On a Farther Shore (2 page)

A slow writer who revised endlessly, Carson had worked on
Silent Spring
for almost four years—though she had worried for much longer than that over the new pesticides developed at the outset of World War II and in the years immediately after it. One of the best known and most widely used of these compounds was a molecule of chlorinated hydrocarbon called dichloro-diphenyl-trichloroethane—DDT.
Although it had been first synthesized in 1874, nobody found a practical application for DDT until 1939, when a forty-year-old chemist named Paul Müller, who worked for the J. R. Geigy Company in Basel, Switzerland, discovered that it killed insects. DDT was immediately deployed against an outbreak of potato beetles in Switzerland, where it proved astonishingly effective. DDT’s long-lasting fatal properties lingered on anything it touched. And because
doses that killed insects appeared to be harmless to warm-blooded animals, including humans, DDT became the overnight weapon of choice in fighting lice, ticks, and mosquitoes that transmitted human diseases. Production of DDT expanded rapidly during World War II to speed it to combat zones for use as a delousing agent, particularly on refugees streaming out of Nazi-occupied territories.
When the U.S. Army sprayed more than a million civilians with DDT and successfully halted a 1943 typhus epidemic in Naples, a conviction that the new pesticide would be a panacea against insect-borne diseases gained wide acceptance. In 1948, Paul Müller won the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine.
At the award ceremony, DDT was declared a major discovery that illustrated the “wondrous ways of science.”

Not everyone believed that.

On June 5, 1945, an FWS airplane flew back and forth just above the treetops of a 117-acre tract of forest in the sprawling Patuxent Research Refuge in Prince George’s County, Maryland, not far from Washington, D.C. The plane sprayed the woods with DDT dissolved in xylene and fuel oil. The mixture drifted down through the forest canopy unevenly, riding updrafts and crosswinds, and arrived on the ground in varying concentrations as the pilot, navigating by sight, passed over some areas more than once and missed other places entirely. Some of the toxic cloud landed on a nearly mile-long section of the Patuxent River, a small, muddy stream that was home to twenty species of fish.

In the days and weeks after the spraying, researchers monitored what became of the mammals, birds, frogs, and fish exposed to the pesticide. In their later report, the scientists noted that the initial general enthusiasm for DDT should be tempered by “grave concern.” The investigators cautioned that while most poisons affect living organisms in different ways—such selectivity is a fundamental requirement for any pesticide—all poisons are “a two-edged sword,” and one as toxic as DDT would likely cause collateral damage to
wildlife. The Patuxent experiment, which had been undertaken after exploratory tests by several federal agencies in 1943 and 1944 hinted at problems with DDT, confirmed as much. Although the airborne DDT appeared to cause no significant harm to mammals, birds, or amphibians, dead fish began collecting in a net stretched across the Patuxent River fewer than ten hours after the spraying. Subsequent tests in carefully maintained artificial ponds showed that, even at concentrations much weaker than were used in the forest spraying, DDT caused extensive mortality in fish.

Further laboratory studies launched as part of the same investigation hinted that the animals that escaped poisoning in the aerial spraying might have just been lucky or simply weren’t exposed to high doses. When mammals and birds were fed DDT, or when it was put into aquariums with developing tadpoles, every species tested was sickened, and many of the animals died. The final report described how death occurred in birds, but noted that the effects of DDT were much the same in all of the animals tested: “excessive nervousness, loss of appetite, tremors, muscular twitching, and persistent rigidity of the leg muscles, the last continuing through death.”
On August 22, 1945, the FWS issued a press release describing the results of the DDT tests and warning that the pesticide should be used with extreme caution. The agency advised anyone observing “unusual reactions” in wildlife following an exposure to DDT to report it at once.

These troubling findings led to a series of investigations of DDT at Patuxent that would continue for years.
By 1947, Patuxent had a staff biologist whose sole responsibility was to investigate “DDT problems.”
That same year, one of the spring visitors to Patuxent was a woman from the Fish and Wildlife Division of Information who signed the guest log as Rachel L. Carson and who was already a step ahead of the emerging science.

Carson routinely read the scientific reports out of Patuxent and would end up editing many of them dealing with DDT. She had misgivings about the popular new insecticide even before the first results from the testing were known.
In July 1945, while the investigators
were still at work, Carson had proposed a story to
Reader’s Digest
. She began breezily enough, but ended on a frightening note:

“Practically at my backdoor here in Maryland, an experiment of more than ordinary interest and importance is going on,” she wrote. “We have all heard a lot about what DDT will soon do for us by wiping out insect pests. The experiments at Patuxent have been planned to show what other effects DDT may have if applied to wide areas; what it will do to insects that are beneficial or even essential; how it may affect waterfowl, or birds that depend on insect food; whether it may upset the whole delicate balance of nature if unwisely used.”

The
Reader’s Digest
, lacking Carson’s vision, passed.

But Carson never stopped thinking about DDT, even as the questions about its safety raised in the Patuxent testing were largely ignored. DDT quickly gained wide acceptance as an agricultural and commercial product, thanks to its low cost, its deadly persistence wherever and however it was used, and a wildly successful campaign to portray the poison as a miraculous answer to the long struggle against the insects that decimated crops and forests, plagued livestock, and brought disease and misery to millions of people every year.

The uses for DDT seemed endless. It could be applied in powders or dusts, in assorted liquid sprays and emulsions, and in aerosol “bombs” that housewives began purchasing in department stores as early as 1945. The bombs used Freon (later found to be destructive of the ozone layer) as a propellant and were claimed to treat an average-sized room in as little as six seconds. DDT was sold in hardware and grocery stores in products such as soap, furniture polish, shelf paper, paint, and fabric treatments. DDT could be applied to lawns by means of a fogging device that attached to the muffler of a lawn mower, dispersing a hot, poisonous cloud as the grass was cut. Airplanes sprayed DDT over millions of acres of forest to kill woodland insects such as the spruce budworm and the gypsy moth. It was sprayed in hospital kitchens and in residential neighborhoods hit by Dutch elm disease. In the South children played in the murk behind DDT fogging trucks that cruised the streets during encephalitis outbreaks. In the fall of
1945, an intrepid pilot sprayed the Yale Bowl to eliminate mosquitoes for an upcoming concert. DDT helped finish the campaign to wipe out the vestiges of malaria in Europe and in North America,
and in 1955 the World Health Organization launched a global effort to eradicate the disease—with DDT as its main weapon.
By 1959, some eighty million pounds of DDT were being used annually in the United States alone.

In early 1958, Carson learned that
Reader’s Digest
planned a favorable article about the use of aerial DDT spraying for gypsy moths—and she wrote to the magazine’s editor warning him there was another side to the story.
About that same time, she also heard about a group of landowners on Long Island who were suing the state of New York to halt a gypsy moth control effort in which their homes and property were being aerially sprayed with DDT. Carson, disinclined toward journalism, tried to persuade the
New Yorker
’s E. B. White—author of the classic children’s books
Stuart Little
and
Charlotte’s Web
—to cover the trial. He suggested instead that she write something.
By spring, Carson had signed a contract with her publisher, Houghton Mifflin, for a book about pesticides tentatively titled “The Control of Nature” that would also appear in installments in the
New Yorker
.

In 1945, as the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service began discovering the danger to wildlife from DDT, the United States exploded three nuclear devices—one at Alamogordo, New Mexico, in the test of a bomb called “Trinity,” and two in Japan, where the cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki were leveled and somewhere between 150,000 and 250,000 people died. During the Cold War of the 1950s and early ’60s, a number of countries—but principally the United States and the Soviet Union—continued to conduct atmospheric tests of nuclear weapons.
A moratorium was agreed to in 1958, and such tests were suspended until the summer of 1961, when the Soviet Union announced it would resume its atmospheric program.

Over the course of the next three months, the Russians exploded
thirty-one nuclear devices, including one 3,300 times more powerful than “Little Boy,” which had been dropped on Hiroshima. Fearful of the Soviets gaining an advantage and under pressure from Congress and the public, President Kennedy, who had campaigned on a pledge to enact a permanent ban on testing, reluctantly restarted American tests.
Between April and November 1962, at sites in the Marshall Islands in the South Pacific, the United States exploded thirty-five nuclear devices in the atmosphere—approximately one every five days.
When a comprehensive ban ended the era of atmospheric testing in August 1963, more than five hundred nuclear devices had been exploded aboveground—about two hundred of them by the United States.

A by-product of these tests was the debris carried on high-altitude winds that eventually returned to earth as radioactive fallout—notably the isotopes strontium 90 and iodine 131. High concentrations came down in the central United States, where people, especially children, were exposed through the consumption of milk from cows that were pastured in areas where fallout landed. Radiation exposure was understood to be a potential health hazard, but for years there was no scientific agreement as to how serious it might be.
In 1957 a group of prominent scientists who believed radioactive fallout had as yet done little harm to humans nonetheless urged the United Nations to seek an international limit on atmospheric testing. The U.S. Atomic Energy Commission disagreed. The government’s position was that atmospheric testing could continue as it had for decades without—in the words of the
New York Times
—“posing any danger to mankind.” Then came the spate of testing in 1962, and by the following spring strontium 90 levels in milk had doubled in some areas.

Invisible and ubiquitous, undetectable without special instruments, radioactive fallout was a strange and terrifying thing—a poison whose effects might not be experienced for years or even decades following exposure. The same held true for DDT, which was also discovered in milk.
Carson recognized an “exact and inescapable” parallel between pesticides and radioactive fallout that had profound
implications. Our species, Carson reasoned, having evolved over thousands of millennia, was well adapted to the natural world but was biologically defenseless in an unnaturally altered one. Pesticides and radiation, apart from their acute toxicities, were also mutagenic—capable of damaging the genetic material that guides the machinery of living cells and provides the blueprint for each succeeding generation. Carson believed that widely dispersed and persistent substances such as DDT and radioactive fallout—which contaminated the environment not in isolated, specific places, but throughout the global ecosystem—were the inevitable and potentially lethal developments of the modern age, each one a consequence, as she put it bluntly in
Silent Spring
, of the “impetuous and heedless pace of man rather than the deliberate pace of nature.”

The furor over
Silent Spring
began at once. In the weeks following publication of the first excerpts in the
New Yorker
, moody stories expressing shock and outrage began appearing in newspapers across the country.
Some compared the book to
Uncle Tom’s Cabin
and predicted an earthquake of change in the way pesticides were used. Most reports nervously welcomed Carson’s dire warning about chemical contamination of the environment, although many also acknowledged a rapidly building counterattack from trade groups and a chemicals industry that decried Carson’s book as unscientific and one-sided, arguing that she took no account of the economic and health benefits achieved through the use of pesticides.

Some of Carson’s detractors imagined her in league with a lunatic fringe that included food faddists, anti-fluoridationists, organic farmers, and soft-headed nature lovers.
A major pesticide manufacturer threatened Carson’s publisher, Houghton Mifflin, with a lawsuit if
Silent Spring
was issued without changes, saying they believed and would attempt to prove that Carson was a front for “sinister influences” in the Soviet Union and its Eastern European satellites that were intent on undermining America.
The U.S. Department of Agriculture
meanwhile told the
New York Times
it was being deluged with letters from citizens expressing “horror and amazement” that the agency permitted the wide use of such deadly poisons.
The Book-of-the-Month Club announced that
Silent Spring
would be its main selection for October 1962, proof that Carson was still expected to be popular even though she’d hit a nerve.
A newspaper in London reported that “a 55-year old spinster has written a book that is causing more heart-searching in America than any book since Upton Sinclair’s
The Jungle
forced Chicago to clean up its abattoirs.”

Everyone remarked on the sharp and fatalistic tone of
Silent Spring
—including, as Carson enjoyed noting, people who had not read it. From its opening pages the book was a harrowing excursion through a chemically strangled world. Carson made no attempt to soften her vision of the future. At stake in the unrestrained use of chemical pesticides was nothing less than human existence itself: