Wonder and humility are wholesome emotions,
and they do not exist side by side with a lust for destruction.
– Rachel Carson

“Headlines in the New York Times in July 1962 captured the national sentiment: “Silent Spring is now noisy summer.” In the few months between the New Yorker‘s serialization of Silent Spring in June and its publication in book form that September, Rachel Carson’s alarm touched off a national debate on the use of chemical pesticides, the responsibility of science, and the limits of technological progress. When Carson died barely eighteen months later in the spring of 1964, at the age of fifty-six, she had set in motion a course of events that would result in a ban on the domestic production of DDT and the creation of a grass-roots movement demanding protection of the environment through state and federal regulation. Carson’s writing initiated a transformation in the relationship between humans and the natural world and stirred an awakening of public environmental consciousness.

“In 1962, however, the multi-million-dollar industrial chemical industry was not about to allow a former government editor, a female scientist without a Ph.D. or an institutional affiliation…to undermine public confidence in its products or to question its integrity. It was clear to the industry that Rachel Carson was a hysterical woman… She was a woman who kept cats and was therefore clearly suspect. (Emphasis mine.) She had overstepped the bounds of her gender and science. But just in case her claims did gain an audience, the industry spent a quarter of a million dollars to discredit her research and malign her character.”

– Lear, Linda. Introduction. Silent Spring, by Carson, First Mariner Books, 2002, pp. x-xix

Rachel Louise Carson (May 27, 1907 – April 14, 1964) was an American marine biologist, writer (publishing her first story at the age of 10), and conservationist whose sea trilogy (1941–1955) and book Silent Spring (1962) are credited with advancing marine conservation and the global environmental movement. Silent Spring inspired a grassroots environmental movement that led to the creation of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. Ms. Carson was posthumously awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom by President Jimmy Carter.

Reading Silent Spring for the second time, I realize this was Carson’s “ode to nature”. Elegantly weaving evidentiary details into her storytelling, Rachel Carson was as much a poet as a scientist – and these two are not diametrically opposed, as much as people might tell you otherwise. Rachel Carson was an independent woman with a mind of her own. Lear writes “Her career path was nontraditional.” and “She deliberately wrote for the public rather than for narrow scientific audience.” These alone made her an outsider in the scientific community, but once Silent Spring was published she became a revolutionary voice speaking up for the rights of all Life on this planet – and a threat to the status quo.

Rachel Carson: Hero(ine), REBEL – and cat lover.

It was a spring without voices.

Elixirs of Death
• For the first time in the history of the world, every human being is now subjected to contact with dangerous chemicals, from the moment of conception until death.
• In the course of developing agents of chemical warfare, some of the chemicals created in the laboratory were found to be lethal to insects…insects were widely used to test chemicals as agents of death for man.

Surface Waters and Underground Seas
• The groundwater between [the Rocky Mountain Arsenal of the Army Chemical Corps] and the farms had become contaminated and it had taken 7 to 8 years for the wastes to travel underground. This seepage had continued to spread and had further contaminated an area of unknown extent [and] investigators knew of no way to contain the contamination or halt its advance. Chemists at the plant concluded that the 2,4-D had been formed spontaneously in the open basins. The holding ponds had become chemical laboratories for the production of a new chemical.
  (Related: Silent Spring – The Rocky Mountain Arsenal)
• The following winter months brought the first intimation that other life was affected: the western grebes on [Clear Lake] began to die, and soon more than hundred of them were reported dead. When the fish of Clear Lake also were analyzed the picture began to take form – the poison being picked up by the smallest organisms, concentrated and passed on to the larger predators. The poison had not really left the lake; it had merely gone into the fabric of the life the lake supports.
• When sportsmen of an area want to “improve” fishing in a reservoir, they prevail on authorities to dump quantities of poison into it to kill the undesired fish, which are then replaced with hatchery fish more suited to the sportsman’s taste.

Soil is in part a creation of life.

Realms of the Soil
• Life not only formed the soil, but other living things of incredible abundance and diversity now exist within it; if this were not so the soil would be a dead and sterile thing. Without the nitrogen-fixing bacteria, for example, plants would starve for want of nitrogen, though surrounded by a sea of nitrogen-containing air. This soil community consists of a web of interwoven lives. What happens to these incredibly numerous and vitally necessary inhabitants of the soil when poisonous chemicals are carried down into their world?
• Benzene hexachloride persists at least eleven years; heptachlor or a more toxic derived chemical, at least nine. Chlordane has been recovered twelve years after its application.
• Although organic insecticides have been largely substituted for arsenic, the tobacco plants continue to pick up the old poison, for the soils of tobacco plantations are now thoroughly impregnated with residues of a heavy and relatively insoluble poison, arsenate of lead.
• Even unsprayed crops may take up enough insecticide merely from the soil to render them unfit for market.

Earth’s Green Mantle
• Many [plants] are marked for destruction merely because they happen to be in the wrong place at the wrong time.
• The earth’s vegetation is part of a web of life in which there are intimate and essential relations between plants and the earth, between plants and other plants, between plants and animals. Sometimes we have no choice but to disturb these relationships, but we should do so thoughtfully, will full awareness that what we do may have consequences remote in time and place.
• The program of sage eradication has been under way for a number of years. Several government agencies are active in it; industry has joined with enthusiasm to promote and encourage an enterprise which creates expanded markets not only for grass seed but for a large assortment of machines for cutting and plowing and seeding. The newest addition to the weapons is the use of chemical sprays. The spraying also eliminates a great many plants that were not its intended target.
  (Related: My wilderness: east to Katahdin)

The chemical weed killers are a bright new toy,

• Such plants are “weeds” only to those who make a business of selling and applying chemicals. I once read an extraordinary statement of a weed killer’s philosophy. The author defended the killing of good plants “simply because they are in bad company.”
• Of some 70 species of shrubs and vines that are typical roadside species in the eastern states alone, abot 65 are immportant to wildlife as food. Such vegetation is also the habitat of wild bees and other pollinating insects. Even the farmer himself seldom understands the value of wild bees and often participates in the very measures that rob him of their services. These insects, so essential to our agriculture and indeed to our landscape as we know it, deserve something better from us than the senseless destruction of their habitat.
• Seldom is the question asked, What is the relation between the weed and the soil? Presumably the weed is taking something from the soil; perhaps it is also contributing something to it. One very useful function of natural plant communities (weeds) is to serve as an indicator of the condition of the soil. This useful function is of course lost where chemical weed killers have been used.
• Crabgrass exists only in an unhealthy lawn. It is a symptom, not a disease in itself.

Needless Havoc
• The (1959) Michigan spraying was one of the first large-scale attacks on the Japanese beetle from the air. The choice of aldrin was determined by the wish to save money. Within a few days after the dusting operation, the Detroit Audubon Society began receiving calls about the birds. A local veterinarian reported that his office was full of clients with dogs and cats that had suddenly sickened.

Cats, who so meticulously groom their coats and lick their paws, seemed to be most affected. Their illness took the form of severe diarrhea, vomiting, and convulsions. The only advice the veterinarian could give his clients was not to let the animals out unnecessarily, or to wash the paws promptly if they did so.

• Perhaps no community has suffered more for the sake of a beetleless world than Sheldon (Illinois). The first “eradication” took place (in 1954), when dieldrin was applied to 1400 acres by air.

It was a rare farm in the Sheldon area that was blessed by the presence of a cat after the war on beetles was begun. Ninety percent (Emphasis mine.) of all the farm cats fell victims to the dieldrin during the first season of spraying. Cats are extremely sensitive to insecticides and especially so to dieldrin. In western Java in the course of the anti-malarial program carried out by the World Health Organization, many cats are reported to have died. So many were killed that the price of a cat more than doubled. Similarly, the WHO, spraying in Venezuela, is reported to have reduced cats to the status of a rare animal.

• These insecticides are not selective poisons. Each of them is used for the simple reason that it is a deadly poison.

(Related: Online study guide for Silent Spring, Chapter 7: Needless Havoc contains the entire chapter)

And No Birds Sing
• “The campus is serving as a graveyard for most of the robins that attempt to take up residence in the spring,” said Dr. Wallace. It became evident that “in spite of the assurances of the insecticide people that their sprays were ‘harmless to birds’ the robins were really dying of insecticidal (DDT) poisoning”. In spite of six years’ spraying, the university campus had lost 86% of its elms, half of them victims of Dutch elm disease. The key to a healthy plant or animal community lies in what the British ecologist Charles Elton calls “the conservation of variety.” Even a generation ago no one knew that to fill large areas with a single species of tree was to invite disaster. And so whole towns lined their streets and dotted their parks with elms, and today the elms die and so do the birds.
  (Related: A Food Chain Mystery: From Elm Leaves to a Silent Spring
  DDT Is Still With Us, 50 Years Since It Was Banned)
• The eagles have almost certainly been storing up the DDT in the tissues of their bodies. And like the grebes, the pheasants, the quail, and the robins, they are less and less able to produce young and to preserve the continuity of their race.

Insecticidal poison affects a generation
once removed from initial contact with it.

• Then about 1956 there was a change to dual-purpose seed treatment; in addition to a fungicide, dieldrin, aldrin, or heptachlor was added to combat soil insects. Thereupon the situation changed for the worse. “Pigeons are suddenly dropping out of the sky dead,” said one witness. Of the birds analyzed, all but one contained pesticide residues. The single exception was a snipe, which is not a seed-eating bird. Between November 1959 and April 1960 at least 1300 foxes died. The actions of the moribund foxes were those of animals poisoned by chlorinated hydrocarbon insecticides.
• In California orchards sprayed with this same parathion, workers handling foliage that had been treated a month earlier collapsed and went into shock.

Rivers of Death
• When millions of tons of poisonous chemicals are applied to the surface of the land, it is inevitable that some of them will find their way into the ceaseless cycle of waters moving between land and sea. Examples of the destruction of fish by agricultural crop sprayings and dustings are everywhere to be found.
• The manager of the [chemical] plant acknowledged that such disposal of insecticide spillage and residues [into storm drains] had been common practice for the past 10 years. On searching further, the fishery officers found other plants where rains or ordinary clean-up waters would carry insecticides into the [storm drains].
• Crabs set upon and destroyed the moribund fishes, but the next day were dead themselves.  (Related: Pesticides, pollutants found in marine life in lagoon, off coast)

Once [poisons] were kept in containers
marked with skull and crossbones.

Indiscriminately from the Skies
• Neither [gypsy moth or fire ant] is a native insect but both have been in this country for many years without creating a situation calling for desperate measures. Yet drastic action was suddenly taken [against the gypsy moth], under the end-justifies-the-means philosophy [by the Dept. of Agriculture]. Planes showered down the prescribed DDT-in-fuel-oil with impartiality, showering insecticide over children at play and commuters at railway stations.
• With the sudden development of chemicals of broad lethal powers, there came a sudden change in the official attitude toward the fire ant. In 1957 the US Department of Agriculture launched one of the most remarkable publicity campaigns in its history. The fire ant suddenly became the target of a barrage of stories portraying it as a killer of birds, livestock, and man. (Emphasis mine.) “United States pesticide makers appear to have tapped a sales bonanza in the increasing numbers of broad-scale pest elimination programs conducted by the U.S. Department of Agriculture,” cheerfully reported one trade journal in 1958. (Follow the $$$)
  Just how sound were these claims? “damage to plants in general is rare”, “has not received a single report of damage to plants by ants in the past five years…No damage to livestock has been observed”, “there has never been recorded in Alabama a human death resulting from the bites of imported fire ants”, “in the almost 40 years that south Alabama has had the fire ant, game populations have shown a steady and very substantial increase”.
  The Department of Agriculture has consistently denied livestock losses related to the fire ant program.
  (Related: Agriculture Department to Abandon Campaign Against the Fire Ant)

Beyond the Dreams of the Borgias
• The contamination of our world is not alone a matter of mass spraying. Each of these recurrent exposures contributes to the progressive buildup of chemicals in our bodies and so to cumulative poisoning.
• Every hardware store, garden-supply shop, and supermarket hs rows of insecticides for every conceivable horticultural situation. Almost every newspaper’s garden page and the majority of the gardening magazines take their use for granted. (Still true today.)
• It has been medically established that persons who lived and died before the dawn of the DDT era (about 1942) contained no trace of DDT or any similar material in their tissues. Meats and any products derived from animal fats contain the heaviest residues of chlorinated hydrocarbons. This is because these chemicals are soluble in fat. Cooking does not destroy residues. The fact that every meal we eat carries its load of chlorinated hydrocarbons is the inevitable consequence of the almost universal spraying or dusting of agricultural crops with these poisons.
• To establish tolerances is to authorize contamination of public food supplies with poisonous chemicals in order that the farmer and the processor may enjoy the benefit of cheaper production.

“Our fate could be sealed
twenty or more years before the development of symptoms.”

The Human Price
• As the tide of chemicals born of the Industrial Age has arisen to engulf our environment, a drastic change has come about in the nature of the most serious public health problems.
• Both major types of insecticides, the chlorinated hydrocarbons and the organic phosphates, directly affect the nervous system.
• A human being, unlike a laboratory animal living under rigidly controlled conditions, is never exposed to just one chemical alone.
• The living cell assaulted by radiation suffers a variety of injuries. All these consequences of radiation have been duplicated in laboratory studies by a large group of chemicals known as radiomimetic or radiation-imitating. Mustard gas as a mutagen has now been joined by a long list of other chemicals known to alter genetic material in plants and animals. Mosquitos exposed to DDT for several generations turned into strange creatures called gynandromorphs – part male and part female.

One in Every Four
• With the advent of man the situation began to change, for man, alone of all forms of life, can create cancer-producing substances, which in medical terminology are called carcinogens. The 20th century was to create countless new cancer-causing chemicals and to bring the general population into intimate contact with them. (Carcinogens have continued to be created well into the 21st century.)
• Dr. Francis Ray of the University of Florida warned that: “we may be initiating cancer in the children of today by the addition of chemicals [to food]… We will not know, perhaps for a generation or two, what the effects will be.” (I suggest that we’ve already seen the effects, which grow exponentially in each generation of Life.)
• What the public is asked to accept as “safe” today may turn out tomorrow to be extremely dangerous. (Related: The effect of Agent Orange on U.S. veterans)
  (Since these were not being manufactured at the time Silent Spring was published, I would add genetically-modified organisms and products created with biotechnology, including newer gene-editing techniques such as CRISPR; the ramifications of which we may not hear about until it’s too late.)
• Many of the most distinguished research men look with suspicion on any agent that damages the chromosomes, interferes with cell division, or causes mutations; any mutation is a potential cause for cancer. (BTW, the “r” in the bovine growth hormone rBST/rBGH refers to Recombinant DNA – a GMO; this is also true for mRNA vaccines. In fact, word is that ALL vaccines are now produced with genetically-modified recombinant DNA.)

“The goal of curing the victims of cancer is more exciting,
more tangible, more glamorous and rewarding than prevention.”
– Dr. Hueper

• The road to cancer may also be an indirect one. A substance that is not a carcinogen in the ordinary sense may disturb the normal functioning of some part of the body in such a way that malignancy results. (Such as chlorinated hydrocarbons.) The situation is made even more complicated by the fact that one chemical may act on another to alter its effect. There may be interaction, too, between a physical and a chemical agent. (Such as X-ray and urethane, or water polluted with detergents which may promote cancer by acting on the lining of the digestive tract.)

Nature Fights Back

Nature is not so easily molded.

• By their very nature chemical controls are self-defeating. [They] may have been pretested against a few individual species, but not against living communities. The balance of nature is not a status quo; it is fluid, ever shifting, in a constant state of adjustment. Man, too, is part of this balance. (An example of this would be if apex predators were eliminated, their prey over-multiplied, then subsequently died of starvation because their environment could no longer sustain them – thus killing off more prey than the predators would have done in the first place.) We are seldom aware of the protection afforded by natural enemies until it fails. Yet we have turned our artillery against our friends.

The Rumblings of an Avalanche
• Dr. A.W.A. Brown: “Barely a decade after the introduction of the potent synthetic insecticides in public health programmes, the main technical problem is the development of resistance to them by the insects they formerly controlled.” The chemical industry is loath to face up to the unpleasant fact of resistance.
• “If insects can become resistant to chemicals, could human beings do the same thing?” Theoretically they could [however] human populations reproduce at the rate of roughly three generations per century, but new insect generations arise in a matter of days or weeks.
• Life is a miracle beyond our comprehension, and we should reverence it even where we have to struggle against it. Humbleness is in order; there is no excuse for scientific conceit here. (Emphasis mine.)

The Other Road
• A truly extraordinary variety of alternatives to the chemical control of insects is available. All have this in common: they are biological solutions, based on understanding of the living organisms they seek to control, and of the whole fabric of life to which these organisms belong. The predator and the preyed upon exist not alone, but as part of a vast web of life, all of which needs to be taken into account.

The “control of nature” is a phrase conceived in arrogance.

– Silent Spring (1962)

In the end, Rachel Carson remained suspicious of promises of “better living through chemistry” and of claims that technology would create a progressively brighter future. This is something she and I share. Something I’m hoping more and more humans will do as well.

All images remain the property of their original owners. All rights reserved.

The Right Way to Remember Rachel Carson
Rachel Carson and the legacy of Silent Spring
Rachel Carson and The House Where She Wrote Silent Spring
The Other Side of Silence: Rachel Carson’s Views of Animals
Rachel Carson Landmark Alliance
Rachel Carson @ Wikipedia

Pesticide Action Network
Chlordane and heptachlor are known as persistent organic pollutants (POP), classified among the “dirty dozen” and banned by the 2001 Stockholm Convention on Persistent Organic Pollutants. [link]
DDT: The 50th Anniversary Everyone Forgot
It is legal to manufacture DDT in the US, though it can only be exported for use in foreign nations. DDT can only be used in the US for public health emergencies, such as controlling vector disease.
List of Superfund sites
Superfund sites are polluted locations in the US requiring a long-term response to clean up hazardous material contaminations. As of August 17, 2022, there were 1,329 Superfund sites in the US National Priorities List. Forty-three additional sites have been proposed for entry on the list, and 452 sites have been cleaned up and removed from the list. New Jersey, California, and Pennsylvania have the most sites.
DuPont and Robert Bilott
Hinkley groundwater contamination
Kerr-McGee Corporation’s large scale perchlorate water contamination
Genetically modified sugar beet

Earth Day 2023 Part 1: Frac(k)tures, EVs, and the search for functioning brain cells
Earth Day 2023 Part 2: Chemical Euphoria, Climate Change Cretins, and the Terminally Brain-Dead
The species weeds most resemble is US.