Skip to main content

Blog Article

The Environmental Impact of ‘Silent Spring’

Exploring Rachel Carson and her magnus opus which launched an environmental movement that remains strong today.

Published November 4, 2005

By Fred Moreno
Academy Contributor

Rachel Carson. Image via USFWS.

“Ecology” derives from the Greek word for “home.” It is defined, in a general sense, as the science that focuses on the interaction of all living things with their environment. Ecology actually owes a debt to Charles Darwin and his studies of the diversity and interdependence of species and their habitats, which laid the groundwork for a new understanding of the natural world. The term itself was coined by the 19th century German zoologist Ernst Haeckel, a staunch advocate of Darwin’s theories on the distribution and abundance of species. (Haeckel is well-known to artists for his meticulous drawings of life forms in his book Kunstformen der Natur.)

Ecology’s popularity as a movement has American roots, however, from its early days as the “nature study movement” and in literary traditions from such writers as Henry David Thoreau and Walt Whitman. As damage to the environment grew more apparent from logging, mining, and industrialization, interest in conservation grew and the establishment of such groups as the Audubon Society and the Sierra Club — as well as modest moves by the federal government to establish national parks and forests — heightened public consciousness.

Silent Spring and the Modern Environmental Movement

But the average American’s knowledge of ecology was minuscule, at best. It took a persistent young biologist and a book to raise the public’s awareness and change the way many people around the world looked at how we live on this planet. The biologist was Rachel Carson and the book was Silent Spring, often cited as one of the two most influential books in American history — the other being Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Historians are nearly unanimous in the belief that the modern environmental movement, which emphasizes pollution and other damage to the quality of life on earth, began with Silent Spring.

Alerting the public to the dangers of dichlorodiphenyltrichloroethanes (DDT) and promoting initiatives to correct the problems it created, the book combined a warning about pesticide pollution with a lyrical celebration of the natural world. Carson outlined how chlorinated hydrocarbons and organic phosphorus insecticides changed the cellular processes of animals, plants, and perhaps even humans. She questioned the wisdom of allowing toxic chemicals to be used in the environment before the impact of their long-term consequences was known. One of the most basic human rights, she said, was the “right of the citizen to be secure in his own home against the intrusion of poisons applied by other persons.”

Benefits Overshadowed by Damage

Of course, the effects of pesticides and other pollutants on the environment and human health was not a new concern. In the 1860s, toxic compounds of lead and arsenic were used in agriculture despite the hazard to health. And DDT itself was not only successful in pest control but even had humanitarian applications during WWII, being used to kill lice, which spread typhus.

(In fact, DDT’s inventor, Swiss chemist Paul Müller, won the Nobel Prize in 1948 “for his discovery of the high efficiency of DDT as a contact poison against several arthropods.”) But its benefits — and those of other of its synthetic relatives such as PCBs and HCB — were soon overshadowed by the damage done to the environment, and to people.

Rachel Carson was not the first to recognize the dangers of DDT, but her talent for conducting research and for synthesizing complex information in accessible terms made her warnings stand out. Born in 1907 in Pennsylvania, she was fascinated by the natural world. She graduated with honors in biology from the Pennsylvania College for Women in 1938 and earned a master’s in zoology from Johns Hopkins, where she also taught.

She worked with the U.S. Bureau of Fisheries (later the Fish and Wildlife Service) and continued her interests in both writing and natural science. Her first book was a description of nature in the ocean, Under the Sea-Wind, followed by The Sea Around Us, which won the National Book Award. It took her four years to research and write Silent Spring and it first saw print as a three-part series in the New Yorker in June, 1962, three months before its official publication as a book.

An Overwhelming Reception

Silent Spring’s reception was overwhelming. Over 100,000 copies sold by Christmas and within the next 10 years, it had been translated into 16 languages. The book has been continuously in print and has sold more than 2 million copies. Despite the book’s resonance with the public and most scientists, Carson came under withering attack by elements of the chemical industry and its supporters in government and the media.

She was accused of being a communist and a crank, and her credentials were questioned. Carson’s biographer Linda Lear notes that she was attacked because she was an “outsider who had not been part of the scientific establishment, first because she was a woman but also because her chosen field, biology, was held in low esteem in the nuclear age.” Critics called her a “bird and bunny lover” who had stepped beyond the bounds of her sex and her science.

Carson responded with dignity and deliberation. She did television and magazine interviews, gave lectures and testified before a U.S. Senate Committee. Finally, a report by President John Kennedy’s Science Advisory Committee vindicated the book and quieted the critics. In the years after Silent Spring, a flood of important environmental legislation passed, starting with the establishment of the Environmental Protection Agency in 1969 and the banning of DDT in 1972. This was followed by acts setting standards for clean air and clean water, as well as legislation to protect workers from toxins in the workplace and to safeguard processed foods from carcinogens.

A Valiant Fight Against Cancer

Tragically, all during the writing of Silent Spring and the turbulent aftermath of its publication, Carson’s health was deteriorating. She learned she had breast cancer in 1960 and endured several rounds of radiation therapy. Despite the treatments, the cancer spread. On April 14, 1964, not quite two years after her groundbreaking book was published, Rachel Carson died; she was 56 years old. In 1980, she was posthumously awarded the nation’s highest civilian honor, the Presidential Medal of Freedom. The citation reads:

Never silent herself in the face of destructive trends, Rachel Carson fed a spring of awareness across America and beyond. A biologist with a gentle, clear voice, she welcomed her audiences to her love of the sea, while with an equally clear voice she warned Americans of the dangers human beings themselves pose for their environment. Always concerned, always eloquent, she created a tide of environmental consciousness that has not ebbed.

Also read: The ISR and Traditional Environmental Stewardship


Author

Image
Contributing Author