From the beginning, Carson, Paul Brooks, and everyone at Houghton Mifflin had been concerned that the downbeat, frightening nature of Silent Spring would discourage a wide readership. Carson had shrewdly seen that the way around this was to focus on showing “the futility and the basic wrongness of the present chemical program—even better than ranting against it, though doubtless I shall rant a little, too.” This was smart, but it also underscored Carson’s mature confidence in herself and her work—a conviction that she could take on a difficult subject and argue against the interests of powerful forces. Carson was comfortable in her new skin as a great woman of American letters.
The response from pesticide makers came swiftly, directly on the heels of the New Yorker serialization. In July 1962 the DuPont Corporation requested advance copies of Silent Spring, touching off a debate inside Houghton Mifflin and involving Carson and Marie Rodell over how to respond. The collective suspicion was that DuPont was contemplating a lawsuit. Houghton Mifflin publisher Lovell Thompson argued that they should comply with the request. If a lawsuit was coming, he said, it would be better to know it sooner rather than later. Plus, if DuPont, after getting the advance copies, then dragged its feet and launched a suit later on, Houghton Mifflin could answer that the company had been given ample time to inspect the book prior to publication. Thompson’s only reservation was the possibility—which he considered remote—that DuPont might succeed in getting a court to issue an injunction that would prevent publication of the book. That, he said, would be “ruinous.”
DuPont did not sue. Neither did the Velsicol Chemical Corporation, a pesticide maker based in Chicago—though it threatened mightily to do so. In early August, Velsicol’s general counsel wrote to Houghton Mifflin demanding it halt publication of Silent Spring, or at least remove any negative reference to its products, which included aldrin, chlordane, dieldrin, heptachlor, and endrin—a murderers’ row of organochlorines from which only DDT was absent. Velsicol objected to Carson’s characterization of all these patented products as dangerous. But the company made a specific claim for two of them—chlordane and heptachlor. Velsicol was the only company that made chlordane and heptachlor. “You are no doubt familiar with the fact,” the company reminded Houghton Mifflin, “that disparagement of products manufactured solely by one company creates actionable rights in the sole manufacturer.”
This same letter also darkly hinted—in a clumsily worded passage—that complaints against pesticides were part of an international Communist conspiracy, a longtime bogeyman in the Cold War:
Unfortunately, in addition to the sincere expression of opinions by natural food faddists, Audubon groups, and others, members of the chemical industry in this country and in western Europe must deal with sinister influences, whose attacks on the chemical industry have two purposes: 1) to create the false impression that all business is grasping and immoral, and 2) to reduce the use of agricultural chemicals in this country and in the countries of western Europe, so that our food supply will be reduced to east-curtain parity. Many innocent groups are financed and led into attacks on the chemical industry by these sinister parties.
This blend of Cold War fear-mongering—the words “east-curtain” referred to the Soviet Union and its Eastern European satellites—with the undemonstrated claim that Carson had falsely maligned Velsicol’s products was the first salvo in the war pitting business interests against environmental concerns that has raged ever since. As portrayed by industry, on one side are decent, hardworking corporate citizens and the products they make for the betterment of the world and the enrichment of their shareholders. On the other side are the flakes and nature lovers who are either Communists or the hapless pawns of Communist influences. As seen from the point of view of the pesticide makers, Carson’s embryonic new idea—environmentalism—was, by definition, un-American.
Houghton Mifflin forwarded Velsicol’s letter to Carson in Maine. Carson sent a note back to Paul Brooks expressing confidence in her facts—and in the legal department at Houghton Mifflin. She also listed her sources for several of the assertions Velsicol had complained about. This was exactly the sort of thing Carson had expected and the reason she had worked so hard to document everything she’d written in Silent Spring. But Carson argued against engaging Velsicol in a back-and-forth over the accuracy of her book, and instead suggested Houghton Mifflin offer only a “routine acknowledgment” of the company’s letter—which they did.
This didn’t satisfy Velsicol, which wrote again to Houghton Mifflin offering “proof” for the safety of its products and demanding a meeting with the publishing company to resolve their objections to Carson’s book. Houghton Mifflin declined, and this time Velsicol did not pursue the matter further—though the matter pursued them some months later. In June 1963, twenty people in Memphis, Tennessee, were sickened by what they believed were vapors coming off a creek near a pesticide plant operated by Velsicol. A few days later, a couple of dozen workmen were hospitalized after inhaling what was thought to be chlorine gas emanating from the Velsicol facility. Velsicol was hit with a slew of lawsuits.
Then, in April 1964, officials from the USDA and the Public Health Service investigated a large fish kill on the lower Mississippi River. They determined the fish had been poisoned by endrin—the most potent of the organochlorine insecticides—which along with several other powerful pesticides was being discharged into the river by the Velsicol plant at Memphis. Velsicol refused entry to its plant for the investigators, but they found endrin in the river anyway—and in the creek where the first cases of illnesses had occurred the year before. In fact, they found endrin in the Mississippi all the way to New Orleans, which used the river as a public water supply. Tests of tap water in the city showed that routine purification did not remove endrin, which was now present in the city’s drinking water. Public health officials said the residues in drinking water were small, but that no level was considered safe. In early 1965, the Public Health Service made an even more alarming discovery: a four-ton, three-foot-thick deposit of endrin in a Memphis sewer that emptied into the Mississippi. City officials hurriedly closed off the sewer line, while endrin production at the Velsicol plant went ahead as usual.
Theoretically, such a reckless contamination of a large area with pesticides was impossible—or so the federal government claimed as it braced for the imminent publication of Silent Spring. In September 1962, the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare issued a long statement defending the government’s oversight of pesticide use, on which that agency alone would spend $2.7 million in 1962. The department insisted that it recognized that pesticides involved “perils” as well as benefits, and that this was the reason the government closely regulated the industry:
The fact that they [pesticides] are poisons, potentially dangerous to man and wildlife, is a cause for serious concern. Because of this concern, the Federal Government has established protective regulations concerning the manufacture, transportation, and use of these chemicals and has led to continuing programs of research into their immediate and long-term effects on man and his environment.
The agency said it also monitored interstate shipments of various crops to ensure they complied with a law adopted in 1954 setting limits on pesticide residues in produce. A 1958 law extended this regulatory authority to processed foods. More broadly, the agency said its Public Health Service was engaged in “nationwide surveillance” of “pollutants and contaminants in the environment.” And the agency said the government monitored itself—through the Federal Pest Control Review Board, which evaluated pesticide use in federally run programs “to insure that these do not present undue hazards to the public generally or to wildlife.”
But just over a month later Jerome Wiesner reported to the president that a Citizens Advisory Committee had just blasted the FDA—another agency within Health, Education, and Welfare—on the issue of pesticide regulation, pointing out that the FDA could not possibly keep pace with the pesticide industry in setting tolera
nces for residues in food when the number of different pesticide products had swollen to some forty-five thousand. One reason the FDA was struggling, the committee reported, was that few of its field agents knew anything about organic chemistry. The committee said the FDA also needed to improve and expand its independent research on the effects of pesticides.
Copies of Silent Spring started circulating days ahead of its official publication date on September 27, 1962. At a meeting of the American Chemical Society in Atlantic City, New Jersey, Carson’s book—which the New York Times reported had already caused “consternation” inside the chemicals industry—was a hot topic and the subject of sharp criticism. Industry insiders complained to the Times that Silent Spring could impede investment in new pesticides and turn the public against the use of existing ones—with calamitous results. An official from the USDA—so at home at a chemicals industry trade meeting that he chaired one of its sessions—called Carson’s book “one-sided,” as nowhere in it did she explain the extent to which the nation’s food supply depended on the use of chemical pesticides. Nor did she acknowledge what the government was doing to regulate the use of pesticides. The Times reporter found a number of industry representatives who were willing to concede the overall factual accuracy of Silent Spring but none who agreed with Carson’s conclusion that pesticide use, like exposure to radiation, was a threat to human existence.
The New Yorker serialization had covered only about one-third of Silent Spring, and with publication of the book tens of thousands of readers—including most reviewers, columnists, and editorial writers—were soon convinced that pesticides did indeed threaten human well-being. Many liked the handsome pen-and-ink illustrations by the Darlings—though they were eerily stark and haunting in context. Apart from the opening fable, Silent Spring was a sober, methodical book, put together like a high wall, each phrase a brick helping to support all the rest. At its heart was a single proposition: Because all life on earth shares a common biochemical evolutionary history, the idea than a synthetic poison can target a single class of organisms and do no other harm is folly. The claim that a chemical was a “pesticide” denied the shared biology of all living things:
These sprays, dusts, and aerosols are now applied almost universally to farms, gardens, forests, and homes—nonselective chemicals that have the power to kill every insect, the “good” and the “bad,” to still the song of birds and the leaping of fish in the streams, to coat the leaves with a deadly film, to linger on in soil—all this though the intended target may be only a few weeds or insects. Can anyone believe it is possible to lay down such a barrage of poisons on the surface of the earth without making it unfit for all life? They should not be called “insecticides” but “biocides.”
Much of the criticism directed at Silent Spring ignored a key word in that passage—barrage. For Carson the main problem with pesticides was the heedlessness with which they were applied—and the literal overkill that came with their use. In the pages of the book, and in her many public comments about pesticides, Carson reiterated that the careful, limited use of chemical poisons was sometimes justifiable and, in certain circumstances involving the protection of human health, morally responsible. There were, she acknowledged early on in Silent Spring, insect problems that required control—so long as that control was “geared to realities” and was not so belligerent as to “destroy us along with the insects.” Carson thought common sense should determine when chemical insect control was warranted, especially with respect to insect-borne diseases. These diseases, she wrote, were most problematic in places where human populations were overcrowded or “in time of natural disaster or war or in situations of extreme poverty and deprivation. Then control of some sort becomes necessary.”
Carson was not reluctant to challenge her readers. An early chapter—the one that had given Paul Brooks fits as he worked to condense it—was called “Elixirs of Death.” In it, Carson explained the toxic chemistry of the organochlorine and organophosphate insecticides. She knew it would be heavy going but justified it by arguing that “every human being is now subjected to contact with dangerous chemicals, from the moment of conception until death.” This, Carson said, was unprecedented. Pesticides were now so ubiquitous in the environment and in all living things that they could reasonably be said to be “everywhere.” Given that, Carson thought it incomprehensible that anyone would not want to know what these substances were and what harm they might cause: “If we are going to live so intimately with these chemicals—eating and drinking them, taking them into the very marrow of our bones—we had better know something about their nature and their power.”
Most of the chapters in Silent Spring were just as bleak but were less technical. Carson explored the unintended consequences of using chemical pesticides when control was either unnecessary or not worth the risk to other species and to the environment generally—so the book was not so much one-sided as it was about one thing. Carson explained how pesticides contaminate soil and water, how they accumulate in the tissues of animals and people directly exposed to only slight amounts of chemical poisons, how their residues find their way into cow’s milk and human mother’s milk, and how they sometimes cause explosive growth in insect populations that become resistant.
Carson’s exploration of the link between pesticides and human cancer—which Barney Crile had earlier warned her went too far—was scary and speculative, relying as it did on a then-primitive understanding of cell biology and on the anecdotal observations of doctors such as Malcolm Hargraves of the Mayo Clinic, whose testimony about the connection between pesticide use and leukemia during the Long Island case had so impressed Carson.
She also based part of her cancer argument on a theory advanced by a prominent German biochemist named Otto Heinrich Warburg from the Max Planck Institute of Cell Physiology. Warburg had won a Nobel Prize in 1931 and was engrossed in the study of cell respiration—the process by which food is converted to chemical energy. He was convinced that both radiation and chemical carcinogens cause cancer by disrupting normal cell respiration and producing clusters of rogue cells that form tumors. Carson was closer to the truth when she considered an alternative idea in which carcinogens directly damage chromosomes, causing gene mutations and interfering with normal cell division—effects that cascade from one generation of cells to the next, a multiplication of abnormalities that eventually produces cancerous cells. As imperfect as her analysis was, Carson reached an important conclusion: In a world in which we are surrounded by potentially carcinogenic agents, focusing exclusively on ways of curing the disease misses the chance to prevent it by reducing or eliminating its causes.
Carson wrote that the effects of exposure to DDT and other pesticides—like exposure to radiation—was of particular concern for children. Many readers in 1962 already knew they were giving their children milk laced with radionuclides from fallout. Now Carson added DDT to the unwholesome cocktail from the dairy case. Nowhere in Silent Spring does Carson let go of the parallel between pesticides and radiation, and in one of the cancer chapters she found an example of pesticide poisoning that mirrored the most infamous radiation poisoning case ever reported. It was the story of a Swedish farmer who dusted sixty acres of land with a mixture of DDT and benzene hexachloride. There was a breeze that day, and as the man worked clouds of the pesticidal dust swirled around him. Later that evening the farmer felt ill, and about a week later he entered the hospital with a high fever and abnormal blood counts. Two and a half months later he died.
This was, Carson wrote, eerily reminiscent of what had happened to the radioman aboard the Lucky Dragon, Aikichi Kuboyama: “Like Kuboyama, the farmer had been a healthy man, gleaning his living from the land as Kuboyama had taken his from the sea. For each man a poison drifting out of the sky carried a death sentence. For one it was radiation-poisoned ash; for the other, chemical dust.”
Carson rejected the idea that technology inevitably led us to abuse our environment through a desire to regulate it i
n our own interest. She held out hope for sophisticated biological controls that could actually target pest species in a way chemical poisons could not. She contended that pesticides, far from being a scientifically sophisticated means of pest control, were, in fact, a step backward in human progress:
As crude a weapon as the cave man’s club, the chemical barrage has been hurled against the fabric of life—a fabric on the one hand delicate and destructible, on the other miraculously tough and resilient, and capable of striking back in unexpected ways. These extraordinary capacities of life have been ignored by the practitioners of chemical control who have brought to their task no “high-minded orientation,” no humility before the vast forces with which they tamper.
Carson’s closing thought was that the phrase “control of nature” represented an abhorrent idea that was “conceived in arrogance, born of the Neanderthal age of biology and philosophy, when it was supposed that nature exists for the convenience of man.” Now, Carson said, we faced the “alarming misfortune” that so primitive a science had “armed itself with the most modern and terrible weapons.”
On September 25, 1962, two days before publication, Houghton Mifflin held a party for Carson at the Carlton House on Madison Avenue in New York. Then a few days after Silent Spring came out, Life magazine phoned Carson to say they were moving up the schedule to run their story about her right away. Carson, who’d decided not to worry about the magazine getting into “silly personal details,” told Dorothy Freeman she’d have to endure reading about the “new me.”
When the article appeared in the October 12 issue, Life reported that Carson was “unmarried but not a feminist”—evidently an important consideration—and went on to describe her as a “shy, soft-spoken woman miscast in the role of crusader” before characterizing her as exactly that: “Like all good indignant crusaders, Rachel Carson presents a one-sided case. The world she describes so vividly in Silent Spring is a dream world or, more accurately, a nightmare world.”
On a Farther Shore Page 37