The First Environmental Warning Shot — ‘Silent Spring’ at 60

Last year’s COP 26 in Glasgow was billed as a last chance to save the planet. Too little has been done so far despite the science being largely unanimous and despite our understanding that we are — as individuals and organisations — all responsible for change. Awareness has never been higher.

None of this was true before the sixties. Much of the extraordinary change in awareness and activism since then is often traced back to the publication (and its pre book serialisation in The New Yorker) in 1962 of Silent Spring by Rachel Carson. Many see the book as the catalyst for what we now know as the environmental movement; certainly, it is accepted that the grassroots response to the book directly led to the formation of the US Environmental Protection Agency in 1970 and to the passing of US clean air and environmental policy legislation in the 60s. Its significance however would go far beyond the US and was by then only just beginning.

David Attenborough sees it as the book that, after Darwin’s Origin of Species, probably changed the scientific world the most.

The thrust of Carson’s argument was that environmental risks from the overuse of pesticides — particularly at that stage, DDT — are created and stored so that their impacts go far beyond their target, seeping into the soil and thus the food chain for animals and humans.

This central message was understandably uncomfortable for the chemical companies and — in common with much of what we have seen since when business interests are threatened — they fought it with money and influence.

Carson’s concerns went back to the mid 1940s but became her focus in 1957 when the US Federal Government instigated a programme of aerial spraying of DDT and other pesticides on land that included private farms. In January 1958, a citizens’ ‘Committee Against Mass Poisoning’ drew attention to aerial-spraying of insecticides which seemed to result in the death of crops and wildlife rather than the insects that were targeted. The committee filed a lawsuit, and it was suggested that Carson (though not a journalist and not yet known as an environmentalist — if such a term had existed) cover the story.

For four years Carson collected evidence of environmental damage attributed to DDT and this work bought her into contact with scientists working in similar areas (there had already been legal actions against the US Government by organic market gardeners) from whom further evidence was gleaned. In parallel too was work by cancer researchers who were classifying pesticides as carcinogenic. At the time however all of this was left field.

That Silent Spring became both mainstream and immensely popular is therefore quite remarkable. A few years earlier, Carson had pitched an idea to the Reader’s Digest about DDT and “whether it may upset the whole delicate balance of nature if unwisely used.” It was rejected.

In 1962 then, Silent Spring created its own genre, market and following. One of the reasons was no doubt that it was a book about science written with passion and emotion; Mark Lynas describes her as “a gifted writer [and] this quality made her broadside against chemical agriculture all the more devastating.”

Carson was not a recognised Scientist and her previous writing experience had not been about the environment or pesticides. Both facts were used for targets on her back by her detractors. She was however very experienced in academic research and already an accomplished writer. In 1951 her history of the ocean, ‘The Sea Around Us’, was published to enormous success (it remained on the New York Times Best Seller List for more than 18 months) and was one of a distinguished trilogy on the subject.

Indeed, this work illustrated Carson’s academic and intellectual rigour which had been developed studying biology (after switching from English) since the age of 21. She studied Zoology and Genetics at Johns Hopkins before graduating with a Masters in Zoology in 1932 aged 24.

Carson’s life though was certainly not one of cloistered academia. Both then and later it was interrupted by hardship (Jill LePore of The New Yorker wrote that “her mother sold apples and chickens and the family china to help pay the tuition”) and the need to support her family. At various times she was the sole breadwinner in a house of six, was required to care for her ageing mother after her father had died and was guardian of an adopted grandnephew.

Carson’s work focus was research, and it was here that she developed her career in the field of aquatic biology starting out at the US Bureau of Fisheries. This of course fostered in her an analytical and (what we would today call) an evidence-based approach essential in joining the dots in an area in which no precedents yet existed. Connections had not yet been made between wartime use of DDT to stop the spread of typhus and untested post war domestic use in agriculture. She was asking new questions. By the late 1950s an increasing array of pesticide programmes were underway and being planned so these questions seemed more pressing to anyone who was taking notice. Few were.

Silent Spring then would emerge into a world with little awareness of the subject let alone of the problem. When first reading the manuscript, Wiliam Shawn, The New Yorker’s Managing Editor, complimented her on making the subject “literature, full of beauty and loveliness and depth of feeling.” It was this quality that would make it a hit with readers but also open it to attack by its detractors who assumed the guise of ‘serious science’ against her amateur lyricism.

The charge of course was lazy. Whilst her education and experience were not directly relevant, both were nevertheless substantial and related. Moreover, she had spoken to many Scientists in preparing the work and most chapters had been reviewed by experts who supported both her and her book’s conclusions (later the President’s Scientific Advisory Committee would report to President Kennedy its agreement with the central concerns of the book and recommend both a short-term strengthening of protective measures and a longer term “comprehensive program for controlling environmental pollution.”)

Carson and her publishers were aware of the likelihood of criticism and attack (and maybe legal action.) In answer to her friend Dorothy Freeman’s concern, Carson wrote her a letter expressing her determination — “knowing what I do, there would be no future peace for me if I kept silent.” This would be admirably brave in anyone but especially so for Carson who by now was seriously ill. Completion of the book was delayed firstly by her suffering from a duodenal ulcer and resulting infections and then by a mastectomy following the discovery of cysts in her breast. Within months however it was discovered that the tumour was malignant. Aware that her illness may be used by her opponents, she chose to keep it private and so no one was aware as she prepared to meet the oncoming blitz.

When it came it was led by both individual chemical companies (including DuPont) and general industry lobbyists. The thrust of the industry’s repudiation was that Carson’s position was (in the words of Carson biographer Linda Lear) that of an ‘hysterical alarmist.’ One of the industry’s leading spokespeople was Dr Robert White-Stevens who rubbished her and her book’s credentials — “the major claims in her book are gross distortions of the actual facts, completely unsupported by scientific experimental evidence and general practical experience in the field.” According to Lear, even a former US Agriculture Secretary apparently wondered in public ‘why a spinster with no children was so interested in genetics’. Lear sees it that “her unpardonable offence was that she had overstepped her place as a woman.”

There were threats to sue and a campaign to publish alternative views promoting the use of pesticides (Monsanto’s ‘The Desolate Year’ was a parody depicting a world of famine and catastrophe caused by the abandonment of pest control.) The attacks were often heavy handed and — from today’s perspective — clumsily inaccurate. Critics accused her of a Luddite desire to ban all pesticides which was never the case; she understood and supported the limited use of pesticides but argued for more research into environmental impacts, particularly from overuse.

Carson resolutely defended herself with an impressively calm and objective demeanour. Her strength was quite extraordinary given the desperately serious decline in her health at the time. Between January and March, a combination of respiratory problems, anaemia, and the return and spread of cancer rendered her condition increasingly desperate. She died on April 14, 1964.

Despite widespread recognition and respect right to the end of her life, the criticism and attacks would continue.

By the mid 70s with DDT banned in the US, her detractors shifted target. Rather than concentrating on the domestic impact on farming, they looked at the international implications of DDT withdrawal from mosquito control in the fight against malaria. This angle has continued ever since, with some maniacally claiming Carson to be personally responsible for tens of millions of consequent deaths. Such an accusation seems foolish given that

• the US ban was for US agricultural use (albeit with an exemption for public health which was exercised throughout the 70s in States including Louisiana, Texas, and California) so it had no bearing on international mosquito control (a later international treaty ban again included an exemption for malaria control), and
• mass outdoor spraying of DDT for malaria control had already ceased in the 70s and 80s (in the case of sub-Saharan Africa as early as 1969, well before the US ban) simply because it was no longer effective. Mosquitos had developed resistance which was a consequence of over-use — the very risk that Carson had warned against.

The focus of Carson’s work in the early 60s was on the potential dangers of DDT primarily to wildlife. She did not claim that these risks were proven or that they would necessarily transfer to humans, but she raised the possibility and called for consequent action.

Now however the actual risks are better understood. Over the years since Silent Spring was published, researchers have linked exposure to DDT with a range of serious health impacts including birth defects, reduced fertility and testicular cancer. As recently as 2021, teams at University of California and the Public Health Institute in Oakland published evidence that third generations of women exposed to DDT in pregnancy suffer from high rates of obesity and other conditions that place them at higher risk of breast cancer and high blood pressure. The US Environmental Protection Agency now classifies DDT as a probable human carcinogen. All of this would suggest to most of us that Carson’s views have been vindicated. Her opponents think very differently.

In their book ‘Merchants of Doubt,’ Naomi Oreskes and Erik Conway describe the way in which the tobacco, sugar, and fossil fuel industries sow doubt around science by the creation of contradictory ‘evidence,’ sometimes via junk science or at the very least findings from directly funded work feigning independence. In today’s post-truth age, we have become used to a barrage of statistical claims from opposing sides and attuned to the likelihood that comparisons are rarely like-for-like (sometimes solid peer-reviewed evidence on the one side versus junk science/PR focused smokescreens on the other.)

Silent Spring has not, it seems, been immune to this. A bewildering array of impressively titled ‘Institutes’ and ‘Think Tanks’ claim that Carson got it wrong, and these accusations have often migrated from their original niche sources to appear in the mainstream media. The reason for the continuing attacks six decades on seems clear — whilst Silent Spring focussed on DDT, the attention it drew has since extended to the full range of climate change threats. To Carson’s admirers this is a great achievement but to her detractors it released the dangerous genie of environmentalism. Ongoing attacks are an attempt to chip away at the foundations of this much bigger beast, often oddly seen through a political lens (The Mail’s Richard Littlejohn describes climate activism as a ‘left wing cause.’)

Ten years ago, in his consideration of the book’s impact at 50, Robin McKie quoted in The Guardian Carson’s denunciation of the links found between science and industry. “When a scientific organisation speaks,” she asked, “whose voice do we hear — that of science or of the sustaining industry?” We are still asking that question and we should remain very sceptical of those who would deny the implication.

Even today with mostly universal agreement on the science, we shouldn’t be surprised that the attacks persist. There is still a feeling in some quarters that humankind knows best — that we can tamper at will. When Rachel Carson debated with White-Stevens in the days after the launch of Silent Spring, she said — “to these people apparently the balance of nature was something that was repealed as soon as man came on the scene. Well, we might just as well assume that you could repeal the law of gravity.”

In these days of ever record-breaking floods, heatwaves, and polar ice melts we are never short of proof of our own powerlessness. And now that the world’s population has grown to 8 bn from the 3.2 bn when Silent Spring was published, the threats are greater and the means of addressing them more complex. In short, we have NEVER needed to address so many environmental risks with such urgency.

Howard F Lyman (author of ‘‘Mad Cowboy,’ his story of turning away from big agriculture towards ‘family farming’ and a plant-based diet) best sums up the impact of Silent Spring on the chemical industry — “it must be like one of those annoying car alarms that just won’t shut off.”

An irritant to some and a saviour to others — either way it’s still a warning grabbing our attention.