let us explore the stars, conquer the deserts, eradicate disease.” As it turned out, however, Carson read the zeitgeist better than Kennedy did. In 1963, faced with questions about the declining effectiveness of DDT and about its safety, the United States halted funding for the malaria eradication program. Six years later—and three years ahead of a ban on DDT use in the United States that was widely attributed to Carson’
s campaign against pesticides—the World Health Organization scrapped the malaria program entirely.
Decades after the publication of Silent Spring, Rachel Carson would still be pilloried by detractors over her supposed contribution to the continued presence of malaria in the world. It’s a hollow charge and an odd legacy, as she nowhere in Silent Spring argued against the use of DDT to fight the disease and, in fact, allowed that the use of pesticides might well be necessary in the protection of human health. But that did nothing to blunt the hostile reaction to Silent Spring, which also held within it the outlines of a partisan divide over environmental matters that has since hardened into a permanent wall of bitterness and mistrust.
With the publication of Silent Spring, public sentiment turned to the question of the environment and our role in its protection. A half century of growing enthusiasm for conservation had faded in the Cold War, and the new fear was that we now seemed as likely to destroy the earth as to preserve it. To people conditioned to the pessimism of the nuclear age, Carson made a dire appeal: Reverse course or continue at our peril. The twin demons of radiation and pesticides, interlinked so artfully in the pages of Silent Spring, made tangible the idea of a “total environment” that we could choose to protect or not. The fault line between conservation and environmentalism had been crossed.
There is no objective reason why environmentalism should be the exclusive province of any one political party or ideology—other than the history of the environmental movement beginning with Silent Spring. The labels for Carson rained down on her like fallout: subversive, antibusiness, Communist sympathizer, health nut, pacifist, and, of course, the coded insult “spinster.” The attack on Silent Spring came from the chemical companies, agricultural interests, and the allies of both in government—the self-protective enclaves within what President Eisenhower had called the “military-industrial complex.” Their fierce opposition to Silent Spring put Rachel Carson and everything she believed about the environment firmly on the left end of the political spectrum. And so two things—environmentalism and its adherents—were defined once and forever.
On a Farther Shore Page 35