On a Farther Shore (36 page)

The AMA was worried not only about such acute poisonings, but also about the long-term effects of pesticide accumulations in body fat. Scientists at the time had only a limited understanding of the hormonal and enzyme activities in fat tissue, but they knew that the deposition or mobilization of fat also involved the liver. It thus seemed a “reasonable assumption” that a buildup of chlorinated hydrocarbon poisons could disrupt important metabolic processes.

Studies already completed on DDT showed that fat tissue was a “biologic magnifier” of the insecticide. Rats that were fed tiny amounts of DDT over periods of time gradually built up body burdens of the poison, resulting in slowing heart rates and liver damage. And while researchers still lacked assays to detect the storage of other chlorinated hydrocarbon insecticides in fat tissue, everything pointed in that direction. Chlordane was known to have a “high order of chronic toxicity,” and dieldrin and aldrin appeared to be as bad or worse. Researchers had to assume that chlorinated hydrocarbons would not be stored only in fatty tissues, but in any tissue or organ where fats were present. These included the membranes
of every cell in the body—which are composed of a double layer of lipid molecules—as well as embryonic fat cells that help regulate fetal development.

By the spring of 1951,
the AMA was advising physicians on how to treat patients poisoned by dieldrin and aldrin, particularly in the southern United States, where these new insecticides were coming into wide use on cotton and tobacco crops. Both appeared to be as toxic as parathion if absorbed through the skin and were believed to be somewhere between three and six times as toxic as DDT.

Like the Patuxent researchers—who complained of being unable to thoroughly test insecticides as fast as they were being developed—the AMA struggled to assess the effects of increasing insecticide use in residential and commercial settings.
In 1952, the Committee on Pesticides began looking at electric and thermal vaporizing devices that had been newly invented to fumigate houses, schools, restaurants, industrial plants, and hospitals. Some vaporizers worked continuously, sending out a steady invisible fog of insecticide. Nobody knew whether such “atmospheric dispersal” was safe, or even how effective it was. The committee found that “technologic improvements in chemicals and in methods of dispersal” came faster than did knowledge of “the physiologic actions of the insecticidal ingredients, particularly with respect to their chronic toxicity and inhalation hazards.” These devices discharged insecticides—usually DDT or lindane—as vapors or fumes that were airborne for a time before recrystallizing on floors, walls, and ceilings, where they remained a potent contact poison for long periods. At least that was the idea.

Testing showed that insecticides dispersed unevenly from vaporizers and tended to concentrate at potentially unsafe levels in the air and on the surfaces closest to the machines. DDT sometimes accumulated so heavily on the walls and ceilings near the vaporizers that crystals of the insecticide flaked off and fell to the floor, coating it with toxic dust. Lindane, the committee said, looked to be safer than DDT in vaporizers—although this wasn’t certain, and the main factor
driving an increasing use of lindane wasn’t safety but rather the growing resistance some insects had to DDT.

Although cases of allergy-like reactions were being reported among people in homes or businesses where insecticide vaporizers had been installed, the AMA found that the government had limited authority under FIFRA to regulate either the devices or the insecticides they dispersed. This was especially problematic because the AMA also found that few people used the devices properly. The supposed safety and miraculous effectiveness of synthetic pesticides were so widely believed that people often tampered with vaporizers to increase their output. The AMA put part of the blame on the manufacturers of vaporizers, whom they accused of promoting the devices for use in homes, hospitals, nurseries, or anywhere food was handled—even though the evidence suggested such uses were risky.

By 1954, the AMA
categorically opposed the use of insecticide vaporizers in homes. Lindane had largely replaced DDT as the poison of choice in such machines.
Two years earlier the AMA had reported that the toxicity of lindane was comparable to DDT in some situations, different in others, and in general difficult to assess. It was known that lindane didn’t accumulate in fat tissues as readily as DDT did, which led to the promotion of lindane as an insecticide that was safer than DDT for use in devices that dispersed insecticides continuously. But more research now indicated that lindane was “stored in significant amounts” in the brain and liver. Researchers also suspected that acute toxicity results obtained in testing on lab animals did not translate to humans.

The AMA was troubled by accounts of poisonings involving children who accidentally ingested lindane, which was usually formulated as pellets or in a white granular form for use in home vaporizers.
In one case an eighteen-month-old toddler who ate one and a half pellets of lindane while her mother was putting a new vaporizer together was rushed to the hospital where she spent the better part of seven hours convulsing and vomiting. She lived. So did several
slightly older children who threw up and went into convulsions after drinking a homemade soft drink their mother had inadvertently “sweetened” with lindane crystals she mistook for sugar. Alongside such reports came stories about representatives of vaporizer makers who insisted that any child who ingested lindane would suffer nothing worse than a tummy ache.

Of course, children can accidentally ingest and be poisoned by any number of chemical products common in most homes. The difference with insecticides is that they
are
poisons and when they are used as intended people are exposed to them on purpose. For the AMA, the use of insecticides in vaporizers was crazy: “
Insecticidal poisons that are effective because of deliberate continuous pollution of the atmosphere have questionable safety. Their use in this manner is contrary to hygienic standards for safe atmospheric and working conditions.”

By the spring of 1957, the questions surrounding synthetic insecticides were serious enough that one major manufacturer suddenly announced it would stop making them. The Thompson Chemicals Corporation, which was based in Los Angeles, said it was halting its production, distribution, and research on “presently known” insecticides, saying that after twelve years of study the company was convinced the “wide-scale” use of insecticides on agricultural crops offered only temporary benefits in pest control and were “at best palliative, and will perhaps prove dangerous and uneconomic in the long run.” The people at Thompson were also worried that the “ingestion of presently employed insecticides” might be hazardous to “humans and other warm-blooded animals,” a possibility they said was “of a highly serious nature.”

These sentiments were not unanimous.
In 1954, Dr. Wayland J. Hayes, Jr., chief of the Toxicology Section of the U.S. Public Health Service, delivered a paper to a meeting of the American Public Health Association in which he pooh-poohed concerns about chronic DDT poisoning in humans, as no case of it had ever been confirmed. Hayes argued that humans—like animals—stored DDT in fat tissue, but
only up to a threshold level, beyond which no increased storage occurred regardless of continued exposure to DDT. In theory, then, since chronic DDT poisoning had never been observed, it must be all but impossible, as evidently a person could not store enough in his or her fat tissues to get sick.

This was true, Hayes insisted, even though a recent study of meals served in restaurants had found widespread DDT contamination of food. Although some foods did not contain detectable amounts of DDT, many did—especially fatty items or foods that were fried in fats—and a “balanced meal” in an American restaurant was almost certain to include a serving of DDT. Hayes did not say whether the DDT came from some treatment in the restaurants or if it arrived on the food fresh from the farm. But the amounts, Hayes pointed out, were smaller than the doses that incarcerated volunteers had taken without ill effect. Hayes published his report the next year in the
American Journal of Public Health
, which touted the article as an antidote to the “baseless rumors of the hidden dangers of DDT.”

The safety of DDT was also official policy at the U.S. Department of Agriculture, which in 1957 authorized an aerial spraying campaign against the gypsy moth over three million acres of New York, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania. The department said the public had become “unduly alarmed” over the alleged hazards of DDT spraying to both human health and wildlife. DDT, said the officials, was deemed safe in small doses by the U.S. Public Health Service and had been in widespread use in the United States and around the world for more than a decade. They said there was no evidence that a single spraying of DDT at a rate of one pound per acre would harm mammals or birds and would kill only a few fish.

One age was passing into the next. For a half century, the idea of preserving the natural world had been seen as our obligation to the earth’s bounty—which was meant for our use but which required our care. The enactment of game and fish laws, the intelligent management
of resources, the establishment of wildlife refuges, and the preservation of pristine wilderness—each instance an example of self-imposed restraint—all belonged to the larger cause of conservation. Conservation was a hopeful, noble, and inherently nonpartisan cause, a quest for the betterment of the world. Its foundation was the conviction that we could protect and enjoy what nature had provided—in perpetuity. From generation to generation, a well-tended earth would endure.

But in 1939, the means for undoing nature itself had been discovered in laboratories in Europe and the United States. DDT and nuclear fission were to become the twin agents of a great change of heart and will. In virtual lockstep, the two technologies, deadly and yet beguiling, were perfected in war and then loosed on a world living uneasily at peace. In the 1950s, their residues—unseen and unbidden—turned up everywhere, a feast of radionuclides and chlorinated hydrocarbons. Fearful of radioactive fallout and largely oblivious to the dangers of pesticides, everyone fed themselves both poisons. This was the new age, a time when nature—that part of existence outside of humanity—would no longer be the main object of concern. Now it was to be the total environment, ourselves included. In the age of conservation, the species that had needed our protection were the animals and birds and fish. In the new age of environmentalism the species that most needed our help would be us.

One age was ended, another begun. The world was ready to know this. All it would take was someone who recognized what was happening and who was willing to say it out loud.

In the summer of 1957, Rachel Carson—along with her mother and Roger—moved into a new house, a spacious brick rambler with large windows that Carson had had built among the trees on a large corner lot in a wooded section of Silver Spring called Quaint Acres. Carson was tired. Roger was an energetic boy who needed more supervision than she could have imagined. The months following the publication of
The Edge of the Sea
were otherwise unproductive.
In 1956, Carson served on the Conservation Committee of the National
Volunteers for Stevenson.
Attentive as always to the smallest publishing considerations, Carson earlier that year expressed her unhappiness with the sales of
The Edge of the Sea
, which had begun sliding down on the
New York Times
bestseller list after reaching number four. She told Paul Brooks she was disappointed in Houghton Mifflin’s advertising, which she thought relied too much on occasional large ads rather than a constant stream of smaller ones. The latter, she thought, would help the book more. She said once the book dropped off the bestseller list it would be “hard to get it back on.” Carson was also annoyed that some bookstores had removed
The Edge of the Sea
from their window displays—though she admitted there probably wasn’t anything Houghton Mifflin could do about that.

Polite but understandably defensive, Brooks wrote back telling Carson they had already spent $20,000 on advertising for
The Edge of the Sea
and sending her a long list of newspapers and magazines in which ads had been placed—calling it “one of the strongest such lists that has ever come across my desk.” He also reminded her that the book had already sold seventy thousand copies—a strong showing and especially so given the Atlantic coast orientation that they always knew would limit its appeal in the western part of the country. Brooks said he felt sure the book would continue to sell steadily for years to come, bestseller or not.

Meanwhile, Carson’s work stalled.
Life
magazine invited her to write an article on the jet stream and how it affects weather—offering the tempting sum of $5,000. But the project bogged down in a disagreement between what Carson thought the story was and what the editors at
Life
wanted. When the whole idea was finally scrapped, Carson told Marie Rodell that she was henceforth “allergic to Life.”
One idea that never went anywhere at all came from Dow Chemical, which was putting up a new plant on the Texas gulf coast and asked if Carson would write about twenty-five words to go on a plaque for the building’s state-of-the-art aquarium. Rodell told the company it was “extremely unlikely” that Carson would agree to such a thing—whereupon Dow made it clear that they were prepared to
pay whatever it took to get Carson’s participation. Carson declined to name a price.

Carson’s vague idea for a book called “Remembrance of the Earth,” about the origins of life, would not itself come to life and slowly faded from her thoughts. She made no progress on “The World of Nature” for Simon and Schuster
and confessed to Dorothy Freeman that she felt “terribly alone” with her problems. She said she was sometimes overcome with panic that she would not see Roger through to adulthood and was haunted by thoughts of what would become of him if something happened to her. Carson was also bitter about the dramatic change in her personal circumstances. Caring for Roger would surely complicate her writing just when her career was taking off. “
Sometimes I think I
can’t
go on,” she told Dorothy. “At other times it seems possible. But always I know I must. Life is such a queer business—great visions, great opportunities opened up, and then a door slammed. I don’t understand it; I never will.”