Carson, Rachel

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9: Rachel Carson

Published in 1962.

The modern-day environmental movement is made up of people who advocate the preservation, restoration, or enhancement of the natural environment. Many considered 1962 as the year the movement began. That year, Silent Spring, a book by naturalist and marine biologist Rachel Carson (1907–1964), was a best-seller and prompted national debate about the widespread use of pesticides, which are chemicals used to kill insects. Carson's book was the first publication alerting the general public that pesticides had many unintended, harmful effects. She outlined how pesticides can enter the food and water supply and end up on people's dinner tables.

"Who has made the decision that sets in motion these chains of poisonings, this ever-widening wave of death that spreads out, like ripples when a pebble is dropped into a still pond?"

Carson was particularly concerned about the effects of DDT (dichloro-diphenyl-trichloroethane), an insecticide developed in 1939 by Dr. Paul Muller (1899–1965), a Swiss chemist. The chemical was first used on a large-scale basis during World War II (1939–45) when it was dispensed in Italy to help stop a rapidly spreading epidemic of typhus. A dangerous disease, typhus includes symptoms such as fever, headache, chills, and general pains followed by a rash that spreads to the whole body except for the face, palms, and soles of the feet. During the war, typhus was being spread by lice, tiny insects that survive by biting or sucking on humans and other warm-blooded animals. The U.S. Army issued small tin boxes of 10 percent DDT dust to its soldiers to kill body lice, head lice, and crab lice. Most notably, DDT was sprayed on South Pacific islands to kill malaria-causing insects and make the islands safe for occupation by U.S. troops. Malaria is a dangerous and infectious disease common in the tropics and transmitted by mosquitoes. In 1948 Muller won the Nobel Prize for Science, a prestigious, annual, international award for his work on DDT, which was credited for saving many lives.

Beginning in 1946, DDT was used increasingly in the United States to kill pests that threatened crops and to fight Dutch Elm disease, a fungus that attacks elm trees and is spread by bark beetles as they move from tree to tree. By spraying DDT and killing the beetle, government officials hoped to stop the spread of the disease that was killing elm trees throughout the eastern half of the United States. In Silent Spring, Carson described the harmful effects of the spraying. A single application on a group of trees, she wrote, killed insects for weeks and months—not only the targeted insects but countless more—and remained toxic in the environment. For example, worms were contaminated by eating leaves tainted with DDT, and then the contamination spread when those worms were eaten by birds and other animals. Eventually, the toxins work their way into the food and water supply, where they are consumed by humans.

Silent Spring reaches readers

Excerpts from Silent Spring first appeared in the New Yorker magazine in three issues in June 1962. The excerpts caused a sensation, as newspapers and magazines reported Carson's findings, and representatives from the chemical industry condemned them. One chemical company, Velsicol, tried to intimidate Carson's publisher by threatening lawsuits before the book was released. Other spokespersons for the chemical industry declared the book to be unscientific and filled with errors. Several magazines shared those views when reviewing the book. Upon publication, however, Silent Spring became an instant and widely acclaimed best-seller.

Despite challenges by chemical industry representatives, Carson's major findings were proven accurate. Until that time, DDT was in some sense considered a miracle chemical since it was used successfully to destroy malaria-spreading insects and stop the spread of the disease that had killed millions of people. However, Carson's observations about DDT brought the dangers of pesticide use into the public eye. Her revelations about the unintended consequences of the chemical's use—including killing all kinds of insects, poisoning worms and birds and other animals, and ending up in the human food and water supply—led to reforms and laws governing the use of the chemical. Silent Spring then, is among the books that had an enormous impact on Americans, leading to change and reform.

Things to remember while reading the excerpt from Silent Spring:

By the mid 1950s, several years before Silent Spring was published, Carson was one of America's best-known nonfiction writers. She had published five books on the sea and numerous magazine articles. Despite being among the most popular and prominent science writers in the nation, Carson could not convince magazines to give her an assignment to write about DDT. This reveals how controversial her views were on the subject. She performed research and compiled information and statistics for several years before publishing Silent Spring.
Carson was a scientist who viewed scientific progress as the development of better ways for humans to live in harmony with nature. She cited the senseless and indiscriminate, or haphazard, chemical spraying of DDT as an example of an attempt to control nature. This, according to Carson in Silent Spring, represented "the Stone Age of science" that ignores scientific progress.
In addition to citing scientific evidence for her claims, Carson frequently describes the beauties and variety of nature in her attempts to persuade the reader of the importance of her cause.

Excerpt from Silent Spring

Over increasingly large areas of the United States, spring now comes unheralded [unannounced] by the return of the birds, and the early mornings are strangely silent where once they were filled with the beauty of bird song. This sudden silencing of the song of birds, this obliteration [wiping out] of the color and beauty and interest they lend to our world

From the town of Hinsdale, Illinois, a housewife wrote in despair to one of the world's leading ornithologists, Robert Cushman Murphy, Curator Emeritus of Birds at the American Museum of Natural History.

Here in our village the elm trees have been sprayed for several years [she wrote in 1958]. When we moved here six years ago, there was a wealth of bird life; I put up a feeder and had a steady stream of cardinals, chickadees, downies and nuthatches all winter, and the cardinals and chickadees brought their young ones in the summer.
After several years of DDT spray, the town is almost devoid [without] of robins and starlings; chickadees have not been on my shelf for two years, and this year the cardinals are gone too; the nesting population in the neighborhood seems to consist of one dove pair and perhaps one catbird family.
It is hard to explain to the children that the birds have been killed off, when they have learned in school that a Federal law protects the birds from killing or capture. "Will they ever come back?" they ask, and I do not have the answer. The elms are still dying, and so are the birds. Is anything being done? Can anything be done? Can / do anything?

A year after the federal government had launched a massive spraying program against the fire ant, an Alabama woman wrote: "Our place has been a veritable [geniune] bird sanctuary for over half a century. Last July we all remarked, 'There are more birds than ever.' Then, suddenly, in the second week of August, they all disappeared. I was accustomed to rising early to care for my favorite mare that had a young filly. There was not a sound of the song of a bird. It was eerie, terrifying. What was man doing to our perfect and beautiful world? Finally, five months later a blue jay appeared and a wren."

The autumn months to which she referred brought other somber reports from the deep South, where in Mississippi, Louisiana, and Alabama the Field Notes published quarterly by the National Audubon Society and the United States Fish and Wildlife Service noted the striking phenomenon of "blank spots weirdly empty of virtually all bird life." The Field Notes are a compilation of the reports of seasoned observers who have spent many years afield in their particular areas and have unparalleled [unequalled] knowledge of the normal bird life of the region. One such observer reported that in driving about southern Mississippi that fall she saw "no land birds at all for long distances." Another in Baton Rouge [Louisiana] reported that the contents of her feeders had lain untouched "for weeks on end," while fruiting shrubs in her yard, that ordinarily would be stripped clean by that time, still were laden [loaded] with berries. Still another reported that his picture window, "which often used to frame a scene splashed with the red of 40 or 50 cardinals and crowded with other species, seldom permitted a view of as many as a bird ortwoatatime." Professor Maurice Brooks of the University of West Virginia, an authority on the birds of the Appalachian region, reported that the West Virginia bird population had undergone "an incredible reduction."

One story might serve as the tragic symbol of the fate of the birds—a fate that has already overtaken some species, and that threatens all. It is the story of the robin, the bird known to everyone. To millions of Americans, the season's first robin means that the grip of winter is broken. Its coming is an event reported in newspapers and told eagerly at the breakfast table. And as the numbers of migrants grows and the first mists of green appear in the woodlands, thousands of people listen for the first dawn chorus of the robins throbbing in the early morning light. But now all is changed, and not even the return of the birds may be taken for granted.

The survival of the robin, and indeed of many other species as well, seems fatefully linked with the American elm, a tree that is part of the history of thousands of towns from the Atlantic [Ocean] to the Rockies [Rocky Mountains], gracing their streets and their village squares and college campuses with majestic archways of green. Now the elms are stricken with a disease that afflicts [ails] them throughout their range, a disease so serious that many experts believe all efforts to save the elms will in the end be futile [hopeless]. It would be tragic to lose the elms, but it would be doubly tragic if, in vain efforts to save them, we plunge vast segments of our bird populations into the night of extinction. Yet this is precisely what is threatened.

The so-called Dutch elm disease entered the United States from Europe about 1930 in elm burl logs imported for the veneer industry. It is a fungus disease; the organism invades the water-conducting vessels of the tree, spreads by spores carried in the flow of sap, and by its poisonous secretions as well as by mechanical clogging causes the branches to wilt and the tree to die. The disease is spread from diseased to healthy trees by elm bark beetles. The galleries which the insects have tunneled out under the bark of dead trees become contaminated with spores of the invading fungus, and the spores adhere to the insect body and are carried wherever the beetle flies. Efforts to control the fungus disease of the elms have been directed largely toward control of the carrier insect. In community after community, especially throughout the strongholds of the American elm, the Midwest and New England, intensive spraying has become a routine procedure.

What this spraying could mean to bird life, and especially to the robin, was first made clear by the work of two ornithologists at Michigan State University, Professor George Wallace and one of his graduate students, John Mehner. When Mr. Mehner began work for the doctorate [degree] in 1954, he chose a research project that had to do with robin populations. This was quite by chance, for at that time no one suspected that the robins were in danger. But even as he undertook the work, events occurred that were to change its character and indeed to deprive him of his material.

Spraying for Dutch-elm disease began in a small way on the university campus in 1954. The following year the city of East Lansing (where the university is located) joined in, spraying on the campus was expanded, and, with local programs for gypsy moth and mosquito control also under way, the rain of chemicals increased to a downpour.

During 1954, the year of the first light spraying, all seemed well. The following spring the migrating robins began to return to the campus as usual. Like the bluebells in [English writer H. M.] Tomlinson's haunting essay "The Lost Wood," they were "expecting no evil" as they reoccupied their familiar territories. But soon it became evident that something was wrong. Dead and dying robins began to appear on the campus. Few birds were seen in their normal foraging activities or assembling in their usual roosts. Few nests were built; few young appeared. The pattern was repeated with monotonous [dull and repetitious] regularity in succeeding springs. The sprayed area had become a lethal trap in which each wave of migrating robins would be eliminated in about a week. Then new arrivals would come in, only to add to the numbers of doomed birds seen on the campus in the agonized tremors that precede death.

"The campus is serving as a graveyard for most of the robins that attempt to take up residence in the spring," said Dr. Wallace. But why? At first he suspected some disease of the nervous system, but soon 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 poisoning; they exhibited the well-known symptoms of loss of balance, followed by tremors, convulsions, and death."

Several facts suggested that the robins were being poisoned, not so much by direct contact with the insecticides as indirectly, by eating earthworms. Campus earthworms had been fed inadvertently to crayfish in a research project and all the crayfish had promptly died. A snake kept in a laboratory cage had gone into violent tremors after being fed such worms. And earthworms are the principal food of robins in the spring.

A key piece in the jigsaw puzzle of the doomed robins was soon to be supplied by Dr. Roy Barker of the Illinois Natural History Survey at Urbana. Dr. Barker's work, published in 1958, traced the intricate cycle of events by which the robins' fate is linked to the elm trees by way of the earthworms. The trees are sprayed in the spring (usually at the rate of 2 to 5 pounds of DDT per 50-foot tree, which may be the equivalent of as much as 23 pounds per acre where elms are numerous) and often again in July, at about half this concentration. Powerful sprayers direct a stream of poison to all parts of the tallest trees, killing directly not only the target organism, the bark beetle, but other insects, including pollinating species and predatory spiders and beetles. The poison forms a tenacious [persistent] film over the leaves and bark. Rains do not wash it away. In the autumn the leaves fall to the ground, accumulate in sodden [soaked] layers, and begin the slow process of becoming one with the soil. In this they are aided by the toil of the earthworms, who feed in the leaf litter, for elm leaves are among their favorite foods. In feeding on the leaves the worms also swallow the insecticide, accumulating and concentrating it in their bodies. Dr. Barker found deposits of DDT throughout the digestive tracts of the worms, their blood vessels, nerves, and body wall. Undoubtedly some of the earthworms themselves succumb [die], but others survive to become "biological magnifiers" of the poison. In the spring the robins return to provide another link in the cycle. As few as 11 large earthworms can transfer a lethal dose of DDT to a robin. And 11 worms form a small part of a day's rations to a bird that eats 10 to 12 earthworms in as many minutes.

Not all robins receive a lethal dose, but another consequence may lead to the extinction of their kind as surely as fatal poisoning. The shadow of sterility lies over all the bird studies and indeed lengthens to include all living things within its potential range. There are now only two or three dozen robins to be found each spring on the entire 185-acre campus of Michigan State University, compared with a conservatively estimated 370 adults in this area before spraying. In 1954 every robin nest under observation by Mehner produced young. Toward the end of June, 1957, when at least 370 young birds (the normal replacement of the adult population) would have been foraging over the campus in the years before spraying began, Mehner could find only one young robin. A year later Dr. Wallace was to report: "At no time during the spring or summer [of 1958] did I see a fledgling [young] robin anywhere on the main campus, and so far I have failed to find anyone else who has seen one there."

Part of this failure to produce young is due, of course, to the fact that one or more of a pair of robins dies before the nesting cycle is completed. But Wallace has significant records which point to something more sinister—the actual destruction of the birds' capacity to reproduce. He has, for example, "records of robins and other birds building nests but laying no eggs, and others laying eggs and incubating them but not hatching them. We have one record of a robin that sat on its eggs faithfully for 21 days and they did not hatch. The normal incubation period is 13 days….

The robins, then, are only one part of the chain of devastation linked to the spraying of the elms, even as the elm program is only one of the multitudinous [many] spray programs that cover our land with poisons. Heavy mortality [death] has occurred among about 90 species of birds, including those most familiar to suburbanites and amateur naturalists. The population of nesting birds in general have declined as much as 90 per cent in some of the sprayed towns….

It is only reasonable to suppose that all birds and mammals heavily dependent on earthworms or other soil organisms for food are threatened by the robins' fate. Some 45 species of birds include earthworms in their diet. Among them is the woodcock, a species that winters in southern areas recently heavily sprayed with heptachlor. Two significant discoveries have now been made about the woodcock. Production of young birds on the New Brunswick breeding grounds is definitely reduced, and adult birds that have been analyzed contain large residues of DDT and heptachlor.

Already there are disturbing records of heavy mortality among more than 20 other species of ground-feeding birds whose food—worms, ants, grubs, or other soil organisms—has been poisoned. These include three of the thrushes whose songs are among the most exquisite of bird voices, the olive-backed, the wood, and the hermit. And the sparrows that flit through the shrubby understory of the woodlands and forage with rustling sounds amid the fallen leaves—the song sparrow and the white-throat—these, too, have been found among the victims of the elm sprays.

Mammals, also, may easily be involved in the circle, directly or indirectly. Earthworms are important among the various foods of the raccoon, and are eaten in the spring and fall by opossums. Such subterranean [underground] tunnelers as shrews and moles capture them in some numbers, and then perhaps pass on the poison to predators such as screech owls and barn owls. Several dying screech owls were picked up in Wisconsin following heavy rains in spring, perhaps poisoned by feeding on earthworms. Hawks and owls have been found in convulsions—great horned owls, screech owls, red-shouldered hawks, sparrow hawks, marsh hawks. These may be cases of secondary poisoning, caused by eating birds or mice that have accumulated insecticides in their livers or other organs.

Nor is it only the creatures that forage on the ground or those who prey on them that are endangered by the foliar spraying of the elms. All of the treetop feeders, the birds that glean [gather] their insect food from the leaves, have disappeared from heavily sprayed areas, among them those woodland sprites the kinglets, both ruby-crowned and golden-crowned, the tiny gnatcatchers, and many of the warblers, whose migrating hordes flow through the trees in spring in a multicolored tide of life. In 1956, a late spring delayed spraying so that it coincided with the arrival of an exceptionally heavy wave of warbler migration. Nearly all species of warblers present in the area were represented in the heavy kill that followed. In Whitefish Bay, Wisconsin, at least a thousand myrtle warblers could be seen in migration during former years; in 1958, after the spraying of the elms, observers could find only two. So, with additions from other communities, the list grows, and the warblers killed by the spray include those that most charm and fascinate all who are aware of them: the black-and-white, the yellow, the magnolia, and the Cape May; the ovenbird, whose call throbs in the Maytime woods; the Blackburnian, whose wings are touched with flame; the chestnut-sided, the Canadian, and the black-throated green. These tree-top feeders are affected either directly by eating poisoned insects or indirectly by a shortage of food….

As the habit of killing grows—the resort to "eradicating" [destroying] any creature that may annoy or inconvenience us—birds are more and more finding themselves a direct target of poisons rather than an incidental one. There is a growing trend toward aerial applications of such deadly poisons as parathion to "control" concentrations of birds distasteful to farmers. The Fish and Wildlife Service has found it necessary to express serious concern over this trend, pointing out that "parathion treated areas constitute a potential hazard to humans, domestic animals, and wildlife." In southern Indiana, for example, a group of farmers went together in the summer of 1959 to engage a spray plane to treat an area of river bottomland with parathion. The area was a favored roosting site for thousands of blackbirds that were feeding in nearby cornfields. The problem could have been solved easily by a slight change in agricultural practice—a shift to a variety of corn with deep-set ears not accessible to the birds—but the farmers had been persuaded of the merits of killing by poison, and so they sent in the planes on their mission of death.

The results probably gratified the farmers, for the casualty [dead or injured] list included some 65,000 red-winged blackbirds and starlings. What other wildlife deaths may have gone unnoticed and unrecorded is not known. Parathion is not a specific for blackbirds: it is a universal killer. But such rabbits or raccoons or opossums as may have roamed those bottomlands and perhaps never visited the farmers' cornfields were doomed by a judge and jury who neither knew of their existence nor cared.

And what of human beings? In California orchards sprayed with this same parathion, workers handling foliage that had been treated a month earlier collapsed and went into shock, and escaped death only through skilled medical attention. Does Indiana still raise any boys who roam through woods or fields and might even explore the margins of a river? If so, who guarded the poisoned area to keep out any who might wander in, in misguided search for unspoiled nature? Who kept vigilant [careful] watch to tell the innocent stroller that the fields he was about to enter were deadly—all their vegetation coated with a lethal film? Yet at so fearful a risk the farmers, with none to hinder them, waged their needless war on blackbirds.

In each of these situations, one turns away to ponder the question: Who has made the decision that sets in motion these chains of poisonings, this ever-widening wave of death that spreads out, like ripples when a pebble is dropped into a still pond? Who has placed in one pan of the scales the leaves that might have been eaten by the beetles and in the other the pitiful heaps of many-hued feathers, the lifeless remains of the birds that fell before the unselective bludgeon of insecticidal poisons? Who has decided—who has the right to decide—for the countless legions [great numbers] of people who were not consulted that the supreme value is a world without insects, even though it be also a sterile [barren] world ungraced by the curving wing of a bird in flight? The decision is that of the authoritarian temporarily entrusted with power; he has made it during a moment of inattention by millions to whom beauty and the ordered world of nature still have a meaning that is deep and imperative.

What happened next …

Pre-publication excerpts of Silent Spring in the New Yorker in June 1962 caused a sensation. Carson was threatened by major chemical companies, including Monsanto, Velsicol, and American Cyanamid, with lawsuits and claims that she was unqualified to write such a book. Their attempts to undermine Carson's findings and reputation only increased public awareness, and Silent Spring became an instant best-seller.

A special television program about the controversy, The Silent Spring of Rachel Carson, was broadcast by CBS in April 1963. Carson appeared calm and knowledgeable on the news special while critics from the chemical industry attacked her. She left viewers with a strong positive impression by remarking, "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 … [We are] challenged as mankind has never been challenged before to prove our maturity and our mastery, not of nature, but of ourselves."

Meanwhile, Silent Spring inspired the public to put pressure on the federal government to investigate its use of pesticides. A panel of experts appointed by President John F. Kennedy (1917–1963; served 1961–63) issued a report, Use of Pesticides, in May 1963 that supported Carson's findings. This document became an important step toward changing the government's pesticide policy.

After the publication of Silent Spring, use of DDT came under much closer government supervision and was eventually banned by the government in 1972. Carson's influence has been credited on the federal level with several major pieces of regulatory legislation: the Clean Air Act (1963), the Water Quality Act (1965), and the National Environmental Policy Act (1969). In 1970 the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) was created.

Carson died of breast cancer in 1964, but her legacy lives on. In 1999 Time magazine included Carson on its list of the one hundred most influential people of the twentieth century.

Did you know …

Carson had been a marine biologist with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and wrote educational brochures for the agency.
Silent Spring was on the New York Times best-seller list for thirty-one weeks.
In 1970 the Rachel Carson National Wildlife Refuge, located in Maine, was dedicated in her memory.

Consider the following …

Carson supported the right of individuals to avoid exposure to potentially harmful materials over the economic concerns of companies. Debates between economic development and environmental concerns occur in virtually every community in the United States. What debates are occurring in your community? Discuss ideas presented by the different sides in the debate and how the issues affect you and your family.
Carson often describes beautiful natural scenes populated by birds and animals to help persuade readers to appreciate their significance and to think about what life would be like without them. Observe animals and natural scenes around your neighborhood and then interview someone who has lived in the neighborhood for more than twenty years. Compare your feelings about your neighborhood with the way it was in the past, and write about changes that were beneficial and others that had a negative impact.