Spring is not silent anymore
This newspaper not so long ago ran a full-page story about a major environmental issue that had been ignored for years.
“Now this has changed,” we said. “Now it is a question being asked and argued with vigor” in state legislatures, civic groups, industries, scientific forums, journals, newspapers, the courts, the Congress and the office of the President.
The article was about the side effects of chemical pesticides. It appeared in March 1963.
And it used just two words to explain the dramatic shift in public opinion: Rachel Carson.
Carson was a formal federal biologist and a gifted writer who spent summers in a cottage on Dogfish Head on West Southport Island. Tomorrow is the 100th anniversary of her birth.
Earlier in her career, Carson wrote books about the ocean and intertidal zone. She became Maine’s most famous fan of tide pools – “the primeval meeting place of the elements of earth and water, a place of compromise and conflict and eternal change.” When Carson spoke to groups in Boothbay and Rockland, she would urge the audience to put on blue jeans and sneakers and explore.
Her biggest impact came with the book “Silent Spring,” published in 1962. It laid out evidence that Americans were poisoning the environment and themselves through the overuse of pesticides.
The book led to regulations and a federal ban on DDT, the pesticide blamed for pushing the bald eagle to the brink of extinction. It also is credited with spawning the environmental movement and the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.
After the publication of “Silent Spring,” Carson was welcomed to a Congressional hearing as “the lady who started all this.”
Carson, who would die from cancer in 1964, told the committee, “We are neglecting the golden opportunity to prevent cancer while we spend millions seeking a cure.”
Even before her book was published, critics called her “an hysterical woman” who didn’t know what she was talking about and would send humans back to the dark ages. She still has critics, and some of them imply that her book led to the deaths of countless African children who might have been saved from malaria with more widespread use of DDT. Here's an overview of that claim.
Carson, for her part, called for the end to indiscriminate and unregulated use of pesticides, not for banning necessary uses of the chemicals. Carson simply pointed out, in a way that has never been refuted, that we should pay attention to the costs, as well as the benefits, of using chemicals to shape the environment.
And, as she wrote so well, “The more clearly we can focus our attention on the wonders and realities of the universe around us, the less taste we shall have for destruction.”
Tomorrow’s Maine Sunday Telegram will have some fine writing of its own about Carson and her legacy here. (I can say that because Anne Gleason is writing it, and I’m not.)
And on Monday, the Portland Press Herald will take a closer look at the bald eagle’s recovery and its future.
Posted by at 06:33 AM
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Carson's book has been the object of intense criticism since its publication. The industry-sponsored attacks were often vicious and personal, but there are some legitimate critics of her work. The scholar you cite, the late J. Gordan Edwards, makes some fair points, but many of his claims are overstated.
It is beyond dispute that the indiscriminate sparaying of DDT in the 1950s was an environmental disaster: it accumulated in the food chain and devastated populations of predatory birds, such as bald eagles. That one of the SAFEST pesticides then in use caused this damage suggested that pesticides are inherently dangerous. That is Carson's thesis, and she has been vindicated.
It's true that DDT is not known to harm people. It prevented typhus outbreaks at the end of WWII and saved hundreds of thousands of lives. It may yet be the best way to combat malaria-bearing mosquitoes.
It is not true that Rachel Carson was unaware or indifferent to this, as Edwards asserts, and her courage in the face of personal attacks, and the fact that a female writer who was not a scientist was the only public voice against irresponsible use of pesticides, makes her a person of extradordianry importance.
J. Gordon Edwards was a well-liked outdoorsman, and a respected academic. But when he accuses Carson of deliberately lying, and links her to a larger'conspiracy', he allows his political affiliations-the article you cite is in a pro-Lyndon LaRouche publication- he is simply not credible.
Posted by
Peter MacmillanMay 29, 2007 06:37 AM
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