American Experience (1988) s29e04 Episode Script

1
NARRATOR:
It was 1962,
the height of the Cold War,
a moment when unrelenting
anxiety about the future
was leavened by an abiding faith
in the power of science
to secure our safety
and prosperity.
Then came an incendiary book
that sowed seeds of doubt.
MAN (on film):
This is one of the nation's
best sellers,
first printed
on September 27, 1962.
Up to now,
500,000 copies have been sold,
and Silent Spring
has been called
the most controversial book
of the year.
NARRATOR:
At the eye of the storm
was Rachel Carson,
one of the most celebrated
American writers of her time.
With her first three books,
a lyrical trilogy about the sea,
Carson had opened people's eyes
to the natural world.
Now, in Silent Spring,
she delivered the dark warning
that they might soon destroy it.
CARSON:
If we are ever to solve
the basic problem
of environmental contamination,
we must begin to count
the many hidden costs
of what we are doing.
MAN (on film):
Miss Carson maintains
that the balance of nature
is a major force
in the survival of man.
Whereas the modern chemist,
the modern biologist,
the modern scientist believes
that man is steadily
controlling nature.
MAN:
It was sort of the gospel
at the time
that human ingenuity
would triumph over nature.
What Carson was arguing
was for caution.
She really confronted
the orthodoxies of her time.
WOMAN:
She was accused
of being a Communist,
of being a hysterical,
female Luddite.
The reaction was
to attack the messenger.
NARRATOR:
Carson was an unlikely heretic.
Dutiful, demure,
and so jealous of her solitude
that her most intimate
relationship
was conducted mainly
through letters,
she'd thrust herself
into the public eye,
all the while harboring a secret
that was literally killing her.
To some, Silent Spring
was an act of heroism;
to others, an irresponsible
breach
of scientific objectivity.
But there could be no dispute
that with her rebuke
to modern technological science,
Carson had shattered a paradigm.
MAN 4:
Rachel Carson not only changed
the kind of questions we ask
about the environment,
I think she caused us to start
to ask those questions.
She's the instigator.
(guns booming)
NARRATOR:
In mid-July 1945,
as the Second World War
ground on in the Pacific
and weary Americans scanned
the morning's headlines
for the word "victory,"
Rachel Carson was trying
to call attention
to what she believed
was a war against the Earth.
Carson was 38 that summer,
and restless.
A writer by inclination
and a biologist by training,
she'd spent
much of the previous decade
in the employ of the
U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service,
overseeing publications
about its conservation work.
The job paid the bills, but
Carson craved a wider audience.
Now, the agency had undertaken
a study
she felt warranted
public attention.
As she put it in a letter to the
popular monthly Reader's Digest:
"Practically at my back door
in Maryland,
"an experiment of more than
ordinary interest and importance
is going on."
On a vast, forested tract
at the Patuxent Research Refuge,
not far from Carson's home
in Silver Spring,
Fish and Wildlife scientists
had begun to examine
the environmental impacts
of a relatively new
chemistry lab creation:
a so-called synthetic pesticide
known as DDT.
WILLIAM SOUDER:
Dichlorodiphenyltrichloroethane,
DDT.
It was first synthesized
back in the 19th century
and it sat on lab shelves
for decades.
Nobody knew if it did anything,
if it had any useful purpose,
until 1939, when a Swiss chemist
named Paul Müller
discovered that it was
a very potent insecticide
and killed all kinds of bugs
very readily.
FILM NARRATOR:
Absorbed through the feet
or other parts of the body,
DDT affects the nervous system
and motor coordination
of the insect.
Several hours elapse
before symptoms develop.
Then in sequence follow
restlessness, tremors,
convulsions, paralysis,
and death.
DEBORAH BLUM:
Farmers have been doing war
with insects and other pests
for a long time,
and they had been using
what we think of now
as almost obviously
homicidal poisons
to do that.
But for the first time,
we have a sort of new-generation
pesticide.
It's a whole new fascinating
kind of chemical formula
that's not obviously toxic
to people,
and insects are dying
all over the place.
NARRATOR:
After the bombing
of Pearl Harbor,
the U.S. military had rushed DD
to the battle zones
in an effort to protect
American troops
from insect-borne diseases
such as typhus,
which was spread by lice
and, left untreated, could kill.
FILM NARRATOR:
This was Naples, Italy, shortly
after the Allied occupation.
Its crowded population lacked
almost everything
for the safeguarding
of public health:
the perfect set-up for epidemic.
DAVID KINKELA:
Naples is really
a city under siege.
And typhus spreads quickly
under those kinds of conditions.
So they set up spray stations
in the cities,
spraying thousands of people
a day with hand sprayers,
people who wanted
to get sprayed,
people who didn't want
to get sprayed,
children, elderly.
FILM NARRATOR:
Next, the 40,000 Italians
dwelling in the jam-packed
air raid shelters
were deloused.
NARRATOR:
In all, more than a million
people were dusted with DDT,
and the epidemic was stopped
in its tracks.
"Neapolitans,"
the New York Times reported,
"are now throwing DDT at brides
instead of rice."
Meanwhile,
in the tropical Pacific theater,
where more soldiers
had been sidelined by malaria
than by gunshot wounds,
entire islands were saturated
with DDT.
MARK LYTLE:
General Douglas MacArthur
once said
that in war, an army commander
had three divisions,
one in the front fighting,
one in reserve,
and one in the rear
being refitted.
He said, "I have one
in the front, one in reserve,
and one in the hospital,"
because of malaria.
But with DDT, that problem
diminished substantially.
It was considered to be
a miracle substance,
in that it saved
hundreds of thousands of lives.
NARRATOR:
By the middle of 1944, TIME
magazine had pronounced DD
"one of the great scientific
discoveries of World War Il."
To Reader's Digest,
Rachel Carson was offering
a new angle:
a piece exploring
DDT's potential
to cause collateral damage
to wildlife.
NAOMI ORESKES:
Biologists for
the Fish and Wildlife Service
begin to see pretty quickly
that when DDT is used
in certain areas,
there's evidence of problems.
There's evidence
of fish kill or bird kill,
and they see that,
and like any expert,
they publish it in a place
where other experts
will read it.
But how that information
then filters out
to a larger public
is a very big question.
SOUDER:
Carson understood
the implications of this.
She wanted to write a story
warning people
that, "We need to be
a little bit careful with this.
"This looks like
it's a great thing,
"but we maybe need to be
cautious in how we use it,
how much of it we use."
LINDA LEAR:
But Reader's Digest
doesn't want this article.
They essentially say,
"Oh, housewives would be
just turned off by this.
"They wouldn't want to know
about this terrible stuff,
so no no, thank you."
(crowd cheering)
FILM NARRATOR:
The victory-flash-electrified
Times Square
keyed to the bursting point,
as the magic word of complete
surrender came through.
NARRATOR:
Just weeks later, the war
in the Pacific finally was won,
and credit for the victory went
to the twin weapons
of modern science:
the atomic bomb and the
so-called insect bomb, DDT.
LYTLE:
America's actually healthier
and the death rate went down
during World War Il,
even if you include soldiers
in the equation.
And so people considered this
a real triumph
of human ingenuity
over the old pestilences
of nature
that had made life nasty,
brutish, and short.
BLUM:
So people just went, "Wow.
"We have this
incredibly potent compound,
"doesn't cause any harm
to anything but bugs.
We'll just use it everywhere."
MAN (on film):
I consider this amazing chemical
the most valuable contribution
of our wartime
medical research program
to the future health and welfare
not only of this nation,
but of the entire world.
NARRATOR:
Carson's misgivings about DD
were not assuaged.
But she was in no position
to spend time
on a story she couldn't sell.
LEAR:
She really is pretty certain
that synthetic pesticides are
not good for the environment,
and that they have
a power to destroy,
which is not being
made clear to anybody.
But Reader's Digest doesn't
think so.
So she gives it up.
She puts it away.
But it really doesn't go away.
CARSON (dramatized):
I can remember no time,
even in earliest childhood,
when I didn't assume
I was going to be a writer.
Also, I can remember no time
when I wasn't interested
in the out-of-doors
and the whole world of nature.
Those interests, I know,
I inherited from my mother
and have always shared with her.
NARRATOR:
She was, from the very
beginning, her mother's child.
A former schoolteacher
of stern Presbyterian stock,
Maria Carson had given up
her career
for marriage and motherhood,
only to find herself
alone among strangers.
Her husband, Robert,
while well-meaning,
had never managed to provide
more than a meager existence.
The family's clapboard house,
on the Allegheny River
just north of Pittsburgh,
lacked both central heating
and running water
throughout the 29 years
the Carsons occupied it.
Maria's two older children
already were school-aged
when their younger sister
was born,
and already showed
a marked lack of interest
in their mother's passions.
Rachel would be different.
SOUDER:
Maria Carson was
an educated woman
and a woman who enjoyed reading.
She enjoyed music.
She was a person
who, to some degree,
lived a life of the mind.
ROBERT MUSIL:
She focused and passed this
all on to Rachel.
She was ambitious
for her daughter.
This was her youngest,
brightest,
frankly, favorite child,
and so she wanted her
to get a good education.
NARRATOR:
Inspired by a popular
educational movement
which held that children should
"study nature, not books,"
Maria made the surrounding woods
and fields
Rachel's first classroom.
Learn to love the natural world,
the theory went,
and one will wish to protect it.
LYTLE:
Rachel and her mother
would spend their afternoons
together exploring.
She learned to identify
wild things
and the songs of birds,
and she could recognize the
nests, and the flora and fauna.
Her mother taught her to be
rigorous in her observation,
but it also, of course,
deepened her relationship
with her mother.
NARRATOR:
She was the solitary
sort of girl
who greeted the birds on the way
to school in the morning
and was partial to the
companionship of books.
At the age of eight, she was
writing stories of her own.
At ten, at her mother's urging,
Rachel entered a contest
sponsored by the popular
children's magazine St. Nicholas
and became a published author.
By 14, she was submitting
her work to magazines for sale.
MUSIL:
If we picture a girl in a small
farm in Nowhere, Pennsylvania,
who is transported
through literature
and can imagine being elsewhere,
I think she was led to see that
as something that she could do,
and it was constantly
reinforced.
LEAR:
Maria Carson had always wanted
to go to college and couldn't,
so she was going to be
quite sure that this daughter,
this smart daughter,
was going to go to college.
NARRATOR:
When Rachel won a scholarship to
Pennsylvania College for Women,
Maria sold off
even the family china
to help cover
her daughter's expenses,
then made the 30-mile round trip
to Pittsburgh most weekends
to visit her.
SOUDER:
She was the star pupil.
Everyone realized right away
what a talented writer she was
and also saw that
this was her ambition in life,
that she wanted to be a writer.
So it came as a great shock when
she fell in love with biology.
The science of life
just struck a chord in her
that I think she didn't realize
was there.
NARRATOR:
Thrilled by the prospect of
understanding the natural world
she'd been taught
to so closely observe,
Carson changed her major
from English to biology
and announced her intention
to go on to graduate school.
She spent the next two years
taking courses in zoology,
physiology, anatomy.
But her true interest
only revealed itself
after graduation,
when she landed
a coveted research spot
at the Marine Biology Laboratory
in Woods Hole, Massachusetts,
and for the first time
in her life
laid eyes on the ocean.
LEAR:
She's moved beyond just the
ordinary person would be moved
who would have seen the ocean
for the first time.
The sea taught her everything
that she later came
to want to understand
and want the world
to understand,
that everything was connected
to everything else.
SOUDER:
If you study biology
and if you look at how all life
on Earth has evolved,
eventually you begin
to see everything in totality.
You can't divorce yourself
or any other living thing
from the environment
that we all share.
And Carson was fascinated
by that.
LYTLE:
It was one
of the most liberating,
expansive experiences
she ever had in her life.
One of her overriding lessons
was that the sea,
with all of its massive expanse
and its varieties of creatures,
was beyond the controlling hand
of man.
NARRATOR:
Had it not been
for the Depression
and her family's dire
financial straits,
Carson might have become
a marine biologist.
As it was,
she'd barely started her
graduate work at Johns Hopkins
before her parents, her
older sister, and her two nieces
came to live with her
in Baltimore.
Full-time study gave way
to part-time study
and part-time work.
Then, when Carson was 28,
her father died suddenly.
Not long after, her sister died,
as well,
leaving two daughters
in Rachel and her mother's care.
Now the family's
sole breadwinner,
Carson left Johns Hopkins
with her master's degree
and took a job with
the U.S. Bureau of Fisheries,
writing an assortment
of publications
about the bureau's
marine conservation work.
SOUDER:
As she's looking over the press
releases she's writing,
she realizes
that some of these subjects
are kind of interesting
and could be turned
into feature stories
for a local newspaper.
So she starts selling stories
to the Baltimore Sun
that are based
on some of the work
that she's seeing being done
at the Bureau of Fisheries.
NARRATOR:
From time to time,
Carson omitted her first name
from her signature,
believing certain pieces
would have more credibility
if they were presumed to have
been written by a man.
Still, as she later said,
"It was a turning point.
"I had given up writing forever,
I thought.
"It never occurred to me
that I was merely getting
something to write about."
SOUDER:
She has at last found this way
to combine her two passions
in life.
Biology and writing merge,
and I think really
from that time forward,
she never thinks of them
as being separate things.
What she is is someone
who writes about science.
NARRATOR:
In 1937, a piece Carson
published in The Atlantic
came to the attention
of Simon & Schuster,
which offered her
a small advance
for a book about the sea.
Hopeful the opportunity
would help her
make the leap
to full-time writer,
she poured three years' worth
of nights and weekends
into the book,
a kind of literary triptych
about the lives
of three sea creatures.
Under the Sea-Wind earned
early critical praise,
but the rush to the bookstore
Carson had dreamed of
never happened.
(bombs streaking and exploding)
SOUDER:
A few weeks after the book
is released,
the Japanese attack
Pearl Harbor,
and everybody's attention
shifts from books,
certainly from slight books,
like a book about creatures
that live in the ocean.
And Under The Sea-Wind just kind
of vanishes without a trace,
never sells even 2,000 copies.
NARRATOR:
For Carson, there would be
no escape from her day job.
The Bureau of Fisheries by then
had merged with another agency
to become the
U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service,
but Carson's position
was essentially unchanged.
And though she excelled in it,
it was not work that she loved.
By the time the war came
to an end, in 1945,
she was back
to pitching feature stories
and frustrated beyond measure.
What she was,
as a friend put it,
was a "would-be writer
who could not afford the time
for creative work."
LEAR:
I don't think Rachel sees
that there's much alternative.
She's got a good job,
she's got family to support.
So she's really stuck.
She felt she'd come
to an obstacle
that didn't have
any easy way around.
Really for the first time
in her life,
I think she really didn't see
the way forward.
And I think she was in the "now
what?" phase for several years.
ANNOUNCER:
Headlines in Chemistry.
ANNOUNCER 2:
And here is our first headline.
Science can now rid the country
of mosquitoes.
ANNOUNCER 3:
The mosquito is doomed!
And so is the tiny bloodthirsty
black fly.
These biting insects can now
be completely wiped out
by man-made fogs
loaded with DDT.
NARRATOR:
Not long after Reader's Digest
declined Carson's DDT piece,
the "miracle pesticide"
was released for civilian use.
For the first time,
the insect-borne scourges
that spread disease
and ravaged crops
seemed subject to man's control.
LYTLE:
Most people were inclined
to think of humans
as the superior, apex species,
and that the rest of the animal,
plant kingdom
existed for our convenience,
and that man's function was
to dominate
and in a sense
bend nature to his purposes.
And so the ethos of science
and technology
is that humans could improve
on nature.
SOUDER:
DDT was going to end diseases
like malaria and typhus.
It was going to greatly increase
agricultural output.
DDT was thought to be
so important
that Paul Müller won the
Nobel Prize for discovering DDT.
NARRATOR:
Cheap and long-lasting, DD
was rushed into widespread use
practically overnight.
In the southeastern
United States,
where malaria was rife,
a coalition of state and
local health agencies
treated some 4 1/2 million homes
with DDT.
By 1951, malaria had been
eliminated
from the entire country.
(engine buzzing)
The U.S. Department
of Agriculture, meanwhile,
promoted DDT to farmers
and, in conjunction
with the military,
sold thousands of decommissioned
planes as crop dusters,
boosting agricultural yields
across the country.
SOUDER:
It's hard to understand now
because it seems instinctive
to us.
But the idea that a chemical
might present a hazard
to your health
or to the well-being
of the natural environment,
this was not front-of-mind
for anybody at the time.
There was really no rigorous
testing of these chemicals
to ensure their safety.
There was much greater attention
paid
to whether they were effective.
BLUM:
Nature was big, and dark,
and scary, and dangerous
in profound ways
through much of human history.
So when people looked at nature,
they saw that the world
would be safer
if they could master it.
And when you get something
that looks like a tool,
a "magic bullet,"
you want the magic bullet.
NARRATOR:
Spurred by the success of DDT,
chemists soon created a host
of new pesticidal compounds:
endrin, dieldrin, toxaphene.
Over the decade to come,
all would be weapons
in the struggle
to master nature.
KINKELA:
So you see an explosion
of American science
that has the potential to solve
deep-seated problems
of famine and disease
around the world.
And so there's this sense
of a quest.
We have the tools,
we have the technology,
we have the know-how,
and this is our moment.
NARRATOR:
On an overcast morning
in July 1949,
Rachel Carson found herself
in a boat
off the coast of Miami,
staring down
into the storm-churned waters
of Biscayne Bay.
After five years spent
making the best of her job
at the Fish and Wildlife
Service,
she'd begun to toy with the idea
of writing another book
about the sea,
and this time,
she was determined
to experience her subject
firsthand.
SOUDER:
She probably didn't let on that
she was a very poor swimmer.
She didn't like boats.
You know, she was happy being in
up to about her knees,
and beyond that she really
wasn't very comfortable.
But she felt that if she could
somehow muster the courage
to go under the surface,
that it would be illuminating
and helpful to her
in her writing.
NARRATOR:
From her desk in Maryland,
it had seemed critical
to her research
that she make this dive.
But now, on the boat,
the prospect of simply
getting into the water
seemed impossibly daunting.
The diving helmet alone
weighed 84 pounds.
Carson, at 5 feet, 4 inches
tall, weighed all of 120.
Trembling, she managed
to descend about eight feet,
to the bottom
of the boat's ladder,
staying just long enough to note
the presence of seaweed
and a few vibrantly colored
fish.
She never once let go
of the ladder's rung.
SOUDER:
Her facemask kind of clouded up.
She was breathing heavily,
she was terrified.
But she spent a few minutes
there
and then climbed back
up the ladder
and went home.
NARRATOR:
Carson judged the dive
a success,
because she'd at least been able
to glimpse the ocean's surface
from below.
But as research,
it was largely irrelevant:
the new book was to be based
not on firsthand observation,
but rather on the surfeit
of oceanographic studies
that lately had been piling up
on her desk.
ORESKES:
Up until World War Il,
nobody really worried much
about what happened
below the waves.
But in World War Il,
submarine warfare becomes
important for the first time,
and the only way you can operate
in the submarine environment
is with a very, very detailed
understanding of the ocean.
And so we start learning
a tremendous amount
about the ocean and
about the life in the deep ocean
that had been quite mysterious
before that.
And the idea that there was
all this amazing diverse life
in the ocean
that we didn't really know about
and that is existing as a kind
of parallel universe,
I think that that really
captured her.
LEAR:
Carson wanted to be
the biographer of the ocean.
She wanted certainly to tell
about its beauty
and about how intricate
nature was.
It's the same question
that she approached
in Under the Sea-Wind,
only now there was
all this information
that she could tap.
She had access
to confidential information.
She had access to war records.
She had access
to submarine research.
She was a master synthesizer.
She could take information
from this place and that place
and then see
how it went together
in ways that I don't think
very many people can do.
SOUDER:
Carson's technique
was to identify
the leading experts
in the field,
ask a few harmless questions
about their work,
and then once she got
her foot in the door with them,
to expand the questioning
so that she could really pick
their brains.
NARRATOR:
In the evenings,
after a full day at the office
and dinner with her mother,
Carson cloistered herself
in her study
and worked on her book,
sometimes until dawn.
DEBORAH CRAMER:
Once you have all these
hundreds and hundreds of papers,
you need to shape them
in some kind of narrative,
and that requires
a very different prose style
than what she was reading.
And so when you go about
taking that material
and transforming it,
but still being true to it,
it's just an extraordinarily
difficult thing,
because when you choose
different words to describe it,
you run the risk
of mistranslating
what you're reading.
LEAR:
It was a painstaking process
because she was a perfectionist.
She had to get
the first sentence right
before she could go
to the second sentence.
And then she'd revise.
It takes a long time for her
to get something that she likes,
and then in the morning,
she's likely to revise it again,
so things go very slowly.
NARRATOR:
Determined that this book
would not languish
as Under the Sea-Wind had,
Carson signed on with a literary
agent named Marie Rodell,
who sold the volume
to Oxford Press
even before it had a title.
"Current suggestions
from irreverent friends
and relatives," Carson joked,
"include Out of My Depth
and Carson at Sea."
By the spring of 1950,
the manuscript,
now bearing the title
The Sea Around Us,
was nearly finished.
Hoping to foster advance
interest in its publication,
Rodell began shopping excerpts
to magazines.
15 turned the material down
before it finally made its way
to William Shawn,
editor of the New Yorker,
who offered to publish ten
of the book's chapters.
SOUDER:
This is the turning point
in Carson's career.
The New Yorker
is a very prestigious,
widely read, widely respected
magazine,
and so to be serialized
in the New Yorker,
to have your work preview there
ahead of its publication
as a book
is almost a guarantee
of success.
NARRATOR:
Carson would clear more from
the New Yorker serialization
than she did from an entire year
at the Fish and Wildlife
Service.
"I am still in a daze,"
she cabled Rodell.
"All I know is how lucky I am
to have you."
By the time Carson's book went
to print in the spring of 1951,
the world seemed to be cleaving
in two.
The Soviet Union had shaken
Americans' sense of security
with the successful test
of an atomic bomb.
Communist forces had triumphed
in China.
Now there was
a pervasive feeling
that the struggle to stem
the red tide
would be unremitting.
ANNOUNCER:
From the White House
in Washington, D.C.,
President Harry S. Truman.
TRUMAN:
My fellow Americans,
I want to talk to you plainly
tonight
about what we are doing in Korea
and about our policy
in the Far East.
In the simplest terms,
what we are doing in Korea
is this: we are trying
to prevent a third world war.
NARRATOR:
Against the backdrop of war,
both hot and cold,
Carson worried
that her second book
would founder like the first.
But thanks to the New Yorker
serialization,
readers snapped it up
all across the country
and found in its pages
an antidote to anxiety.
READER:
"The whole world ocean extends
"over about three-fourths
of the surface of the globe.
"If we subtract the shallow
areas of the continental shelves
"and the scattered banks
and shoals,
"where at least the pale ghost
of sunlight
"moves over the underlying
bottom,
"there still remains
about half the Earth
"that is covered by miles-deep,
lightless water,
that has been dark
since the world began."
NARRATOR:
Drawing upon all that was then
known about the ocean,
Carson told the story
of its life over the eons
and revealed a natural realm
largely indifferent
to the rhythms of man.
SOUDER:
It's a book that is jammed with
news from the natural world.
It's about currents,
about the propagation of waves,
about storm systems, about the
ocean's relationship to climate.
You have to remember
that this is all new.
Nobody knows
what the ocean is like.
So there's a lot
of really compelling information
that transcends that term.
It's not just information,
it's revelation.
It's this immersive experience.
NARRATOR:
"It is a work of science,"
one critic raved.
"It is stamped with authority.
"It is a work of art:
"It is saturated
with the excitement of mystery.
It is literature."
CRAMER:
What she has done is to take
a very complicated subject
and distill it into its essence,
and bring the reader
right there.
So science, which can be
extraordinarily impersonal
and dry,
has suddenly become immediate
and very important.
NARRATOR:
Three weeks after it appeared
in bookstores,
The Sea Around Us made the
New York Times bestseller list.
Amid the near-universal praise
for the book,
there occasionally emerged
a distorted portrait of Carson
as a working scientist
with rare literary gifts,
or as an experienced diver
who'd come to know her subject
at a depth of a hundred feet.
Thrilled
about the book's success
but dismayed at the attention
focused on its author,
Carson did nothing
to correct the misconceptions.
SOUDER:
Critic after critic
would remark in some way,
either offhandedly or directly,
how amazing it was
that a woman understood
these technical matters
and wrote so beautifully
about them,
particularly because the ocean
was such a hostile place,
where, you know,
presumably only men could go.
So Carson had to endure that.
And so I think
letting this fiction stand
was her little way
of kind of getting even
with the people that doubted her
or doubted her gender.
I think it amused her.
NARRATOR:
By early September,
The Sea Around Us
had reached number one
on the bestseller list.
There it would remain
for an astonishing 32 weeks.
When it at last dropped a notch,
it was joined on the list
by a re-issue
of Carson's first book,
in what the New York Times
called
a "publishing phenomenon as rare
as a total solar eclipse."
At 44, Rachel Carson,
the one-time "would-be writer,"
had two of the country's
non-fiction bestsellers.
LYTLE:
The Sea Around Us was
one of the bestselling
science books of all time.
It sold
almost two million copies
in its initial publication.
It was also translated into,
I think, 30 foreign languages,
so it was an international
bestseller.
It won the National Book Award.
So it really made her
a public figure
with a very large following.
NARRATOR:
"We have been troubled
about the world,
and had almost lost faith in
man," one reader wrote Carson.
"It helps to think about
the long history of the Earth,
"and of how life came to be.
"When we think in terms
of millions of years,
"we are not so impatient
that our own problems
be solved tomorrow."
You have a grandstand seat here
to one of the most momentous
events
in the history of science.
This is the first full-scale
test of a hydrogen device.
If the reaction goes,
we're in the thermonuclear era.
MAN (on loudspeaker):
It is now 30 seconds
to zero time.
Put on goggles or turn away.
MAN (on loudspeaker):
5, 4, 3, 2, 1.
(explosion booming)
LEAR:
Carson was always aware,
I think,
from, especially,
her time in government,
that some people looked
at science
as discovering
something beautiful and new,
and some people
looked at science
as discovering ways
in which to wage war,
to destroy things,
not to create things,
that by the time
of the Cold War,
there are really two sciences
going on in the United States.
NARRATOR:
World War Il had raised
the profile of American science.
Now the Cold War made it soar.
KINKELA:
The atom was used
in a very destructive way,
but it also suggested
in many ways
that science was at the
forefront of something grand.
This is the way in which we will
solve the problems of the world.
NARRATOR:
The laboratory was no longer
merely the source
of the nation's military might.
It was also, ever increasingly,
a font of ingenious chemical
tools
that gave mankind an edge
against its enemies
in the natural world.
KINKELA:
For any sort of question
that deals with nature,
what is emerging
in the postwar period
is that chemicals
will solve the problem.
So if your question is about
crop production, more chemicals.
If your question is about
public health, more chemicals.
If your question is about,
"How do I protect my home
from these unwanted pests?"
More chemicals.
BLUM:
People are worshiping at the
altar of science and technology
because finally it's making us
the human masters of the planet,
and we're taking
this incredibly dangerous,
un-nurturing landscape,
and it is now under our control.
Science is rewriting
the way we live on Earth.
And so there was
very little questioning.
NARRATOR:
Rachel Carson was less sure.
To her, there seemed something
dangerous about a world
in which human ingenuity
knew no limits.
LEAR:
She sees human beings
in their post-World War Il form
as being arrogant,
that human arrogance
outruns human wisdom,
and we ought to try
to put them back together
as equals again.
NARRATOR:
When the demands of promoting
The Sea Around Us
threatened to overwhelm her,
Carson escaped to Maine,
to a remote stretch
of the central coast,
where slivers of land reach out
into the ocean
and the tides rise higher
than anywhere
along the Atlantic seaboard.
A research trip had
first brought her to the area
some years before,
and it had since been
her ambition,
as she'd put it to a friend,
"to be able to buy a place here
and then manage to spend
a great deal of time in it."
Now, flush from the sales
of two bestselling books,
she purchased a plot
on Southport Island
and built a summer cottage
of her own.
SOUDER:
At the edge of her property,
there's this large area
of rocky shelf tableland
that at high tide
is under the water,
but at low tide is exposed.
And so this exposes
all the crevices
and nooks and tidal pools
where starfish and periwinkles
and sea anemones live.
All these creatures
of this intertidal zone
that so fascinated Carson
and always had,
that's all available to her
right there.
MUSIL:
She identifies with the
creatures who live on the edge,
this borderland
between the power of water
that could also crush you,
and its ability to release life
and to create new life.
Rachel wanted to be still,
to feel and to imagine,
and this was the place
that would allow her to do that.
NARRATOR:
Before her house
was even habitable,
Carson received a letter
from a Mrs. Dorothy Freeman,
whose family owned a cottage
a half-mile up the shoreline
from Carson's property.
Dorothy's husband, Stanley,
had been given a copy
of The Sea Around Us
for his birthday.
MARTHA FREEMAN:
My grandparents had read it
out loud to each other
sailing or on the porch
of their cottage,
and had adored it.
It really spoke to a lot of
what they cared about in life.
My grandmother read
about Rachel coming
in the local newspaper,
and sent her a little
welcoming note in 1952,
and she got a note back.
NARRATOR:
Despite all the attention
that recently had been showered
upon her
Requests for interviews,
speaking invitations,
mountains of fan mail
Carson felt isolated
and more than usually burdened
by her family.
Maria Carson, as she aged,
had grown demanding and jealous
of Rachel's time and attention.
And then
there was niece Marjorie,
who had taken up
with a married man
and become pregnant.
LYTLE:
Carson and her mother arranged
to have the woman
admitted to a special home,
where she had the baby and
kept it out of the public eye,
and sort of protected her from
the rumor mill and whatnot.
Carson once wrote, she said,
"If ever I was bitter
about anything,
I was bitter about that."
The problems with her niece
really detracted
from the joy and the wonderful
sense of success she felt
for The Sea Around Us.
NARRATOR:
Having finally resigned
her position
at the Fish and Wildlife Service
to dedicate herself to writing,
Carson lacked even
the companionship of colleagues.
The friendship that bloomed
with the Freemans
was a revelation to her.
The couple shared her love
for nature and the sea,
and enthusiastically joined
in her tide pool explorations,
Dorothy marveling
at the unseen life
that teemed at the shoreline,
while Stanley took photographs.
But of the two, it was Dorothy
to whom Carson felt most drawn.
FREEMAN:
I think Rachel had
the same experience in a way
that I had with my grandmother,
in that she was just so present,
so much herself,
so comfortable in herself,
that she was really open to
seeing who you were, listening.
You totally felt heard
and understood.
I did, anyway,
and I believe Rachel did.
She was just a very comfortable
person to be with,
a really wonderful friend
to have.
SOUDER:
Dorothy Freeman
and Rachel Carson had,
almost from the beginning,
this deep, deep,
emotional connection
that they would later describe
as the ability
to know exactly what
the other one was thinking
about everything,
to feel as though they were
inside the other person's head
at all times.
Everything they each loved
about the world
hit them in the same way.
NARRATOR:
Dorothy was 55,
the mother of a grown son,
a new grandmother,
a devoted homemaker and wife.
Now, as the summer turned
to fall
and Southport was abandoned
for the season,
she became the confidante
that Carson, at 46,
had never had.
CARSON (dramatized):
Darling Dorothy,
I don't suppose anyone
really knows
how a creative writer works
or what sort of nourishment
his spirit must have.
All I am certain of is this:
that it is quite necessary
for me
to know that there is someone
who is deeply devoted to me
as a person,
and who also has the capacity
and the depth of understanding
to share vicariously
the sometimes crushing burden
of creative effort.
Last summer I was feeling,
as never before,
that there was no one
who combined all of that.
And then, my dear one,
you came into my life!
SOUDER:
They started writing letters
to each other,
and the letters became
more and more frequent,
and they very quickly escalated
to include a level
of personal affection
that was surprising to everyone
except to them.
Before they ever see each other
in person again,
they've declared their love
for each other.
Carson never really had
any relationships.
She never dated.
I think she knew
that Dorothy was the one person
who really was the one person,
the soulmate.
And the beaut y is that Dorothy
feels the same thing in her way,
to the extent that she can.
NARRATOR:
In phone calls
and occasional visits,
and in letter after letter,
Carson poured out to Dorothy
the challenges
of completing her third book,
an Atlantic shore guide
she'd agreed to write
for Houghton Mifflin
even before The Sea Around Us
had been published.
Freed at last to do nothing
but write,
Carson found the task
nearly impossible.
Again and again, her approach
to the guide changed.
Entire chapters were laboriously
revised,
and what was meant to be
a two-year project
soon stretched into four.
CARSON (dramatized):
Maybe the easiest way for me
to write a chapter
would be to type "Dear Dorothy"
on the first page!
As a matter of fact,
you and your particular kind
of interest and appreciation
were in my mind a great deal
when I was rewriting parts
of the section on rocky shores.
SOUDER:
Once they're together
And they're rarely physically
together,
they're almost always
in different places
writing letters to each other
Once they're together,
they're never apart.
There's never any question
between them.
FREEMAN:
There's a huge amount
of affection.
I mean, it is love.
It is the love
of kindred spirits.
They wrote to each other
three, four, five times a week.
So their relationship was always
this caring at a distance.
They knew each other
for about 12 years,
and I think I added it up
at one point
that they were probably
in each other's presence
for, at most, 60 days.
NARRATOR:
When The Edge of the Sea,
the widely-acclaimed
third volume
in Carson's marine trilogy,
finally hit bookstores
in the summer of 1955,
it would be dedicated
not to her mother,
as The Sea Around Us had been,
but to Dorothy and Stanley
Freeman.
(theme song playing)
ANNOUNCER:
Let's face it: the threat
of hydrogen bomb warfare
is the greatest danger
our nation has ever known.
Enemy jet bombers
carrying nuclear weapons
can sweep over a variety
of routes
and drop bombs on any important
target in the United States.
The threat of this destruction
has affected our way of life
in every city, town, and village
from coast to coast.
These are the signs
of the times.
(air raid siren blaring)
KINKELA:
You can imagine
what it might be like
to be thinking and hearing
almost all the time
that you could die
at any moment, right?
That the Soviet Union
will attack.
There's going to be no warning,
and the only way that you could
protect yourselves
is to duck and cover yourselves
with whatever you have
around you.
The threat was incredibly
palpable.
NARRATOR:
More and more,
when Rachel Carson
raised her eyes
to take in the man-made world
around her,
what she felt was a quiet rage.
The Cold War had become
a macabre game
of one-upsmanship,
a high-stakes standoff
fueled by the threat
of nuclear destruction.
Then, on March 1, 1954,
the United States pressed
for the lead
with the test of a dry-fuel
hydrogen bomb,
code-named "Shrimp."
SOUDER:
Everything goes right
with this test
except the things that go wrong,
and the things that go wrong
are really big problems.
The explosion
was much more powerful
than the scientists
had predicted,
about 2 1/2 times more powerful
than it was supposed to be;
largest explosion
that had ever occurred
on the face of the Earth
that wasn't a volcano.
NARRATOR:
Radioactive fallout scattered
over more than
5,000 square miles
and then drifted downward,
settling on open ocean,
inhabited islands,
and a hapless
Japanese fishing boat
named Lucky Dragon Number 5.
SOUDER:
This gray, snow-like ash begins
to fall out of the sky
and it coats the ship
from stem to stern.
It gets on every surface.
And it coats the men.
It gets in their eyes.
They're tasting it to see if
they can figure out what it is.
That becomes apparent
within a couple of days,
because very soon,
everybody on the ship is sick.
NARRATOR:
By the time the Lucky Dragon
returned to port,
everyone on board had succumbed
to radiation poisoning,
their skin blackened, their hair
falling out in clumps.
Their ordeal made headlines
all over the world.
SOUDER:
For the first time,
people realized
that the real danger
in nuclear war
was not
the explosions themselves,
but the fallout,
this total contamination
of the Earth
that had the potential
to wipe out
every living organism
on the face of the Earth.
NARRATOR:
The Atomic Energy Commission
and other government agencies
now issued a flurry
of reassurances
that atmospheric testing
was safe,
and that fallout constituted
no appreciable danger
outside of the test zone.
FILM ANNOUNCER:
The atomic cloud,
like a giant vacuum cleaner,
has sucked up dirt and debris
from the Earth
and is full
of radioactive particles.
Is it dangerous?
Yes, right now it is.
You wouldn't want to go into it,
but neither would you
deliberately walk
into a blazing fire.
You have to use common sense.
BLUM:
It's really easy for us
to look back
at something like above-ground
nuclear testing
and think, "Well, that was
a primitive moment."
But people had just suffered
through a really terrible war.
Tens and tens and tens
of thousands of young Americans
had died abroad.
And so you can also say
to yourself, as they did,
"We have to have the weapon
that ends all wars."
Right?
"And if there's some sacrifice
involved,
well, you know,
that's for the greater good."
KINKELA:
People were not dying
because of nuclear tests.
And that is tied to the question
of how people understood harm.
And throughout much
of the 20th century
and into the early 1950s,
it was really about sort of
the question of,
does this kill you?
Very simple.
Is it acutely toxic, and if so,
how much
can a human body withstand
before it kills somebody?
NARRATOR:
Carson framed the question
differently,
and her doubts about the vector
of modern technological science
now began to harden
into a certainty.
LEAR:
Now she has to come to grips
with the fact
that humans can destroy nature.
So her mission, if you will,
is to show the world
what a perfect thing
the natural systems are
and how easily the hand of man
can muck it up.
And that becomes a theme
in everything
that she starts to write.
It's the undercurrent.
NARRATOR:
By the close of 1954,
Carson had a title in mind,
Remembrance of Earth,
and a vague idea for a book
that would illuminate
the relation of life
to its environment.
But months gave way to years,
and she made no progress
with it.
Then, in early January 1957,
her niece Marjorie contracted
a pneumonia so severe
she had to be hospitalized.
Two weeks later,
Marjie was dead,
and her five-year-old son Roger
became Carson's responsibility.
ROGER CHRISTIE:
Rachel kind of had
a hard life that way.
You know, first she had to raise
my mother and my mother's sister
because their parents died
when they were very young,
and then the same thing
repeated itself
just when she was getting out
from under it.
She was very considerate
of m y feelings all the time,
sometimes to the detriment
of her own work.
NARRATOR:
In the spring, on the heels
of her 50th birthday,
Carson legally became
Roger's adoptive mother
and tried to resign herself
to her changed circumstances.
But as she confessed to Dorothy,
she could not entirely
keep herself
from feeling a dark resentment.
She was all but convinced
she'd never again have the time
to write.
Then, friends told her
about a U.S. Department
of Agriculture program
to eradicate the fire ant,
and more than a decade
after she'd proposed the piece
about DDT to Reader's Digest,
pesticides came roaring back
into her consciousness.
ANNOUNCER:
The fire ant is believed
to have entered this country
from South America in 1925.
The destructive insect has
brought heavy losses to crops
in Alabama, Mississippi,
and Louisiana.
Once they swarm across a field
like this, nothing survives.
LYTLE:
The fire ant was
the perfect invasive species
for the Cold War era.
They were red,
they snuck into the country,
they were subversive,
and they were mostly annoying.
For some reason,
the Department of Agriculture
got it into their head that,
scientists there,
that this would be
a perfect demonstration
of the power of pesticides
to solve a nagging problem.
NARRATOR:
The enthusiasm for DD
and other synthetic pesticides
had given way to the conviction
that science could do far more
than control insects
and other unwanted pests.
The objective now
was eradication.
KINKELA:
It meant extermination,
extermination of the species.
So in 1955, you see the advent
of the World Health
Organization's
Malaria Eradication Program,
which was in many ways designed
to exterminate
not the problem of malaria,
but the problem of mosquitoes.
The Fire Ant Eradication Program
was the same idea.
Scientists are convinced that
this is the right way to go.
And if we fail, then
we're going to fail humanity.
It becomes this all-or-nothing
equation.
ORESKES:
And so what we see in the 1950s
is tremendous amounts of money
going into studying
pest killing,
not so much money
going into studying
broader questions
of wildlife biology,
broader questions
of environmental health,
broader questions
of environmental toxicity.
LYTLE:
The people involved,
the scientists and whatnot,
who are inventing pesticides,
think they're doing God's work,
and that they are also helping
the United States keep its edge
in the Cold War environment.
The Department of Agriculture
and the chemical industry say,
one of the reasons that we have
such a rich material life
is that we have found ways
to control these problems,
to maximize food
and fiber production,
and it's one of the things
that distinguishes
the U.S. and its allies
from the Communist bloc.
Our standard of living
is so much higher
and we owe it
to human ingenuity.
NARRATOR:
In 1957, in the U.S.D.A.'s
all-out war
against the fire ant,
some 20 million acres
in the South
were doused with pesticides,
killing not only ants,
but blackbirds and meadowlarks,
armadillos and opossums.
The sprayed areas,
as one Alabama agricultural
official reported,
"reeked with the odor
of decaying wildlife."
LYTLE:
The hunting-fishing community
was outraged.
County agricultural agents
dropped their support
for the project
and it really was a black eye
for the Department
of Agriculture,
but it was a warning for Carson.
NARRATOR:
What concerned Carson
was not merely
that synthetic pesticides
had unintended consequences,
but that substances
about which so little was known
were now practically ubiquitous.
Widely employed
by government agencies
to protect
health and agriculture,
as well as American interests
abroad,
synthetic pesticides also were
sold directly to consumers,
who, by 1957, could choose
from an array of some 6,000
different products.
SOUDER:
You could get shelf paper
for your kitchen cabinets
that was impregnated with DDT.
You could get paints and
varnishes that had DDT in them.
One of my favorite devices,
and my father owned this,
was a cylinder about the size
and shape of a beer can,
and it had DDT in it.
It attached to the muffler
of your lawn mower,
so the hot exhaust gas
would volatilize the DD
and spray a fog out
across your yard.
So if you were having
company over for a picnic later,
you could poison the grass
before they got there
and nobody would get
a mosquito bite.
(engine slowly starting)
NARRATOR:
Although manufacturers
were required by law
to register
new chemical compounds,
the government mandated
no independent safety testing
of those compounds
and placed no limitation
on their sale or use.
So long as the label provided
safe-use instructions,
the product was deemed
to be safe under the law.
ORESKES:
That's, of course, reinforced
by the manufacturers
of the pesticides.
The companies
that are manufacturing DD
focus on this question of
immediate short-term toxicity.
They say,
"Well, look, it's not toxic.
"We applied it on all
these soldiers in World War Il
and they were all fine, so
that proves that this is fine."
KINKELA:
You had examples of people
digesting spoonfuls of DD
just to prove how safe it was.
At the same time,
birds are dying en masse,
fish are dying,
and I think Rachel understood
that something radically
transformative was happening,
this sense that scientists had
been asking the wrong question.
Scientists had been thinking
about the question
of acute toxicity,
rather than, what are
the long-term impacts
of this chemical world
that we're creating?
LEAR:
Carson is not eager
to take on pesticides.
She's too busy
and life is too complicated,
but there's this story there,
so she knows there's a story.
On the other hand,
it's also the fact
that it is the story
about human hubris.
CARSON (dramatized):
It was pleasant to believe
that much of Nature
was forever beyond
the tampering reach of man.
He might level the forests
and dam the streams,
but the clouds and the rain
and the wind were God's.
But I have now opened my eyes
and my mind.
I may not like what I see,
but it does no good
to ignore it,
and it's worse than useless
to go on repeating
the old "eternal verities"
that are no more eternal
than the hills of the poets.
NARRATOR:
Rachel Carson had long known
that scientists were divided
on the issue
of synthetic pesticides
and that conclusions
about their safety
depended on who was asked.
ORESKES:
You have scientists
who are working closely
with the Department
of Agriculture
and with the chemical industry,
and are part of a mindset,
a worldview that says,
"I've got a pest, I've got
a boll weevil or a gypsy moth,
"and I want to kill that pest,
and I want to kill effectively,
without killing the person who
is applying it to the crops."
And so almost all the attention
is either on the killing
of the pest
or the non-killing
of the farmer.
But on the other hand,
you have wildlife biologists
who are not linked
to any particular industry,
they're out in nature,
they're thinking
about the interrelations
between fish, birds,
pollinators, plants,
chemicals, and the environment,
and so they see
there's evidence of problems.
NARRATOR:
For Carson, it began
with research,
a gathering of bits
of information
excavated from technical reports
and obscure scientific journals.
What soon became clear
was that pesticides such as DD
accumulated in the organisms
exposed to them,
and grew ever more concentrated
as they moved up the food chain.
According to one study,
earthworms were still so toxic
a full year after exposure
to DD
that they poisoned the robins
that fed upon them.
Another demonstrated
that when birds were fed
a miniscule amount of DDT daily,
both their fertility and
the survival rate of their young
dramatically declined.
Most troubling of all
was the evidence
that insect populations
very quickly
developed resistance
to synthetic pesticides.
ORESKES:
If you dump large amounts
of pesticides in a field,
you will kill
many of the insects
you intend to kill,
but there'll be some fragment
that survive
because for whatever reason,
they happen
to be more resistant.
That sub-population lives on,
they breed, they pass on
to their offspring
whatever that resistance is
that they have,
and pretty soon you have
a pesticide-resistant
population.
Carson fully understood
that ultimately this strategy
was going to fail,
and the farmer would be
in the position
of either needing
a different pesticide
or using more and more and more.
And so then you have a kind
of arms race of pesticide use.
You use more pesticides,
insects become more resistant,
more resistance,
more pesticides,
more resistance, and now you're
trapped in an escalating cycle,
and it's a damaging cycle,
because meanwhile you're also
killing fish and birds
and other things that you like
and that you want.
NARRATOR:
In isolation,
each study Carson read
was little more
than an anecdote.
Taken together,
they offered compelling evidence
that synthetic pesticides had
potentially grave disadvantages,
none of which
were yet fully understood.
LYTLE:
She was not against
the wise use of pesticides.
She saw the need for that.
But what she was against
was the indiscriminate spreading
of poisons
that had untold
and unanticipated consequences
for all living things,
human beings included.
NARRATOR:
"I realized that here
was the material for a book,"
Carson later recalled.
"Everything which meant most
to me as a naturalist
"was being threatened,
and nothing I could do
would be more important."
In May 1958,
she signed a contract
with Houghton Mifflin
for what her friend and editor
Paul Brooks had dubbed
"the poison book."
It was slated to be a short
volume, perhaps 50,000 words,
of which William Shawn
of the New Yorker
already had offered
to publish two excerpts.
Only Dorothy had misgivings.
LEAR:
It's a book about death, and
it's a book about destruction,
and Dorothy's not comfortable,
and she's not comfortable
with Rachel writing that,
using her talent for beauty
and beautiful words
to write
about the elixirs of death.
She had Rachel before
when she's writing about tide
pools and beautiful things.
She can't follow her
in this research.
CARSON (dramatized):
You do know, I think,
how deeply I believe in the
importance of what I am doing.
Knowing what I do,
there would be no future peace
for me
if I kept silent.
LEAR:
She wants to tell that story,
and try to tell it fairly,
and tell it scientifically,
but she's got an argument
from the beginning.
It isn't, "Well, let's talk
about the good and bad
of pesticides."
And the first titles
of this book
are Man Against the Earth
and Man the Destroyer.
Carson's underlying anger
is right there.
LYTLE:
In a sense, she was going public
with a lot of data
that was somewhat inconclusive
or premature.
On the other hand, she felt,
what is the morality
of remaining quiet
when you have a huge amount
of circumstantial evidence
that points to a substance
being toxic or dangerous?
You know, advocacy
is not something
scientists of the time
were wont to do,
but for Carson,
it became a crusade.
NARRATOR:
On November 22, 1958,
with Carson deep
into the research for her book,
Maria, now 89,
suffered a stroke.
When she died on the morning
of December 1,
Rachel was at her bedside,
holding her hand.
"More than anyone else I know,
she embodied a 'reverence for
life,"' Carson told a friend.
"And she could fight fiercely
"against anything
she believed wrong,
"as in our present crusade!
"Knowing how she felt about that
will help me
to carry it through
to completion."
Just weeks later,
Carson was back to work,
driven by the growing certainty
that manmade pesticides menaced
not only the environment,
but human health.
LEAR:
Carson is convinced
that there is this link
between pesticides
and cancer in humans.
And that is going to be
an explosive part to this book
that she didn't initially plan,
and she has to be very careful
of how she puts that out.
NARRATOR:
Once again, the evidence
was preliminary
Much of it as yet unpublished.
It was also well outside
Carson's training
as a biologist,
and therefore difficult
for her to parse.
But the more she learned,
the more focused she became
on the parallels
between synthetic pesticides
and radioactive fallout.
SOUDER:
They operated
in much the same way.
They were widely dispersed.
You could absorb a body burden
of both of them.
Both of them were being linked
to cancer and birth defects.
Things would happen years,
even decades after the exposure.
These were long-range problems
that you didn't know
were happening
when they were happening.
NARRATOR:
Events soon bolstered
Carson's case.
In the spring of 1959,
government officials
publicly admitted
that they had underestimated
the hazards of nuclear fallout.
Of particular concern was
the radionuclide strontium-90,
which had made its way
into the nation's dairy supply
and was now thought to cause
leukemia, bone cancer,
and birth defects.
LYTLE:
This is the height
of the Baby Boom,
and so you have a nation focused
on its child and family life
being potentially poisoned
by this by-product
of the nuclear testing regime.
NARRATOR:
As Carson's editor, Paul Brooks,
told her,
"All this publicity
about fallout
"gives you a head start
in awakening people
to the dangers of chemicals."
Then, just before
Thanksgiving 1959
came the so-called
cranberry scare.
LYTLE:
People of m y generation
remember the Thanksgiving
with no cranberry sauce.
Farmers in Oregon
had sprayed their cranberry bogs
with a pesticide,
but they did it
in the wrong growth cycle,
so that it got into the berries
themselves
and then
into the national food supply.
SOUDER:
It was potentially
a cancer-causing agent.
This might have been one of
the first public demonstrations
of the hazards
of chemical pesticides.
Of course,
this alarmed the public,
who wanted their cranberries
but didn't want to be poisoned,
and it greatly distressed
the cranberry industry.
To Carson,
this was just exhibit A
in a story she'd already formed
in her own mind
and was ready to tell.
NARRATOR:
With shipments of cranberries
being seized for inspection
and panicked grocers pulling
cranberry products from shelves,
Oregon's bad berries
were on the verge
of ruining a $50 million crop.
Growers in other states
cried foul,
and government officials
went into high gear
to shore up the industry.
Secretary of Agriculture
Ezra Benson
had himself photographed
eating cranberries.
On the presidential
campaign trail,
Senator John F. Kennedy quaffed
a cranberry juice toast,
while his opponent,
Vice President Richard Nixon,
swallowed down
four full helpings
of the supposedly tainted fruit.
SOUDER:
Whether the public was reassured
by that, we can't know.
But it demonstrated
that there was
this inherent coalition,
this inherent partnership
between the government
and its clients in industry
The chemicals industry,
the agricultural industry
That would be very resistant
to the ideas
that Carson
was going to propose,
that she was going
to come head-to-head
with the massed might
of the U.S. economy
and the U.S. government
if she tried to prove
to the public
that they were being poisoned.
NARRATOR:
"I think you know,"
one of Carson's
research contacts warned her,
"how grim this struggle
with the U.S. government
"and the whole chemical industry
is bound to be."
Initially, she'd thought it
a nuisance:
first, in early January 1960,
a painful ulcer,
then a sinus infection
that laid her low for weeks,
then two lumps
in her left breast,
discovered during an examination
in March.
LEAR:
Carson is making progress.
She knows she's going to finish
this book.
And suddenly she's got
this catalogue of illnesses
that happen to her.
She was never very good
at facing up to limitations.
Probably none of us are,
but she's in denial
and she hides it
under the covers of herself,
and to herself,
and just tries
to plow through it.
NARRATOR:
Carson had a history
of breast tumors
and twice had had them
surgically removed.
This time, one tumor
was "suspicious enough"
to require a radical mastectomy.
Still, the surgeon assured her
that no malignancy
had been found,
so Carson sought
no further treatment.
It was only when she discovered
a hard lump on her rib,
months later,
that she sought a second opinion
and learned that the surgeon
had withheld the truth.
According to the pathology
report,
the removed tumor had in fact
been malignant,
and it had metastasized
to her lymph nodes.
SOUDER:
It was common at the time
for doctors in such situations
to discuss a diagnosis,
a prognosis, a treatment
with a woman's husband,
who they believed
would be better able
to handle this information,
process it,
make decisions
if decisions had to be made.
LYTLE:
It may also be that the cancer
was sufficiently
far enough advanced
that he figured,
"Well, there's nothing much
we can do about this.
We've done what we can."
But, you know, in the process,
he denied her six months
of potential treatment
that might have mitigated
the cancer
or might have extended her life.
NARRATOR:
Carson's first thought
was for her privacy.
"Somehow I have no wish
to read of m y ailments
in literary gossip columns,"
she told a friend.
"Too much comfort
to the chemical companies!"
SOUDER:
She was sure
that she would be accused
of having written the book
as a retribution
against the chemical industry
on the unfounded allegation
that pesticides caused cancer.
She understood
this was a serious risk
and this would be
a point of attack against her.
NARRATOR:
The months that followed
were excruciating:
radiation treatments,
a flare-up of her ulcer,
a staph infection
that progressed
to septic arthritis in her knees
and ankles.
By the end of January 1961,
she was unable to walk
and could barely stand.
CARSON (dramatized):
Darling,
you know my high hopes
for the goal I might meet
by March,
hopes I entertained
last October!
Now I look back
at the complete and devastating
wreckage of those plans,
not only no writing for months,
but the nearly complete loss
of any creative feeling
or desire.
Sometimes I wonder whether
the Author even exists anymore.
CHRISTIE:
I think she handled it
as well as she could.
You know,
the only negative thing
I would have to say about it
in retrospect was,
she wasn't honest enough
with me about it,
although who knows whether
that would've been a good thing?
You know, but that's all
I remember about it,
just that it was kind of
a broken time.
NARRATOR:
To her research files on cancer,
Carson now began
to save clippings
on experimental treatments
and improbable miracle cures.
She would never be truly healthy
again,
but as soon as the radiation
treatments were finished,
she went back to work.
CHRISTIE:
The book became a race
for her to finish.
That was the one time
where it would impact on us
in that, you know,
she would say,
"I have to go and lock myself
in the study
"and you have to go
amuse yourself,
and that's just the way it is."
And that got more and more
intense as time went on.
NARRATOR:
In late January 1962,
nearly four years
after she'd begun to write it,
Carson finally submitted
the bulk of the manuscript
to both Houghton Mifflin
and the New Yorker.
It was, she wrote Dorothy,
"like reaching the last station
before the summit of Everest."
William Shawn called as soon
as he'd finished reading it.
Silent Spring, he told her,
was "a brilliant achievement."
That night, while listening
to her favorite violin concerto
alone in her study,
Carson wept.
CARSON (dramatized):
Darling, I could never again
listen happily to a thrush song
if I had not done all I could.
And last night the thoughts
of all the birds
and other creatures
and all the loveliness
that is in nature
came to me with such a surge
of deep happiness,
that now I had done
what I could.
I had been able to complete it.
Now it had its own life.
NARRATOR:
On June 16, 1962,
as the elements of Silent Spring
were being prepared
for publication,
the first New Yorker installment
arrived on the newsstands,
and with its opening paragraphs
lured readers
into a fertile world of plenty.
READER:
"There was once a town
in the heart of America
"where all life seemed to live
"in harmony
with its surroundings.
"The town lay in the midst
"of a checkerboard
of prosperous farms,
"with fields of grain
and hillsides of orchards
"where, in spring,
white clouds of bloom
drifted above the green fields."
LYTLE:
The birds sing, and the woods
are filled with living things,
and it's an abundant,
happy place.
And then suddenly the residents
discover the birds are gone
and the animals have died
and many of the plants
have withered.
SOUDER:
People start to get sick for
reasons that can't be explained.
Livestock have
stunted offspring.
Everything goes bad.
READER:
"In the gutters under the eaves
"and between the shingles
of the roofs,
"a few patches of white granular
powder could be seen.
"Some weeks earlier, this powder
had been dropped, like snow,
"upon the roofs and the lawns,
the fields and the streams.
"No witchcraft, no enemy action
"had snuffed out life
in this stricken world.
The people had done it
themselves."
ORESKES:
She creates an image of silence.
"What would it be like
if you woke up in the morning
"and you went outside
"and instead
of hearing birds chirp or sing,
you heard nothing?"
And that's
so amazingly powerful, right?
And it just, you know,
it stops you in your tracks.
NARRATOR:
In the zealous quest
for mastery, Carson argued,
synthetic pesticides
had been used indiscriminately,
excessively, heedlessly,
upsetting the delicate balance
of nature
and putting all life at risk.
LYTLE:
She felt that proponents
of widespread pesticide use
were conducting an experiment
with life itself
without having done
adequate testing or research
to determine
what the consequences might be.
And that the citizenry
weren't being informed
because the proponents
of pesticides
were telling them
only one side of the story
and the one that benefited
their own interests.
And so all these things are part
of the Cold War consensus
by which Americans lived:
the benevolence of corporations,
the authority of science.
Well, Carson's challenging
all of those things.
NARRATOR:
The furor arose even before
the second and third
installments of Silent Spring
hit the newsstands.
The New Yorker was deluged
with letters.
So, too, was the U.S.D.A.
Most of those who wrote,
an agency spokesman
told the New York Times,
expressed "horror and amazement"
that the use
of such toxic chemicals
was even permitted.
CRAMER:
She raised the level
of awareness
of the general public
of all of these chemical
applications
and why we need to think
about their implications.
People were deeply moved
and frightened by what she said.
NARRATOR:
Scientists for the chemical
industry and the U.S.D.A.
were incensed
by Carson's assertions.
What, they wondered publicly,
was the death of a songbird
against the possibility
of ending malaria
or world hunger?
As one industry chemist put it,
"DDT alone has saved
as many human lives
"over the past 15 years
as all the wonder drugs
combined."
LYTLE:
The proponents of pesticides
argued
that you have to take risks
to go forward.
That's very much part
of our scientific, technological
culture.
BLUM:
They saw themselves as doing
something in the higher good.
They were fostering
human development.
They were killing plagues.
They were making the world
a better place.
ORESKES:
Carson herself acknowledged
there was this benefit
through the use of pesticides.
But the whole point
of her argument
is that there's been a kind of
an assumption and a rush.
The benefits were obvious,
so people rushed
to take advantage
of those benefits,
but there were
these other problems
that were maybe not as obvious,
but actually might outweigh
the benefits.
NARRATOR:
By August, with the publication
of the book
still more than a month away,
the controversy
over Silent Spring
had reached
the nation's capital,
and a special
Science Advisory Committee
had been convened
to review all federal policies
on pesticides.
On August 28, the subject
even found its way into one
of the president's regular
televised press conferences.
REPORTER:
There appears to be growing
concern among scientists
as to the possibility
of dangerous long-range
side effects
from the widespread use
of DDT and other pesticides.
Have you considered asking
the Department of Agriculture
or the Public Health Service
to take a closer look at this?
Yes, and I know
that they already are,
I think particularly, of course,
since Miss Carson's book,
but they are examining
the matter.
SOUDER:
You can only imagine how worried
the people who made
these pesticides were.
When President Kennedy said,
"Yeah, we're going to look
into this.
"We're going to reach in
to the private sector
"and see if we need to
regulate these products
in a different way,"
that was a threat.
That's a threat
to the bottom line.
That's a threat to the business
that these companies were in.
LYTLE:
They formed essentially
a war council
to get together and develop
a propaganda campaign
to discredit Carson,
to discredit the science
in her book,
and to defend their practices.
NARRATOR:
From public relations
departments
throughout the chemical industry
now came a flood
of bulletins and brochures
which emphasized
the benefits of pesticides.
The Monsanto Company,
an industry leader,
papered news outlets
across the country
with a spoof of Silent Spring's
opening chapter,
in which a pesticide-free world
loses millions
to yellow fever and malaria
FILM NARRATOR:
She dines on healthy blood,
and in payment leaves
the chills and fever of malaria.
NARRATOR:
and crop-ravaging insects
drive humanity
to the brink of famine.
Silent Spring, critics charged,
was a "high-pitched,"
"emotional,"
"scientifically indefensible"
screed.
To heed Carson's call
for restraint, it was argued,
meant nothing less than
"the end of all human progress."
KINKELA:
There is this sort of
real tension
between this understanding
of chemical sciences
as a sort of hyper-masculine,
lab-intensive research
that produces
these wonderful technologies
and these scientists
who work in nature,
who examine issues
over the long term,
but who really
aren't scientists.
They're sort of like a cult.
And having a woman
at this particular moment
being the lead spokesperson
of that kind of idea
really chafed,
and made the chemical scientists
really angry.
ORESKES:
The idea that this woman,
you know, this woman with what,
a master's degree,
that she knows something
that we don't know?
You know, you just see their
condescension towards her
in their just really dismissive
approach
and their misrepresentation
of her work.
They try to accuse her
of rejecting modernity,
of being unrealistic, of
wanting to ban all pesticides,
none of which are true,
but it's a way to try
to discredit her
and discredit the argument,
and it's a way to not even
have the argument.
NARRATOR:
Concerned the attacks
from industry scientists
created the impression
that the science
was "all on the other side,"
Carson prevailed
upon Houghton Mifflin
to publish a rebuttal
to her critics.
LYTLE:
The commercial, monetary,
political resources
that the agencies
and the businesses
that were arrayed against her
could command
were daunting indeed.
But many scientists
strongly supported Carson
and accepted her case
and even contributed to it.
ORESKES:
The worst thing you could say
about Silent Spring
is actually a compliment:
It's not a work of science.
And that's true,
it's not a work of science.
It's a work
of science communication.
She is communicating to us
what scientists have to say
and she's communicating
the meaning
of that scientific work.
She makes clear what's at stake,
and that's her great gift.
NARRATOR:
In the end, Silent Spring
flew off the shelves.
Within two weeks of its official
publication, on September 27,
65,000 copies had been sold.
Before long,
it was a runaway bestseller.
Every major publication in
the country reviewed the book.
More than 70 newspapers
also ran editorials.
Carson, meanwhile,
was the subject
of so many magazine articles
and cartoons
that she and Roger began
to collect them.
Absent from all the publicity
was the fact
that Carson's cancer had spread
to the right side of her body
and that she was once again
undergoing radiation treatments.
Inundated with interview
requests,
Carson agreed that fall
to only two
that involved cameras:
a profile in LIFE magazine
and an appearance on CBS Reports
with Eric Sevareid.
For both, she wore
a heavy, dark wig
she'd purchased
at Elizabeth Arden.
The two-day interview session
with CBS
at her home in Silver Spring
was so taxing
that it became plain to Sevareid
that Carson was ill.
Get the piece on the air
as soon as possible,
he urged his producer.
"You've got a dead
leading lady."
LEAR:
Carson was determined
as a young girl.
She was determined
to get an education.
She was determined
to be a writer.
She was determined to find
something to write about.
And with Silent Spring,
she was determined
that this message would get out.
She's willing to endure
almost everything
to get that message out.
CARSON:
My text this afternoon is taken
from the Globe Times
of Bethlehem, Pennsylvania,
a news item in the issue
of October 12.
After describing in detail
the reactions to Silent Spring
of the farm bureaus
in two Pennsylvania counties,
the reporter continued:
"No one in either count y farm
office who was talked to today
"had read the book,
but all
disapproved of it heartily."
(audience laughing)
NARRATOR:
In early December 1962,
in an address to
the Women's National Press Club,
Rachel Carson finally answered
her critics.
Challenging the industry's
contention
that "chemicals are never used
unless tests have shown them
to be safe,"
she reminded her audience
that pesticide manufacturers
financed the studies
of their own products' safety.
I know that many thoughtful
scientists are deeply disturbed
that their organizations are
becoming fronts for industry.
Is industry becoming a screen
through which facts
must be filtered
so that the hard, uncomfortable
truths are kept back
and only the harmless morsels
are allowed to filter through?
The tailoring, the screening
of basic truth
is done to accommodate
to the short-term gain,
to serve the gods
of profit and production.
LEAR:
She is calling
for the population
to understand that money
has a great deal to do
with what is done in science.
She says, "We need to ask
who speaks and why.
"What is done
in the name of science
and why doesn't the public
have a right to know?"
These are not just
scientific questions.
These are questions that
a social revolutionary asks.
CARSON:
These are matters
of the most serious importance
to society.
And I commend their study to you
as professionals
in the field of communication.
Thank you.
(audience applauds)
NARRATOR:
Unable to silence Carson,
the chemical industry
lobbied hard
to muzzle the forthcoming
CBS special on Silent Spring.
In March, just weeks before
the program was slated to air,
the network was flooded
with mimeographed letters
urging fairness
A campaign orchestrated,
CBS assumed,
by the chemical industry lobby.
Then, just days
before the broadcast,
two of the show's five
commercial sponsors pulled out,
followed swiftly by a third.
CBS was undaunted,
and on the evening
of Wednesday, April 3, 1963,
"The Silent Spring
of Rachel Carson"
was beamed into living rooms
all across the country.
Good evening.
We are living in what has been
called the synthetic age.
The age of the atom,
the missile,
the frozen TV dinner.
In the next hour, you will hear
that this is also the age
of the wormless apple
and the calculated risk.
Do you know how long
the pesticides persist
in the water
once they get into it?
Not entirely.
Do you know the extent
to which our groundwater
may be contaminated right now
by pesticides?
We don't know that, either,
nor do we know
NARRATOR:
As the program unfolded,
a welter of scientists
and government officials,
as well as Carson herself,
argued the pros and cons
of synthetic pesticides.
In the end, one fact was clear:
For every scientific certainty,
there was a host
of unanswered questions.
CARSON:
We have to remember
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.
SEVAREID:
A spokesman
for the chemical industry,
Dr. Robert White-Stevens.
Miss Carson is concerned
with every possibility
of hazard and danger,
whereas the agricultural school
has to concern itself
with the probability,
the likelihood of danger,
and to assess that
against utility.
If we had to investigate
every possibility,
we would never make
any advances at all,
because this would require
an infinite time
for experimental work,
and we would never be finished.
CARSON:
We've heard the benefits
of pesticides.
We've heard a great deal
about their safety,
but very little
about the hazards,
very little about the failures,
the inefficiencies,
and yet the public was being
asked to accept these chemicals,
was being asked to acquiesce
in their use
and did not have
the whole picture.
So I set about to remedy
the balance there.
LEAR:
CBS Reports becomes almost a
second publication of the book.
People who hadn't read it and
probably wouldn't have read it
can see that Rachel Carson
is a very calm, rational woman
who is not frothing at the mouth
and is not a raving Communist.
She's giving the public credit
for being able
to understand science.
NARRATOR:
With an audience estimated
at between ten and 15 million,
"The Silent Spring
of Rachel Carson"
catapulted the environment
to the top
of the political agenda.
The next day,
Senator Abraham Ribicoff,
chair of the subcommittee
on government operations,
was charged with conducting
a broad congressional review
of environmental hazards,
including pesticides.
Then, on May 15,
came the long-awaited report
from the president's
Science Advisory Committee.
ORESKES:
And they say
in more prosaic language
what she has essentially
already said in Silent Spring,
which is, "Yes, there are some
benefits to using pesticides,
"and no, we probably don't want
to outlaw and ban
"all pesticides tomorrow,
"but there is substantial
scientific evidence
"that the indiscriminate use
of pesticides,
"the overuse of pesticides,
"and particularly certain
persistent pesticides like DD
may be problematic."
NARRATOR:
"I think it's
a splendid report,"
Carson told a journalist.
"It's strong, it's objective,
"and, I think, a very fair
evaluation of the problem.
"I feel that the report
has vindicated me
and my principal contentions."
By now, Carson knew
she didn't have long to live.
Despite ongoing
radiation treatments,
the cancer had spread
and spread again,
to her collarbone, her neck,
her shoulder.
Though often in pain,
she kept her call for change
insistent,
appearing in late May
on the Today Show
and in early June before
Ribicoff's Senate committee,
where she delivered 40 minutes
of testimony
to a rapt, capacity crowd.
We have acquired
technical skills
on a scale undreamed-of
even a generation ago.
We can do dramatic things
and we can do them quickly.
By the time damaging
side effects are apparent,
it is often too late
or impossible
to reverse our actions.
LEAR:
She's aware that
there will be changes coming
because of her words,
because of her book,
so she's at peace,
comfortable in some ways
with the fact that she's done
the work that she set out to do.
If we are ever to solve
the basic problem
of environmental contamination,
we must begin to count
the many hidden costs
of what we are doing
and to weigh them
against the gains or advantages.
SOUDER:
Now we enter
into a period of time
in which everyone understands
that the environment
is an important subject,
that it's something
we should talk about,
something we should consider
when we are using
new technologies
that might adversely affect it.
It puts the government squarely
into the middle
as a regulating authority,
as a force that can restrain
technology.
This hadn't been part
of the dialogue before.
CARSON (dramatized):
It seems strange, looking back
over my life,
that all that went
before this past decade
seems to have been merely
preparation for it.
Into that decade have been
crowded everything
I shall be remembered for.
NARRATOR:
There was for Carson
one last summer at Southport,
a summer filled with birdsong
and the sound of the wind
in the spruce trees.
There were walks along the shore
with Dorothy,
slow and ginger now on account
of Carson's constant pain,
and bittersweet hours spent
watching the surf
crash against the rocks.
FREEMAN:
I don't think the kids,
my brother and Roger and I,
understood that this was
some big last deal.
But it was Rachel's last summer
at Southport,
and she was unable to go down
to the beach.
And yet, we all still had
a lovely summer day going down
and bringing little creatures
up to the cottage
for her to look at
and talk to us about,
and then instruct us
that they had to go back
where they came from.
I think I like that
as a quintessential
and last memory,
because that was her essence,
and there it was.
NARRATOR:
The cancer spread to her pelvis,
then to her upper back and arms.
By October,
back in Silver Spring,
Carson was spending
most of her time in bed.
LEAR:
She had all these other ideas
of what she wanted to write.
I think she comes to terms
with the fact
that she will lay down her pen
without having done them all.
Um, but the biggest thing,
of course,
is what to do with Roger.
To face the fact
that when she dies
Which she doesn't really
face well
Roger needs a family,
and she can't seem
to come to grips with that.
CHRISTIE:
She tried to shield me
from how serious it was,
and it was never
You know, well,
"I'm going to die."
I don't know how she expected it
to work really,
beyond, you know, making
provisions for me in her will.
It's not something
we talked about.
FREEMAN:
The best she could do was
add a codicil to her will
that said it was her wish that
either the Paul Brooks family
Paul Brooks being her editor
at Houghton Mifflin
Or my parents would take Roger
in and would adopt Roger.
I think in the end she punted.
She just, wherever she was
in her life,
the end of her life,
she didn't want to
or couldn't make that decision.
NARRATOR:
By spring, the cancer had spread
to her brain.
Dorothy still wrote
nearly every day,
but Carson no longer wrote back.
When Dorothy came for a visit
in early April,
Carson was only dimly aware
that she was there.
On April 14, 1964,
Rachel Carson died.
She was 56 years old.
Some of her ashes were buried
next to her mother's grave.
The rest Dorothy Freeman spread
over the ocean
at Southport Island.
BLUM:
There's a Before Rachel
and After Rachel
in the way we think
about what matters
in protecting the environment.
There are not very many people
who you say,
"That person drove
a paradigm shift,"
but she did.
And it's post-Silent Spring
that you start seeing
genuine environmental regulation
in a way
that didn't exist before.
It's like a rain
on a dry landscape.
That book was it.
LEAR:
Silent Spring was the book
that changed the world.
It taught us
that life was fragile,
that it was mutable,
that science was not omniscient.
Her message was
that there's an ongoing story.
It doesn't just stop
with the removal of pesticides.
LYTLE:
Many business
and political types
who can't stand
environmental regulation
have since been trying
to discredit Rachel Carson.
They feel if they can
discredit her,
they can in a sense deconstruct
the environmental apparatus.
And they're still doing it.
It has not gone quiet.
ORESKES:
Rachel Carson begins
a conversation
that we needed to have,
that we weren't having in 1963,
and that we still haven't
really figured out
how to have in an
appropriate way even today.
It's a conversation about
the pros and cons of technology.
It's a conversation about
the role of nature in our life
and about whether or not
we make our lives better
through technological
innovations
or whether we do damage
that outweighs the benefits.
SOUDER:
Carson said, "Let's try to look
"at life from the other side.
"Let's try to look
at the natural world
as if we were actually
a part of it."
That's a different way
to understand things
than anyone had ever proposed
before.
You're not separate.
You're human, but you're not
separate from this living world.