Biologist Rachel Carson: Heroine of the green movement

Biologist Rachel Carson: Heroine of the green movement
Published: 26 May 2007
Independent UK

Rachel Carson was a shy biologist who, with one book, changed history. Paul Vallely celebrates the centenary of the woman who first warned the world of the perils of environmental pollution

She was the mother of environmentalism, and in 1962 she published what turned out to be the founding text of modern ecology: Silent Spring. Its title was meant to evoke a time - not far in the future - when the season of new growth would be one in which, to quote Keats, "no birds sing", because they had all died from pesticide poisoning. It was a work which was to be listed - alongside The Wealth of Nations, Das Kapital and The Origin of the Species - as a book which changed the course of history.

Its subject was the use of the chemical DDT which, in the 1950s, was being sprayed recklessly around the American and European countryside to control pests as minor as the spruce budworm. No thought was being given to its ecological impact. In 1962, "the environment" had not been invented.

Its author, Rachel Carson, was born 100 years ago tomorrow. She was an American marine biologist who, as a child, spent hours with her mother absorbed in the ponds, fields and forests around her home on a small family farm in Pennsylvania. She worked at the US Bureau of Fisheries as an aquatic biologist where she worked as a government official until a trilogy of books on the sea brought her a good income and modest literary stardom.

Then, in the late 1950s ,she received a letter from a friend who owned a bird sanctuary in New England. It told of how all the creatures had died after a government-sponsored spraying of DDT. Carson set about piecing together an account of how a pesticide aimed at eliminating one organism worked its way through the food chain - and as well as killing insects ends up poisoning larger animals and humans. In the process she developed a new way of thinking about the relationship between humans and nature. "Man, however much he may like to pretend the contrary, is part of nature," she wrote. Humanity's aim should not be to master nature, but ourselves.

It was the basis for a subversion of received wisdom. Suddenly science, technology, agro-business, industrialism and even materialism and consumerism were under attack.

Not everyone went as far as Herbert Marcuse, who claimed that "authentic ecology flows into a militant struggle for a socialist politics which must attack the system at its roots, both in the process of production and in the mutilated consciousness of individuals". But the seeds of change were sown.

The cultural authority of science, and the politicians who defended it, were called into question. Trust could henceforth no longer be automatic. Scepticism was the new order. Ecology took on the ideology of a resistance movement.

The establishment united against her. A counter-attack was orchestrated by agro-chemical interests including Monsanto and supported by the US government. There were threats of lawsuits. A reviewer for Time magazine typified the mainstream response, writing that Carson was "unfair, one-sided, and hysterically overemphatic". One prominent politician, Ezra Taft Benson, concluded she was "probably a Communist".

Time has, on the whole, been kind to Carson's reputation. In 1980 she was posthumously given America's highest civilian honour, the Presidential Medal of Freedom. (She died in 1964, of cancer.) However, re-reading Silent Spring today it is not hard to see why she came in for such criticism.

She is, by turns, sentimental and romanticised; her tone is apocalyptic. The human use of synthetic chemicals amounted to a "relentless war on life". Modern society was "losing the right to be called civilised." Chemicals were not just deadly but "sinister and deadly" with a "violent crossfire". Everything was "total" or "incredible", an "alchemy" or an "elixir". Poisons were there "from the moment of conception" and "probably" in the tissues of the unborn child.

If Carson was the mother of modern environmentalism, then she signalled its vices as well as its virtues. "As crude a weapon as the cave man's club, the chemical barrage has been hurled against the fabric of life," she wrote. Her own prose was a crude weapon too. She gave birth to the emotionalism that has clouded the eco-movement. All chemicals were tarred with the blackened brush with which she painted DDT.

Balancing the benefits and risks of modern science is both a practical and ethical question about how to balance human and non-human interests. Carson steered clear of that question. "She made everything black and white," says Professor Chris Pollock, of the Institute of Grassland and Environmental Research, "whereas life is really a murky grey". It requires cost-benefit analysis of the kind Carson avoided.

A key example of this is the role of DDT in eliminating malaria, something that Carson never even mentions. In the two decades before Silent Spring, DDT had saved between 50 and 100 million lives, the World Health Organization estimates. It virtually eradicated malaria in the southern United States, Europe and parts of Latin America and India.

When DDT was banned, thanks to the outcry Carson's book produced, it had only begun its work in Africa. In South Africa, malaria cases have increased by 1000 per cent in the late 1990s alone - but dropped by 80 per cent in Kwa Zulu Natal in 2000, the one province that still extensively used DDT.

Silent Spring had claimed that DDT not only harmed wildlife but caused cancer in humans too. The cases Carson brought to support this - like the woman who sprayed spiders in her basement and died a month later of leukaemia - are now dismissed by modern oncology.

Carson claimed that "today more American school children die of cancer than from any other disease" but it turned out that the percentage of children dying of cancer was rising because other causes of death, such as infectious diseases, were drastically declining.

In more recent times some have dubbed Silent Spring as a candidate for the Ten Most Harmful Books of the 19th and 20th centuries, and others have said that the anti-DDT campaign she inspired was eventually responsible for almost as many deaths as some of the worst dictators of the last century.

Last week the World Health Organization met to call for the increased use of DDT to save millions from the ravages of malaria. A small amount sprayed, twice a year, on the walls of homes in Africa and India could curb a disease which every day kills the equivalent of seven jumbo jets filled with children.

The irony is that Carson did not call for DDT to be banned, only for its indiscriminate use to be curbed. But that was not the message that campaigners took from her messianic book.

"Things were overtaken by people with even more extreme views when what was needed was a rational scientific debate, says Professor Alan Malcolm, head of the Institute of Biology.

"And yet, had the book not been so over-blown it would probably not have made the impact it did. Sometimes you have to have a very extreme person to get the debate started at all. She was a heroine, but clearly she was a flawed one".

The consequences of that, for good and ill, remain with us today.

Extract from 'Silent Spring'

The history of life on earth has been a history of interaction between living things and their surroundings. To a large extent, the physical form and the habits of the earth's vegetation and its animal life have been moulded by the environment. Considering the whole span of earthly time, the opposite effect, in which life actually modifies its surroundings, has been relatively slight. Only within the moment of time represented by the present century has one species - man - acquired significant power to alter the nature of this world.

During the past quarter-century this power has not only increased to one of disturbing magnitude but it has changed in character. The most alarming of all man's assaults upon the environment is the contamination of air, earth, rivers and sea with dangerous and even lethal materials. This pollution is for the most part irrecoverable; the chain of evil it initiates not only in the world that must support life but in living tissues is for the most part irreversible. In this now universal contamination of the environment, chemicals are the sinister and little-recognised partners of radiation in changing the very nature of the world - the very nature of its life. Strontium 90, released through nuclear explosions into the air, comes to earth in rain or drifts down as fallout, lodges in soil, enters into the grass or corn or wheat grown there, and in time takes up its abode in the bones of a human being, there to remain until his death. Similarly, chemicals sprayed on croplands or forests or gardens lie long in soil, entering into living organisms, passing from one to another in a chain of poisoning and death. Or they pass mysteriously by underground streams until they emerge and, through the alchemy of air and sunlight, combine into new forms that kill vegetation, sicken cattle, and work unknown harm on those who drink from once-pure wells. As Albert Schweitzer has said, "Man can hardly even recognise the devils of his own creation."

It took hundreds of millions of years to produce the life that now inhabits the earth - aeons of time in which that developing and evolving and diversifying life reached a state of adjustment and balance with its surroundings. The environment, rigorously shaping and directing the life it supported, contained elements that were hostile as well as supporting. Certain rocks gave out dangerous radiation; even within the light of the sun, from which all life draws its energy, there were short-wave radiations with power to injure. Given time - time not in years but in millennia - life adjusts, and a balance has been reached. For time is the essential ingredient; but in the modern world there is no time. .

The rapidity of change and the speed with which new situations are created follow the impetuous and heedless pace of man rather than the deliberate pace of nature. Radiation is no longer merely the background radiation of rocks, the bombardment of cosmic rays, the ultra-violet of the sun ... radiation is now the unnatural creation of man's tampering with the atom. The chemicals to which life is asked to make its adjustment are no longer merely the calcium and silica and copper and all the rest of the minerals washed out of the rocks and carried in rivers to the sea; they are the synthetic creations of man's inventive mind, brewed in his laboratories, and having no counterparts in nature.

To adjust to these chemicals would require time on the scale that is nature's; it would require not merely the years of a man's life but the life of generations. And even this, were it by some miracle possible, would be futile, for the new chemicals come from our laboratories in an endless stream; almost 500 annually find their way into actual use in the United States alone ... 500 new chemicals to which the bodies of men and animals are required somehow to adapt each year, chemicals totally outside the limits of biologic experience ...