Silent Spring After 50 Years

This year marks the 50th anniversary of a foundational document in modern environmentalism: Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring. Today, when Carson’s book is often mentioned but rarely read, it is easy to forget how important it was in shaping American attitudes about the environment. Serialized in The New Yorker, featured as a Book of the Month Club selection, given a CBS TV special, and praised by President John F. Kennedy, Silent Spring was a national sensation in the early 1960s. The book led to Carson’s testimony before a Senate subcommittee, which, together with her 1964 death from cancer, established the book’s iconic status and placed Carson on a pedestal as the “mother of the environmental movement.” It is difficult to justify Silent Spring’s reputation as crusading investigative reporting. Carson was a longtime critic of DDT rather than a scientist who discovered pesticide problems in research. She edited 1940s reports by her boss at the Fish and Wildlife Service, Clarence Cottam, which were critical of DDT’s use to control mosquitoes in marshlands. Indeed, in the anniversary volume I coedited for the Cato Institute, Pierre Desrochers and Hiroko Shimizu report that Carson herself unsuccessfully pitched an article attacking DDT to Reader’s Digest in 1945. Unfortunately, the legacy of Silent Spring is—at best—mixed. Carson rightly pointed to abuses by government pesticide-spraying programs that ignored private property rights and caused significant harm. But Carson also embraced strands of what University of Maryland economist Robert Nelson has labeled “environmental religion.” Indeed, as Desrochers and Shimizu show, the intellectual “groundwaters” for Silent Spring included sources such as her friend William Vogt’s 1948 best-seller Road to Survival, which praised pests such as tsetse flies and malaria-carrying mosquitoes as “blessings in disguise” for reducing populations in poor countries, whose “greatest national assets” included high death rates. And Carson’s message that chemicals posed an existential threat—she termed pesticides like DDT “biocides”—helped legitimize the long-standing strain of apocalyptic thinking that environmentalists have ever since invoked to justify measures restricting liberty. Indeed, Carson’s original title for the book, Man Against the Earth, embodied the apocalyptic theme...more