This is the second in a handful of posts this September on the 60-year legacy of Rachel Carson’s environment-changing book, Silent Spring. The first post is here.
Rachel Carson did not set out to annoy the chemical industry. In fact, she didn’t really want to write Silent Spring at all, and asked others to take the lead, including E.B. White. In the end though, she saw it as necessary and set about the painstaking four-year process of research and writing that it took to complete the book.
It was well-researched, and scientifically sound. And Ms. Carson did not call for the total ban on the use of chemical pesticides, only that their indiscriminate and reckless use be halted.
“It is not my contention that chemical insecticides should never be used. I do contend that we have put poisonous and biologically potent chemicals indiscriminately into the hands of persons largely or wholly ignorant of their potential for harm… I contend, furthermore, that we have allowed these chemicals to be used with little or no advance investigation of their effects on soil, water, wildlife, or man himself.”
This is hardly the hysterical, politically correct, poorly-researched diatribe she was accused of. This didn’t stop the vitriolic attacks from the chemical industry of course. Nor did it stop some critics who were themselves scientists: the American Entomological Society was, it turned out, funded by Monsanto, Velsicol and other large chemical companies.
Nonetheless, Rachel Carson steadfastly continued to weather the name-calling, dismissal, and outright denial of truth, whereas many others refused to speak, and with good reason. Several researchers who endorsed Carson’s views lost their jobs.
Eventually, her calm insistence on truth-telling, combined with follow-up research that further confirmed the harm of pesticides like DDT, led to the restriction of these chemicals as part of the new agencies and legislation in the 1970s in America. Within a decade after Silent Spring was published, the chemical industry was forced to find alternatives.
I like to think that is wasn’t so much that the ‘environment won’, or that the chemical industry ‘lost’, but rather than science-informed policy eventually dominated the decision-making.
I believe we’re starting to see the same ‘victory’ with respect to climate change today.
However, instead of government learning lessons from the Silent Spring experience and more rapidly passing sensible policy, industry learned much faster. The fossil fuel lobby was much more efficient in recent decades than the chemical industry ever was in the 1960s.
History repeated itself and lasted much longer, with climate scientists like Michael Mann, Ben Santer, the late Stephen Schneider, and many others being publicly and vociferously-attacked and threatened, and even sued (for doing science?!) As with the attacks on Carson, the industry-sponsored denial of climate change lacked any scientific substance, and was funded by big companies with vested interest in ignoring the problem. For at least 30 years, climate scientists have been harassed and accused of cultish environmentalism.
But just this year in America (and much earlier in other nations), we have new policy. Policy that acknowledges and supports the transition that will benefit us and our environment. And just like the policy that emerged after Silent Spring, it doesn’t ban everything (or actually anything in this case), it starts to regulate widespread pollution, and incentivize alternatives.
Rachel Carson showed us how to stand firm with scientific reason and common sense. She, and all of us, eventually prevailed. Our modern scientists were able to follow in her footsteps and do the same. They, and we, are now beginning to prevail.