WEBVTT - How Did 'Silent Spring' Change the World? 0:00:01.840 --> 0:00:07.400 Welcome to Brainstey, a production of iHeartRadio, Hey Rain staff 0:00:07.440 --> 0:00:13.240 Lauren Bolbebaum. Here. In nineteen sixty three, an hour long 0:00:13.280 --> 0:00:17.760 documentary aired on the television program CBS Reports. In it, 0:00:18.000 --> 0:00:21.480 a serene, articulate, middle aged woman sat in her den 0:00:21.640 --> 0:00:24.120 and proposed that it might not be such a good 0:00:24.160 --> 0:00:27.560 idea to spray nine hundred million pounds of an insecticide 0:00:27.600 --> 0:00:31.080 called DDT on crops, roadsides, and lawns across the country 0:00:31.240 --> 0:00:35.640 every year. She pointed out that nobody knew what the 0:00:35.680 --> 0:00:39.440 long term consequences might be for humans or other animals. 0:00:40.640 --> 0:00:44.360 She was the American marine biologist and conservationist Rachel Carson, 0:00:44.600 --> 0:00:47.680 who had just published the book Silent Spring, a work 0:00:47.680 --> 0:00:50.720 of investigative science that helped start the environmental movement in 0:00:50.760 --> 0:00:55.000 the United States. Offering an opposing point of view in 0:00:55.040 --> 0:00:58.360 the documentary was a spokesperson from the chemical company American 0:00:58.480 --> 0:01:02.400 Synamid by the name of Robert White Stevens. Clad in 0:01:02.400 --> 0:01:05.560 a lab coat and sporting thick, black rimmed glasses, he 0:01:05.640 --> 0:01:09.640 said that Carson was wrong, that smart scientists knew better, 0:01:10.000 --> 0:01:12.280 and that man was well on the road to mastering 0:01:12.400 --> 0:01:18.680 nature with chemicals like this. Rachel Carson was a country girl. 0:01:19.240 --> 0:01:21.280 She was born on May twenty seventh of nineteen oh 0:01:21.360 --> 0:01:24.280 seven in Springdale, Pennsylvania, where she grew up on a 0:01:24.319 --> 0:01:28.280 sixty acre farm that's about twenty four hectares. There, she 0:01:28.440 --> 0:01:31.440 wandered the fields, attesting her knowledge of the animal calls 0:01:31.440 --> 0:01:35.000 and plants her mother taught her to identify. Life wasn't 0:01:35.000 --> 0:01:37.520 that far from the scenes described in her favorite books 0:01:37.680 --> 0:01:40.440 like The Wind in the Willows and Everything by Beatrix Potter. 0:01:42.560 --> 0:01:45.360 But the farm wasn't doing well financially, and to make 0:01:45.480 --> 0:01:48.080 ends meet, her father sold off parcels of land to 0:01:48.120 --> 0:01:52.240 developers little by little, and so urbanity began to creep 0:01:52.280 --> 0:01:55.720 into Carson's life. As streets and shops moved ever closer, 0:01:56.760 --> 0:02:01.520 she witnessed an ecological shift. When Carson was young, she 0:02:01.600 --> 0:02:05.200 read and wrote, often composing short prose pieces and essays. 0:02:05.560 --> 0:02:07.600 She would later say that she couldn't remember a time 0:02:07.640 --> 0:02:09.440 when she didn't know she was going to be a writer. 0:02:10.280 --> 0:02:12.480 By the age of ten, she was already published. Her 0:02:12.480 --> 0:02:15.400 work was accepted in Saint Nicholas, a magazine for children 0:02:15.560 --> 0:02:18.120 that had previously printed the childhood works of f. Scott 0:02:18.160 --> 0:02:23.560 Fitzgerald and William Faulkner, so it's no surprise that when 0:02:23.600 --> 0:02:26.960 she went to college she majored in English, but part 0:02:26.960 --> 0:02:29.440 way through her studies she took a biology class and 0:02:29.480 --> 0:02:32.760 became so enamored with her professor, One Mary Scott Skinker, 0:02:33.120 --> 0:02:36.360 that Carson switched majors and landed a summer internship working 0:02:36.360 --> 0:02:41.120 with Skinker at the US Marine Laboratory in Massachusetts. That 0:02:41.400 --> 0:02:44.840 was her first encounter with the ocean, and it was momentous. 0:02:45.760 --> 0:02:49.200 Although she's best known for Silent Spring, a, Carson's lifelong 0:02:49.280 --> 0:02:51.680 passion and the subject of most of her work was 0:02:51.760 --> 0:02:57.160 the ocean. After receiving her BA, she enrolled in Johns 0:02:57.200 --> 0:02:59.959 Hopkins in nineteen twenty nine, where she completed her masters 0:03:00.160 --> 0:03:03.200 and zoology, and eventually began a PhD program in nineteen 0:03:03.240 --> 0:03:07.320 thirty two to study marine biology. But the Great Depression 0:03:07.440 --> 0:03:11.120 changed things. While she was working on her doctorate, her 0:03:11.160 --> 0:03:14.079 family moved in with her. Working as a lab assistant 0:03:14.120 --> 0:03:17.120 and teacher, Carson was a sole breadwinner in the house, 0:03:17.360 --> 0:03:19.799 supporting not only her mother and father, but also one 0:03:19.800 --> 0:03:24.560 of her sisters and two nieces. Under severe financial pressure, 0:03:24.800 --> 0:03:27.120 Carson had to quit her doctoral program and get a 0:03:27.200 --> 0:03:30.400 job to support her family. It was nineteen thirty five 0:03:30.560 --> 0:03:33.400 and President Franklin Roosevelt had expanded the number of government 0:03:33.480 --> 0:03:35.960 jobs to help dig the country out of the depression. 0:03:36.920 --> 0:03:39.400 The Carson sat the Civil Service exam and aiced it. 0:03:39.840 --> 0:03:44.600 She outperformed every other applicant. With her background in marine biology, 0:03:44.800 --> 0:03:47.240 she was soon employed by the US Bureau of Fisheries 0:03:47.520 --> 0:03:51.200 later the Department of Fish and Wildlife as an aquatic biologist. 0:03:52.040 --> 0:03:54.520 She was the second woman ever hired by that agency. 0:03:56.640 --> 0:03:59.280 Much of her work at the Bureau involved research and writing. 0:04:00.120 --> 0:04:02.360 During World War II, Carson was part of a team 0:04:02.440 --> 0:04:05.560 investigating the nature of underwater sounds and terrain to help 0:04:05.600 --> 0:04:09.040 the Navy with the development of its submarine program. She 0:04:09.240 --> 0:04:13.320 also authored pamphlets targeted at housewives, providing information on how 0:04:13.360 --> 0:04:18.640 to best cook fish but given wartime meat rationing. But 0:04:18.720 --> 0:04:21.160 when in the midst of all of this she submitted 0:04:21.160 --> 0:04:24.160 to her boss an eleven page essay about marine life, 0:04:24.360 --> 0:04:26.799 he told her it was too good for government publication 0:04:27.200 --> 0:04:32.280 and urged her to submit it to magazines instead. Her 0:04:32.360 --> 0:04:35.559 essay under Sea appeared in Atlantic Magazine in nineteen thirty 0:04:35.560 --> 0:04:38.200 seven and is considered the piece that launched her career 0:04:38.320 --> 0:04:42.520 as a naturalist. Encouraged by the success, Carson began a book, 0:04:42.640 --> 0:04:44.600 which she wrote on the back of Fish and Wildlife 0:04:44.600 --> 0:04:48.320 Service stationery. It was published in nineteen forty one as 0:04:48.480 --> 0:04:52.400 Under the Sea Wind, but the timing was unfortunate, as 0:04:52.440 --> 0:04:54.560 a few weeks later the US entered World War II. 0:04:55.720 --> 0:04:58.320 After a stall in her writing career, The New Yorker 0:04:58.360 --> 0:05:00.840 published what would become her second book, The Sea Around Us, 0:05:00.880 --> 0:05:04.160 in serial in nineteen fifty one. When it came out 0:05:04.200 --> 0:05:06.480 in book form, it spent eighty six weeks on the 0:05:06.480 --> 0:05:09.360 New York Times bestseller list and won the National Book Award. 0:05:11.560 --> 0:05:14.240 After the success, Carson resigned from the US Fish and 0:05:14.240 --> 0:05:18.240 Wildlife Service to pursue writing full time. By nineteen fifty two, 0:05:18.320 --> 0:05:21.080 she had received a Guggenheim Fellowship, which, combined with her 0:05:21.120 --> 0:05:23.880 book's royalties, enabled her to buy a small patch of 0:05:23.960 --> 0:05:26.160 land on the coast of Maine in nineteen fifty three. 0:05:28.200 --> 0:05:31.680 There she devoted herself to writing full time. In nineteen 0:05:31.720 --> 0:05:34.800 fifty five, she published The Edge of the Sea, another bestseller. 0:05:35.720 --> 0:05:38.560 By this time, her nieces were grown and her mother, Maria, 0:05:38.680 --> 0:05:43.279 lived with her. Carson never married, nor did she show 0:05:43.360 --> 0:05:47.040 signs of a romantic interest in Men, but after her 0:05:47.080 --> 0:05:49.760 move to Maine, she met a woman named Dorothy Freeman. 0:05:50.520 --> 0:05:53.440 It was the beginning of a passionate but almost entirely 0:05:53.560 --> 0:05:56.960 secret love affair to the outside world. The two women 0:05:57.000 --> 0:06:00.320 were close friends, but Freeman was married with Chill Ldren 0:06:00.480 --> 0:06:03.680 and strove to hide the nature of their relationship, and 0:06:03.839 --> 0:06:06.279 at the time in the nineteen fifties, the American government 0:06:06.320 --> 0:06:11.960 had labeled homosexuality as a mental illness. Carson and Freeman 0:06:12.040 --> 0:06:16.000 conducted much of their relationship via letters. To safeguard their secret, 0:06:16.040 --> 0:06:18.760 they would often enclose two letters in a single envelope. 0:06:19.480 --> 0:06:22.039 One letter was for public consumption and could be read 0:06:22.080 --> 0:06:26.000 aloud to family and friends. The other was private and passionate. 0:06:27.960 --> 0:06:30.400 The private letters, they agreed were to be consigned to 0:06:30.680 --> 0:06:34.719 the strong box, which was their code for burning. They 0:06:34.800 --> 0:06:37.719 couldn't bring themselves to burn all of the private letters, though, 0:06:38.080 --> 0:06:41.440 and in nineteen ninety five, Freeman's granddaughter published the surviving 0:06:41.480 --> 0:06:47.120 ones in a book about the two women's relationship. Meanwhile, 0:06:47.240 --> 0:06:51.240 the insecticide DDT was developed in the nineteen forties. It 0:06:51.320 --> 0:06:53.679 was first used in wartime to help control the spread 0:06:53.720 --> 0:06:58.520 of malaria, typhus, and other diseases. Transmitted by insects, but 0:06:58.680 --> 0:07:01.440 with the end of World War II, the manufacturers sought 0:07:01.440 --> 0:07:07.480 commercial uses for the substance. DDT was remarkably successful at 0:07:07.560 --> 0:07:11.120 keeping insect pests out of crops and gardens, but it 0:07:11.160 --> 0:07:13.840 wasn't clear what the effects might be on other organisms, 0:07:13.960 --> 0:07:17.920 including beneficial insects like bees, other wildlife than animals up 0:07:17.960 --> 0:07:22.720 the food chain, including humans. Some scientists raised alarms as 0:07:22.720 --> 0:07:25.800 early as the nineteen forties, but they largely went unheeded 0:07:25.840 --> 0:07:31.800 in the name of progress and profit. As an employee 0:07:31.800 --> 0:07:34.400 of the Fish and Wildlife Service, Carson had read government 0:07:34.440 --> 0:07:38.120 reports on DDT, how it hadn't been tested for civilian use, 0:07:38.280 --> 0:07:42.200 and how it was killing wildlife. She proposed an article 0:07:42.200 --> 0:07:45.120 on the subject to Reader's Digest, but they rejected the pitch. 0:07:46.040 --> 0:07:48.640 Carson returned her attention to the sea, but she kept 0:07:48.640 --> 0:07:51.760 her eye on the slowly mounting evidence that DDT might 0:07:51.800 --> 0:07:56.880 not be the miracle chemical people had hoped for. Then, 0:07:57.080 --> 0:07:59.880 in nineteen fifty eight, a citizens group called the Committee 0:07:59.880 --> 0:08:02.840 adaninst Mass Poisoning filed a lawsuit in New York State 0:08:03.200 --> 0:08:07.480 trying to stop the aerial spraying of insecticides. A member 0:08:07.520 --> 0:08:09.800 of the committee contacted Carson to urge her to write 0:08:09.800 --> 0:08:14.400 about the suit. A Carson was reluctant at first. It 0:08:14.440 --> 0:08:18.000 would entail leaving Maine for New York, and she had responsibilities. 0:08:18.600 --> 0:08:21.080 One of her two nieces had died young, orphaning a 0:08:21.120 --> 0:08:24.720 boy named Roger, who Carson then adopted, and Carson was 0:08:24.760 --> 0:08:27.520 also beginning what would be a long and painful struggle 0:08:27.600 --> 0:08:32.880 with breast cancer. Nevertheless, the more she looked into DDT, 0:08:33.280 --> 0:08:35.520 the more convinced she became that she had to write 0:08:35.559 --> 0:08:38.439 about it. She asked colleagues to follow the New York 0:08:38.480 --> 0:08:41.000 trial while she remained at home and began her research. 0:08:42.040 --> 0:08:44.760 It was the inception of what would become Silent Spring, 0:08:45.160 --> 0:08:48.960 which The New Yorker serialized in nineteen sixty two. It 0:08:49.080 --> 0:08:53.079 was an immediate sensation. Esteemed author E. B. White declared 0:08:53.080 --> 0:08:55.440 it one of the best and most important pieces ever 0:08:55.520 --> 0:08:58.720 published in the magazine. When it came out as a book, 0:08:58.840 --> 0:09:00.760 it shot to the top of the best list and 0:09:00.880 --> 0:09:05.920 instigated a national debate about the dangers of pesticides. President 0:09:06.000 --> 0:09:09.640 John F. Kennedy ordered an investigation, citing Carson's book as 0:09:09.640 --> 0:09:14.960 an important factor. Vested interests, particularly companies that manufactured products 0:09:15.000 --> 0:09:18.120 like DDT went into attack mode, doing their best to 0:09:18.160 --> 0:09:21.920 discredit Carson as an amateur, an alarmist, a communist, and 0:09:22.360 --> 0:09:28.400 insult of insults unwomanly. But she remained strong and spirited 0:09:28.679 --> 0:09:31.560 and continued to speak out against what she rightly believed 0:09:31.600 --> 0:09:35.760 was a threat, and all the while still privately battling 0:09:35.800 --> 0:09:39.520 breast cancer. When she testified before Congress and did the 0:09:39.559 --> 0:09:42.560 interview for that documentary, she wore whigs to cover her 0:09:42.559 --> 0:09:48.760 hair loss from radiation treatments, to the chagrin of her detractors. 0:09:48.880 --> 0:09:51.880 Carson's conclusions were backed up by the findings of President 0:09:51.960 --> 0:09:56.240 Kennedy's Science Advisory Committee report. As a result, the use 0:09:56.280 --> 0:10:00.520 of DDT and other pesticides was heavily regulated. The Silent 0:10:00.559 --> 0:10:04.000 Spring is widely credited with having sparked the modern environmental 0:10:04.040 --> 0:10:07.520 movement and lead the foundation for creating the US Environmental 0:10:07.559 --> 0:10:12.520 Protection Agency, but most of that happened later in the 0:10:12.559 --> 0:10:17.160 nineteen seventies. Just two years after Silent Spring, in nineteen 0:10:17.200 --> 0:10:21.320 sixty four, Carson died of metastatic breast cancer. She was 0:10:21.360 --> 0:10:24.600 only fifty six years old. She had worked through incredible 0:10:24.600 --> 0:10:27.680 illness to complete the book, and her partner, Freeman, would 0:10:27.720 --> 0:10:33.160 later maintain that silent Spring had killed her. But before 0:10:33.160 --> 0:10:35.760 she died, Carson wrote that she was thinking about her 0:10:35.800 --> 0:10:38.479 next book. It was going to be about the mysterious 0:10:38.640 --> 0:10:43.080 rise in sea levels. If only she had lived. Given 0:10:43.120 --> 0:10:46.240 the extraordinary influence of silent Spring, it's hard not to 0:10:46.280 --> 0:10:48.720 think that Rachel Carson might have been able to publicize 0:10:48.720 --> 0:10:51.559 the dangers of climate change decades before it became a 0:10:51.600 --> 0:10:58.480 global concern. President Jimmy Carter honored Carson posthumously in nineteen 0:10:58.520 --> 0:11:01.720 eighty with the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the highest civilian 0:11:01.720 --> 0:11:07.240 award in the United States. President Carter said, a biologist 0:11:07.280 --> 0:11:10.360 with a gentle, clear voice, she welcomed her audiences to 0:11:10.400 --> 0:11:13.000 her love of the sea. A while with an equally 0:11:13.000 --> 0:11:16.400 determined voice, she warned Americans with the dangers human beings 0:11:16.440 --> 0:11:24.960 themselves pose for their own environment. Today's episode is based 0:11:25.000 --> 0:11:27.280 on the article ten things you Should Know about Rachel 0:11:27.280 --> 0:11:31.319 Carson on HowStuffWorks dot Com, written by Osene Kuran. Brainstuff 0:11:31.320 --> 0:11:33.280 is production of by Heart Radio in partnership with how 0:11:33.280 --> 0:11:36.240 Stuffworks dot Com and is produced by Tyler Klang. Four 0:11:36.240 --> 0:11:40.080 more podcasts my Heart Radio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, 0:11:40.200 --> 0:11:43.400 or wherever you listen to your favorite shows,