Silent Spring by Rachel Carson

‘Better living through chemistry’ has been a well known motto for the Dow Chemical Company and the chemistry industry for many years. The positive effect of chemicals around the world is evident in combating disease, eradicating dangerous pests, providing medicine for acute and chronic illnesses, supplying industry with raw materials, etc. There is a daily consumption of chemicals in foods, pharmaceuticals, water, and the air we breathe. Chemicals are used in common home products as soaps, cleaners, shampoos, lipstick, preservatives, plastics, fabrics, building materials, gardening applications, paints, furniture, and many more. No one would argue that society has benefited from chemicals researched and developed by the chemical industry. In ways too numerous to note society has, in fact, had better living through chemistry. Unfortunately, some chemicals used by society in many ways, also have negative effects. Just as with nuclear energy, the chemistry industry has its downside. With victory in World War II the U. S. society gave science, and including chemistry, a blank check to produce whatever the scientists believed would be beneficial. Just as nuclear bombs destroyed our enemy, chemists were busy at work destroying insect pests in agriculture and attacking human illness. Chemists were caught in the same dichotomy as physicists who produced military weapons. Their basic research ultimately had side-effects which led to destruction. A striking similarity exists with physicists by chemists by also being part of the post-war-industrial-complex. As a result of war time science, there were in place chemical processes that were adapted to a peaceful society. After the war instead of making nerve gas, TNT bombs, ammunition, detonators, and many other chemicals used for war, chemists turned attention to control of the environment. For almost twenty years chemists produced thousands of tons of insecticides and herbicides. The explosive use of these agents went unchecked and unregulated for years.

In 1962 Rachel Carson started a quiet revolution against the chemical industry with her book Silent Spring. Up to that time chemists activities went mostly unquestioned. However, Carson coupled the chemical industry’s focus on profits and disregard for public welfare, with the government’s lack of control and regulation. The field of ecology was born with an emphasis on, not just the science, but the ethical and moral obligation of science to preserve the planet. The issue that Carson attacked first was the widespread use of DDT and pesticides. DDT was the most successful pesticide used to save countless lives. Carson believed the explosive use of chemicals to kill pests, eradicate disease, defoliate, and pollute via spraying was as effective as nuclear bomb radiation. It was an assault on nature. In an attempt to control nature the chemical industry was contaminating the environment resulting in a threat to living organisms including people. Carson writes:
For the first time in the history of the world, every human being is now subjected to contact with dangerous chemicals, from the moment of conception to the moment of death. In the less than two decades in their use, the synthetic pesticides have been so thoroughly distributed throughout the animate and inanimate world that they occur virtually everywhere… They have entered and lodged in the bodies of fish, birds, reptiles, and domestic and wild animals so universally… and man himself…All this has come about because of the sudden rise and prodigious growth of an industry for the production of man-made or synthetic chemicals with insecticidal properties. (pages 15-16)

Carson was the first to note the problem with this ubiquitous use of chemicals. The potential biological potency of DDT and other chemicals being mass produced was put on notice. Chemists now were made to face their own environmental fallout. Were the chemicals in pesticides and DDT harmful to birds and animals resulting truly in a silent spring? There was an attempt to discredit Carson and her book by the chemical industry. She was branded as emotional, and the book a diatribe by an unhappy woman. Science and society had again apparently collided. Ethical, environmental, and economic facets of this issue were forced into the open. Were the chemists responsible for chemical abuses just as the physicists? Or was the problem the development, and application of the chemicals by an industry that was motivated by economics. This situation may also be considered one that does not pit science against society since the two are so intertwined in terms of research and development on the one hand, and defining appropriate use of the chemicals on the other. What may be required as a solution is more of a holistic ownership of science where both science and society work together for the maximum benefit and minimum harm to society. Applied research must be coupled more directly with the effects that will be thrust upon society as a result of the application of the science. In this case, the use of chemicals and their effect on society, including the environment, as a whole was not considered. The need to combine applied science with outcomes on society is paramount. Carson extended the definition of society to include the planet and all living things. Perhaps the time has come where the goals or outcomes of science (here I speak of applied not basic research) and the effects on society have to be considered equally important. Up to the writing of Silent Spring the separation between the chemicals produced by science and the results on the world were separate and distinct.

The chemistry behind DDT and other pesticides is rooted in the branch of science called organic chemistry. Organic chemistry is based on chains of carbon atoms with other elements attached as a functional group that determines the chemical properties. For example, the formula for DDT, dichloro-diphenyl-trichloro-ethane’ is C14H9Cl5. This molecule was synthesized in 1874 and its potent use as an insecticide was discovered by Paul Muller in 1939. (The Merck Index, page 2829). The litany of pesticide chemicals that are dusts, sprays, and aerosols have intimidating names: dieldrin, aldrin, parathion, malathion, pentachlorophenol, methoxychlor, phenothiazine, etc. and all are noted in Carson’s book. Her work was the initial salvo as an indictment against unchecked chemical pollution on the environment that resulted in government regulation and the birth of the environmental movement in the U. S. Carson details the dangerous effect of chemical herbicides on ecosystems and society.
The ‘control of nature’ is a phrase conceived in arrogance, born of Neanderthal age of biology and philosophy, when it was supposed that nature exists for the convenience of man. The concepts and practices of applied entomology for the most part date from that Stone Age of science. It is our alarming misfortune that so primitive a science has armed itself with the most modern and terrible weapons, and that in turning them against the insects, it has also turned them against the earth. (page 297)