Unsustainable Silent Spring

The fiftieth anniversary of the seminal book Silent Spring was bound to inspire at least one tribute from academia. “She casts off her native lyricism for the tones of elegy, tragedy, apocalypse, and suburban Gothic,” Rob Nixon writes in The Chronicle Review. “Through her, we enter a tenebrous world of ‘death by indirection,’ a planet imperiled by insidious, creeping threats.”

Nixon is the Rachel Carson professor of English at the University of Wisconsin at Madison. “Carson’s swerve in Silent Spring demands that she radically recast concerns that had defined her as a writer, above all, an attentiveness to wonder and the unseen,” Nixon avers. “The wide-eyed amazement that colored her oceanographic writings gives way to a more fearful questioning of ‘what if,’ as exponentially increasing, unregulated chemical compounds threaten ecological integrity, food security, and public health with a slow-acting, amorphous lethality.”

“Her devotion to the unseen also assumes more sinister hues. The ocean trilogy invites readers to look again—to see the vivid variety of life forms that have passed unnoticed in a tide pool or unimagined in the ocean depths. But when the unseen resurfaces in Silent Spring, it is transformed utterly: At our peril do we overlook the invisible poisons that permeate our cells and our planet, poisons that travel unpoliced and undetected along the migratory paths of invisible death.”

Well, that’s one way of looking at it. Another way is to look at the facts Carson offered to support her predictions.

In his 2006 book, Eco-Freaks, John Berlau points out that Carson, in her efforts to get the pesticide DDT banned, labeled it an “agent of death” developed by the U. S. military in World War II in order to wage chemical warfare. Berlau claims that the U. S. used it mainly to fight the malaria afflicting American forces fighting in the Philippines. Berlau is Senior Fellow for Finance and Access to Capital in the Center for Economic Freedom at the Competitive Enterprise Institute.

After her demise, Carson’s campaign was ultimately successful, but at what price?

“One in twenty African children dies of malaria and of those that survive, many are brain damaged,” Accuracy in Media chairman Don Irvine wrote in 2004. “Each year 300 to 500 million people worldwide get malaria.”

“Under international pressure, South Africa stopped DDT spraying in 1999 and death rates spiked up,” Reed Irvine and Cliff Kincaid noted in an Accuracy in Media report published in 2003. “Half of these deaths were children under five.”

“South Africa went back to DDT in 2000 and promptly reduced malaria rates by seventy-five percent.”

Malcolm A. Kline is the Executive Director of Accuracy in Academia.

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