The Legacy Of "Silent Spring"

Despite Industry Backlash, Rachel Carson's Warning About Chemicals Helped Found The Green Movement

(CBS)  In her groundbreaking book "Silent Spring," Rachel Carson jolted a prosperous post-war America — a country confident that science and technology were leading the way to a future in which disease and hunger could be overcome, in no small part thanks to a new generation of powerful pesticides.

But in "Silent Spring," Carson warned that progress had a price.

"These sprays, dusts and aerosols are now applied almost universally to farms, gardens, forests and homes — non-selective chemicals that have the power to kill every insect, the good and the bad, to still the song of birds and the leaping of fish in streams, to coat the leaves with a deadly film and to linger on in soil," she said in a 1962 documentary for CBS News. "All this, though the intended target may be only a few weeds or insects."

At the midpoint of the 20th century, spraying was a familiar sight to many young baby boomers including Robert Kennedy, son of the late New York senator, Robert Kennedy.

"We had sprayers coming — coming down our street, big fogging trucks, you know … to spray for DDT," he told CBS News correspondent Thalia Assuras. "And my brothers and I would go out and play combat in the fog, you know, running in and out of this fog, breathing this stuff."

Kennedy is now an environmental lawyer, and says Rachel Carson was a pioneer who inspired a generation of activists.

"She was the first one to quietly, you know, kind of nudge the American people and say, 'Well, wait a second. There's a cost here that you're not being told about,'" he said.

Carson, an unassuming scientist and writer, was an unlikely activist for sure, but the seeds were planted early in her childhood. She grew up in a modest house just outside of Pittsburgh.

"She enjoyed wandering around in the fields," said Patricia DeMarco, the executive director of the Rachel Carson Homestead. "It was her playground. She just was very fascinated with living things and growing things. From an early age she wanted to be a writer and her mother was teaching her at home a lot."

After earning a college science degree, Carson took a job at the Federal Bureau of Fisheries, which later became the Fish and Wildlife Service.

"While she was put out in the field as an aquatic biologist, soon she was editing other scientists' reports," said Linda Lear, author of a biography on Carson who also contributed to a new book of essays about her legacy.

In her free time, Carson wrote three increasingly successful books about the mysteries of the sea. The books sold so well that she turned to writing full-time. She hoped that her writing would help educate the public about the wonders of nature.

"Always to instill her science writing with an ethic, if you will, of how beautiful nature is," Lear said, "how intricate it is and how everything in nature is related to everything else.

So when Carson saw evidence that pesticides — DDT in particular — were killing birds and other wildlife, she decided that would be the subject of her next book.

It took her four years to write "Silent Spring," based on research from a network of scientists around the country. Finishing the book became a matter of will; she was fighting breast cancer.

[mikecbsmoore]

Do you really believe the resurgence of the bald eagle in Catalina Island is worth the cost of millions of Africans dying of malaria? The WHO has recently rescinded its ban on DDT due to research that has proven Ms. Carson's allegations to be false. Your piece ridiculed her critics as being over the top. In reality, he only claimed that "thousands" would die... it was to be "millions." The bird egg fragility requires concentrations many times that needed for eradication of mosquitoes carrying malaria. Ms. Carson started the ball rolling alright... to mass extinction of native peoples. Shame on you for your revisionist propaganda!

[sandy19731]

You guys are so right - we absolutely should have trusted the petro-chemical companies to eradicate disease and keep us all healthy.

Healthy debate in the form of publishing a book, my God! What an idea!

[erasmus6]

You people posting here, don't even have a complete brain between you.

[angelicmeans]

She was right and it is happening again. 50% of the bees in California are gone. Wasps, hornets, other pollinators, hummingbirds and even bats are also disappearing. Three years ago bees showed failure to eat and disoriented behavior and then days later abandoned the hive, queen and larvae, just disappearing. This is called Colony Collapse Disorder. as primary culprits in CCD. %u2026Of particular concern are pesticides%u2026 Among these are
I have been informed that a group of pesticides called neonicotinoids was introduced 3 years ago by Bayer Crop Science. "neonicotinoids%u2026these chemicals are known to be highly toxic to honey bees and other pollinators. %u201DSince beekeepers cannot name any products, I called Bayer and found the names of the products which contain neonicotinoids. These are Admire, Provado, Calypso, Poncho, Gaucho, and TriMax but perhaps they are sold under other names in different stores.
If there is even the smallest possibility that these 6 products are killing the bees, shouldn%u2019t it be imperative to immediately halt the use of these products? These chemicals are not toxic to humans unless one considers famine as toxic.

[mgpm-2009]

...and you stupid conservatives would rather soak the world in chemicals for a buck. No matter what it does to us. That's sick...really sick....leaving your soul on the altar of the almighty dollar. pathetic.

[lambofgoth]

Don't mind the conservatives and their mindless pro-Monsanto babble... They are still high from sleeping with their preacher last night.

[octavianfdlr]

Here's a piece of "mindless pro-Monsanto babble" I encountered a few years ago in the pages of Science:

In a letter to the editor, it was pointed out that the tilling of fields was preventing the storage of carbon in the soil. This is because burrying crop residues causes them to decompose more rapidly. (Organic carbon oxidizes more rapidly underground than on the surface) Furthermore, when the soil is turned over, formerly burried crop residues are exposed on the surface, causing them to oxidize more rapidly. (Organic carbon oxidizes more rapidly on the surface than underground) Therefore, this writer argued, we need to have strong laws requiring the use of herbicides instead of tilling the fields, to fight Global Warming.

Does it get more mindless?

[thelastjedi1]

Ms. Carson should be as villianized as Hitler or Stalin. 25-30 million Africans have died of malaria because of overreaction to Rachel Carson's fictional book.

How many people will die because of Al Gore's fictional movie?

[brainworms1]

First of all DDT isn't banned in Africa or South America, Indonesia, China or India where most of the mosquitos live, so those third-world peoples aren't dying outright from malaria...they're just suffering from higher rates of cancer and birth defects. We're also feeding them bushels of GM corn, you know, with the pesticide built right in.

It's only in whitebread America and Europe that the elite of the world are slightly protected from the most deadly agricultural chemicals. Come to think of it, we aren't detonating much depleted uranium munitions locally either.

When ecological systems collapse, the top of the food chain is always the first to go. Millions are going to die either way.

[factchecker7]

No, they are dying from malaria; there's absolutely no doubt about that. The last estimate put it at over a million per year in 2005. The world has lost hundreds of millions since the environmental laws were enacted. Unfortunately people and governments tend to over react based on very thin information. I'm scared we'll see this with the Global Warming issue. I think it is very prudent to investigate all environmental issues but people need to also realize that lots of people stand to gain a lot of money from fanning the fears of others. Gore will make an enormous fortune if Global Warming is handled the way that he suggests. His financial investiments alone prove that.

Please people, don't be so ugly to each other! When you start insulting each other it simply proves that you have nothing meaningful to add to the conversation. It makes you look foolish and turns people against your opinion....sleeping with their minister? there's a lot of hate in that person's soul. What a miserable person.

[factchecker7]

No, they are dying from malaria; there's absolutely no doubt about that. The last estimate put it at over a million per year in 2005. The world has lost hundreds of millions since the environmental laws were enacted. Unfortunately people and governments tend to over react based on very thin information. I'm scared we'll see this with the Global Warming issue. I think it is very prudent to investigate all environmental issues but people need to also realize that lots of people stand to gain a lot of money from fanning the fears of others. Gore will make an enormous fortune if Global Warming is handled the way that he suggests. His financial investiments alone prove that.

Please people, don't be so ugly to each other! When you start insulting each other it simply proves that you have nothing meaningful to add to the conversation. It makes you look foolish and turns people against your opinion....sleeping with their minister? there's a lot of hate in that person's soul. What a miserable person.

[tolerford]

First discovered Carson in '89, asking a librarian where I might find an identification of what I'd found on a South Carolina beach. Found Carson's drawing of it, description and purpose. Since then have read extensively about her and by her. She's my Number One heroine.

[factchecker7]

No, they are dying from malaria; there's absolutely no doubt about that. The last estimate put it at over a million per year in 2005. The world has lost hundreds of millions since the environmental laws were enacted. Unfortunately people and governments tend to over react based on very thin information. I'm scared we'll see this with the Global Warming issue. I think it is very prudent to investigate all environmental issues but people need to also realize that lots of people stand to gain a lot of money from fanning the fears of others. Gore will make an enormous fortune if Global Warming is handled the way that he suggests. His financial investiments alone prove that.

Please people, don't be so ugly to each other! When you start insulting each other it simply proves that you have nothing meaningful to add to the conversation. It makes you look foolish and turns people against your opinion....sleeping with their minister? there's a lot of hate in that person's soul. What a miserable person.

[factchecker7]

No, they are dying from malaria; there's absolutely no doubt about that. The last estimate put it at over a million per year in 2005. The world has lost hundreds of millions since the environmental laws were enacted. Unfortunately people and governments tend to over react based on very thin information. I'm scared we'll see this with the Global Warming issue. I think it is very prudent to investigate all environmental issues but people need to also realize that lots of people stand to gain a lot of money from fanning the fears of others. Gore will make an enormous fortune if Global Warming is handled the way that he suggests. His financial investiments alone prove that.

Please people, don't be so ugly to each other! When you start insulting each other it simply proves that you have nothing meaningful to add to the conversation. It makes you look foolish and turns people against your opinion....sleeping with their minister? there's a lot of hate in that person's soul. What a miserable person.

[archangelric]

lets see ...

we have natural diseases that kill X number of people

we invent toxic chemicals (rather than look for environmentally and medically safe natural ones) that kill the disease carriers AND poison the environment possibly reducing the number killed by the disease (Y) in the process of poisoning others (Z); the poisons also kill plants and animals that are FOOD for W people starving them (but of course, they live in poor countries, are unimportant) killing so we have either X - Y or X + Z W - Y

Do the math

[booyaw_77]

We have to start looking for natural alternatives. For example, minnows eat mosquitos instead of poisoning the ponds with chemicals. Just about all the natural world is like this. A natural predator. No chemicals.. No gene splicing.. No frankensteins.. Just natural creatures that'll help yaz out.

[booyaw_77]

"Well, I had to genetically engineer a new tree to fight off all the extra CO2 in de atmosphere. How was I to know that plant DNA is even MORE complex than human DNA? And that my genetically engineered frankenstein would make a blight that'd kill off every living plant on the planet earth in 6 months thereby killing every living thing except the cockroaches? I was just trying to help! Sorry!"

Uh-uh.

[booyaw_77]

The natural world is a thing of beauty and deep wisdom. And not a big experiment for the demented and immorally minded to go playing with *** everybody else up in de process. It is a thing requiring deep deep understandings! And should be respected as such.. A gift! From de landlord..