Environmental Heroes - Rachel Carson
Introducing Environmental Heroes - a new series of blogs where we look at the lives & work of individuals who have made a difference to local and international environmental efforts.
Silent Spring - a book that changed the world
Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring - First Edition Cover 1962.
Rachel Carson, author of Silent Spring. Official photo as FWS employee. c. 1940.
Before she published the work that has been described as one of the most important books of the 20th century, Rachel Carson from Springdale, Pennsylvania was already a distinguished writer, and a respected government scientist. She published a highly successful trilogy of books about the sea, and was a biologist with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service.
In 1958 she embarked on four and a half years of detailed study of the effects of chemical pesticides such as DDT on bird life, the rest of the food chain, and risks to human health. She was able to undertake painstaking research and reading, and then to set it out in crystal clear and compelling, accessible language.
When she published Silent Spring in 1962, it caused a sensation. The book documented the overwhelming, pervasive misuse and overloading of deadly pesticides in the U.S. but also around the world, and their enormous impacts on bird life and related species. For example, wholesale spraying of coastal marshes killed fiddler crabs, and a collapse of the bird populations dependent on them. The book also documented the potential and actual human health damage associated with the wholesale use of some pesticides in farming, households and many aspects of everyday life.
President John F. Kennedy became aware of extracts of Silent Spring in the New Yorker. He asked a panel of the President’s Science Advisory Committee to investigate. When the Committee reported in 1963, it supported the book’s findings, which answered some of the industry critics, who had denounced Rachel Carson as a “hysterical woman”. Instead she gained much recognition in political circles and testified to Congress in June 1963. Congress went on to amend chemical legislation to add safety assessments to required pesticide labelling.
Silent Spring was one of the triggers of widespread public concern about the environment that led to big changes in the 1970s. Another was the famous incident in 1969 when the Cuyahoga River in Cleveland Ohio became so grossly polluted that it caught fire. Republican President Nixon established the Environmental Protection Agency ‘EPA’ in 1972, and it took over responsibility for chemical regulation. In 1976 the U.S. Congress passed the Toxic Substances Control Act, and the EPA went on to use this legislation to ban or greatly restrict six substances condemned in Silent Spring: DDT, chlordane, heptachlor, dieldrin, aldrin and endrin. Yet so pervasive and long lasting are these substances that traces are found in the tissues of many species, and are thought to affect bird life in some British rivers today.
Silent Spring was a fundamental building block in public opinion and the resulting regulation of chemicals and pesticides, and it remains surprisingly relevant in that context today, a reference point for both scientists and politicians. It is directly relevant to the development of a pesticides policy for the United Kingdom in 2021 that there is still no credible answer to the issue of trace amounts of pesticides in our foods, or credible measurement of the effects of such residues in combination. In 2017, the Chief Scientific Adviser to the UK Department of the Environment, Food & Rural Affairs, in a ground-breaking article, said that there was no proper assessment of the effects of applying pesticides at an industrial scale across whole landscapes, and that all the assumptions of policy based on measurement of the effects of one substance at a time in a laboratory were false. Rachel Carson got there first, with her warnings of the unforeseen effects of pesticides applied across whole landscapes: and her masterly description of establishing ‘tolerances’ as authorising contamination of public food supplies with poisonous chemicals in order that the farmer and processor may enjoy the benefits of cheaper production, and then setting up a policing agency to make certain that the consumer does not receive a lethal dose. Interestingly, she did not argue for a total ban on pesticides, but rather for a far more selective and targeted use.
The Cumbrian shepherd and writer James Rebanks in his new book English Pastoral describes the tremendous impact on him of reading Silent Spring and realising how it applied to the changing face of farmland around him. He argues that while the environmental movement responded to her rallying call about DDT and other farm chemicals, it overlooked her warnings about the intensification and industrialisation of farming, and the ongoing impacts of that.
The wider and longer-term impact of her work is based on Rachel Carson’s awareness of the connectedness of nature, of mankind’s place within the natural world, and capacity to do enormous damage by unrestrained actions. Silent Spring is dedicated to Albert Schweizer, who she quoted as saying:
“Man has lost the capacity to forsee and to forestall. He will end by destroying the earth.”
That insight helped influence the whole environmental movement, and makes Rachel Carson’s work highly relevant to today’s debates about climate change and the threats to the earth’s biodiversity.