Rachel's cry

The day I sit down to write this column is the jubilee of a movement of sorts. It was exactly 50 years ago, on September 27, 1962, that Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring was published. The book became an instant hit for its deft handling of a subject hitherto dealt with only in science journals. It struck a chord with ordinary people, made powers that be to sit up and take notice, and rubbed the industry the wrong way. Many people credit it for having heralded the beginning of the environmental movement. Others say it is too much to attribute to a book, but no one would deny that, as the biologist Roland Clement said, it “stirred the pot”.

Silent Spring begins with “A Fable for Tomorrow”, in which Carson speaks about a strange blight creeping over a town in the heart of America where all life seemed to live in harmony with its surroundings. “Some evil spell had settled on the community: mysterious maladies swept the flocks of chickens; the cattle and sheep sickened and died. Everywhere was a shadow of death. The farmers spoke of much illness among their families. In the town the doctors had become more and more puzzled by new kinds of sickness appearing among their patients. There had been several sudden and unexplained deaths, not only among adults but even among children, who would be stricken suddenly while at play and die within a few hours.

"It stirred the pot."

“There was a strange stillness. The birds, for example where had they gone? Many people spoke of them, puzzled and disturbed. The feeding stations in the backyards were deserted. The few birds seen anywhere were moribund; they trembled violently and could not fly. It was a spring without voices.”

The book was about the ill-effects of pesticides on the environment. Carson argued that the chemicals created to kill insects, weeds, rodents and other organisms made their way up the food chain and threatened animal and bird species and eventually humans. They should not be called ‘insecticides’, but ‘biocides’, she said.

Carson was no novice who stumbled into an emotional campaign for the environment. A writer by vocation, Carson was a scientist by profession and was well aware of the concerns wildlife biologists at the Patuxent Research Refuge in Laurel, Maryland, had about the deadly chemical DDT, which was administered by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, where she worked. But what caught her immediate attention was a 1957 lawsuit against the U.S. Department of Agriculture regarding aerial spraying over Long Island. She now began collecting material on pesticide effects, and four years of research eventually became Silent Spring. It was initially serialised in The New Yorker.

Its publication caused ripples in political and industry circles, and President John F. Kennedy directed his Science Advisory Committee to investigate Carson’s claims. The ultimate result was environmental legislation to regulate the use of chemicals and pesticides.

But criticism against Carson was vicious. She was threatened with lawsuits, and personal attacks included charges against her of being a communist sympathiser wanting to reduce Western countries’ ability to produce food, to achieve “east-curtain parity”. Even today, critics accuse her of “cherry-picking studies to suit her ideology” or of sounding a false alarm, causing millions of people around the world to suffer the painful and often deadly effects of malaria.

But Silent Spring’s legacy is that Carson posed the moral question. The idea that nature existed to serve man never appealed to her. Says her biographer Linda Lear in the aptly titled book Witness to Nature, “She wanted us to understand that we were just a blip. The control of nature was an arrogant idea, and Carson was against human arrogance.”

Over the years, many chemicals that Carson had proved were highly dangerous are still being used in many parts of the world. A recent report, Global Chemicals Outlook, compiled by UNEP working with international experts, says though the exact number of chemicals in the global market is not known, 143,835 chemical substances have been pre-registered under the requirement of the European Union’s chemicals regulation, REACH.

The global chemical output (produced and shipped) was valued at $171 billion in 1970. By 2010, it had grown to $4.12 trillion.

The report further says: Chemical manufacturing and processing activities, once largely located in the highly industrialised countries, are now steadily expanding into developing countries and countries with economies in transition. For example, from 2000 to 2010, chemical production in China and India grew at an average annual rate of 24 per cent and 14 per cent, respectively, whereas the growth rate in the United States, Japan and Germany was between 5 per cent and 8 per cent. In 2001, the OECD issued projections that by 2020, developing countries would be home to 31 per cent of global chemical production, and 33 per cent of global chemical consumption.

DDT was banned in the U.S. in 1972, eight years after Carson’s death. The Stockholm Convention, which took effect in 2004, outlawed several persistent organic pollutants, and restricted DDT use to vector control. The Convention has been ratified by more than 170 countries and is endorsed by most environmental groups. According to some reports, India is the only country still manufacturing DDT.

“Individuals living in poverty are particularly vulnerable, both because their exposures may be particularly high, and because poor nutrition and other risk factors can increase susceptibility to the effects of toxic exposures,” says the UNEP report. Examples are not far to seek; the deadly effect of endosulfan in our own backyard is too well known and documented.

That is where Silent Spring becomes chillingly contemporary.