The New Yorker has a wonderful story about Rachel Carson which points out that we ignore most of her writing. She’s most famous for Silent Spring, which of course I’ve read, but much of her prior work was about the sea and the shore, which I have not. I guess I’m going to have correct that deficiency.
It also fills in many biographical details about her life, which was full of family responsibilities and struggles. My respect for her keeps going up and up.
I have to highlight one detail, though. After Silent Spring, this quiet, private woman who was dying of cancer (and refused to mention it in public), was savagely targeted for harassment by the American chemical industry. Remember this if anyone tries to tell you that science is not political.
“What she wrote started a national quarrel,” “CBS Reports” announced in a one-hour special, “The Silent Spring of Rachel Carson,” in which footage of Carson was intercut with footage of government and industry spokesmen, to create a de-facto debate. (Carson refused to make any other television appearance.) In the program, Carson sits on the porch of her white-railed house in Maine, wearing a skirt and cardigan; the chief spokesman for the insecticide industry, Robert White-Stevens, of American Cyanamid, wears thick black-framed glasses and a white coat, standing in a chemistry lab, surrounded by beakers and Bunsen burners.
Whoa. Caricature much? White coats & beakers, the trappings of scientism. I am amused, and appalled.
White-Stevens questions Carson’s expertise: “The major claims of Miss Rachel Carson’s book, ‘Silent Spring,’ are gross distortions of the actual fact, completely unsupported by scientific experimental evidence and general practical experience in the field.”
Carson feigns perplexity: “Can anyone believe it is possible to lay down such a barrage of poisons on the surface of the earth without making it unfit for all life?”
White-Stevens fumes: “Miss Carson maintains that the balance of nature is a major force in the survival of man, whereas the modern chemist, the modern biologist and scientist believes that man is steadily controlling nature.”
Stop right there. White-Stevens is simply wrong — that is a horrifying attitude to take, that rather than existing as a part of nature, humans are responsible for controlling nature. I can’t imagine any modern biologist taking White-Stevens position, in part thanks to Rachel Carson.
You can now watch the whole 1963 program, thanks to the intertubes. It’s not a pleasant experience: there’s a train of expressionless, somber white men all positively asserting that all of the chemicals they’re spraying across the landscape are harmless, that they have been thoroughly tested and do no harm to people at all, which is not particularly reassuring coming from people who think all of nature is to be brought under their control.
Watch for the scene where White-Stevens is lecturing at a lectern, and the camera pans to the audience…which consists entirely of men in crewcuts, white shirts, and/or ties. There are also scenes where the defenders have to reluctantly admit that widespread pesticide use sometimes damages the environment — they talk of streams full of dead fish, and one says that he’s seen the elimination of 80% of the wildlife in some areas. Watch the whole thing and it gets more and more clear that the overuse of pesticides has led to serious effects on animals at concentrations far lower than the industry endorses. White-Stevens does not come out of this looking good.
Rachel Carson, on the other hand, is magnificent. She doesn’t get enough air time.
Note that this was all before the EPA was established, which the current administration is trying to destroy.
Very scientific.
That’s right! God gave us DOMINION! God is like the wise parent who puts a nutritious meal in front on His child and says “You can’t get up (to heaven) until you eat it all up.”
Be very careful about “canonizing” Carson, there were quite a few different reasons the government agency scientists were speaking against her at the time. There was definitely some big business collusion, but more to the point she was writing using emotions, anecdotes and animism instead of scientific fact, despite having a scientific background. I always try to remind scientific colleagues that we don’t have patron saints for a reason, and almost no one should be free of criticism.
Excellent write up here:
https://www.masterresource.org/silent-spring-at-50/silent-spring-at-50/
She wanted a pendulum shift, and used poor sample size, cherry picking and even Biblical allusion to try and get things moving. Many scientists actually in conservation agree that it over-corrected, such as with massive wildfires created by years of wilderness neglect based on the idea that we can just “leave it alone” and that nature balances itself. Silent Spring was what we needed at the time to stop and re-evaluate the “modern” approach to nature (which was certainly more akin to post 1, led by Judeo-Christian entitlement), but a completely hands-off approach is not viable, or even desirable with human population where it is.
Note that also in the above transcription, White-Stevens is NOT saying that he believes that he has dominion over biology, chemistry etc. He is actually “fuming” that Ms Carson believes that he does.
Frustrating, ain’t it, when people using emotional arguments put us scientists in boxes with words in our mouths..
If there is one thing you learn as a scientist, it is that we are certainly not in control of nature. The converse sounds like the error of a chemical engineer. And a bad one at that. (Apologies to chemical engineers).
“Dominion”?
I thought that was only Canada, and only since1867????
Carson’s battle with industry mirrors that of the Caltech geochemist Clair Patterson, who was the first researcher to accurately determine the age of the Earth. His work was initially frustrated by the fact that the element lead was contaminating his samples, despite heroic efforts to maintain a clean laboratory. He ultimately discovered that the lead was in Pasadena’s air, which in the early 1950s contained high levels of tetraethylead, an anti-knock compound added to gasoline to improve engine performance. That finding led to a long fight between Patterson and the gasoline industry.
Patterson finally won out, but it’s sad that the ad hominem, shoot-the-messenger philosophy of American industry (including the tobacco and petrochemical industries) continues to hamper scientific progress.
I was about to say many prominent skeptics have used industry psuedoscience to attack Rachel Carson’s legacy, but I see kagy already demonstrated my point by linking to a libertarian blog that, among other things, attacks climate science. That gives you an idea of the credibility of the “science” kagy and his/her ilk use when discussing Carson.
The most recent example was Paul Offit, who harmed his credibility by recycling the right-wing myth that DDT bans caused by Silent Spring led to millions of malaria deaths. https://lat.ms/2n5SNTo
Anyway, RationalWiki has a short but good summary of how bad science has been used to attack Carson: https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Rachel_Carson
I admit Offit and MasterResource are not the best examples to cite, but they certainly are the more researched examples that I can easily link to for discussion without becoming an investigative reporter (not enough time!). I thought about listing that caveat but didn’t want to make a long post into a diatribe.
I just try to stay away from too many “ends justify the means” arguments, and many conservation advocacy groups tend to idolize Carson, despite the fact that the world she sort of “sold” in her books no longer really exists (primeval shores, idyllic rural farming communities, etc) and to argue for “Nature takes care of it” is a blind to the problems we have already created by messing with things. As a global population, our impact is undeniable and now we’re in the sticky situation of how we run a household overflowing with family and guests.
Though we do not “have dominion” over the Earth, biological processes, or even geophysical ones we can certainly understand and affect them (Anthropocene, anyone?) and may end up being forced to, in order not to seriously disenfranchise or impinge upon the third World, or just to fix what we’ve already done. I only argue that Carson is a point in history that we have passed, and should be taken with a grain of salt.
Hardly. For example, this is… Well, let’s be generous and say “hugely problematic”*:
That’s simply not true. Silent Spring contains numerous references to the use of “DDT and other pest controls” for disease vector control – indeed, one of her key arguments against indiscriminate agricultural use of these agents is that this leads to the development of resistance in the target species, thereby drastically reducing their effectiveness for disease control. Furthermore, DDT has never been banned for disease-vector management, although it is no longer widely used – because most mosquito populations are now highly resistant to it, exactly as she warned. [See, for example, the discussion of the development of DDT-resistance in anopheles mosquitoes on pages 269-270 of Silent Spring.]
If that’s your idea of an “excellent write up”, I’d hate to see your version of a crude hatchet-job.
[* Or you could be somewhat less charitable and call it “an obvious tissue of bare-faced lies”. It’s almost as if they’re assuming that their target audience hasn’t read the book they’re criticising and so reckon then can get away with blatantly misrepresenting its contents.]
Oh, and again the point that there is very little “science” in her works. Frustrating to me as a natural resource manager haha
Ouch guys. Well, this is why I never post. I’ll continue lurking. So much for healthy skepticism on my part.
The screen grab of the video looks like it is from the 50s or something, but it reminds me of the same thing when I was a kid in the 70s in the suburbs of Chicago. In the summers, a truck would come out at dusk every month or two and fog the trees with some kind of pesticide. Dutch Elm disease was wiping out trees at the time, so I’m not sure if it was related to that or to mosquito control.
At any rate, we kids used to think it was great fun to run behind the trucks and cavort in the “fog”. I can still remember the smell/taste of the chemical. Lord knows what we were breathing.
I do not believe that you have read any of her books or know anything about any of her actual arguments. She never argued that “Nature takes care of it” or anything like it. She argued in favour of what we would now call integrated pest management, with a particular emphasis on biological controls. You’re arguing against a straw man erected by liars and charlatans.
What, because you obviously haven’t got the first fucking clue what you’re talking about? Yeah, that’s a pretty good reason for keeping quiet.
“Healthy skepticism ” involves carefully weighing both sides of an argument and evaluating the evidence for each. It does not involve uncritically accepting a bunch of claims without making even the most trivial effort to investigate whether they have any basis in fact – that’s called “gullibility”.
@9 Dunc: Yeah, the millions of deaths is a very good sign of a source motivated by ideology rather than accuracy. In many cases it’s quoted as more than the holocaust. But somehow, this giant wave of missing people never seems to have any positive citations; it always gets quoted to other people quoting other people who simply assume it was millions because they trust DDT was that effective.
@11 kagy: If you want to have a critical look at Carson, I’m sure there is lots you can come up with. But asking us to listen to people who are so obviously indifferent to truth as this, is not healthy skepticism. We all know she has motivated detractors; they are not trustworthy enough to tell us anything about where she made mistakes or not.
“Well, this is why I never post.”
I rarely post myself, but when I do, I at least try to take time to understand what I’m writing about. You rushed straight to an unreliable source because it validated your beliefs.
“So much for healthy skepticism on my part.”
“Skepticism” isn’t posting inaccurate information then, when called out for it, saying “Gee, I don’t have time to be an investigative reporter, but I know I’m right even though I can’t prove it.”
monad, @ #15:
The way you get “more deaths than Hitler” is simple: you assume that DDT would have completely eradicated malaria in short order, and so blame every single death from malaria since the publication of Silent Spring on Carson. Take special care to ignore that fact that the development of DDT resistance was already well underway, as discussed in the book.
Most people who actually understand disease control will argue the opposite: by encouraging the restriction of the agricultural use of DDT (and thus reducing the spread of resistance, which made disease-control programs more effective), Carson saved quite a large number of lives. If the industry had had its way, DDT probably would have been completely useless before the end of the 60s, and all those disease-bearing mosquito populations would have come roaring back with a vengeance.
Yeah, I got the “Carson killed more people than Hitler” argument on twitter, right away. Also blocked that twit, right away.
This is just a lie.
It is true that we have a huge problem with massive wildfires every year. I should know, being on the west coast where the fire season is now year around.
It has nothing to do with “leaving nature alone”.
In fact, it is the exact opposite.
We’ve been suppressing wild fires for over a century now.
The result is overstocked forests with high fuel loads due to lack of
frequent low intensity wild fires. .
When they burn, they now burn catastrophically.
Wow! Masterresource.org… a free-market energy blog…supported by the Cato Institute…opposing “climate alarmism”…damn, dude, you sure know how to pick them! And FWIW, we have the Gates Foundation just today committing another $4 billion to malaria research in part because the insecticides have stopped working due to increased immunity of the mosquitoes the vector the parasite. Now just think how much faster the immunity would have been acquired if the insecticide had continued to be sprayed everywhere.
I do hereby propose that every glibertarian who advances the “Carson killed more than Hitler” be sentenced to the death of a thousand eighty-eight cuts–to be inflicted a paper cuts by every page the hardcover version of Atlas Shrugged. At least that fucking book could finally be put to some decent use!
The trend now is to let low intensity fires just burn.
Sometimes land managers will actually set fires when they think it is safe, to reduce fuel loads, i.e. controlled burns.
One of the other factors making wild fires worse and worse is…climate change. It’s getting drier and hotter out here.
1. The reason why people stopped spraying DDT to control malaria vector mosquitoes is real simple.
It stopped working!!!
It’s just straight Darwin.
The sprayers weren’t very careful and quickly ended up with…DTT resistant mosquitoes.
2. DTT isn’t banned.
Worldwide anyway.
It is still used just about everywhere except the USA, mostly to control mosquitoes in malaria areas.
“The Convention (UN) includes a limited exemption for the use of DDT to control mosquitoes that transmit the microbe that causes malaria – a disease that still kills millions of people worldwide.
The intent is common sense.
To balance the multiple hazards of DTT against the hazards of…malaria.
It is sad how many of theses things still ring so true.
The shifting of blame to imperfect users, the “really, it’s safe, the system works, believe us, look at all the other times we unleashed something toxic and then caught it” and the fucking truth that for most pesticides there is still no data on how they may interact. We ask grandma to carry a list of her pills so nobody accidentally gives her something that may inhibit/change some reaction, but with crops it’s still fine to sell something that stays under the threshold for 50 different pesticides.
Whaaa? Our massive wildfires of today are certainly not a result of laissez-faire but rather a combination of climate change and a forest-management policy that was in place for decades of spotting all new fires and completely extinguishing them by 10 a.m. the next morning. Many western forests are now so dry and so overgrown with understory fuel plants that they’ll burn at the slightest provocation whatsoever.
DDT effective in preventing dysentery. Right. Well-sourced, evidence-based criticism that is. Didn’t realize DDT could magically fix sanitation systems.
raven beat me to the punch on wildfires being worse because of human efforts to prevent/stop any fires.
I think it was “The Sea Around Us” the movie and a book that helped me cement my understanding of our intimate connection to all of “The Environment”. Her book and a documentary “A Silent Spring” was a logical and timely follow up and a continuation. Her point was not to write another scientific paper which could be easily ignored by industrial vested interest and be unseen and unread by the population but to demonstrate the results of not recognizing that we are but a part of a process much bigger and longer running then any mere civilization has ever been and we ignore that reality at our own peril. It was aimed at a general audience to do that.
That essential message is still true and is at the root of the “conflict ” anthropomorphic global climate change.
uncle frogy
If anyone’s interested, Library of America (LOA) is bringing out an edition of Rachel Carson’s writings. Silent Spring is included, but much of the other writings PZ mentions wanting to read are there, too. link.
Should we also point out that India has used about 75% of the world’s DDT supply for mosquito control, ever since it was invented. And somehow they have have the highest rate of malaria in the world?
Indeed, it may have something to do with that, as in the places that still use DDT, the only way to kill mozzies with it is to drown them with it; same principle as holding back the power antibiotics for nasty shite. She specifically had a cutout in her recs in Silent Spring for disease control – I read the book when I was doing a high school report. I also found a tin of DDT-Pyrethrin blend in my basement when I moved into my current residence, underscoring how prevalent the stuff is.
Also, something that hasn’t been mentioned here, but I found fascinating (tho tangential) is that there’s fairly good evidence that Carson was some flavor of queer – though it was unclear if gay, bi or homoromantic ace. She was apparently in a relationship which she described and corresponded in fairly romantic terms, even raised an adopted kid.
Kagy,
I won’t swear at you and abuse you, but…
I have to agree with dunc and others that you have gotten your information from an unreliable, and extremely biased, source. You deserve it to yourself to actually read her book (if I was a priest I’d say that is your penance for impugning the character of a good person by believing the first thing you read about her!).
She was not a “back to nature” person. She did not advocate a ban on DDT. She advocated against the indiscriminate use of DDT and for its controlled use. This was because of the evidence of increasing immunity to DDT, it’s persistence in the environment, it’s persistence in the fatty tissue of humans, and evidence of side-effects. It has never been banned world wide. It is still in use today in some countries where the benefits outweigh risks (hopefully). However, people were spraying the walls of their houses with it. She criticised practices such as these. And the reduced use of DDT has never been shown to have caused any increase in deaths from malaria, let alone the millions claimed by some egregious conservative and right wing sources.
So, put the book at the top of your reading list and take your penance! :D
Does anyone here remember those TeeVee ads from the 50s and 60s that used the tag line: “Use once. Throw away” which usually showed a young and shapely modern housewife tossing a Kleenex off to the side while smiling with glee about how much time and work she just saved?
I remember when there were at least twenty dumps within thirty minutes drive from my New Hampshire home. On some weekends we’d load up some junk furniture or such and go throw it over the edge of a ravine. Then we’d spend a good half hour rummaging around for stuff we could take home.
We’d sometimes take a .22 rifle to plink at rats.
One day, exploring the bottom of a certain dump, I noticed that there was a small creek that flowed there. Upstream, the water was clear and drinkable. Downstream, it was like last night’s dishwater, neither clear nor drinkable.
Put me off of the throw away meme right there. To this day, I wince inwardly every time I take a bag of refuse to the curb.
Our delight of convenience has been the seed of our inconvenience, even our disgust and our disease.
How about “Use once, wash, rinse, dry and reuse”? Is that really so hard? Is that really way too much work?
Crudely Wrott
I am a fan of
“fill a bit of paper with your nasal mucus, throw it away”
rather than
“fill a bit of cloth with your nasal mucus, give it to the little woman to clean”
.
but sometimes I think about the volume of sewage in landfills since disposable diapers…
29 – should read: was.
chigau
I’m with you there. Husband gets a pass, because he does the laundry. Fabric tissues and (oh the horrors) cloth diapers aren’t actually more environmentally friendly because they require energy and water for washing, not to mention the time.
Having said that, I don’t understand the whole “landfill” thing.
I separate my garbage into
-paper
-glass
-kitchen waste
-plastic
-rest
The first 4 get taken for recycling (though there are big issues with the plastic recycling), the rest gets burned in a modern facility where the smoke is filtered. The energy is used to heat homes.
Kagy @ #3
Frustrating, isn’t it, when the source you’re using to back up your claims of strawman is itself a strawman attack?
And of course, the claim that Carson was responsible for “millions of deaths” is not intended to have any emotional impact… No, it’s just a neutral statement that we can dispassionately debate.
unclefrogy
] I think it was “The Sea Around Us” the movie and a book that helped me cement my understanding of our intimate connection to all of “The Environment”. [
I read “The Sea Around Us” years after I read “Silent Spring”. Which sent me right back to scanning the bookshelves to re-read it. The writing in that earlier work was absolutely brilliant. I realised that the shock value of the contents of “Silent Spring” had substantially overwhelmed appreciation of the writing itself. Which is still pretty good.
kagy @ 3:
You are completely wrong on this one.
When the National Forest Service was created in the early 1900s, the price demanded by, and recieved by, the logging industry was total and absolute fire suppression — all fires in all circumstances. Which, in most North American forests, interrupted the natural fire system under which the environment had evolved.
Prior to the total fire suppression ideal of the early 1900s (which continued into the 1980s), most Western forests had a natural fire cycle (which may (the archaeologists are still arguing this one) have been helped along by native American nations). Most fires were small, slow-moving, and very healthy. They burned the low brush and the flame heights were low enough that they rarely made the jump to the trees. And when they did, the trees were spaced widely enough (in most areas) that only a few acres of trees were burned. Which provided more open areas.
When the NFS, NPS, BLM, BuRec, and state land agencies jumped on the total suppression bandwagon, for a while, it worked. All fires were extinquished as quickly as possible. Unfortunately, this meant that the underbrush was able to grow high and thick enough to act as a ladder fuel to the trees. More saplings survived, which meant a thicker forest with less space between trees. So by the 1970s, fires were getting larger and hotter.
Now, fire suppression has been replaced with fire management. Intentionally set controlled burns are commonly used to keep the ladder fuels under control. Fires in wilderness areas that are naturally caused are allowed to burn (which provides a very healthy mosaic of old growth, young growth, and open areas). Thickly grown areas are selectively logged in to open the forest up.
This has also helped plants and trees. California Redwoods germinate when slow and relatively cool fires burn the cones. There are plants which grow on the knobs of the Southern Appalachians which only germinate after fires.
And it helps wildlife. The 1988 fires in Yellowstone National Park were portrayed in the national press as a disaster. And, in the short term, they were. Wife and I drove through Yellowstone early that summer, before the fires, and we saw almost no wildlife and spent so much time driving through green caves that, in part, we were wondering what the big deal was. We went back with the kids in 98 and 01 and the wildlife — elk, moose, bison, wolves, coyotes, fox, marmots, ground squirrels, eagles, swans, etc — were everywhere.
Nature does balance itself. Eventually. If we allowed all wildland fires to burn freely, it would take a few centuries to return to equilibrium. By managing the fires for positive effects — controlled burns, guiding fires into areas where it will do the most good — we may (barring what will happen due to global climate change) be able to bring most forest back into a natural burn cycle in 50 to 100 years.
So I disagree that the massive wildfires are caused by neglect. They were, and are, caused by interference with the the natural cycles for the benefit of a very few, very rich, timber companies.
(sorry for the tl;dr)