On a Farther Shore

by William Souder

  A few days before the first installment of Silent Spring came out in the New Yorker, Carson flew to California to deliver a commencement speech at Scripps College in Claremont. She told Dorothy Freeman she was so glad to be away from the phone. Carson said she was desperately tired but that the cross-country flight by jetliner—her first—was thrilling. She said she never stopped gazing out the window as the continent passed under her far below.

  Carson’s speech was eagerly anticipated at Scripps, where the administration had been after her to visit the campus for years. But it was important to her, too. Whether she meant it mainly to offer a context for Silent Spring or as an unusually ambitious charge to the graduates, Carson’s speech amounted to a summing up of everything she had learned and come to believe about the human place in nature. She titled it “Of Man and the Stream of Time,” and it sounded, intentionally or not, like a farewell.

  Carson began by telling the students that the more she had lived and thought about things, the more it seemed to her that of all the difficulties that “crowd in upon us today” the most perilous was our changed relationship with nature. She said the concept of nature was itself a tricky construct, but that she liked the simple definition that identified nature as “the part of the world that man did not make.” Humanity was part of the natural order—but by tradition and through an insistent arrogance, we had long assumed that nature was under our dominion, and that we were the masters of nature and everything that inhabited the natural world. Carson said she was often mystified by the reaction when she showed people the many forms of life flourishing in a tidal pool. Were these living entities edible? Could they be made into some kind of useful product? Carson said she could scarcely understand these questions when it was impossible to “assign a value” to creatures so exquisite that their mere existence should be cause for contentment with the peerless universe.

  Carson said that before the attack on Hiroshima, she had doubted that nature could ever need protection from man. The world changed—slowly, of course—but certain of its features seemed immutable: the advance and retreat of the great oceans over eons, the daily ebbing and flooding of the tides, the uncountable mass migrations of the birds and fish. These things and many more seemed beyond the reach of human influence. Until they weren’t. The earth, Carson said, was nothing if not a water world that was now growing parched:

  The once beneficent rains are now an instrument to bring down from the atmosphere the deadly products of nuclear explosions. Water, perhaps our most precious natural resource, is used and misused at a reckless rate. Our streams are fouled with an incredible assortment of wastes—domestic, chemical, radioactive, so that our planet, though dominated by seas that envelop three-fourths of its surface, is rapidly becoming a thirsty world.

  Life being what it is—adaptable and tenacious—nature might survive even the insults of the modern age if they did not come so quickly, Carson said. Evolution is a response to both friendly and hostile conditions, but time is its essential ingredient and time was running out:

  The radiation to which we must now adjust if we are to survive is no longer simply the background radiation of rocks and sunlight, it is the result of our tampering with the atom. In the same way, wholly new chemicals are emerging from the laboratories—an astounding, bewildering array of them. All of these things are being introduced into our environment at a rapid rate. There simply is no time for living protoplasm to adjust to them.

  Carson said that measured against the “backdrop of geologic time,” human beings had inhabited the world for only a moment—but a portentous one in which we had to consider our impact not only on the earth but perhaps on worlds beyond it. It had taken only a few short centuries to move from a time when we gazed out at the ocean and wondered what was over the horizon. Now, she said, “our whole earth has become only another shore from which we look out across the dark ocean of space, uncertain what we shall find when we sail out among the stars.” Based on the experience of her own generation—which had brought the world to such a dangerous crossroads—Carson said it was now time for the inheritors of the earth and its many difficulties to finally prove human mastery not of nature, but of itself. “Your generation,” she said, “must come to terms with the environment.”

  Carson thought the speech went well. Relaxing the next day, she got word that Silent Spring would be a Book-of-the-Month Club selection for October, with Justice Douglas, one of Carson’s most ardent admirers, to write the copy for the catalog. Glad but underwhelmed, Carson wrote to Dorothy that the good thing was that now the book would find its way “to farms and hamlets all over the country that don’t know what a bookstore looks like—much less the New Yorker.” Sounding more than a little jaded, Carson said, “It is perhaps not shameless to say that after three best-sellers one does not get wildly excited about such news, which is perhaps too bad, but the deep satisfaction is there.”

  Carson and Roger left Silver Spring for Maine at the end of June 1962, as the early reactions to the Silent Spring articles were taking hold. Among the first to weigh in was the New York Times, which on July 2 ran an editorial endorsing Carson’s message on chemical pesticides and the “generally unsuccessful effort to eliminate insect pests and the extent to which we are, in the process, subjecting ourselves to the hazard of slow poisoning through the pollution of our environment.” Anticipating the storm of criticism to come, the Times predicted that Carson would be accused of being an alarmist who reported only the arguments against the use of pesticides while ignoring their benefits. But the Times carefully pointed out that Carson had made it clear in Silent Spring that there was room for the intelligent application of pesticides in some situations. “Miss Carson does not argue that chemical pesticides must never be used, but she warns of the dangers of misuse and overuse by a public that has become mesmerized by the notion that chemists are the possessors of divine wisdom and that nothing but benefit can emerge from their test tubes.”

  It’s not certain that President Kennedy read the Silent Spring excerpts as they appeared over three weeks in June. But the president was alerted to the articles in early July by a local judge in Plattsburgh, New York, named Irving Goldman. Goldman had attended law school at Yale, and he wrote to the president as a fellow “Ivy Leaguer,” imploring Kennedy to involve the federal government in stricter oversight of pesticide use. Goldman said his concern was for protecting public health now and in future generations, as pesticides were so dangerous as to make the effects of radiation “seem minor by comparison.” Goldman sent copies of the letter to the USDA, the FDA, both of his U.S. senators, and his representative in the House.

  The White House gave the letter careful attention. It was routed to the president with Goldman’s specific recommendation underlined: “Some action should be taken forthwith to regulate the manufacture and distribution of these chemicals,” and the secretary of health, education, and welfare was asked to comment on Goldman’s letter. Of course pesticides were already subject to regulation by the U.S. Department of Agriculture under the authority of FIFRA and other federal statutes—but it was clear that Goldman believed far too little was being done.

  Within days, Kennedy’s special assistant, T. J. Reardon, Jr., had obtained a cautious draft response to Goldman from Secretary of Agriculture Orville Freeman’s office. The letter took a more sanguine tone than the president himself used in his press conference a few weeks later when he would tell the country he was ordering a broad review of pesticide use in response to Carson’s articles. Reardon told Goldman that the government had been regulating pesticides for nearly a century. He said that the rapid development and commercialization of newer pesticides that so concerned Miss Carson had already led to tighter controls to “insure the protection of the public.” Reardon mentioned the recently created Federal Pest Control Review Board—an analogue of the toothless Federal Radiation Council—as an example of the government’s diligence, and added vaguely that “all aspects of manufacture, sale, and use”
of pesticides were under “constant review.” He concluded on a sharper, dismissive note, informing Goldman that chemical pesticides provided “great benefits” to the country “without any grave or undue hazard to the public.” Furthermore, Reardon said, “Your Government is making every effort to insure that these important aids to our abundance continue to be controlled in the best interests of the entire Nation.”

  Put another way, at midsummer the Kennedy administration’s official position was that Rachel Carson had made much out of nothing.

  Over at the USDA, where the chronically ambivalent Orville Freeman was already under siege over the radiation problems with milk, everyone seemed to understand that the concerns raised by Judge Goldman were going to be shared by a large portion of the public—and that a firestorm was imminent. Shirley Briggs warned Carson that the Department of Agriculture was rumored to be combing over the New Yorker articles in search of a cause of action for libel—or even just a mistake—so far without success. Freeman told his senior staff he didn’t know yet whether it was going to be official policy to “fight” with Carson but that he wanted everyone to start coming up with ideas for attacking her while at the same time working out less confrontational responses—including simply saying that pesticides were useful and carefully regulated. Freeman suggested that whichever of these approaches seemed most workable could eventually become the official policy.

  Freeman did not mention—probably because he didn’t have to—that farm interests, his primary constituency, were going to take exception to Silent Spring when it was published and were already on edge over press coverage of the articles in the New Yorker. He assumed more articles would come as the controversy deepened around Carson’s still-unpublished book, though it’s unlikely he imagined anything like the five-part series that began appearing in the Long Island daily Newsday on August 20, 1962.

  The stories were written by a gifted young investigative reporter named Robert A. Caro—who would gain fame for The Power Broker, a biography of New York City planner Robert Moses, and for his ambitious multivolume biography of Lyndon Johnson. Any hope Orville Freeman or anyone else in the administration had of fashioning a calm response to Silent Spring went out the door with Caro’s opening paragraph:

  The lid is about to blow off a behind-the-scenes controversy over swelling scientific evidence that chemical pesticides, enthusiastically promoted by the United States Agriculture Department despite 16 years of warnings, have decimated species of wildlife and now threaten man with cancer, leukemia and abnormal gene development.

  Caro reported that President Kennedy—reversing field after the cool response to Judge Goldman—was now personally engaged in the pesticides issue and had ordered science adviser Jerome Wiesner to launch an investigation. He described the problem as a growing body of evidence suggesting a connection between the widespread use of chemical pesticides and rising incidences of disease in both wildlife and human populations. Caro likened the scientists’ fears about pesticides to those over the horrific birth defects in Britain caused by the morning-sickness drug thalidomide—except that the dangers from pesticides were, if anything, worse because their possible effects on genes could play out over the course of many generations. He didn’t draw a literal parallel between pesticides and radiation, although his concern for the impact of pesticides on future generations was identical to that raised by Linus Pauling and other scientists over fallout.

  The truth about pesticides, Caro reported, was being obscured by a massive public relations campaign to promote their safety and effectiveness—orchestrated by their manufacturers, who represented an $800 million a year industry. The pesticide makers were aided in this effort by the U.S. Department of Agriculture, which “leaped aboard the pesticides bandwagon as soon as DDT was introduced” and was now running “vast” spraying campaigns of its own while encouraging the general use of pesticides by farmers. Caro said that internal reports critical of these policies were routinely suppressed and that people working in pesticide programs rarely complained about them for fear of being fired.

  Caro took note of the benefits of pesticide use—rising farm productivity and sharp declines of insect-borne diseases in many parts of the world. But he reported that many scientists had been quietly warning of side effects. Now those whispers had become a scream thanks to “famed biologist and author Rachel Carson.” Caro said the New Yorker series had drawn one of the heaviest mail responses in the magazine’s history—and a matching flood of angry letters had arrived at the USDA, where Caro scored a coup by getting the first interview with Orville Freeman on the subject. Freeman told Caro that pesticides were “on balance” of greater benefit than harm and that there was no cause for “panic and hysteria.” But Caro reported that department officials involved in pesticide programs had recently been ordered to stop blanket denials of any problems with pesticide use.

  In subsequent installments over the next four days, Caro kept up an attack on official policy—or the lack of one—regarding pesticide use and portrayed the scientific community as divided on the issue. Caro saw the USDA and the pesticides industry as partners in what had become a massive, self-propagating enterprise, with neither willing to consider the collateral damage pesticides might do to wildlife or human health. He explored the possible link between pesticides and cancer, and skillfully explained how DDT and other organochlorine pesticides are stored in fatty tissues and how body burdens of stored pesticides can be magnified upward through food chains.

  Caro had less success in getting Orville Freeman to give a coherent answer to the seemingly simple question of whether the USDA had oversold pesticides. It was clear that by the time Caro got to Freeman the secretary had decided against any public vilification of Carson and Silent Spring. Ridiculously, he told Caro that his department regarded Carson as an “ally” in bringing the pesticide issue to the attention of the American people—an odd claim given the department’s long history of insisting pesticide dangers were a nonissue.

  Freeman told Caro he wasn’t satisfied with what his department knew about the effects of pesticide use on wildlife or on human health—which was next to nothing—and that going forward they were going to give the matter “strong concerted attention.” When Caro asked Freeman if that meant they would suspend large-scale spraying operations until their effects were better understood, Freeman ducked the question, saying he thought he’d already covered that. More comfortable on the shifting middle ground, Freeman reminded Caro that a scientific consensus on pesticide safety did not exist.

  Caro’s Newsday series wrapped up just five days before President Kennedy was asked about pesticides at his news conference. The president’s claim that several agencies were looking into the matter as a direct result of “Miss Carson’s book” may have been technically correct—if hand-wringing and confusion could be described as looking into something. Presidential science adviser Wiesner got more direct orders to investigate the situation the day after Kennedy met with the press.

  Wiesner began assembling a panel to report to the president on the pesticide problem by the following spring. At about the same time, an agency the president neglected to mention was more aggressively looking into the controversy around Silent Spring. The FBI had launched an investigation of Carson—though at whose request and for what reason is unknown. Apparently the agency made inquiries with the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service and looked into who Carson had been talking to on the phone recently—all of which suggests the FBI was curious about whether Carson was having questionable contact with foreign nationals, which, of course, she wasn’t. Not surprisingly, nothing came of the investigation. The FBI’s report on Carson, completed in mid-December, ran to only two pages. It was marked “Confidential,” filed, forgotten, and eventually destroyed.

  Carson had reason to think that one agency inside the federal government, the U.S. Department of the Interior—her former home—was going to back the position she’d taken in Silent Spring. Even before the
excerpts started appearing in the New Yorker, Carson had heard from a man named Paul Knight, who was an assistant to Interior Secretary Stewart Udall. Udall, a staunch conservationist, was himself at work on a book about environmental problems, called The Quiet Crisis, that was to come out the following year.

  Knight told Carson he was interested in the problems of communicating scientific ideas to the public and said America was in for “a lot of discussion” about pesticides and their effects on wildlife and human health. In July 1962, after the New Yorker series had run, Knight wrote to Carson again commending her for putting the pesticide problem on the national agenda and telling her he’d already had conversations with at least one member of Congress about how the government should respond. He told her he was speaking “off the record,” but hinted that she had started something that was going to play out in a dramatic and public way. “These comments are personal and unofficial,” Knight said, “although I expect that we will be directly involved before it is over.”

  In October, Newsday’s Robert Caro reported that the Wiesner committee had already learned that many of Rachel Carson’s claims in Silent Spring were true, and the panel expected to recommend sweeping changes in federal research on pesticides and would propose legislation to curb their indiscriminate use. As for Carson’s book, Caro reported that it had sold its entire first printing of one hundred thousand copies during the two weeks it had been out.