How Rachel Carson’s ‘Silent Spring’ Brought an Environmental Awakening
As we march forward from Earth Day, our focus on global mobilization for the environment and protecting the planet’s valuable resources threatened by a changing climate remains steadfast.
It would be remiss to not highlight the meticulous research and details in Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring, published in 1962, which shocked the agricultural industry with her critique of pesticide use in the United States. Her book still matters today. Her work awakened an environmental activism in the American psyche that was not seen since the 19th century when Henry David Thoreau wrote about Walden Pond.
“Every once in a while in the history of mankind, a book has appeared which has substantially altered the course of history,” Senator Ernest Gruening, a Democrat from Alaska, told Carson at a Senate subcommittee hearing on pesticides in 1963. At the time, she was 56 and dying of breast cancer, yet she had told almost no one.
Silent Spring. Credit: RachelCarson.org
Gruening’s statement holds true. Thomas Paine’s Common Sense stirred radical sentiment in the early days of the American Revolution, and Uncle Tom’s Cabin by Harriet Beecher Stowe galvanized the North’s dislike of slavery in the decade leading up to the Civil War. Silent Spring eloquently exposed the hazards of DDT and, at a grander scale, spread public awareness that nature was vulnerable to human intervention and, in return, nature could harm humans. The book has sold more than two million copies.
Carson grew up about 18 miles along the Allegheny River from Pittsburgh in the town of Springdale. She had a natural affinity for the outdoors, which was matched by her love for writing and poetry. Conversely, she could see smoke billowing from the stacks of the American Glue Factory from her bedroom window. It was 1907 during the country’s Industrial Age boom, and the factory was less than a mile away from Carson’s four-room log cabin with her family. Horses were slaughtered in the factory, and the rancid smell of tankage and fertilizer from horse parts was so strong that, along with the mosquitoes that bred in the swamps near the river, it prevented Springdale’s residents from sitting on their porches in the evening.
It was Carson’s mother, Maria, who had great hopes that could be educated and escape Springdale. Rachel won a scholarship to Pennsylvania College for Women, now known as Chatham University, in Pittsburgh. After graduation, she moved to Baltimore and attended graduate school for zoology at John Hopkins University. Carson completed her master’s degree before dropping out to support her family.
Carson truly possessed an ecological view of nature and often described the resiliency of all living things. She became a science editor for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (FWS) and wrote its educational brochures. Her books Under the Sea Wind, The Sea Around Us (which stayed on the New York Times best-seller list for 86 weeks), and The Edge of the Sea were anthems to the interconnectedness of nature.
An elegant Great Egret at the Rachel Carson Reserve in Beaufort, North Carolina. Credit: Pam Schodt from Getty Images
What was first developed in the 1940’s as an insecticide to control insect-borne illnesses like malaria and typhus during WWII, dichloro-diphenyl-trichloroethane, or DDT, became one of the world’s most controversial chemical compounds. Unlike most pesticides, whose effectiveness is limited to destroying one or two types of insects, DDT was capable of killing hundreds of different kinds at once. Carson was destined to learn about this chemical.
Once DDT became available for civilians, only a few people expressed skepticism and caution about this “wonder pesticide.” Carson wrote to Reader’s Digest about a series of DDT tests being conducted near where she lived in Maryland. Her pitch was rejected.
Thirteen years later, Carson’s pitch was reignited when a friend in Cape Cod wrote her a letter about the mysterious disappearance of birds around her house. After a recent DDT treatment for mosquitoes - a treatment deemed harmless by the state of Massachusetts - the birds were literally dropping like flies. The use of DDT had proliferated by that time in the country, and while Carson had gained a wealth of research on the topic, another pitch for a magazine assignment on the subject was rejected again. But, no matter. It was Olga Huckin’s letter to Carson that sparked the work for Silent Spring.
Rachel Carson. Credit: WikimediaCommons
It took Carson four years to complete. The book begins with a haunting myth, “A Fable for Tomorrow,” in which Carson talks about “a town in the heart of America where all life seemed to live in harmony with its surroundings.” She presents not so much as untouched nature, but a town where people and roads coexisted with nature. That is, until, a mysterious affliction overtakes this tranquil place.
“No witchcraft,” Carson writes, “no enemy action had silenced the rebirth of new life in this stricken world. The people had done it themselves.”
Carson goes on to describe how DDT had entered the food chain and became stored in animals’ fatty tissues, including humans, causing cancer and genetic damage. Fish, birds, apple blossoms, and even human children, had been “silenced” by the effects of DDT. Silent Spring made readers bare witness to nature, and how humans are merely a blip on the natural order of things, rather than dominators of nature through chemistry and labeling it “progress.” It also poses a basic moral question about how we treat nature, and demands personal action to be a better society, similar to the calling that Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin accomplished nearly a century earlier.
First, The New Yorker published Silent Spring in three parts in June 1962. It alarmed readers across the country and received harsh criticism from lobbyists in the chemical industry. Monsanto and the American Cyanide Company parroted propaganda against Silent Spring, while other attacks were more personal on Carson’s character, even her sanity.
Carson, due to her diligent preparation, was ready for all of this. She compiled a 55-page brief of notes and a list of experts who had read and approved her manuscript. Prominent scientists rose to Carson’s defense and President John F. Kennedy ordered his scientists advisory committee to examine the issues raised in Silent Spring. DDT came under heavy scrutiny from then on. The burden of proof shifted from DDT’s opponents to its manufacturers. The book paved the way for the creation of the Environmental Protection Agency.
No matter who tried to discredit Carson and Silent Spring, a newly informed public rallied behind environmental law like never before. In 1970, protests successfully prevented the construction of an airport near Everglades National Park. That same year 20 million Americans gathered for the first Earth Day, calling for air and water cleanup and the preservation of natural areas.
Environmentalist Rachel Carson postage stamp. Credit: WilshireImages from Getty Images Signature
The ramifications of Silent Spring are still felt today. Ninety-nine percent of scientists agree that climate change is happening and that humans are connected to exacerbating, if not causing it. Carson was really onto something.
“It was a spring without voices,” Carson wrote. “The public must decide whether it wishes to continue down the present road.”
Learn more:
Natural Resources Defense Council: The Story of Silent Spring
The New York Times: How ‘Silent Spring’ Ignited the Environmental Movement
Earthday.org: Why ‘Silent Spring’ Still Matters Today
The New Yorker: Silent Spring - 1
The New Yorker: Silent Spring - 2
The New Yorker: Silent Spring - 3
RachelCarson.org