On a Farther Shore (46 page)

This seemingly reasonable complaint—that the spray men were people, too—ignored the abundant evidence that technicians were already enlisted in humanity’s global nuclear suicide pact and were practicing their dark arts regularly in the American desert, on the frozen wastes of eastern Asia, and over the tropical lagoons of remote islands in the far Pacific. Living on the verge of annihilation, Carson wrote, was not living. Quoting the ecologist Paul Shepard, Carson wondered, “
Who would want to live in a world which is just not quite fatal?”

“
Yet such a world is pressed upon us,” Carson continued in her
own words. “The crusade to create a chemically sterile, insect-free world seems to have engendered a fanatic zeal on the part of many specialists and most of the so-called control agencies. On every hand there is evidence that those engaged in spraying operations exercise ruthless power.”

From the start, most of Carson’s critics also chose to ignore her insistence that what was needed was not an end to the use of pesticides, but rather an end to their heedless overuse—a distinction that was lost on people whose economic interests were entwined with chemical controls. But Carson made it clear. “
It is not my contention that chemical insecticides must never be used,” she wrote. “I do contend that we have put poisonous and biologically potent chemicals indiscriminately into the hands of persons largely or wholly ignorant of their potentials for harm.”

If Carson thought that leaving the door open for the judicious use of pesticides was enough to insulate her from accusations of overreaching, she soon learned otherwise. Even before the second installment of
Silent Spring
appeared in the
New Yorker
, Carson was under attack for attempting to undermine a global initiative that had been supported for years by the U.S. Congress and by the Eisenhower and Kennedy administrations.

Since the mid-1950s, the World Health Organization, an arm of the United Nations, had made the eradication of malaria a worldwide priority. Malaria is an ancient plague. Caused by a mosquito-transmitted parasite that is known to have infected humans in Africa for five hundred thousand years, the disease kills hundreds of thousands of people every year and sickens many millions more.
In 1958, Congress passed legislation authored by Senators John F. Kennedy and Hubert Humphrey allocating a contribution of $100 million to the WHO malaria project. The campaign relied almost entirely on using DDT against the mosquitoes that carried the disease. The goal was to have houses and huts in regions with malaria treated twice a year.

It was known that some mosquitoes were resistant to DDT and
that others would become so—perhaps adapting into a “super race” that not only wasn’t killed by the pesticide but wasn’t even discouraged from inhabiting places where it had been sprayed. And it was also understood that spray teams would never find and treat every domicile in some places with malaria, as there were often no roads, or the people were nomadic. But it was assumed that malaria would disappear from remote, isolated pockets on its own if it could be snuffed out across most of its range—the expectation being that the parasite would follow a classic pattern of decline, then rarity, then extinction, in this case by human design.

The early years of the WHO’s malaria eradication program produced encouraging results. By 1960, malaria had been erased in eleven countries and sharply curtailed in a dozen more. In India, where historically as many as seventy-five million people contracted malaria every year, that number fell below one hundred thousand. As deaths from malaria went down, life expectancies went up in some countries, and so did crop production and land values. But DDT had a side effect that even Rachel Carson hadn’t anticipated: As malaria started to disappear, so did the scientists who studied the disease. What had been a multidisciplinary effort to understand and control a difficult epidemic turned into the one-dimensional chore of spraying DDT wherever the disease was present.

One irate reader wrote to the
New Yorker
to protest Carson’s indictment of DDT, echoing the accusation that she had made many errors—none more egregious than her claim that the insecticide had had only “limited success” against malaria and in the long run might make things worse as mosquitoes acquired resistance to DDT and the disease flared up again in areas where it was being used. Not so, the letter writer insisted. Malaria could be eradicated in seven to ten years. But this effort took money, he said, which would now be more difficult to raise thanks to Carson’s “mischief.” He suggested the
New Yorker
’s famous standards for absolute accuracy were in decline, as it would have otherwise learned from any number of experts that
Carson was mistaken on this point. Apparently unaware of the distinction between people who study wildlife biology and people who practice nudism, he referred to Carson as a “naturist.”

The writer might have waited for publication of the book to get a fuller sense of Carson’s stand on DDT and malaria. It is true that
Silent Spring
is a sustained polemic against the use of synthetic pesticides; it is impossible to find so much as a phrase endorsing their general use. Carson never did find anything good to say about pesticides. But she left room for the possibility that they might be a wise choice in situations involving public welfare.

Carson acknowledged that DDT had been essential to the successful suppression of a typhus outbreak in Italy during the Second World War. And she also pointed to its use against malaria-carrying mosquitoes immediately after the war. The problem, she said, was that insects became resistant to DDT, and there was often a rebound of insect-borne diseases in areas where it was used.
This, Carson wrote, had to be carefully weighed in fighting diseases and their insect carriers—such as “typhus and body lice, plague and rat fleas, African sleeping sickness and tsetse flies, various fevers and ticks.” But she conceded that these were “important problems that must be met.”

By the time
Silent Spring
came out, world health officials were arguing with one another over the increasing resistance of mosquitoes to DDT and whether this might defeat the goal of eradicating malaria. It was a question that Carson could have explored but did not in
Silent Spring
. Had she chosen to, the later claim that she had single-handedly brought about millions of deaths from malaria might not have gained the widespread currency it did. Carson’s intense focus on the downside of pesticide use—like the tunnel vision that permitted her an idiosyncratic reading of “Locksley Hall” and to ignore Henry Williamson’s Nazi sympathies—wasn’t balanced against any upside, even though she conceded there might occasionally be one.

But her decision against exploring the malaria issue more thoroughly could not have been an easy one. In 1962, the U.S. Postal Service issued a commemorative stamp in support of the malaria program,
and President Kennedy reaffirmed American commitment to the eradication of the disease. The president said the program was an international effort that proved the people of the world could work together on common objectives—as he had called upon them to do in his inaugural address when he’d said, “
Together let us explore the stars, conquer the deserts, eradicate disease.” As it turned out, however, Carson read the zeitgeist better than Kennedy did.
In 1963, faced with questions about the declining effectiveness of DDT and about its safety, the United States halted funding for the malaria eradication program.
Six years later—and three years ahead of a ban on DDT use in the United States that was widely attributed to Carson’s campaign against pesticides—the World Health Organization scrapped the malaria program entirely.

Decades after the publication of
Silent Spring
, Rachel Carson would still be pilloried by detractors over her supposed contribution to the continued presence of malaria in the world. It’s a hollow charge and an odd legacy, as she nowhere in
Silent Spring
argued against the use of DDT to fight the disease and, in fact, allowed that the use of pesticides might well be necessary in the protection of human health. But that did nothing to blunt the hostile reaction to
Silent Spring
, which also held within it the outlines of a partisan divide over environmental matters that has since hardened into a permanent wall of bitterness and mistrust.

With the publication of
Silent Spring
, public sentiment turned to the question of the environment and our role in its protection. A half century of growing enthusiasm for conservation had faded in the Cold War, and the new fear was that we now seemed as likely to destroy the earth as to preserve it. To people conditioned to the pessimism of the nuclear age, Carson made a dire appeal: Reverse course or continue at our peril. The twin demons of radiation and pesticides, interlinked so artfully in the pages of
Silent Spring
, made tangible the idea of a “total environment” that we could choose to protect or not. The fault line between conservation and environmentalism had been crossed.

There is no objective reason why environmentalism should be the exclusive province of any one political party or ideology—other than the history of the environmental movement beginning with
Silent Spring
. The labels for Carson rained down on her like fallout: subversive, antibusiness, Communist sympathizer, health nut, pacifist, and, of course, the coded insult “spinster.” The attack on
Silent Spring
came from the chemical companies, agricultural interests, and the allies of both in government—the self-protective enclaves within what President Eisenhower had called the “military-industrial complex.” Their fierce opposition to
Silent Spring
put Rachel Carson and everything she believed about the environment firmly on the left end of the political spectrum. And so two things—environmentalism and its adherents—were defined once and forever.

A few days before the first installment of
Silent Spring
came out in the
New Yorker
, Carson flew to California to deliver a commencement speech at Scripps College in Claremont.
She told Dorothy Freeman she was
so glad
to be away from the phone. Carson said she was desperately tired but that the cross-country flight by jetliner—her first—was thrilling. She said she never stopped gazing out the window as the continent passed under her far below.

Carson’s speech was eagerly anticipated at Scripps, where the administration had been after her to visit the campus for years. But it was important to her, too. Whether she meant it mainly to offer a context for
Silent Spring
or as an unusually ambitious charge to the graduates, Carson’s speech amounted to a summing up of everything she had learned and come to believe about the human place in nature. She titled it “Of Man and the Stream of Time,” and it sounded, intentionally or not, like a farewell.

Carson began by telling the students that the more she had lived and thought about things, the more it seemed to her that of all the difficulties that “crowd in upon us today” the most perilous was our
changed relationship with nature. She said the concept of nature was itself a tricky construct, but that she liked the simple definition that identified nature as “the part of the world that man did not make.” Humanity was part of the natural order—but by tradition and through an insistent arrogance, we had long assumed that nature was under our dominion, and that we were the masters of nature and everything that inhabited the natural world. Carson said she was often mystified by the reaction when she showed people the many forms of life flourishing in a tidal pool. Were these living entities edible? Could they be made into some kind of useful product? Carson said she could scarcely understand these questions when it was impossible to “assign a value” to creatures so exquisite that their mere existence should be cause for contentment with the peerless universe.

Carson said that before the attack on Hiroshima, she had doubted that nature could ever need protection from man. The world changed—slowly, of course—but certain of its features seemed immutable: the advance and retreat of the great oceans over eons, the daily ebbing and flooding of the tides, the uncountable mass migrations of the birds and fish. These things and many more seemed beyond the reach of human influence. Until they weren’t. The earth, Carson said, was nothing if not a water world that was now growing parched:

Life being what it is—adaptable and tenacious—nature might survive even the insults of the modern age if they did not come so quickly, Carson said. Evolution is a response to both friendly and
hostile conditions, but time is its essential ingredient and time was running out:

Carson said that measured against the “backdrop of geologic time,” human beings had inhabited the world for only a moment—but a portentous one in which we had to consider our impact not only on the earth but perhaps on worlds beyond it. It had taken only a few short centuries to move from a time when we gazed out at the ocean and wondered what was over the horizon. Now, she said, “our whole earth has become only another shore from which we look out across the dark ocean of space, uncertain what we shall find when we sail out among the stars.” Based on the experience of her own generation—which had brought the world to such a dangerous crossroads—Carson said it was now time for the inheritors of the earth and its many difficulties to finally prove human mastery not of nature, but of itself. “Your generation,” she said, “must come to terms with the environment.”