Olga Owens Huckins watched the birds falling lifeless all around her property in Massachusetts in January 1958. It was just after the area had been sprayed with DDT from a plane. She wrote to the Boston Herald and sent a copy of her letter to her friend Rachel Carson. Carson was a marine biologist and a best-selling nature writer who was already very concerned about the use of man-made chemicals, especially pesticides, on the natural world.
Carson already had three best-selling non-fiction books: Under the Sea Wind, The Sea Around Us and The Edge of the Sea. She added her friend’s letter to the evidence she was building for her next book.
“How could intelligent beings seek to control a few unwanted species by a method that contaminated the entire environment and brought the threat of disease and death even to their own kind? Yet this is precisely what we have done. We have done it, moreover, for reasons that collapse the moment we examine them.”
Rachel Carson, Silent Spring
Silent Spring was published on 27 September 1962, sixty years ago. It led to the banning of DDT for agricultural use, and has been named one of the 25 greatest science books of all time. Sir David Attenborough said he thinks it is only second to Darwin’s Origin of the Species in terms of its impact on the scientific world. Carson never saw this reaction to her book. Even as she appeared on national television and testified before a US Senate subcommittee she was dying. The radiation treatment for her breast cancer, discovered while researching the book, weakened her body and she died of a heart attack in 1964, aged 56.
Carson knew she would face huge criticism, especially from the chemical companies whose products she was criticizing. She used her contacts – built through her years as a marine biologist for the US Fish and Wildlife Service – to build a defense. She wrote carefully, knowing her arguments would be dismissed as ‘hysterical’ by the mostly male establishment she was taking on. Carson hid her illness so it could not be used to dismiss her work. Her publisher got Silent Spring picked for a US ‘Book of the Month’ scheme which saw it delivered to 150,000 subscribers across the US. Carson said this would “carry it to farms and hamlets all over that country that don’t know what a bookstore looks like—much less The New Yorker.” Bit patronizing but still a canny move to get the story she told of zealous use of pesticides as harmful to nature, including humanity, to more than just the narrow confines of the east coast intelligentsia.
After Silent Spring was published, Carson was abused for being the wrong type of scientist. For being a nature fanatic. Even for being unmarried (and therefore somehow a Communist…)
Within a decade the US had banned DDT as a pesticide for agricultural use. The Stockholm Convention of Persistent Organic Pollutants, signed in 2001, aimed to eliminate or restrict the use of POPs, and restricted the use of DDT to malarial control. Carson’s careful laying out of the evidence would have been nothing without her evocative way of writing about nature.
“The road we have long been traveling is deceptively easy, a smooth superhighway on which we progress with great speed, but at its end lies disaster.”
Rachel Carson, Silent Spring
Sources
https://www.environmentandsociety.org/exhibitions/rachel-carsons-silent-spring