Rachel Carson: Extended Profile

By Discover The Networks
2005

The dire doomsday predictions and unproven scientific assertions of environmental alarmist Rachel Carson led her to be enshrined as the founder of the modern environmental movement in America.

Carson was born on May 27, 1907. The youngest of three children, she grew up in a small farmhouse in rural Springdale, Pennsylvania, which is located just outside of Pittsburgh. Her love for nature, she explained, grew as a result of her mother teaching her about the “joy in the out-of-doors.”

In 1929 Carson graduated from Pennsylvania College for Women (now Chatham College) with a BA in biology, and three years later received her MA in zoology from Johns Hopkins University. For a few years she taught zoology at both Hopkins and the University of Maryland while also continuing her studies at the Woods Hole Marine Biological Laboratory in Massachusetts. However, she was unable to finish her Ph.D. due to “familial obligations.”

In 1935 Carson became the first woman to take and pass a civil service exam. She then moved to Washington, D.C. to work as a part-time radio show writer for the U. S. Bureau of Fisheries’ (now the Fish and Wildlife Service) “Romance Under the Waters.” The program brought to life the new scientific discoveries being made in the oceans.

In 1936 Carson received a full-time appointment as a junior aquatic biologist. To help make ends meet financially, she also wrote natural history features, focusing mainly on marine zoology, for the Baltimore Sun.

At the urging of her government editor, Carson submitted a piece, “Undersea,” to Atlantic Monthly, which was published in 1937. In 1941 Carson published her first book, Under the Sea-Wind. Five years later she was promoted to information specialist, where she wrote pamphlets on conservation and edited scientific articles. In 1949 she became editor-in-chief for all Fisheries’ publications. With the publication of Carson’s next two books, The Sea Around Us and The Edge of the Sea, which “opened up scientific knowledge about the oceans to the layperson,” she became a household name as a famous naturalist and science writer. Due to the overwhelming success of her second book in 1952, Carson retired from the government to write full time. She wrote articles that attempted to infuse readers with wonder about the natural world: “It is a wholesome and necessary thing for us to turn again to the earth and in the contemplation of her beauties to know the sense of wonder and humility.”

The constant thread running through Carson’s writings is the belief that mankind’s use of pesticides has tremendous power to “irreversibly” alter the natural world. She wrote:

“Nonselective 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 the streams, to coat the leaves with a deadly film, and to linger on in the soil. . . . 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? They should not be called ‘insecticides’ but ‘biocides’. . . The more I learned about the use of pesticides, the more appalled I became. I realized that here was the material for a book. What I discovered was that everything which meant most to me as a naturalist was being threatened, and that nothing I could do would be more important.”

In 1945 Carson began trying to publish her junk science-based articles on the dangers of DDT, a pesticide widely used to kill mosquitoes, but no one dared print her exaggerated, alarmist claims. Then in 1962, she published Silent Spring, a manifesto warning about the deadly effects of DDT on plant and animal life, claiming that the pesticide caused cancer, genetic defects, and damage to the world’s food supply.

“There was once a town in the heart of America,” wrote Carson in Silent Spring, “where all life seemed to live in harmony with its surroundings . . . a pastoral Eden of hardwood forests and bountiful wildlife . . . strange blight crept over the area and everything began to change. . . . Everywhere was a shadow of death. . . . There was a strange stillness. . . . The few birds seen anywhere were moribund; they trembled violently and could not fly. It was a spring without voices. On the mornings that had once throbbed with the dawn chorus of scores of bird voices there was now no sound; only silence lay over the fields and woods and marsh. . . . Even the streams were now lifeless. . . . No witchcraft, no enemy action had silenced the rebirth of new life in this stricken world. The people had done it themselves.”

Carson’s best-selling tome induced a manic wave of anti-pesticide hysteria and Carson soon became a cause célèbre. (She was the star witness at several Congressional hearings.) Because of her book, anti-DDT sentiment was so strong that the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) banned its use in the United States and any nation receiving American foreign aid. Green radicals celebrate the Carson-induced DDT ban as their first great environmental victory. “Without this book, the environmental movement might have been long delayed or never have developed at all,” said Al Gore, who credits Carson for inspiring his own environmental activism.

However, now more than forty years after the publication of Silent Spring, its findings are largely dismissed by scientists. Todd Seavey of the American Council on Health and Science has noted: “No DDT-related human fatalities or chronic illnesses have ever been recorded, even among the DDT-soaked workers in anti-malarial programs or among prisoners who were fed DDT as volunteer test subjects — let alone among the 600 million to 1 billion who lived in repeatedly-sprayed dwellings at the height of the substance’s use. The only recorded cases of DDT poisoning were from massive accidental or suicidal ingestions, and even in these cases, it was probably the kerosene solvent rather than the DDT itself that caused illness. Reports of injury to birds could not be verified, even when one researcher force-fed DDT-laced worms to baby robins. Reports of fish kills have been greatly exaggerated, resulting from faulty data or aberrant, massive spills or overuse of the chemical that do not hint at a general danger in its use.”

Notwithstanding the new evidence, many of Carson’s most devoted disciples remain committed to her theories. Among her most ardent supporters, in addition to Al Gore, are Teresa Heinz Kerry, the Natural Resources Defense Council, the Sierra Club, the Environmental Defense Fund, and the Howard Heinz Endowment. Some groups, such as Greenpeace and the World Wildlife Fund, have made allowances for the new evidence and have changed their position from demanding a worldwide DDT ban, to allowing its limited use.

The impact of Carson’s work has been monumental, its effects disastrous. It led to the DDT ban, which in turn led to the deaths of millions of African men, women and children killed by preventable diseases that DDT could have stopped. Today malaria infects between 300 million and 500 million people annually, killing as many 2.7 million of them. Ninety-five percent of those infected and killed are African children under the age of five.

It is virtually impossible for developing countries to thrive without DDT because their populations, those who actually survive the deadly infectious diseases, never regain their full health. “Malaria perpetuates poverty by debilitating people,” said Dr. Roger Bate, author of When Politics Kills: Malaria and the DDT Story. “Unable to work, its victims cannot afford to feed themselves or their children. Sick and malnourished, they are prone to a vicious cycle of future infection and debilitation. To break the cycle, to save lives, it is imperative that we have all the tools, including DDT, that work to help control malaria, protect health and ensure development.”

Rachel Carson died at her home in Silver Spring, Maryland on April 14, 1964 after a long battle with breast cancer.