RACHEL CARSON
The Obligation to Endure
(1962)
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the problem of chemical pesticides in Silent Spring, Rachel
BEFORE SHE TOOK up
Carson (1907–1964) was already a respected scientist and a
After earning a master's degree in zoology from Johns Hopkins University in 1932,
and its later incarnation as the Fish and Wildlife Service. In 1949, she rose to the
she spent her early career as an aquatic biologist with the U.S. Bureau of Fisheries
position of chief editor of publications for the Fish and Wildlife Service and pub-
lished three books about the ocean: Under the Sea-Wind (1941), The Sea Around
National Book Award and sold so many copies that Carson was able to give up
Us (1951), and The Edge of the Sea (1955). The second of these books won the
her job and devote her time to writing.
With the publication of her most famous work, Silent Spring, Carson took on
the unfamiliar role of social activist. The book began as a magazine article about
the environmental impact of pesticides, especially of the compound dichlorodiphe-
nyltrichloroethane, better known as DDT. During and after World War II, DDT had
been used throughout the world to control insects, remove disease threats, and
increase food production. Carson traced the poisonous effects of DDT and other
pesticides through the ecosystem, beginning with plants and insects and moving
to fish, birds, wildlife, domestic animals, and finally to people, for whom, Carson
argued, DDT was a carcinogen.
When the book was published, the chemical pesticide industry launched a
major counterstrike aimed at discrediting Carson. Despite their attack, the book
became a phenomenal bestseller and caused millions of Americans to consider
the effects of chemicals on their environment. Furthermore, it caused many to
reevaluate their faith in technology, scientific progress, and the role of govern-
ment in protecting their interests.
Carson died of breast cancer in 1964 before she could see the effect of her work
on the world. In 1972, largely because of Silent Spring, the Environmental Protec-
tion Agency banned the use of DDT. In 1980, Carson was posthumously awarded
the Presidential Medal of Freedom. And in 1999, the Modern Library Editorial
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Board ranked Silent Spring as one of the most important nonfiction books of the
twentieth century.
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Carson's accomplishment in Silent Spring, the second chapter of which follows,
goes beyond exposing the dangers of pesticides. The portrait that she created of a
deeply interconnected natural world, where changes to one species have far-reaching,
unforeseen consequences for the entire ecological system, struck a deep chord with
her readers and even changed their perception of nature. Today, many consider the
RACHEL CARSON • The Obligation to Endure
329
movement.
publication of Silent Spring to mark the beginning of the modern environmental
Carson's claim about the dangers of chemicals is primarily supported by facts
and statistics. She links together a series of historical and scientific facts to focus
previously viewed by many in only a positive light.
readers' attention on the negative consequences of using chemicals-chemicals
The history of life on earth has been a history of interaction between living things
and their surroundings. To a large extent, the physical form and the habits of the
earth's vegetation and its animal life have been molded by the environment. Con-
sidering the whole span of earthly time, the opposite effect, in which life actually
modifies its surroundings, has been relatively slight. Only within the moment of
time represented by the present century has one species-man-acquired significant
power to alter the nature of his world.
During the past quarter century this power has not only increased to one of dis-
turbing magnitude but it has changed in character. The most alarming of all man's
assaults upon
the environment is the contamination of air, earth, rivers, and sea with
dangerous and even lethal materials. This pollution is for the most part irrecoverable;
the chain of evil it initiates not only in the world that must support life but in living
tissues is for the most part irreversible. In this now universal contamination of the
environment, chemicals are the sinister and little-recognized partners of radiation
in changing the very nature of the world—the very nature of its life. Strontium 90,
released through nuclear explosions into the air, comes to earth in rain or drifts
down as fallout, lodges in soil, enters into the grass or corn or wheat grown there,
and in time takes up its abode in the bones of a human being, there to remain until
his death. Similarly, chemicals sprayed on croplands or forests or gardens lie long
in soil, entering into living organisms, passing from one to another in a chain of
poisoning and death. Or they pass mysteriously by underground streams until they
emerge and, through the alchemy of air and sunlight, combine into new forms that
kill vegetation, sicken cattle, and work unknown harm on those who drink from
once pure
wells. As Albert Schweitzer has said, “Man can hardly even recognize
the devils of his own creation."
It took hundreds of millions of years to produce the life that now inhabits the
earth—eons of time in which that developing and evolving and diversifying life
reached a state of adjustment and balance with its surroundings. The environment
,
rigorously shaping and directing the life it supported, contained elements that were
hostile as well as supporting. Certain rocks gave out dangerous radiation; even within
the light of the sun, from which all life draws its energy, there were short-wave radia-
tions with power to injure. Given time-time not in years but in millennia--life
1. Albert Schweitzer: German-Alsatian theologian, philosopher, music scholar, and physician
(1875-1965), who won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1952 for his lifelong devotion to providing medical
services in Africa
SCIENCE AND NATURE
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adjusts, and a balance has been reached. For time is the essential ingredient; but in
the modern world there is no time.
The rapidity of change and the speed with which new situations are created follow
the impetuous and heedless pace of man rather than the deliberate
pace of
Radiation is no longer merely the background radiation of rocks, the bombardment
of cosmic rays, the ultraviolet of the sun that have existed before there was any life
on earth; radiation is now the unnatural creation of man's tampering with the atom.
The chemicals to which life is asked to make its adjustment are no longer merely the
calcium and silica and copper and all the rest of the minerals washed out of the rocks
and carried in rivers to the sea; they are the synthetic creations of man's inventive
mind, brewed in his laboratories, and having no counterparts in nature.
To adjust to these chemicals would require time on the scale that is nature's; it
would require not merely the years of a man's life but the life of generations. And
even this, were it by some miracle possible, would be futile, for the new chemicals
come from our laboratories in an endless stream; almost five hundred annually find
their way into actual use in the United States alone. The figure is staggering and its
implications are not easily grasped—500 new chemicals to which the bodies of men
and animals are required somehow to adapt each year, chemicals totally outside the
limits of biologic experience.
Among them are many that are used in man's war against nature. Since the mid-
1940's over 200 basic chemicals have been created for use in killing insects, weeds,
rodents, and other organisms described in the modern vernacular as “pests”; and they
are sold under several thousand different brand names.
These sprays, dusts, and aerosols are now applied almost universally to farms,
gardens, forests, and homes-nonselective chemicals that have the power to kill
every insect, the "good" and the "bad," to still the song of birds and the leaping
of fish in the streams, to coat the leaves with a deadly film, and to linger on in
soil-all this though the intended target may be only a few weeds or insects. 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? They should not be called "insec-
ticides," but "biocides."
The whole process of spraying seems caught up in an endless spiral. Since DDT
was released for civilian use, a process of escalation has been going on in which ever
more toxic materials must be found. This has happened because insects, in a trium-
phant vindication of Darwin's principle of the survival of the fittest, have evolved
super races immune to the particular insecticide used, hence a deadlier one has always
to be developed and then a deadlier one than that. It has happened also because
,
for reasons to be described later, destructive insects often undergo a “flareback," or
resurgence, after spraying, in numbers greater than before. Thus the chemical war
never won, and all life is caught in its violent crossfire.
Along with the possibility of the extinction of mankind by nuclear war, the
central problem of our age has therefore become the contamination of man's total
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RACHEL CARSON . The Obligation to Endure
at in
331
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environment with such substances of incredible potential for harm-substances
that accumulate in the tissues of plants and animals and even penetrate the germ
cells to shatter or alter the very material of heredity upon which the shape of the
Some would-be architects of our future look toward a time when it will be
sible to alter the human germ plasm by design. But we may easily be doing so now
by inadvertence, for many chemicals, like radiation, bring about gene mutations. It is
10
ironic to think that man
trivial as the choice of an insect spray.
All this has been risked—for what? Future historians may well be amazed by
our distorted sense of proportion. How could intelligent beings seek to control a
few unwanted species by a method that contaminated the entire environment and
brought the threat of disease and death even to their own kind? Yet this is precisely
what we have done. We have done it, moreover, for reasons that collapse the moment
use of pesticides
is necessary to maintain farm production. Yet is our real problem not one of over-
production? Our farms, despite measures to remove acreages from production and to
farmers not to produce, have yielded such a staggering excess of crops that the
American taxpayer in 1962 is paying out more than one billion dollars a year as the
total carrying cost of the surplus-food storage program. And is the situation helped
when one branch of the Agriculture Department tries to reduce production while
another states, as it did in 1958, “It is believed generally that reduction of crop acre-
under provisions of the Soil Bank will stimulate interest in use of chemicals to
ages
obtain maximum production on the land retained in crops.”
All this is not to say there is no insect problem and no need of control. I am
saying, rather, that control must be geared to realities, not to mythical situations,
and that the methods employed must be such that they do not destroy us along
with the insects.
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The problem whose attempted solution has brought such a train of disaster in its
wake is an accompaniment of our modern way of life. Long before the age of
insects inhabited the earth—a group of extraordinarily varied and adaptable beings.
Over the course of time since man's advent, a small percentage of the more than
half a million species of insects have come into conflict
with human welfare in two
principal ways: as competitors
for the food supply and as carriers of human disease
.
Disease-carrying insects become important where human beings are crowded
together, especially under conditions where sanitation is poor, as in time of natural
disaster or war or in situations of extreme poverty and deprivation. Then control
of some sort becomes necessary. It is a sobering fact, however, as we shall presently
see, that the method of massive chemical control has had only limited success, and
also threatens to worsen the very conditions it is intended to curb.
Under primitive agricultural conditions the farmer had few insect problems.
arose with the intensification of agriculture the devotion of immense
15
332
SCIENCE AND NATURE
acreages to a single crop. Such a system set the stage for explosive increases in
specific insect populations. Single-crop farming does not take advantage of the
; as an
to be. Nature has introduced great variety into the landscape, but man has displayed
a passion for simplifying it. Thus he undoes the built-in checks and balances by
which nature holds the species within bounds. One important natural check is a
limit on the amount of suitable habitat for each species. Obviously then, an insect
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of large areas of the United States lined their streets with the noble elm tree. Now
the beauty they hopefully created is threatened with complete destruction as disease
to build up large populations and to spread from tree to tree if the elms were only
occasional trees in a richly diversified planting.
Another factor in the modern insect problem is one that must be viewed against
a background of geologic and human history: the spreading of thousands of different
kinds of organisms from their native homes to invade new territories. This worldwide
migration has been studied and graphically described by the British ecologist Charles
Elton in his recent book The Ecology of Invasions. During the Cretaceous Period, some
hundred million years ago, flooding seas cut many land bridges between continents
and living things found themselves confined in what Elton calls "colossal separate
nature reserves.” There, isolated from others of their kind, they developed many new
species. When some of the land masses were joined again, about 15 million years ago,
these species began to move out into new territories—a movement that is not only
still in progress but is now receiving considerable assistance from man.
The importation of plants is the primary agent in the modern spread of species,
for animals have almost invariably gone along with the plants, quarantine being
comparatively recent and not completely effective innovation. The United States
Office of Plant Introduction alone has introduced almost 200,000 species and vari-
eties of plants from all over the world. Nearly half of the 180 or so major insect
enemies of plants in the United States are accidental imports from abroad, and most
of them have come as hitchhikers on plants.
In new territory, out of reach of the restraining hand of the natural enemies
that kept down its numbers in its native land, an invading plant or animal is able
to become enormously abundant. Thus it is no accident that our most troublesome
insects are introduced species.
These invasions, both the naturally occurring and those dependent on human
assistance, are likely to continue indefinitely
. Quarantine and massive chemical
campaigns are only extremely expensive ways of buying time. We are faced, accord-
ing to Dr. Elton, "with a life-and-death need not just to find new technological
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