On a Farther Shore

by William Souder

  During the Pinchot Institute’s first year of operation in 1963, experiments at another facility, the new wildlife pathology lab at Patuxent, demonstrated that sublethal doses of pesticides in the food supplies of waterfowl and upland game birds caused drops in reproductive success and led to mortality. The researchers at Patuxent were also studying the long-term, multigenerational effects of pesticides in fish and were monitoring “serious” accumulations of pesticide residues in the tissues of ducks, geese, bald eagles, deer, and other wildlife.

  In the spring of 1964—just days before Rachel Carson died—Secretary of the Interior Stewart Udall told Senator Ribicoff’s committee that evidence of such widespread pesticide contamination was so compelling that a nationwide pesticide monitoring program was needed. Udall also said it was time to end the use of highly toxic chemical pesticides in applications that could not be controlled. This was an acknowledgment that, despite the claims of manufacturers and government regulators, some pesticides were unsafe even when used as directed. Udall said his department had mounting evidence that episodes of pesticide contamination in wildlife—including some of the appalling fish kills on the lower Mississippi—were the result of “normal” pesticide use. Udall said ways had to be found to limit the movement of persistent toxic compounds everywhere throughout the environment, or there was no alternative but to stop using them altogether.

  This, of course, was the point Carson had made in Silent Spring—poison one corner of the environment and you risk poisoning the whole thing. In the fall of 1964, Udall exercised his considerable authority over most federal lands and issued tough new rules for pesticide use on more than 550 million acres under the jurisdiction of the U.S. Department of the Interior. In general, the guidelines made chemical pesticides a last resort control method and called for the most limited applications and the lowest possible doses whenever they were used. He instructed all the agencies involved to avoid using pesticides—including DDT, chlordane, dieldrin, and endrin—that were known to accumulate in living organisms. Two months later, the FWS issued a notice declaring the agency’s serious concern for bald eagles, which were building up alarming body burdens of DDT wherever they were studied.

  For a decade and more, the dangers of pesticides were the focal point of a broadening environmental movement that led to the enactment of the Clean Air Act (1963), the Clean Water Act (1972), and the Endangered Species Act (1973). On April 22, 1970, environmental activists organized by Wisconsin senator Gaylord Nelson—a fan of Aldo Leopold’s Sand County Almanac and Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring—held the first Earth Day, and millions attended rallies across the country. Later that spring, Secretary of the Interior Walter Hickel formalized Stewart Udall’s earlier policy on pesticide use on federal lands, formally banning the use of DDT, aldrin, dieldrin, heptachlor, lindane, and several others.

  Shortly after his inauguration in 1969, President Richard Nixon established the Council on Environmental Quality in his administration. In April 1970—as the Earth Day rallies were being organized—Nixon was advised to create a new agency with formal regulatory control over environmental matters, including the registration and use of pesticides under FIFRA. In July, Nixon asked Congress to authorize the Environmental Protection Agency—which opened for business the following December. Among the first orders of business for the new agency was the removal of many pesticides from general use, starting with DDT. A young, eager legal staff took on the mission of canceling pesticide registrations and during the 1970s the EPA ended the domestic use—but not the manufacture for export—of DDT, aldrin, dieldrin, chlordane, heptachlor, and endrin. The United States thus joined Sweden—where Paul Müller had received his Nobel Prize—as one of the first countries to ban DDT.

  Those early days of swift, aggressive action against environmental contaminants gave way to a slower, softer EPA in the years since, under both Democratic and Republican administrations. More sophisticated chemical and biological assay techniques have made it possible for pesticide makers to game the system by overwhelming the EPA with study after study, dragging out renewal registrations for suspect chemicals for years while they stay on the market. That may change as the agency begins looking more closely at chemicals that interfere with or mimic hormones.

  In 1996, the field of toxicology was turned upside down with the publication of a book called Our Stolen Future, which described emerging evidence that some chemicals—including pesticides such as DDT and their by-products—bind to specialized receptors in cells that are meant to recognize hormones like estrogen, but which can be fooled by a chemical mimic. The result can be disease, reproductive problems, and birth defects—the same problems that now turn up in epidemiological studies of people living in areas with high exposures to pesticides. For many people, Our Stolen Future was seen as a sequel to Silent Spring. The same year it was released, Congress directed the EPA to develop new assays to detect endocrine-disrupting properties in chemicals.

  It took until the fall of 2009 for the first of those test procedures to be approved—and when they were, one of the first chemicals that tested positive as an endocrine disrupter was the pesticide atrazine, a weed killer that for many years was the most heavily used herbicide in the world. Banned in the European Union in 2003, atrazine had a long, long history of continued use in the United States while the EPA went in circles with the manufacturer over whether it was safe. In 1988, Congress ordered the EPA to reregister older pesticides, including atrazine. Atrazine was then selected for “special review” in 1994. Twelve years and one million pages of documents later, the EPA ignored evidence that atrazine was an endocrine disrupter and issued the new registration. Three years later, after its own new assays confirmed potential problems with atrazine, the EPA reopened the case.

  In 2006, the World Health Organization announced its endorsement of the use of DDT to combat malaria, mainly in Africa. The WHO had never lifted its approval of DDT for this purpose, but that year the agency decided an affirmative commitment to the insecticide was needed. The move was backed by most environmental groups—as it certainly would have been by Rachel Carson had she been alive to do so. But the myth that Carson wanted a total end to the use of chemical pesticides persists.

  Carson would be less tolerant of the lack of action to reverse or at least slow global warming caused by fossil fuel consumption. George W. Bush had promised during his campaign for the presidency in 2000 that he wanted carbon dioxide emissions regulated by the EPA as a greenhouse gas pollutant. Within weeks of taking office in 2001 he reversed his position. Bush also announced the United States would not sign on to the Kyoto Protocol, an international agreement intended to limit greenhouse gases. In June 2001, the National Academy of Sciences—which Bush had asked to look into the global warming question—reported to the president that global warming was real, that human activity was the main cause, and that things were getting worse. Bush did nothing then, and little—apart from improvements in automobile fuel consumption—has happened since. Rachel Carson would find nothing new in the unwillingness to confront this problem. Human arrogance and disregard for the collateral damage we inflict upon the environment was a story she knew well.

  Roger Christie went to live with Paul Brooks and his wife, whom Carson had named in her will as prospective guardians—along with Stanley Freeman, Jr., and his wife. Inexplicably, she had never discussed this with either family.

  In 1968 Dorothy Freeman married a longtime family friend who lived year-round on Southport Island. Her second husband died two years later, but Dorothy remained at Southport, dividing her time between the house and the cottage at Dogfish Head. In 1975 she gave a talk about Carson at the University of Southern Maine in Gorham. She told the audience that Rachel Carson had been her “closest friend” and that she believed Carson felt the same about her. “Because of the eleven years that I knew her,” Dorothy said, “I feel that my whole life was enriched beyond understanding.” Dorothy Freeman died in 1978 at the age of eighty.

&nbs
p; Acknowledgments

  My deepest thanks to Stanley Freeman, Jr., and Martha Freeman, and to their spouses, the late Madeleine Freeman and Richard Barringer—an accomplished and gracious family who spent a lovely summer morning showing me the Freeman cottage at Dogfish Head on Southport Island in Maine, where we sat on the deck overlooking Sheepscot Bay as they shared their recollections of Rachel and Dorothy. My conversations continued with Stan and Martha for many months thereafter, and I appreciate their help, their openness, and their encouragement more than I can say.

  Thanks, also, to Roger Christie and Wendy Sisson for allowing me to spend a week at the Carson cottage on Southport Island, where I wrote portions of Chapter 7 at Rachel’s desk as the sounds and smell of the sea came to me through an open window.

  I started work on this book by asking Linda Lear whether she thought I should, and I am grateful to her for encouraging me to do so. Linda’s essential biography, Rachel Carson: Witness for Nature, and her collection of research materials at Connecticut College were invaluable sources of fact and inspiration. I am also indebted to my friend Mike Lannoo, of the Indiana University School of Medicine, who read the manuscript and offered valuable suggestions for its improvement. Mike’s own fine book, Leopold’s Shack and Ricketts’s Lab, was essential to my understanding of both of these men. Many thanks to Mark Madison, David Klinger, and Anne Post at the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service’s National Conservation Training Center. Mark, an early and enthusiastic adviser on this book, opened the Fish and Wildlife archives to me, while David and Anne helped with personnel and publication records from Carson’s time at the agency.

  Special thanks to my longtime friend and prose mentor, Dan Kelly, who read the manuscript and made me make it better, as I knew he would.

  Thank you to Fran Collin and Sarah Yake of the Frances Collin literary agency, trustee of the Rachel Carson literary estate, for reviewing quoted passages from Carson’s writings and granting permission for their use. Thanks to Brian Goldberg of the Department of English at the University of Minnesota for a helpful interpretation of “Locksley Hall” and to Mark Edlund of the St. Croix Watershed Research Station for a tutorial on diatoms. Thanks also to Simon Ratsey and Gwyneth Campling in England for their help with terminologies peculiar to the countryside and waterways of Devon. And thank you to William H. Calvert for information on the migration and life cycle of monarch butterflies.

  Thank you to Nell Baldacchino of the Patuxent Research Refuge for showing me around that sprawling facility and to Greg Piniak for doing the same at the Center for Coastal Fisheries and Habitat Research at Beaufort. Thanks as well to lab director David Johnson for his historical perspective on the Beaufort station and the region. Thank you to Ron Orchard of the Southport Historical Society and Hendricks Hill Museum for the local lowdown on Carson’s summertime destination. Thanks to Patricia M. DeMarco, former executive director of the Rachel Carson Homestead Association, for showing me Carson’s childhood home in Springdale. And thank you to Diana Post, president of the Rachel Carson Council, and to her husband, Clifford C. Hall, who showed me Carson’s last house in Silver Spring.

  Special thanks to my good friends Paul Lombino and Leslie Schultz in Boston, and Karl Vick and Stacy Sullivan in New York for putting me up and keeping me fine company when I was doing research in those cities.

  I would have been lost without the capable and friendly assistance of the librarians and archivists who guided me through the long written record of Carson’s life and work. Most sincere thanks to Elaine Ardia at the Edmund S. Muskie Archives and Special Collections Library at Bates College; to Rachel M. Grove Rohrbaugh, archivist at the Jennie King Mellon Library at Chatham University; to Benjamin Panciera and Nova M. Seals at the Linda Lear Center for Special Collections and Archives at Connecticut College; to Lynda Garrett at the Patuxent Wildlife Research Center library; to Thomas Lannon of the New York Public Library Manuscripts and Archives Division; to Stephen Plotkin, reference archivist at the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library; to Maureen Booth, law librarian, U.S. Department of the Interior Library; and to Ann Roche of the Southport Memorial Library. Thanks also to the dedicated staffs at the National Archives and Records Administration in College Park, at the Washington Historical Society, at the Historical Society of Old Newbury, and at the Hennepin County Central Library, my hometown go-to resource for odd books and obscure articles.

  Apart from some of the early letters from Dorothy Freeman—which regrettably are lost to history—Rachel Carson never threw away anything written by or to her, and through good fortune her personal papers ended up in New Haven. The Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Yale University houses one of the world’s great literary collections in one of the world’s most beautiful buildings. It was for many weeks my home away from home. I am deeply indebted to the entire staff there, especially to those on the front desk who retrieved materials, answered my questions, and in general made my research a pleasure from start to finish. Very special thanks to Karen Nangle, who did all that and so much more.

  Sincere thanks to Domenica Alioto at Crown, for her many suggestions and close attention to the manuscript and in helping me with permissions and other essential details. Rachel Klayman, my editor at Crown, and Chuck Verrill, my agent, have been full partners in this endeavor. I thank them for their wise counsel and unflagging support, though I cannot actually thank them enough. Thanks, also, to John Glusman for his early and ardent support, and for finding me a home at Crown.

  Finally, thank you to my wife, Susan, and to our children, Joe, Martha, Tom, and Liz, for letting me do this again.

  Notes

  Rachel Carson lived in the age of words and print. To say that she wrote professionally understates the case. Carson wrote nonstop, leaving behind four books, many newspaper and magazine articles, and, just as important, thousands of letters that tell the story of her work and her life. She corresponded regularly with scientists, doctors, colleagues, publishers, editors, publicists, agents, friends, students, politicians, and her legions of admirers. Carson’s letters were models of lean prose that exhibited the author’s knack for saying exactly what she meant.

  Carson’s correspondence with Dorothy Freeman is held in the Dorothy Freeman Collection at the Edmund S. Muskie Archives and Special Collections Library at Bates College. Most of the balance of Carson’s letters, along with an extensive inventory of personal papers and records—including notebooks, manuscripts, research materials, speeches, and unpublished writings—make up the Rachel Carson Papers, which are in the Yale Collection of American Literature at the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Yale University. The original documents from these two collections, or in some instances facsimiles of originals, are the primary sources for this book.

  I also found important source materials in other archival collections. These included the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum; the Linda Lear Collection of Rachel Carson Books and Papers, held in the Linda Lear Center for Special Collections and Archives at Connecticut College; the Rachel Carson Collection in the archives of the Jennie King Mellon Library at Chatham University; the New Yorker records and the National Audubon Society records in the Manuscripts and Archives Division of the New York Public Library; the archives of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service at the National Conservation Training Center Museum and Archives; the Historical Society of Old Newbury; the National Archives and Records Administration in College Park, Maryland; the library of the U.S. Geological Survey Patuxent Wildlife Research Center; the Historical Society of Washington, D.C.; the Southport Historical Society and Hendricks Hill Museum; and the Southport Memorial Library.

  I have also drawn on many secondary published sources, including newspaper and magazine articles, industrial and trade publications, and peer-reviewed papers from scientific journals. Books, cited in detail in the accompanying bibliography, were also vital sources, and three deserve special mention: Rachel Carson: Witness for Nature, Linda Lear’s seminal biography and t
he essential road map for all subsequent Carson scholarship; Always, Rachel: The Letters of Rachel Carson and Dorothy Freeman 1952–1964, edited and annotated by Dorothy’s granddaughter Martha Freeman and that includes most of the letters from the Muskie collection; and The Voyage of the Lucky Dragon, Ralph E. Lapp’s superb account of the Castle Bravo incident and its aftermath.

  In the interests of economy, I have dispensed with source citations for factual information of a general and easily retrievable nature—geographical details, name and place spellings, dates of major events, routine biographical accounts of prominent persons, and so on—as well as for broad assertions that are my own conclusions based on having read the record. All other factual statements are derived from the sources that follow in the notes below.

  Over time, copies of documents have migrated among various archives, so that some are now found in more than one place. Where possible I have indicated the location I believe to be the primary repository; otherwise I cite the location where I found the document. For frequently mentioned collections, the following abbreviations are used:

  Beinecke Rachel Carson Papers, Yale Collection of American Literature, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University, New Haven, Connecticut

  Chatham Rachel Carson Collection, archives of the Jennie King Mellon Library, Chatham University, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania

  JFK Library John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum, Boston, Massachusetts

  Lear Collection Linda Lear Collection of Rachel Carson Books and Papers, Linda Lear Center for Special Collections and Archives, Connecticut College, New London, Connecticut

  Muskie Edmund S. Muskie Archives and Special Collections Library, Bates College, Lewiston, Maine

  NARA National Archives and Records Administration, College Park, Maryland

  NCTC U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service National Conservation Training Center Museum and Archives, Shepherdstown, West Virginia