The Legacy Of "Silent Spring"

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

(CBS) 
Roger Christie, Carson's great-nephew, said he could tell how ill she was and perhaps at some level he knew she was dying. Carson adopted him when he was five and she was just shy of 50.

"I think subconsciously, I knew she was dying," he said.

Through sheer determination, Carson participated in an hour-long CBS News documentary on pesticides, which aired not long after "Silent Spring" became a national best seller.

"Can anyone believe it is possible to lay down such a barrage of poisons on the surface of the Earth without making it unfit for all life?" she said in the documentary.

While Carson didn't contend that chemical insecticides must never be used, she faced harsh opposition.

"Well, the one guy, the chief critic was — as they say, he would have made a great villain in a Bela Lugosi movie," Christie said.

His name was Dr. Robert White-Stevens, a spokesman for the chemical industry.

"The major claims in Miss Rachel Carson's book, 'Silent Spring,' are gross distortions of the actual facts, completely unsupported by scientific experimental evidence, and general practical experience in the field," he told CBS more than four decades ago. "If Man were to faithfully follow the teachings of Miss Carson, we would return to the Dark Ages, and the insects and diseases and vermin would once again inherit the Earth."

"He was way over the top," Christie said. "'If Miss Carson has her way, the — hundreds of thousands of people would be starving in the streets tomorrow!'"

When CBS turned to government experts, the questions were many, but the answers few. Dr. Page Nicholson, water pollution expert, Public Health Service, wasn't able to answer how long pesticides persist in water once they enter or the extent to which pesticides contaminated groundwater supplies.

Even still, Christie said he knew his aunt was having an impact when President John F. Kennedy mentioned the book at a press conference.

"And my Uncle Jack, John F. Kennedy, read her book, and said, 'I'm gonna appoint an independent commission to investigate whether it's true or not," Robert Kennedy said. "That commission met for almost a year. And then at the end of that time period, [they] came out and said that essentially everything in Rachel Carson's book was true."

Rachel Carson died in 1964, just 18 months after "Silent Spring" was published. She would never know that her crusade against pesticides forever changed the way Americans view their environment.

DDT was banned in this country in 1972. Carson's work also led to the creation of the Environmental Protection Agency, and without her pioneering efforts, we might not be marking Earth Day.

"Silent Spring" foreshadowed the debate over global warming, clean energy and organic food.

But to best understand Carson's legacy, there's no better place to look than Catalina Island, just off the coast of southern California — home again to the bald eagle.

The eagles had all but disappeared after DDT was dumped into local waters, which led egg shells to become so thin that chicks couldn't survive. But just this month, for the first time in decades, eggs left in nests in the wild hatched on their own.

Ann Muscat, president of the Catalina Island conservancy, believes the eagles owe it all to Rachel Carson.

"So I think that wherever she is right now, she must be looking down on Catalina and thinking, 'This is really a wonderful occasion,'" Muscat said.

[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..

[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]

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.

[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

[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.

[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.

[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?

[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?

[lambofgoth]

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

[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.

[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.

[erasmus6]

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

[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!

[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!