SILENT SPRING

Reviewed 4/27/2003

Silent Spring, by Rachel Carson

SILENT SPRING
Rachel Carson
Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1962

Rating:

5.0

High

LibCong 60-5148 368pp. HC/FHD $?

DDT. Malathion. Chlordane & heptachlor. Aldrin & dieldrin. These substances, and more, were indicted by Rachel Carson's path-breaking book. The flowering of organic chemistry that gave us our many varieties of plastics1 also produced a host of herbicides and pesticides that seemed a Godsend in the war against malarial mosquitoes and other scourges. And so they were. But they were also highly dangerous — a fact the corporations that manufactured the profitable substances tended to deny or minimize.

Indeed, when Silent Spring was published in 1962, its author was denounced as a meddling ignoramus. She was a woman, after all, and back then women were not supposed to understand such things. Her book was also denigrated for excessive concern with wild animals and plants.

Today, of course, we recognize the dangers of contamination with pesticides — with manufactured chemicals in general. We also understand the concept of ecology: how disturbances, of whatever origin, can ripple through the web of life to cause devastation far from their initial point of appearance.

That is not a new understanding; it predates Rachel Carson by many decades. But she was the writer who understood the scope of the problem in both emotional and intellectual terms, and had the skill and dedication to make that understanding available to the public. Quite simply, Rachel Carson was right; the pesticide companies and the Department of Agriculture were wrong. The book documents that beyond any rational hope of refutation. No further study was needed; widespread experimentation of long duration had already been performed, and the subjects were the people and the natural environs of these United States. All that was needed was to distill the research reports, news accounts, and anecdotes into a coherent account that the lay reader could absorb. In that endeavor, Rachel Carson succeeded admirably — so much so that the two-word title Silent Spring has itself become a shorthand identifier for the pesticide problem.

Merely to read the accounts of incidents presented here is to share Carson's outrage. It is not merely that massive amounts of pesticides were sprayed over cities and suburbs. It is not that this was often done with little justification and no advance notice. It is not even the collateral damage that ensued: eradication of the entire songbird populations in the sprayed area; destruction of beneficial insects like bees; numerous deaths of wild mammals, livestock and household pets; immediate cases of illness in humans exposed. No, the final outrage is that the people responsible, the "control men", as Ms. Carson called them, consistently denied the truth of reports by affected families, by scientists in the field, even by Congressmen and a Supreme Court Justice2. This behavior is strongly reminiscent of the way tobacco company executives in our own day stonewalled over whether cigarettes cause lung cancer. In both cases, the threats to health are denied or minimized. In both cases, the motivation is the same: to keep the product selling and the money flowing. As Ms. Carson writes on page 162, about the campaign to eradicate fire ants3 in the southeast,

United States pesticide makers appear to have tapped a sales bonanza in the increasing number of broad-scale pest elimination programs conducted by the U.S. Department of Agriculture," cheerfully reported one trade journal in 1958, as the fire ant program got under way.

– Page 162

Her research was thorough. Poring over newspaper stories, academic journals, Department of Agriculture publications, and the newsletters of county agriculture extension offices, interviewing entomologists, medical doctors and other experts, and talking to ordinary folks affected, she documented the widespread misuse of pesticides that took place mostly in the 1950-1960 decade. Briefly, that misuse had the following results:

The book presents many detailed descriptions of incidents of misuse. But this is no mere litany of disasters, nor a blanket condemnation of an evil pesticide establishment. Ms. Carson recommends better alternatives throughout, and sums these up in her final chapter, "The Other Road". She recognizes that pesticides have value when properly used, and acknowledges the Department of Agriculture when it does so. Her book nevertheless closes with a warning against the technological hubris which fosters the delusion that newly invented solutions are always best.

The "control of nature" is a phrase conceived in arrogance, born of the Neanderthal age of biology and philosophy, when it was supposed that nature exists for the convenience of man. The concepts and practices of applied entomology for the most part date from that Stone Age of science. It is our alarming misfortune that so primitive a science has armed itself with the most modern and terrible weapons, and that in turning them against the insects it has also turned them against the earth.

– Page 297

Rachel Carson was fond of songbirds, flowers, and butterflies. That comes through very clearly in many passages. So does her solid understanding of science. Silent Spring deserves to be read for both reasons, and its warning heeded, despite the fact that so much has been learned since its publication. For the same sort of mistakes are being made: pesticide residues still occur on fruits and vegetables, and farm workers still suffer from excessive exposure to these chemicals.

Fortunately, it is an easy read — if due to its subject not a pleasant one. Facts and figures are well presented; they do not overwhelm the reader, and the text flows smoothly. Wonderfully detailed drawings by Lois and Louis Darling decorate the opening of each of its seventeen chapters. The List of Principal Sources runs 54 pages, and is cross-referenced to the text. There is also a thorough index.

It is almost free of mistakes. I noticed but three, shown below; the first one is almost certainly a typographical error, and the other two definitely are.

Page 17: "Although the Second World War marked a turning away from inorganic chemicals as pesticides into the wonder world of the carbon molecule, a few of the old materials persist."
  The highlighted phrase should read "hydrocarbon molecule".
Page 241: "Part of the public trust in such an eventual outcome results from the misconception that cancer is a single, though mysterious disease, with a single cause and, hopefully, a single cure."
  Missing comma. The highlighted phrase should read "cancer is a single, though mysterious, disease,".
Page 286: "As little as one microgram (1/1000 gram) in a trap is an effective lure."
  Oh, those pesky powers of ten! Pheromones are potent, so 1 microgram is probably right. Then the fraction should read "(1/1,000,000 gram)".

It also deserves to be kept as a reference, and as a collectible. In fact, based on this one book, I'll venture to say that if you can find a full set of Rachel Carson's books, original editions in good condition, you'll have a treasure that will grow in value in every sense of that term.

1 Touted so memorably in The Graduate.
2 Justice William O. Douglas wrote a book about environmental destruction caused by the U.S. Forest Service spraying in Wyoming's Bridger National Forest: My Wilderness: East to Katahdin, New York: Doubleday, 1961.
3 This campaign involved a massive use of dieldrin and heptachlor, relatively new pesticides. They proved ineffective against the fire ant, whose threat was overblown in any case.
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