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On September 27, 1962, Rachel Carson published her book Silent Spring. It was a landmark moment in the history of global environmentalism.
“Carson and her book Silent Spring are frequently cited as the catalysts that inspired the environmental movement that began in the 1960s and which gained national and international momentum by the 1970s,” the American Chemical Society (ACS) says on its website.
A huge controversy was ignited with the publication of Carson’s book. It eventually led to the formation of the United States Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). The US government also passed numerous laws protecting the environment and human health, including a ban on domestic use of DDT in 1972 due to its widespread overuse and harmful impact on the environment, as per the ACS.
But what was Silent Spring all about? And who was Carson?
Carson was born on May 27, 1907, in Springdale, in the US state of Pennsylvania. She was born on her family’s farm located in the small rural community that had been named after its natural springs and a small valley.
Here, Carson grew up in the lap of nature. “Carson was born on May 27, 1907, in Springdale, PA and grew up surrounded by the woods on her family’s farm. Her mother influenced her to explore the natural world around her, coinciding with Rachel’s growing passion for writing,” the US Natural Centers for Environmental Information notes on its website. She went on to become a marine biologist and worked for the US Fish and Wildlife Service.
Carson’s childhood memories of growing up in Springdale left a lasting impression on her. One sees it even in the first chapter of Silent Spring, A fable for tomorrow.
“There was once a town in the heart of America where all life seemed to live in harmony with its surroundings. The town lay in the midst of a checkerboard of prosperous farms, with fields of grain and hillsides of orchards where, in spring, white clouds of bloom drifted above the green fields. In autumn, oak and maple and birch set up a blaze of colour that flamed and flickered across a backdrop of pines. Then foxes barked in the hills and deer silently cross the fields, half hidden in the mists of the autumn mornings.”
This is nature writing at its finest. A paragraph down the line, the tenor changes:
“Then a strange blight crept over the area and everything began to change. Some evil spell had settled on the community: mysterious maladies swept the flocks of chickens; the cattle and sheep sickened and died. Everywhere was a shadow of death…”
What exactly was this blight that Carson was writing about?
DDT (1,1,1-trichloro-2,2-di(4-chlorophenyl) ethane, also known as dichloro-diphenyl-trichloroethane) was first synthesised in 1874. “Its effectiveness as an insecticide, however, was only discovered in 1939,” the US EPA notes on its website.
That is because the potent insecticide saved the lives of millions of US servicemen from malaria in the jungle battlefields of World War II.
“After the war, the U.S. Department of Agriculture and corporations promoted DDT and other powerful chemicals to increase domestic productivity and combat a variety of ills,” as per the ACS.
But Carson saw things differently.
In her book, she wrote about the onslaught on ecology that DDT and other insecticides and pesticides caused, rather than just their effectiveness as chemicals.
“Carson built her case on science. She did extensive research, citing dozens of scientific reports, conducting interviews with leading experts, and reviewing materials across disciplines,” the ACS article notes.
Her book caught the attention of the American public. According to silentspring.org, “Carson offered a different perspective. The government was failing to ensure that these chemicals were safe, she warned. Millions of acres of crops were being treated with DDT, entire counties sprayed. In their eagerness to increase profits, chemical companies were manufacturing new pesticides rapidly and carelessly. Carson charged that Americans had become the subjects of an uncontrolled lab experiment.”
All these new ideas that the public was getting to know also meant that the manufacturers of pesticides and insecticides would no longer remain the heroes they had been made out to be.
This caused a backlash. Carson faced a volley of personal attacks. One was by Ezra Taft Benson, former US Secretary of Agriculture.
He speculated about why a spinster with no children was so concerned about genetics. He felt it could be because she was a Communist.
1962 was the height of the Cold War. The Cuban missile crisis took place in October that year as the US and USSR stood eyeball-to-eyeball and the spectre of nuclear war hung over the world.
The 1950s had already seen the witchunts by Senator Joseph McCarthy of suspected Communists in the United States.
But Carson faced the flak with courage. Despite the fact that she was gravely ill and undergoing radiation therapy for breast cancer, she stood by her book.
Carson passed away in 1964. But the impact of her book did not weaken. While the Ronald Reagan White House took away several of the changes brought about by the impact of Silent Spring, the legacy of Carson has endured to this day.
In June this year, DDT, the notorious synthetic insecticide that she fought so much against, was found to have declined in humans and the environment since 2004 due to tight regulation globally, along with 11 other Persistent Organic Pollutants, as per a new study.
The global environment movement owes a debt of gratitude to Carson. Had she not seen the deadly impacts of pesticides on humans, non-humans and ecosystems, many lives would have been lost. Most importantly, her book gave the most important weapon of all: Knowledge, which is power, as they say.
