On September 27, 1962, Houghton Mifflin published Silent Spring by Rachel Carson, and within a year it had sold about half a million copies in the United States and had been translated into more than a dozen languages. It had been serialised in the New Yorker in three instalments in June. The chemical industry had spent about a quarter of a million dollars on a campaign against it before it appeared.
The argument is in the title. Carson's opening chapter describes a town in which the birds have stopped singing, the bees have gone, the cattle are sick and people fall ill, and she calls it a fable, and then says that every one of the things in it has happened somewhere in America. The rest of the book is the evidence, most of it about DDT and the chlorinated hydrocarbons, which persist in soil and water and accumulate up the food chain.
The mechanism she set out was the one that made the case. A chemical sprayed at a few pounds to the acre washes into water, is taken up by plankton, is concentrated in the fish that eat the plankton, is concentrated further in the birds that eat the fish, and ends up in the eggshells of ospreys, bald eagles and peregrine falcons, which thin and break. It also ends up in mothers' milk, which she pointed out. In human fat.
Carson was a biologist, not an activist. She had worked for the US Fish and Wildlife Service for fifteen years, had written The Sea Around Us in 1951, which was on the bestseller list for 86 weeks, and had left government to write full time. She had been following the pesticide question since 1945, when she had first tried to get an article published about it. She was also dying: she had breast cancer diagnosed in 1960 and she was 56 when the book came out.
The response was vicious. The National Agricultural Chemicals Association ran a campaign, and a group of scientists funded by the industry attacked the book in print, and one reviewer suggested that if man were to follow the teachings of Miss Carson, we would return to the Dark Ages. She answered it on CBS in April 1963, in a programme that about 15 million people watched, and she testified before a Senate subcommittee in June.
President Kennedy asked his science advisory committee to look at it, and its report in May 1963 largely supported her. DDT was banned for agricultural use in the United States in 1972, and the Environmental Protection Agency had been created in 1970. Carson died in April 1964. The bald eagle, the peregrine falcon and the osprey have all recovered in North America.