Rachel Carson's Toxic Legacy

Margaret Wente

Toronto Globe and Mail
Thursday, May 24, 2007

I was 12 when I read Rachel Carson's newly published book, Silent Spring, in 1962. Although I'd never heard the term "environmentalist," she turned me into one. I didn't understand the complicated science in it. But I was horrified by her evocation of a natural world whose creatures were being wiped out by man-made poisons - the silent spring, where no birds sang. In school, I wrote an essay praising Silent Spring, and another one explaining why a bomb shelter wouldn't help you survive a nuclear attack. (That was an apocalyptic time, not unlike our own.)

Born 100 years ago this week, Ms. Carson is still revered as the patron saint of the environmental movement. Schools, conferences and special days are named after her. Among her foremost admirers is Al Gore. "Silent Spring came as a cry in the wilderness, a deeply felt, thoroughly researched and brilliantly written argument that changed the course of history," he wrote.

Indeed it did - and not necessarily for the better. In fact, it led to one of the greatest tragedies of modern times. Thanks to Ms. Carson's all-out attack on pesticides, DDT was banned in the West. But DDT was also the most effective anti-malarial agent ever invented; before it fell into disrepute, it was credited with saving 100 million lives. When the Western nations cut off their support for DDT spraying programs in the Third World, the death toll shot back up.

Today, malaria cripples local economies and kills 2.7 million people every year - mostly children under 5. In a devastating investigative piece, New York Times journalist Tina Rosenberg wrote, "Silent Spring is now killing African children because of its persistence in the public mind."

"Poor woman. She never actually said 'Ban DDT,' " says Amir Attaran, an expert on public-health and development policy at the University of Ottawa.

"Her point was that we should use chemicals less." But for environmental fundamentalists, Silent Spring was the ideal propaganda tool to drive home their message. And even though the World Health Organization has now reversed itself on DDT, countless environmental and cancer activists continue to cite the DDT ban as one of environmentalism's greatest "victories."

DDT's persistence in the environment did, indeed, affect certain bird species, such as eagles. But after decades of testing, there's not a shred of evidence that it causes cancer in humans, as Ms. Carson claimed. Although she was an eloquent, impassioned writer, science wasn't her strong suit. "She focused on the one environmental subject [chemicals] where you have to have the greatest scientific knowledge," says Prof. Attaran.

Silent Spring is riddled with anecdotal evidence and misleading assertions that flunk the most basic science test. "Today more American school children die of cancer than from any other cause," she wrote, implying that pesticides were to blame. But the real reason for this alarming trend was the dramatic decline in other causes of child mortality, especially infectious diseases. At the time she wrote, the mortality rate from childhood cancer hadn't changed for decades. Curiously, she also overlooked the greatest man-made cancer agent of them all: cigarettes.

Today the legacy of Silent Spring is all around us. As cities and towns rush to ban lawn sprays, you can thank Ms. Carson for the dandelions in the park. The belief that man-made agents are unnatural, and thus inherently bad - even in the most minute amounts - is now widespread. Millions of people are convinced that toxic chemicals in our food, our water, and our air are responsible for the cancer epidemic, even though no such epidemic exists. Her apocalyptic prophecies about how mankind is destroying the Earth are faithfully reproduced by extremists in the global warming crowd.

Most seriously, groups like the Sierra Club continue to lobby against DDT because of the potential for "widespread misuse" - yet another example of the distressing tendency among environmentalists to sacrifice the interests of the Third World because they think they know better.

Ms. Carson wasn't really the mother of environmentalism either, as her admirers like to claim. By the time she came along, the environmental movement had been going strong for decades, and the public had already embraced the importance of species conservation and the preservation of open spaces.

The movement was already poised for its next - and far more problematic - wave, the assault on Big Chem. "She didn't launch that movement," says Prof. Attaran. "She was used by it."

And she was not used well. She may have turned the sixties generation on to environmentalism. But ultimately, Silent Spring is a case study in the tragedy of good intentions.