A conspiracy of silence
Seven wild women / Rachel Carson
Dichloro-diphenyl-trichloroethane. DDT. Three heavy letters that, hooks rusted, hang leadened weights to the heart. Known also as the ‘atomic bomb of pesticides’, DDT was formulated in vast quantities for use during the second world war to combat disease spread by lice and mosquitoes, the successful application of this toxic crystalline chemical was very soon to be belched from planes and helicopters over farmland across the United States. A contact poison that disorganises the nervous system of a wide variety of insects, hailed a silver bullet pesticide, a single shot formula for putting an end to the blight of agricultural disease, this neatly tailored funeral cloak was cast across the land, silencing meadows and fields beneath its smothering sprawl. In the years that followed, the rural landscape in effect became a desert, void of almost all life, nothing more than a bleak regimented patchwork of panels hammered into a form that suited our human needs, riveted together with posts and barbed wire.
Falcon eggs
“It was a spring without voices. On the mornings that had once throbbed with the dawn chorus of robins, catbirds, doves, jays, wrens, and scores of other bird voices there was now no sound; only silence lay over the fields and woods and marsh”
Born in Springdale Pennsylvania in 1907, Rachel Carson was instinctively drawn to the study of wildlife from an early age, as a child, if she wasn't exploring the land surrounding her parents farm, then she had her head in a book. She loved to read and had a deep fascination with words, later enrolling at Pennsylvania college for women to study English. But it wasn't too long before Rachel recognised that all those days lost without anchor, adrift upon the texts of Moby dick and Treasure island, had not been simply escapist indulgences, it had not been just the pitch and swell of words that had carried her imagination, but also the central protagonist, the ocean, with a growing realisation that it was only the natural world that could guide her writing. With no time to waste she switched her studies to biology, reinforcing her education and fascination for the sea by attending summer courses at the Woods Hole marine biological laboratory in Massachusetts. Having to stay on for an extra year due to financial difficulties she finally graduated and continued to persevere against the odds to gain a master’s degree in zoology, she had become a rare hybrid of scientist and poet, a perfect storm of lyric, knowledge and passion.
Pursuing her ocean writing she had a breakthrough when Atlantic monthly published a short essay titled Undersea, this was later to become expanded into her first book Under the sea wind, followed 10 years later by The sea around us then another five years before the edge of the sea, this trilogy of books dedicated to the ocean were successful and critically well received, the pages are inked from the heart and filled with observations punctuated with a rare, simple and profound perfection.
“To stand at the edge of the sea, to sense the ebb and the flow of the tides, to feel the breath of a mist moving over a great salt marsh, to watch the flight of shore birds that have swept up and down the surf lines of the continents for untold thousands of years, to see the running of the old eels and the young shad to the sea, is to have knowledge of things that are as nearly eternal as any earthly life can be.”
The ground breaking work that would rattle the fire bell beside the sleeping ear of governments around the world was about to hit the shelves and it wouldn't be a book about the sea. In the late 1950’s Rachel had started to focus her research on conservation and the environment. She was becoming more and more concerned by the quantities of pesticide being showered over swathes of countryside without any questions concerning the effects on wildlife. The use of synthetic pesticides, especially DDT, had been concerning her for many years, and escalating reports of high mortality in birds where DDT was being sprayed forced her hand.
In 1962 Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring was unleashed upon the world, nothing this accessible had been made so publicly visible and available before, this was a brave revolutionary book that slammed a fist down on the legislation office table shouting no more! In a language that all could easily digest, Silent spring examined, through meticulous research, how short-sighted human activities were having a negative impact upon life on earth, targeting chemical manufacturers and the napping government officials. Stating a fierce argument against the obsessive overuse of pesticides and the far reaching, long term damage their use causes to human health and the wider environment. Silent Spring directly accused government bodies of intentional disinformation, questioning why whiter than white industry claims were being accepted without question, why if alarm bells were ringing was no one running?
Many chapters were dedicated to lifting the shroud on the hidden noxious mechanisms of DDT, literally a machine of war which was now being pushed by commercial companies for domestic use. Silent Spring pressed the point that due to its low solubility DDT inflicts extensive long term damage to aquatic life, running from the land into waterways it enters the base of the food chain, starting with zooplankton and crustaceans which are processed by invertebrates, who in turn are eaten by fish, which are then consumed by birds and mammals and so on and because these chemicals never leave the body, each predator in succession becomes more toxic than the last, the predator at the top of the chain (including humans) becoming super toxic. This calamitous discovery became most evident when catastrophic declines in raptor (bird of prey) populations became apparent, species such as Peregrine falcons were being hit with such an impact that local extinctions were occurring. These highly successful apex predators were feeding on contaminated mammals and birds, the poisons they were carrying reducing their ability to produce calcium, making egg shells so thin that they would break in the nest.
Due mostly to the influence of Rachel Carson, and her book Silent Spring, DDT was eventually banned in the US in 1972, (banned in the UK in 1986) but not before untold damage to wildlife and ecosystems had been cause. In the thirty years prior to the ban 1,350,000,000 pounds of this toxic concoction had already been dumped across hills, valleys, rivers and streams, decades later, the recovery from this damage is only just beginning to turn the corner.
Silent Spring is an astonishing piece of science led investigative journalism penned by a poet, its beauty lies within its ability explain facts in simple terms, it highlighted the interconnections between humans and the rest of the natural world, it empowered the everyday person with the knowledge that could fuel positive action, it created a change in attitude towards the natural environment and is now widely regarded as being the igniting force behind the modern global environmental movement. Greta and school strikes now crop up in common every day conversion, young people across the world are now the ones shattering the stagnant silence with that clattering fire bell, the blue touch that Rachel Carson held an ember to in the late 1960’s, now fizzes and crackles with a fresh exhilarating ferocity, casting magnesium bright bouncing sparks in every direction, kindling fresh fires wherever they fall.
“One way to open your eyes is to ask yourself, what if I had never seen this before? What if I would never see it again?”