From Pandora’s Lab (Paul Offitt, 2016) pp185-9
SILENT SPRING was successful because it was lyrical, compelling, and dramatic. But there was another reason it had had such an enormous impact: Silent Spring was biblical, appealing to our nation that we had sinned against our creator.
The book begins in Eden. “There was once a town in the heart of America where all life seemed to live in harmony with its surroundings.” Man, however, had eaten from the tree of knowledge, worshipping the false god of economic progress while destroying paradise. As a consequence, “a shadow of death had fallen on the people and the land?” And so man was to be cast out of Eden, forced to toil on a scorched earth while suffering all manner of illnesses.
In truth, Rachel Carson’s Eden never existed. And nature has never been in balance. It’s been in constant flux, arguably in chaos. Because the simple truth is that Mother Nature isn’t much of a mother: She can kill us, and unless we fight back, she will. “[Carson] paints a nostalgic picture of Elysian life in an imaginary American village of former years, where all was in harmonious balance with Nature and happiness and contentment reigned interminably,” wrote one scientist. “But the picture she paints is illusory. [T]he rural Utopia she describes was rudely punctuated by a longevity among its residents of perhaps thirty-live years, by an infant mortality of upwards of twenty children dead by the age of five of every hundred born. by mothers dead in their twenties from childbed fever and tuberculosis, by frequent famines crushing isolated peoples through long, dark, frozen winters following the failure of a basic crop the previous summer, [and] by vermin and filth infesting their homes . . . Surely she cannot be so naive as to contemplate turning our clocks back to the years when man was indeed immersed in Nature’s balance and barely holding his own.”
William Cronon, an environmental scientist and the author of Changes in the Land, took Carson’s argument to its illogical end: “It is not hard to reach the conclusion that the only way human beings can hope to live naturally on the earth is to follow the hunter-gatherers back into a wilderness Eden and abandon virtually everything that civilization has given us. If nature dies because we enter it, then the only way to save nature is to kill ourselves.” Biologist I. L. Baldwin sounded a similar theme: “Modern agriculture and modern public health, indeed, modern civilization could not exist without a relentless war against the return of a true balance of nature.” Carson never saw it that way, insisting on a world that had never existed: “Under primitive agricultural conditions the farmer had few insect problems,” she wrote, ignoring that fact that early farming societies were riddled with insect-borne diseases and insect-induced famines.
IN 2006, the World Health Organization, realizing its mistake, changed its position on DDT, no longer bowing to political pressures to ban the product. On September 15, Dr. Arata Kochi, director of the Global Malaria Programme, announced the new policy: “I asked my Staff. I asked malaria experts around the world, ‘Are we using every possible weapon to fight this disease?’ It became apparent that we were not. One powerful weapon against malaria was not being deployed. In a battle to save the lives of nearly one million children a year – most of them in Africa – the world was reluctant to spray the inside of houses and huts with insecticides; especially with the highly effective insecticide known as dichlorodiphenyltrichloroethane or DDT.” The Sierra Club backed Kochi; the Pesticide Action Network didn’t.
For more than 30 years, countries where malaria epidemics were common had been denied this lifesaving chemical. Although there were alternatives, and some of those alternatives were used, no chemical was as cheap, long lasting, or effective as DDT. As a result, millions of people, mostly children, died needlessly.
Carson’s supporters have heard the criticisms. They’ve argued that, had she lived longer, she would never have promoted a ban on DDT. Indeed, in Silent Spring, Carson wrote, “It is not my contention that chemical pesticides never be used.” But it was her contention that DDT had caused leukemia, liver disease, birth defects, premature births, and a whole range of chronic illnesses. An influential author cannot, on the one hand, claim that DDT causes leukemia (which, in 1962, was a death sentence) and then, on the other hand, expect that anything less than a total ban on the chemical would be the result.
“THE QUESTION IS WHETHER any civilization can wage relentless war on life without destroying itself, and without losing the tight to be called civilized.” wrote Rachel Carson in Silent Spring. Roger Meiners, co-author of Silent Spring at 50: The False Crises of Rachel Carson, countered. “This rhetorical question suggests another: whether any civilization that hobbles new technology that could reduce hunger and disease, on the chance that the new technology might have negative consequences – essentially giving up a real bird in hand for a hypothetical bird in the bush – should lose the right to be called civilized.”
THE LESSON FROM RACHEL CARSON and the banning of DDT reprises an earlier theme – it’s all about the data – as well as suggesting two new ones.
When officials at the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) were deciding whether to ban DDT, they had two sets of data from which to choose. One was a 9,000-page report generated by more than a hundred experts in the fields of chemistry, toxicology, agriculture, and environmental health that included hundreds of graphs and figures. DDT, the report concluded, wasn’t killing birds, wasn’t killing fish, and wasn’t causing chronic diseases in people. Although numbingly boring, the report was accurate.
The other source of evidence was a book: Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring – a beautifully written, heart-pounding tale with biblical overtones. Unlike the expert report, however, it was short on data and long on anecdotes. For example, to prove that eagles were dying from DDT, Carson had relied on the observations of a retired banker from Florida whose hobby was bird-watching. In the end, the EPA’s decision to ban DDT wasn’t based on data; it was based on fear and misinformation.
Carson’s story provides another lesson. In the 16th century Paracelsus, a Swiss physician and philosopher said, – “the dose makes the poison.” When Rachel Carson wrote Silent Spring, she appealed to a 1960s, back-to-nature mentality supported by young, energetic, community-minded activists. Carson’s basic premise – that manmade activities were destroying the environment – was correct. Thanks to Rachel Carson, we are now far more attentive to our impact on the planet. Unfortunately, Carson also gave birth to the notion of zero tolerance – the assumption that any substance found harmful at any concentration or dosage should be banned absolutely. If large quantities of DDT (like those used in agriculture) were potentially harmful, then even small quantities (like those used to prevent mosquitoes from biting) should be avoided. In a sense, Rachel Carson was an early proponent of the precautionary principle. But, as we’ll see in the {final chapter with cancer-screening programs, we should be cautious about being cautious.
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