Environment & Energy
Related: About this forumRachel Carson Didn’t Kill Millions of Africans
How the 50-year-old campaign against Silent Spring still distorts environmental debates.
By William Souder|Posted Tuesday, Sept. 4, 2012, at 5:02 AM ET
Silent Spring, Rachel Carsons landmark warning about the indiscriminate use of pesticides, turns 50 this month. By extension, that puts the environmental movement also at the half-century markalong with the bitter, divisive argument we continue to have over both the book and the movement it spawned. The terms of that argument, which emerged in the brutal reaction to Silent Spring from those who saw it not as a warning but as a threat, havent changed much. And they leave us with a vexing question: Why do we fight? How is it that the environment we all share is the subject of partisan debate? After all, the right and the left inhabit the same planet, even if it doesnt always seem that way.
Carsons book was controversial before it even was a book. In June 1962, three long excerpts were published by The New Yorker magazine. They alarmed the public, which deluged the Department of Agriculture and other agencies with demands for action, and outraged the chemical industry and its allies in government. In late August 1962, after he was asked about pesticides at a press conference, President Kennedy ordered his science adviser to form a commission to investigate the problems brought to light, the president said, by Miss Carsons book. A month later, when Silent Spring was published, the outlines of the fight over pesticides had hardened. Armed with a substantial war chestCarsons publisher heard it was $250,000pesticide makers launched an attack aimed at discrediting Silent Spring and destroying its author.
The offensive included a widely distributed parody of Carsons famous opening chapter about a town where no birds sang, and countless fact-sheets extolling the benefits of pesticides to human health and food production. Silent Spring was described as one-sided and unbalanced to any media that would listen. Some did. Time magazine called the book hysterical and patently unsound.
Carsons critics pushed her to the left end of the political spectrum, to a remote corner of the freaky fringe that at the time included organic farmers, food faddists, and anti-fluoridationists. One pesticide maker, which threatened to sue if Silent Spring was published, was more explicit: Carson, the company claimed, was in league with sinister parties whose goal was to undermine American agriculture and free enterprise in order to further the interests of the Soviet Union and its Eastern European satellites. The word Communistin 1962 the most potent of insultswasnt used, but it was understood. Silent Spring, said its more ardent detractors, was un-American.
more
http://www.slate.com/articles/health_and_science/science/2012/09/silent_spring_turns_50_biographer_william_souder_clears_up_myths_about_rachel_carson_.single.html
and the fight goes on- Forbes has a hatchet Job on Carson's legacy out today:
http://www.forbes.com/sites/henrymiller/2012/09/05/rachel-carsons-deadly-fantasies/