Read On a Farther Shore Online
Authors: William Souder
White-Stevens, who evidently tended to talk that way all the time, was dressed for the occasion in a white lab coat that was meant to emphasize his expertise against “Miss Carson’s” hysterical foolishness. But as CBS intercut White-Stevens’s comments with shots of bubbling beakers and chemical-company smokestacks, the line between sober researcher and mad scientist blurred. White-Stevens’s claim that a registered pesticide used in accordance with label directions posed
no
hazard to humans or wildlife was, as he might have said it, a gross distortion of the actual facts. The more he talked, the more his defense of pesticides seemed an over-the-top cover story. Sevareid, meanwhile, piled on statistic after statistic about pesticide use, totaling up crop damage and pesticide consumption and the sheer volume of new poisonous products for farm, home, and garden. It was numbing after a while. But it sounded like
way too much
.
White-Stevens was not the program’s only pesticide proponent. Luther Terry, the U.S. surgeon general, said insecticides had been vital in controlling diseases such as malaria—in America, but also more extensively abroad. George Larrick, head of the FDA, denied that pesticide residues in food were a problem. Larrick took the position—and was encouraged to do so by Jay McMullen, who did much of the interviewing—that pesticides at small enough doses were not toxic. The ever-reliable pesticide defender Wayland Hayes, from the U.S. Public Health Service, agreed that there was no evidence
that the amounts of pesticides Americans now regularly consumed were dangerous—though he conceded that one, DDT, was stored at measurable levels in the fatty tissues of people. He said this storage of DDT “has not caused any injury that we can detect.”
This was all a familiar story to Carson. “We’ve heard a great deal about the benefits of pesticides,” she said. “We’ve heard a great deal about their safety. But very little about the hazards, very little about the failures, the inefficiencies—yet the public was being asked to accept these chemicals, the public was being asked to acquiesce in their use and did not have the whole picture. So I set about to remedy the balance.”
Carson was asked to read selected passages from
Silent Spring—
including her all-important disclaimer that nothing she wrote should be construed as a call for the end to all pesticide use. These excerpts covered several of Carson’s most frightening revelations—the magnification of pesticides through the food chain, the collateral damage to nontarget species, the silencing of the birds, and the patently offensive idea that these poisonous substances were now readily available for purchase everywhere, by anyone, for any purpose—even though they were, in general, far more toxic than medicines requiring a written prescription. And there was no escape from this toxic new environment. “We have to remember,” Carson said, “that children born today are exposed to these chemicals from birth. Perhaps even before birth. Now what is going to happen to them in adult life as a result of that exposure? We simply don’t know. Because we’ve never before had this kind of experience.”
Balance being a thing hard to achieve but easy to perceive where it exists, Carson won the debate, handling herself with poise and coming across as a voice of reason and reasonable concern—in no way appearing to be a raving member of the lunatic fringe or a front for Communist seditionists.
Carson, predictably, did better than the spokesmen for the federal government in part because they could not decide what position to
take. After saying that pesticide residues in food were not a problem, the FDA’s George Larrick added vaguely that
Silent Spring
had caused the agency to “take a new look at our responsibilities to the general public.” Larrick expressed doubt about the government’s ability to regulate pesticides, given the rapid pace of innovation that was flooding the market with new products. Larrick also conceded that mass sprayings over large areas with airplanes were all but impossible to confine within their intended boundaries, and that it was hard to limit their effects to only the targeted species.
Even White-Stevens admitted that large-scale spraying had some negative effects on wildlife—though he insisted that “in general” wildlife numbers quickly recovered. A spokesman for the FDA said it was true that pesticide residues were being found in drinking water—and Larrick confirmed this was also the case with milk. No tolerance level for DDT or any other pesticide had ever been established for milk, Larrick said, though the objective was to keep pesticides out of milk because of its “very special” importance in the diets of children and infants.
An FWS man—perhaps not surprisingly given the agency’s history of pesticide testing—took the harshest view of pesticide use, saying that damage to wildlife was widespread and that sublethal doses of DDT had been demonstrated to cause reproductive and developmental problems in birds. He said not nearly enough was known about pesticide contamination of the total environment, but that it had become all but impossible to find animals that did not have some body burden of pesticides. Speaking for humans, Surgeon General Luther Terry said the main question was what the consequences of long-term exposure to low levels of pesticides might be. Everyone understood that people accumulated pesticide residues in their bodies just as wildlife did; whether that was harmful was an open question.
But it was Orville Freeman—almost daring anyone to take him seriously—who best captured the government’s confused, impotent response to Carson’s portrait of official ineptitude and inaction. Trying
his best to characterize the impact of
Silent Spring
on official policy, Freeman could not get his bearings on camera:
Let’s say the book I believe will have helped the American people in alerting them that we need to do more work but we also need to be personally conscious—this is like anything else. The government is not going to do it for you. Somebody else is not going to do it for you. Basically you’re going to have to do it for yourself. And that means to protect yourself and that means to see to it that your government protects you when you can’t protect yourself.
What Freeman meant by “do it” wasn’t clear, though he seemed to be talking about the regulation and proper use of pesticides—which the public had been assured in every other context was, in fact, under the able control of the government. When Freeman was asked if he thought the public had been sufficiently informed about the potential hazards of pesticides he was more sure of himself. “The answer I can say very quickly,” he said, “is no.” Asked why that was, Freeman said he thought the public had not been “receptive” to such information. Smiling incongruously at one point, Freeman said the issue of wildlife being harmed in spraying programs was one that he could speak to “with relative, shall we say, detachment” because all of the examples Carson reported had occurred before he was secretary of agriculture. When he was asked how much the USDA was spending to develop biological insect controls, Freeman said about $1.5 million a year—which was, as Jay McMullen pointed out, less than the $2 million the chemical industry said it invested in developing just one synthetic pesticide.
During the course of the program both Sevareid and McMullen described its subject as “the pesticides problem.” McMullen, in a long speech to the camera near the end of the show, lamented the general lack of knowledge about the depth of the problem among most of the experts he’d interviewed. McMullen also questioned the delays
in a report from President Kennedy’s pesticide committee. He said CBS had learned the committee was riven with dissension and that disagreements among various government agencies over what if anything to do about pesticides had stalled the report.
Sevareid brought the program to a close on a philosophical note—saying the real difference between Rachel Carson and her critics wasn’t so much an argument over pesticides as a duel between competing views of nature and our place in it. White-Stevens, taking the bait, said that man—with his cities and roads and airports and exploding population—had already undone the so-called balance of nature, and that his survival thus depended on the continuing control of natural processes that worked against his interests. Carson, almost but not quite smiling at this, sat up a little straighter and said:
Now to these people apparently the balance of nature was something that was repealed as soon as man came on the scene. Well, you might just as well assume that you could repeal the law of gravity. The balance of nature is built on a series of relationships between living things, and between living things and their environments. You can’t just step in with some brute force and change one thing without changing many others. This doesn’t mean we must never interfere, never tilt the balance of nature in our favor. But when we make the attempt we must know what we’re doing. We must know the consequences.
This neat and modern definition of ecology rang true—and Carson was allowed to continue her thought on the point at length. Understanding and respecting the balance of nature had become even more important, she said, with our recently acquired capacity to destroy all of nature. Even short of total annihilation, we now caused the “deadly products of atomic explosions” to rain down on the earth regularly. Unless we could learn that we were part of nature, not its overlord, we weren’t going to see the foolishness of a war against nature.
“I truly believe that we in this generation must come to terms with nature,” Carson concluded, “and I think we’re challenged as mankind has never been challenged before to prove our maturity and our mastery not of nature, but of ourselves.”
For Carson and for her publisher, the program was a victory.
Houghton Mifflin bought a copy of it for a man in the Massachusetts Department of Fish and Game who wanted to show it at meetings. Carson, relieved it had gone well, went back to thinking about her health and the future. She enjoyed a letter from one of the sponsors of
CBS Reports
, the Kiwi shoe polish company.
The president of its American division wrote to her directly, telling Carson the company had been flooded with letters commending it for bringing “such an important program” to the public. He said that in fifteen years of advertising in the United States they’d never had “such a fine reaction” to a program they’d sponsored.
Carson got more support for
Silent Spring
when—as Paul Knight had predicted—the U.S. Department of the Interior committed itself to working harder on the pesticide problem by opening a new pesticides lab at what was now the Patuxent Wildlife Research Center. Carson was invited but couldn’t attend the opening ceremony—though Interior Secretary Stewart Udall made sure her presence was felt. In his speech, Udall said the government’s first-ever facility dedicated to studying pesticides and wildlife was really meant to take on questions that went beyond chemicals and animals:
This laboratory is dedicated to Man—to his search for knowledge about the natural world around him—to his wise use of the tools for controlling that world. The work done here may prevent or halt the threat of the “silent springs” that stalk the earth—for this laboratory marks the beginnings of a new national awareness of the present and potential dangers we have almost thoughtlessly brought to the world in which we live.
A great woman has awakened the Nation by her forceful account of the dangers around us. We owe much to Rachel Carson.
The Interior Department, through the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, was actually already in the middle of a two-year review of pesticide data that would appear in a massive report a few months later. The findings included evidence of pesticide contamination in wildlife living hundreds or even thousands of miles away from where the chemicals were being used. The researchers determined that although 75 percent of the United States had
never
been treated with insecticides—and only about 5 percent of the country was treated in any given year—DDT and other insecticides were found in the bodies of three of every four animals and birds collected across a broad swath of North America. For some species—notably the bald eagle—it was hard to find any specimen that didn’t have DDT in its tissues.
Still to come that spring, however, was the report of the president’s pesticide committee—which was finally released on May 15, 1963. Seen by almost everyone as a vindication of
Silent Spring
, the forty-three-page report prompted CBS to broadcast a follow-up to “The Silent Spring of Rachel Carson” saying as much.
Eric Sevareid reported that
Silent Spring
, the “most controversial book of the year,” had now sold more than five hundred thousand copies and started a “national quarrel.” The CBS report noted that pesticides, used properly, were important in fighting disease, as during an outbreak of mosquito-transmitted encephalitis in the St. Petersburg area of Florida in the fall of 1962. But it also acknowledged the many risks that came with pesticide use.
Carson, interviewed for her reaction to the committee’s report, noted that it went further than she had in claiming that pesticides contaminated vast portions of the landscape, even when applied to much smaller areas. Sevareid wrapped up the report saying that both
Silent Spring
and now a presidential commission had confirmed that there was “danger in the air, and in the waters and the soil, and the leaves and the grass.” Carson, he said, had two objectives in
Silent Spring
.
One was to alert
the public to the hazards of pesticide misuse—which she had done. The other was to “build a fire” under the government. The findings of President Kennedy’s pesticide commission, Sevareid said, were “prima facie” evidence that she’d accomplished this, too.
The
New York Times
ran an editorial two days after the report’s release calling for a “serious re-examination” of pesticides such as DDT, heptachlor, aldrin, and dieldrin, as public controls over the use of these “potent substances” were inadequate. Without mentioning Carson by name, the
Times
said the report of the president’s pesticide committee confirmed the dangers from an “unchecked proliferation” of synthetic pesticides that she had warned about. There was no longer any doubt, said the
Times
, that “these chemicals, even when properly used, have killed large numbers of birds, fish and other usefully living organisms, thus upsetting the ecological balance.