Carson, Rachel

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Rachel Carson

BORN: May 27, 1907 • Springdale, Pennsylvania

DIED: April 14, 1964 • Silver Spring, Maryland

American author; biologist

American biologist Rachel Carson (1907–1964) warned of the dangers of chemical pesticides in her 1962 best-selling book, Silent Spring. Pesticides are chemicals used to destroy insects, especially those that damage crops or spread disease. Carson's arguments provoked major public debate about whether such poisons, while effective in eliminating mosquitoes and other pests, might prove far more dangerous to the American landscape and even the health of its citizens in the long run. In the book, she cited evidence that bird populations were dwindling as a result of the overuse of a pesticide known as DDT (dichloro-diphenyl-trichloroethane). Carson told her readers that there could be a time in the future when no songbirds would be alive to return each spring. Ultimately, DDT was banned in the United States ten years later. Rachel Carson and Silent Spring are often credited with launching the movement to protect America's natural resources.

"[M]an is a part of nature, and his war against nature is inevitably a war against himself."

Writing, zoology, and biology

Rachel Carson was born on May 27, 1907, in Springdale, Pennsylvania. She grew up on a large piece of land owned by her family in western Pennsylvania. A thoughtful, shy youngster, she spent much of her free time roaming through the woods surrounding the family home. Her literary talents were evident at an early age. She was a published writer by the age of eleven, wrote poetry while in her teens, and decided to pursue an English degree when she enrolled at the Pennsylvania College for Women in Pittsburgh.

During her junior year, however, Carson took a biology course that reawakened her childhood interest in nature. Against the advice of many, she switched her major to zoology, the study of animal biology, and graduated in 1929 with high honors. She won a fellowship to study at the Woods Hole Marine Biology Laboratory on Cape Cod in Massachusetts, and then a scholarship to Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland, for a graduate degree in zoology. After she finished, she taught there for a time and also at the University of Maryland. Fascinated by the sea, she returned to the Woods Hole institute every summer for further study.

In 1935 Carson discovered a way to merge her literary talents with her chosen field when she began to write radio scripts for the U.S. Bureau of Fisheries. A year later, that same government agency hired her as an aquatic biologist. She continued her writing career on the side, submitting articles on marine topics to such publications as the Baltimore Sun. One such piece involved the migratory patterns of Chesapeake Bay eels. In 1937 her article titled "Undersea," about the richly complex marine environment, was published in the Atlantic Monthly. A book publisher read it and invited her to expand the topic into a full-length book.

Becoming a full-time writer

Under the Sea Wind (1941), Carson's first book, was published by Simon & Schuster, but it did not receive much attention because America suddenly found itself at war in late 1941. During World War II (1939–45)—when Great Britain, France, the United States, the Soviet Union, and their allies defeated Germany, Italy, and Japan—Carson remained with the Bureau of Fisheries. The bureau eventually became the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. In 1949 she became the editor-in-chief of publications for the agency.

Still drawn to the topic of marine life and the majesty of the oceans, Carson wrote The Sea Around Us, which became one of the best-selling books of 1951. In it, she described the origins and geological characteristics of the world's oceans. It won several awards, including the prestigious National Book Award for nonfiction in 1952 and spent a year and a half on best-seller lists. Because of the book's success, Carson was able to retire from her government job and devote herself to writing full time. She had a home built on the coast of Maine, near West Southport, and produced a third book, The Edge of the Sea. This 1955 title was also greeted with favorable reviews and spent several months on the New York Times best-seller list.

Carson was a respected figure in the scientific community and communicated regularly with leading researchers in the fields of marine biology and animal life. The origins of Silent Spring came when Carson read a letter to the editor of the Boston Herald newspaper written by someone she knew. The Massachusetts resident claimed that DDT, a widely praised chemical pesticide that had come into general use since World War II, was destroying the birds in the wildlife refuge near the letter-writer's home. Carson's acquaintance claimed that she had discovered the bodies of seven dead birds in one day alone.

DDT and malaria

DDT was the world's first synthetic, or human-made, pesticide. An abbreviated term for its full chemical name of dichloro-diphenyl-trichloroethane, DDT was extremely effective in killing off mosquito populations. Carson and other scientists had already begun to recognize that it was also harmful to plant and animal life. At the time, however, DDT's benefits were considered to be far greater than its negative effects. The pesticide had been discovered by a Swiss chemist in late 1930s, and its development over the next few years occurred through the support of the U.S. government during World War II.

Previously, during World War I (1914–18), countless numbers of military personnel had died unnecessarily from diseases, such as typhus, carried by insects. Typhus causes fever, headache, chills, and general pains followed by a rash that covers almost the entire body. During the war, typhus was spread by head lice, tiny insects that survive by biting or sucking on humans or other warm-blooded animals. When the United States entered World War II in 1941, troops began fighting enemy forces on the many Japanese-controlled islands in the Pacific Ocean. The tropical climates of the Pacific Theatre, as the warfront was called, posed the risk of numerous other diseases for American troops. One of these was malaria, a dangerous and infectious disease common in the tropics and carried by mosquitoes. In some areas, as many as three-quarters of U.S. soldiers stationed in the Pacific were exhibiting symptoms of malarial fever. In 1942 an entire division had to be removed from combat when 10,000 of its 17,000 men became ill.

When U.S. military planes began spraying DDT from the air on territories they planned to seize from the Japanese, it proved to be an incredibly efficient way to reduce the mosquito population and drastically decrease the number of malaria cases. After the war's end, people began to use the chemical in civilian life, too. Thousands living in the tropics died from malaria every year, including Americans who lived in southern states. India posted annual malaria fatalities as high as 800,000 in some years. By the late 1950s, a major world public health campaign was underway, funded with U.S. aid and administered by the World Health Organization. Fatality rates from malaria had declined significantly by the time Carson read the Boston Herald letter.

The scientists who worked on the Global Malaria Eradication Programme realized that DDT did not kill off mosquitoes entirely. There were some mosquitoes with a genetic structure that allowed them to survive the spraying. Then, they quickly multiplied and repopulated the area. Thus, an entirely new mosquito population, resistant to DDT, began to emerge. The letter Carson had discovered in the Boston Herald was only the beginning of what seemed to be a minor ecological catastrophe in the making. (Ecology refers to the relationship between organisms and their environments.)

DDT had been used in the western United States in an attempt to kill off the gypsy moth and the spruce budworm. In Midwestern towns, it was used to exterminate bark beetle populations that spread the tree-destroying Dutch elm disease. In the American South, DDT was sprayed to eliminate bothersome fire ants. In all of these places, Carson discovered, other species had either died off or suffered from disruptions in the food chain. The food chain is basically food energy that passes from one organism to another as each consumes a lower member on the chain and in turn is eaten by a higher member. Many Americans, like the Boston Herald letter writer, had begun to notice that there were fewer of their favorite birds in their backyards when warmer weather arrived.

Threatened with legal action

Carson decided to make DDT and its dangers the subject of her next book, which she tentatively titled "Man Against the Earth." She had hoped to finish it within a year, but her careful research methods, and the increasingly worrisome findings she discovered, made it a four-year process. In addition, midway through, she was diagnosed with breast cancer and underwent surgery and then radiation treatments, which weakened her. Finally in June 1962, the New Yorker magazine began to publish a series of excerpts from Silent Spring, which is what the book was later called. Reaction to the book was swift. Chemical companies immediately issued statements declaring that Carson was making false claims. One company even threatened to sue the New Yorker, but the magazine's editor responded that his legal department had checked all the facts and found them to be on solid scientific footing.

DDT's effectiveness had prompted research into and the development of a new generation of chemical pesticides, such as dieldrin, parathion, heptachlor, and malathion. Some of the new chemicals were even more poisonous than DDT. Carson blamed the U.S. government and public health officials for failing to investigate any possible negative effects of these synthetic pesticides. She faulted the manufacturers for promoting the chemical's use as a safe and effective way for humans to control their environment. As her research had shown, DDT contained ingredients that failed to break down once it was sprayed. It became even more poisonous as it traveled through the food chain. Wildlife that ate insects exposed to DDT carried it in their systems. Bird populations decreased because female birds began laying eggs with shells that were too weak to protect the embryo.

Silent Spring was published by Houghton Mifflin on September 27, 1962, and quickly reached the New York Times best-seller list. Its title was borrowed from a poem by British Romantic poet John Keats (1795–1821), in which the poet imagined a spring when the birds failed to reappear. Carson's first chapter, "And No Birds Sing," sketches out just such a situation, in an unnamed town in the "heart of America" at a future date. "The few birds seen anywhere were moribund [dying]; they trembled violently and could not fly," she wrote. "It was a spring without voices. On the mornings that had once throbbed with the dawn chorus of scores of bird voices there was now no sound; only silence lay over the fields and woods and marsh."

Aldo Leopold

Aldo Leopold was one of the early conservationists in American land management. A hunter, forester, and nature writer, Leopold believed that large portions of land should be legally set aside as protected wilderness areas in order to preserve their beauty for future generations. His most famous work is A Sand County Almanac and Sketches Here and There (1949), sometimes referred to as the bible of the environmental movement.

Born in 1887, Leopold grew up in Burlington, Iowa, on the banks of the Mississippi River. His father owned an office-furniture company and taught him how to hunt during his youth. At Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut, Leopold earned a graduate degree in forestry, a new program at the school. In 1909 he joined the U.S. Forest Service. He was posted to what was then called Arizona Territory. (Arizona had yet to become a state.) He led crews that traveled on horseback to examine timber forests. In 1912 he married Estella Bergere, the daughter of wealthy New Mexico ranchers. The couple eventually had five children.

Leopold began to write about hunting, forestry, and ecology for various magazines. In his younger years, he believed that natural predators such as wolves, mountain lions, and grizzly bears should be targeted by hunters as a way to allow other animals to flourish for the sport. He later reconsidered this idea, arguing instead that the natural order should be preserved.

In 1924 Leopold and his family moved to Madison, Wisconsin, when he was transferred to a Forest Service office there. He retired four years later to pursue a career as a full-time writer and consultant on game and land use. In 1933 he was offered a professorship at the University of Wisconsin's campus in Madison. He was the first person in the United States to hold the title of professor of game management. In 1935 he became one of the founding members of the Wilderness Society.

Leopold's ideas about land preservation were somewhat extreme for the time. The modern age was still relatively new, and humankind's mastery over nature was viewed as a sign of progress. He made two trips to Mexico's Sierra Madre mountain range in the late 1930s, visiting remote places untouched by humans. This experience further influenced his beliefs. There, he saw firsthand how majestic a healthy ecosystem actually was, unlike all the other places he had seen in his life. In his writings and courses, he called for large tracts, or areas, of land to be left undisturbed. If allowed to flourish in a natural state over the generations, such tracts would serve as a laboratory of sorts for contemporary as well as future researchers and nature-lovers.

Leopold and his family practiced his ideas on a parcel of land he had acquired near Madison. They planted pines, hunted with bows and arrows they made themselves, and became keen observers of nature. Leopold carried a small notebook with him everywhere he went on the property and recorded details of plant and animal life as well as geological changes over the seasons. His observations were published in A Sand County Almanac.

Leopold died of a heart attack while trying to put out a fire at his neighbor's cottage. His Sand County Almanac, published a year later, was rediscovered by a new generation of environmentalists in the 1960s. It remains one of the most widely read texts in the land-conservation movement. Leopold believed that Earth is a biologically diverse community, and that humankind, the land, and its nonhuman inhabitants are all part of a system that depends on one another. This idea would become the guiding principle for pro-environment groups a half-century later.

Prompts government study

Carson's book explains that DDT had made its way into the diet of humans because of its presence in the food chain. It actually accumulates in fatty tissue, she wrote, and was even found in the native Aleut population of Alaska. This community lived hundreds of miles away from any area where DDT had been sprayed. Carson did not urge an outright ban on the use of synthetic pesticides, only more research into their potentially damaging effects on plants, animals, and humans.

Silent Spring scared and upset the public. Though some scientists questioned Carson's claims, she included a fifty-five-page list of sources at the close of the book. The major chemical companies, including Monsanto, Velsicol, and American Cyanamid, launched a public-relations attack on her and the book's credibility. But the move actually backfired, noted writer Peter Matthiessen in Time magazine many years later. "In their ugly campaign to reduce a brave scientist's protest to a matter of public relations," Matthiessen wrote, "the chemical interests [companies] had only increased public awareness."

The impact of Carson's book extended all the way to the White House. President John F. Kennedy (1917–1963; served 1961–63) created a Science Advisory Committee to investigate Silent Spring's warnings. Later, the committee's report found that Carson's claims were true. In April 1963 Carson appeared on television to answer her critics on the CBS News documentary "The Silent Spring of Rachel Carson." Some 15 million viewers tuned in. Her calm explanations of her book's arguments helped silence some of her harsher critics. "We still talk in terms of conquest," she said in the interview about humankind's view of Earth. "We still haven't become mature enough to think of ourselves as only a tiny part of a vast and incredible universe. Man's attitude toward nature is today critically important simply because we have now acquired a fateful power to alter and destroy nature. But man is a part of nature, and his war against nature is inevitably a war against himself," she explained. By the end of that year, lawmakers in forty states were considering bills that would regulate the use of pesticides.

Carson's legacy

Carson did not survive to witness the far-ranging impact of her book. She died of cancer and heart disease on April 14, 1964. Eight years after Carson's death, the United States banned the use of DDT. The long and bitter battle to ban it ended only when wildlife experts found that the bald eagle, the country's cherished national symbol, had suddenly become an endangered species—an animal that is in danger of becoming extinct, often as a result of environmental changes caused by humans. Carson's book also provoked calls for the formation of a federal supervisory agency whose job it would be to prevent future ecological catastrophes. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) began its work in 1970. Its national, state, and local offices are staffed by scientists, researchers, and public-policy analysts whose mission is to protect human health by safeguarding America's natural environment.

Carson's Silent Spring remains one of the classic nonfiction works of the twentieth century. It fueled an interest in organic farming, or growing crops without the use of synthetic pesticides and fertilizers, and also forced governments to penalize companies that released toxins from the manufacturing process into the air and water. Her warnings have been repeated in many of the arguments against interfering with the environment, including the debate on genetically modified crops at the turn of the twenty-first century. Genetically modified crops are those that result from human-made changes to the plants' gene structure, which affects their growth, development, and how they reproduce. "What Carson did in Silent Spring," noted Geoffrey Norman in an essay for Esquire, "was to introduce to the general imagination the concept of ecology: the way the natural world fit together, the pieces so tightly and inextricably [not able to be taken apart] bound that you could not isolate cause and effect. The consequences of any action rippled through the whole system, affecting everything and sometimes even changing the system itself. So when we poisoned gypsy moths with massive sprayings of DDT, we were, ultimately, poisoning ourselves."