On a Farther Shore (41 page)

Carson had been friends with the popular and prolific nature writer Edwin Way Teale for many years.
Teale and his wife had visited Carson at her cottage on Southport Island—Teale said he would never forget seeing the perfect reflection of the Milky Way on the glassy waters of Sheepscot Bay at midnight.
The Teales also shared Carson’s love of cats, and the two writers often compared notes on both their pets and the writing business.
Carson urged Teale to find a way to serialize his work in magazines. In May 1958, just as Carson had begun work on “The Control of Nature,”
Teale wrote to encourage her to examine the parallels between pesticides and radioactive fallout. He told her about a friend who’d recently set off an alarm meant to intercept smugglers of radioactive materials at Idlewild Airport some six months after he’d visited Las Vegas:

Paul Brooks shared this view. In his internal memo outlining “The Control of Nature” for other executives at Houghton Mifflin, Brooks explained that while the subject of pesticide use might seem “rather specialized,” plenty of readers were already concerned about the increasing use of chemical poisons and that their ubiquitous and invisible presence in the environment offered “a clear parallel to the problem of nuclear fallout.” In both cases—radiation and pesticides—Brooks said the risks were cumulative and involved potential interference with the genetic regulation of life, including human life.

From her earliest thinking about the book, Carson had been careful to make an important distinction between radioactive fallout and the use of pesticides. The former was a by-product of warfare and, as such, arguably something humanity would prefer to forgo—if only theoretically. There was no rational argument for exploding nuclear weapons in the atmosphere, apart from the tortured idea that doing so would prevent the same thing from happening in anger and on a massive scale. But Carson felt that she could not take an absolute stand against the use of pesticides—which she felt were sometimes useful and advisable if applied sparingly and with care. This was an important point, as she would later be accused of calling for the total elimination of chemical poisons—as part of a concerted campaign to discredit her, even though she had repeatedly said something different.
When Paul Brooks asked Carson about a mosquito spraying program in his own neighborhood outside of Boston, she offered careful advice. Brooks said the town was using helicopters to “spot spray” areas where mosquitoes bred. Carson agreed with him that this was preferable to more widespread spraying that had gone on in the past.

“
I hate to advise you on your helicopter problem,” Carson wrote. “Of course it is better than airplane spraying, and I know it is not realistic to take a flat position against any spraying at all. I am afraid there have to be compromises, much as I hate any part of it.”

Sometime in early 1959, “The Control of Nature” acquired a broader and even less graceful new working title—“Man Against the Earth.”
Carson again felt only lukewarm about the new title, which she perhaps unconsciously realized still said exactly the wrong thing. Both titles suggested a separation between human beings and nature that was contrary to one of the book’s premises—that we are part of nature, and that what is poisonous to one organism is likely to be poisonous to another. The idea of balancing human interests against those of the natural world was scientifically nonsensical.
In May, Brooks told Carson he wanted to list “Man Against the Earth” in Houghton Mifflin’s publishing schedule as a February 1960 release. This assumed not only that she was almost done, but that they could
also get the
New Yorker
serialization ready in time for the articles to run just before the book came out. Brooks said he needed Carson to be honest with him about whether she could meet such a deadline.
Carson wrote back to assure him she would finish soon, that a February publication date would work, and that the new title was growing on her.

When the Houghton Mifflin list came out in June,
Carson and Marie Rodell were alarmed by a flurry of press reports hinting that the author of several pleasant books about the ocean would soon publish a depressing book on pesticides.
Carson wrote to the publicity department at Houghton Mifflin warning that future press releases about the book would need to be carefully worded to avoid any tinge of sensationalism, as the subject was already enmeshed in “violent controversies.” She said she wanted to make sure she had a say in anything further that came out ahead of the book. In the meantime, she promised to send the publicity department a description of the book that would better prepare them to explain what it was about when the time came. Carson admitted that it was a hard book to characterize. “Even I find it so,” she said.

Filed away alongside Carson’s voluminous scientific research, however, was a page of notes—mostly handwritten—in which she had outlined the “basic themes” of the book, which were several. Carson thought that pesticide spraying was an example of applied entomology that amounted to “Stone Age science” in its clumsy disregard for unintended damage to the environment but which had at its disposal a formidable arsenal of chemical weapons “possessing all the deadliness of the Atomic Age.” Working against nature, rather than with it, Carson wrote, made the whole concept of spraying a “negative force.” She believed the economic case for pesticide use was unsound, and that the claims for the safety of chemical poisons was not only a “big lie” but assumed a level of public gullibility she found offensive. Carson also thought—as she had for some time—that science itself had gone astray, and that chemical pesticides were only one example of technology that had been developed and deployed without
proper consideration of the consequences. Engineers, she said, were “practical technicians” who could find a way to do almost anything but never stopped to ask whether something
should
be done. Finally—and standing apart from the other ideas—was her desire to show how pesticides and radiation were two halves of the same problem.

Carson did not make the kind of progress on the book over the summer of 1959 that she had imagined she would when she told Paul Brooks to announce it as a February 1960 release.
Both Carson and Roger were laid low by illnesses while they were at Southport Island—Roger was actually hospitalized for a week with a respiratory infection.
Carson did make time to let Houghton Mifflin know of her displeasure at finding
The Edge of the Sea
out of stock at the bookstore in Boothbay Harbor. Months of frustration were capped off in September when, as Carson and Roger were driving from Maine back to Silver Spring,
their car was hit by a truck near Baltimore. Nobody was hurt, but settling the insurance and arranging for repairs were another distraction from work.

In December 1959, Carson wrote a long, plaintive letter to Brooks—it was part apology, part promise of better things to come. She told him how grateful she was for his patience—and that she knew how sorely she tried it. She said that what kept her going even though she’d failed in her promise to deliver the manuscript—most recently by the end of the year—was her certainty that the work she was doing was necessary, that it would give the book an “unshakable foundation.” Carson felt that people who criticized pesticide use without fully understanding the science did more harm than good and ended up as “targets” of those whose interests involved the continued use of chemical poisons. She assured Brooks that while she might be attacked for what she was writing, she would have the weight of evidence on her side. She said she knew that he understood all this, but that in the end she alone could comprehend the immensity of the task she had set for herself. That it took so long was almost unbearably frustrating. On a positive note, Carson told Brooks that she’d recently hired a wonderfully competent new assistant—her name was
Jeanne Davis—who had a college degree, was married to a doctor, had worked at several medical schools, and had experience reading the kinds of scientific literature that was piled high in Carson’s study.

Carson also apologized for the piecemeal approach she was taking—working on chapters or sometimes just parts of chapters in a seemingly random order. She really couldn’t explain why, but that it was the only way she could handle the material and it wasn’t going to change. She promised to send him another almost completed chapter soon. While Brooks took a genuine interest in all of this, she knew that what he really needed to know was when she might finish the book. Carson admitted that she didn’t know, but if things went “reasonably well,” she might be done by February—a hopeful thought so lacking in conviction that Brooks probably discounted it out of hand. Carson said she and Roger had both been feeling better lately, though she had developed some sort of thyroid condition that caused brutal headaches and sometimes cost her hours or even an entire day of work.

Brooks wrote back just before the holidays to wish Carson—not unselfishly, he said—a happy and creative New Year.

Carson was aware that other writers were looking into the issue of pesticides—and that there had been a general concern about contamination of the food supply for some time, even before the development of synthetic pesticides. All the way back in 1933, Arthur Kallet and F. J. Schlink had published a book called
100,000,000 Guinea Pigs
arguing that Americans were the unwitting participants in a vast, uncontrolled experiment involving the adulteration of food, drugs, and cosmetics with a growing assortment of chemical additives. Kallet and Schlink accused the FDA of complicity in what amounted to mass poisoning. They placed a special emphasis on the use of lead arsenate as an insecticide on fruit and vegetable crops.

Lead arsenate, they explained, leaves a toxic residue on produce that can easily be removed by the grower with a mild solution of
hydrochloric acid—but which cannot be washed off with a simple rinse under a faucet in someone’s kitchen. The consumption of lead arsenate subjects a person to not one but two poisons—lead and arsenic. The government had set a low tolerance limit for arsenic residues in food—and prohibited
any
residual lead—but Kallet and Schlink claimed the FDA made no serious attempt to police the situation. Farmers, not knowing better or not caring—or both—overused lead arsenate and rarely succeeded in removing it from their crops before delivering them to market. Kallet and Schlink said that lead arsenate was probably more poisonous than anyone realized, as the investigation of arsenic toxicity at low concentrations had only recently come under study. Lead, meanwhile, presented a different concern:

This, of course, was an argument familiar to Carson—as were many of the assertions in a more recent and still more alarming book, William Longgood’s
Poisons in Your Food
, which her former publisher, Simon and Schuster, brought out in the early spring of 1960. Like Kallet and Schlink, Longgood concerned himself not only with chemical pesticides, but with the whole toxic smorgasbord of synthetic additives and adulterants present in the food supply, especially in the dairy case, where the “
milk you give your children to make them grow and have strong bones” was laden with strontium
90 from fallout, plus an assortment of other poisons, antibiotics, and insecticides. Longgood, whose prose was blunt and ungraceful, was particularly attentive to toxicity testing that was either insufficient or that suggested the seriousness of a particular residue ending up eaten or drunk by an unsuspecting consumer. One especially ghoulish test involved Carson’s bête noire:

Longgood—an experienced newspaper reporter who’d previously covered international affairs and written a book about the Suez Canal—got roughed up in the press over
The Poisons in Your Food
, which many found over the top. John Osmundsen, reviewing Long-good’s book for the
New York Times
, caught the flavor of the criticism.
Osmundsen accused Longgood of ignoring the demands of modern agriculture, which was dependent upon fertilizers and pesticides, and of overlooking research indicating that many food additives had been found safe at low concentrations. Worse, Osmundsen wrote, was an absence of balance and perspective that should have come naturally to a seasoned journalist. Osmundsen said the book was a “selectively documented, sometimes inaccurate, frequently hysterical tract against the use of any chemicals in foods.” He thought the book “scientifically indefensible,” but conceded that Longgood might have made a few good points worthy of further consideration, including concerns about the use of pesticides on crops and livestock—a seemingly central issue Osmundsen chose to mention as almost an afterthought.

Carson was aware of the controversy around
The Poisons in Your Food
, which she’d made a conscious decision not to read lest it influence
her own book. Although she’d once referred to her book as a “crusade” in a letter to Dorothy Freeman, Carson was worried that what had happened to Longgood could happen to her. Her main hope, she told Marjorie Spock, lay in the careful consideration of the science that would not just support her case but make the argument without any interpretation on her part. This was a daunting task, one that caused her doubts and anxiety and seemed so unlike anything she had done before. She wrote: