Figuring, page 51
Carson resigned as the conclusion of the heated 1952 election season loomed with alarming inevitability. Its result ended the Democrats’ two-decade reign of the White House. When Eisenhower took office, the Republican administration swiftly began instituting policies that effected the destruction of nature, casting it as a commodity of industry. The Fish and Wildlife Service—the sole government agency responsible for the protection and preservation the natural world—was atop their target list. After appointing a businessman as secretary of the interior, the Republican government removed the longtime director of the Fish and Wildlife Service, Albert M. Day—a trained field scientist and a passionate, visionary conservationist whom Carson considered a kindred spirit and mentor—and replaced him with a nonscientist political pawn who would sign off on removing hard-won environmental protections in order to turn nature into “natural resources”—a euphemism for profitable commodities.
Carson believed that such exploitation of nature for ruthless commercial and political gain “should be deeply disturbing to every thoughtful citizen.” In August 1953—the summer she met Dorothy—she poured her sobering rhetoric into a letter to the editor of The Washington Post. Since Carson was already the most esteemed science writer in the country, it was picked up by the wire of the Associated Press, syndicated widely, and reprinted in Reader’s Digest—the era’s equivalent of going viral. Carson’s voice was a clarion call to resistance:
The real wealth of the Nation lies in the resources of the earth—soil, water, forests, minerals, and wildlife. To utilize them for present needs while insuring their preservation for future generations requires a delicately balanced and continuing program, based on the most extensive research. Their administration is not properly, and cannot be, a matter of politics.
The agencies responsible for those resources, she argued, should be governed by people with the proper expertise and experience to understand and heed the findings of the scientists in their charge. Her words of admonition reverberate with ominous prescience across the decades between her time and ours:
For many years public-spirited citizens throughout the country have been working for the conservation of the natural resources, realizing their vital importance to the Nation. Apparently their hard-won progress is to be wiped out, as a politically minded Administration returns us to the dark ages of unrestrained exploitation and destruction.
A century after Walt Whitman remarked that “America, if eligible at all to downfall and ruin, is eligible within herself, not without,” Carson ended her letter with a kindred sentiment:
It is one of the ironies of our time that, while concentrating on the defense of our country against enemies from without, we should be so heedless of those who would destroy it from within.
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Several months after the publication of The Edge of the Sea, a book in which Carson had noted the systematically documented and “well recognized” fact of global climate change, this seething cauldron of environmental concern came to a boiling point and became the subject of her next and final book—the masterwork that would ignite the modern environmental movement.
Ever since Reader’s Digest had rejected her DDT story idea more than a decade earlier, Carson had remained alert to the dangers of chemical poisons and the increasing recklessness of pesticide spraying for so-called pest control. She keenly followed scientific studies on the effects of pesticides on wildlife and clipped all newspaper articles she could find on the subject, which came in growing numbers as more and more communities around the country reported the mass deaths of birds, fish, frogs, small mammals, cattle, horses, and household pets following pesticide spraying. Scientists found that even earthworms—the creatures Dickinson had eulogized as “our little kinsmen” and Darwin had celebrated in his final book as having plowed and created the earth as we know it, without whose work agriculture “would be very difficult, if not wholly impossible”—were dying by the legion from pesticide poisoning. The mere 20 percent that survived carried the chemical in their bodies and transmitted it to the birds who ate them, poisoning them in turn. The human animal, too, was far from safe. Reports of horrifying cases were piling up: the thirty-eight-year-old illiterate farmer who, not realizing the chemical with which he sprayed his tobacco crop was toxic, let himself get soaked with it and was dead within fifteen hours; the young entomologist studying pesticides at a university who neglected to put on his protective mask one morning, grew nauseous at the lab by the afternoon, and died at home by evening; the ten-year-old who found a bottle in the woods and drank from it, not knowing it was filled with tetraethyl pyrophosphate—an insecticide developed in the late 1940s and hailed by newspapers as “the answer to the 17-year locust plague” afflicting the Midwest; the child foamed at the mouth and was dead within fifteen minutes. Such cases were far from isolated horror stories—in California alone, state records reported more than a thousand human poisonings by pesticide per year.
The chemical most widely used for pest control was DDT—dichloro-diphenyl-trichloroethane, for the insect control application of which the Swiss chemist Paul Müller had received the Nobel Prize a decade earlier. The use of DDT had accelerated during World War II, when showers of it further dehumanized Jewish refugees thought to be carrying lice. In 1943, the U.S. Army doused more than a million civilians with DDT in an effort to contain a typhus epidemic in Naples. Although other factors may well have led to the successful curtailment of the outbreak, DDT took on the sheen of a silver bullet against insect-borne diseases and was soon applied as liberally as mercury had been prescribed a century earlier, its side effects just as untested and its long-term consequences as unconsidered.
In 1957, aware of Carson’s longtime disquiet about pesticides, Marie Rodell alerted her to a case in Long Island, where fourteen citizens were taking the federal government to court in an effort to save their land from being sprayed against gypsy moths, citing growing concern over the environmental hazards of DDT and lack of evidence that gypsy moths were problematic in the area in the first place.
The trial was organized by a local poet and farmer named Marjorie Spock. At eighteen, Marjorie—the younger sister of the pediatrician Benjamin Spock—had rebelled against her family’s pressure toward a traditional life by moving to Switzerland to study biodynamic agriculture—the term “organic” as related to produce wouldn’t come into popular use for another decade—with the Austrian philosopher and social reformer Rudolf Steiner. There she met and fell in love with another student of Steiner’s—Mary Richards, who went by the nickname Polly. Disabled by a lifelong digestive disorder, most likely to have been celiac disease, Polly could consume only the purest food. When the couple moved back to America in their twenties, they settled not far from Whitman’s hometown in Long Island and sustained themselves with modest organic farming—a lovely vegetable garden and a couple of dairy cows.
In the summer of 1957, government airplanes began raining DDT mixed with fuel oil on Marjorie and Polly’s little farm as frequently as every two hours, supplanting “the delicate and wild odor of the woods” Whitman had once celebrated in the Long Island air with the miasma of chemicals and jet fuel. Appalled at this toxic violation of their civil liberty and afraid for their very lives, the couple saw no choice but to sue for an injunction. Spock hired a skilled legal team and recruited other residents of the pesticide-barraged area, including J. P. Morgan’s daughter, Theodore Roosevelt’s son, and Robert Cushman Murphy, the prominent naturalist and former curator of birds for the American Museum of Natural History.
After twenty-two weeks in court, an Eisenhower-appointed judge refused to allow seventy-five uncontested findings of scientific fact in evidence and denied the citizens’ appeal. The defeat ultimately cost Spock and Richards $100,000, but their case established a model for citizen resistance against the government’s assault on nature.
Carson, having followed the proceedings, was galled by the verdict, her alarm further amplified when she learned that Reader’s Digest, which had rejected her DDT exposé thirteen years earlier, was planning an article in favor of pesticide spraying. She asked Rodell to put her in contact with Spock, who was thrilled by Carson’s interest in the case. She then began calling government offices tasked with studying the effects of aerial spraying on wildlife, reaching as high as the U.S. Congress in the hope of finding an official willing to talk to her.
A Deep Throat of sorts finally emerged from the Food and Drug Administration and whispered to her the rumor, which the agency was still investigating, that a major baby food manufacturer had ceased using a particular vegetable owing to pesticide contamination. As she gathered evidence, Carson wrote to the editor of Reader’s Digest to admonish him against “the enormous danger—both to wildlife and, more frighteningly, to public health—in these rapidly growing projects for insect control by poisons, especially as widely and randomly distributed by airplanes.” Once again, her admonition fell on deaf ears.
In January 1958, the Boston Herald published a spirited letter by a friend of Spock’s from New Hampshire, herself an organic gardener and naturalist, reporting the decimation of wildlife by pesticide spraying, cautioning against the potential deadly consequences to humans, and inciting citizens to take a stand against this “mass poisoning.” The paper published several responses, including one from a man involved in the spraying program who declared pesticides “entirely harmless” and dismissed the woman’s letter as “hysterical.”
Olga Owens Huckins, former literary editor of the Boston Post, sent the editor of the Boston Herald a searing account of the gruesome deaths that birds in the sanctuary behind her home had died the previous summer after a mosquito control airplane had rained poison over their small shoreside town:
The “harmless” shower bath killed seven of our lovely songbirds outright. We picked up three dead bodies the next morning right by the door. They were birds that had lived close to us, trusted us, and built their nests in our trees year after year. The next day three were scattered around the bird bath. (I had emptied it and scrubbed it after the spraying but YOU CAN NEVER KILL DDT.) On the following day one robin dropped suddenly from a branch in our woods. We were too heartsick to hunt for other corpses. All of these birds died horribly, and in the same way. Their bills were gaping open, and their splayed claws were drawn up to their breasts in agony.
Addressing the argument that DDT is the lesser evil in the war on mosquitoes, Huckins noted that the spraying had actually produced pesticide-resistant mosquitoes far more vicious than those of previous seasons and insisted that the solution to the problem was not to double the strength of the poisons but to stop spraying altogether until there was sufficient evidence, “biological and scientific, immediate and long run, of the effects upon wild life and human beings.”
Huckins sent a copy of her letter to Carson—they had been epistolary friends ever since Carson had written to thank her for a beautiful review of The Sea Around Us seven years earlier. She begged Carson to help her find someone in Washington who might be able to help. In the course of sourcing that someone for her friend, Carson would later recall, she began seriously considering a book on the subject.
Shortly after receiving Huckins’s letter, Carson reached out to E. B. White, whose lyrical nature essays she and Dorothy had read aloud to each other in their private hours but who also wielded the light-saber of his radiant mind with merciless might at what he saw as morally troublesome. In his New Yorker editorials, the beloved author of Charlotte’s Web and Stuart Little had been among the first to caution against the dangers of humanity’s arrogant misuses of science against nature. Two years earlier, he had admonished:
I think man’s gradual, creeping contamination of the planet, his sending up of dust into the air, his strontium additive in our bones, his discharge of industrial poisons into rivers that once flowed clear, his mixing of chemicals with fog on the east wind add up to a fantasy of such grotesque proportions as to make everything said on the subject seem pale and anemic by contrast….I belong to a small, unconventional school that believes…that no chemical waste is the correct amount to discharge into the fresh rivers of the world.
Carson alerted White to the Long Island case, telling Dorothy it was just “the sort of thing he could be devastating about if he chose”—a corrective devastation she hoped to see on the pages of the country’s most influential magazine.
White responded right away. Pesticides, he told Carson, were but one part of the vast problem of pollution, which ought to be “of the utmost interest and concern” to every wakeful citizen. “It starts in the kitchen and extends to Jupiter and Mars,” he observed with prescience apprehended only in hindsight. But White, who professed not to know “a chlorinated hydrocarbon from a squash bug,” thought Carson far more scientifically qualified for the task and intimated that she should cover it for The New Yorker herself.
But Carson had reached out to White because, despite her unwavering moral conviction about the cause, she was simply too threadbare to take on the task. She was consumed with the care of her eighty-five-year-old mother. She was learning to mother her new six-year-old son. She was gnawed by guilt over a contract she had signed four years earlier with Harper & Brothers for a book on the origins of life for a new series titled World Perspectives—envisioned by the philosopher Ruth Nanda Anshen, it was to feature books by the world’s great “spiritual and intellectual leaders who possess full consciousness of the pressing problems of our time with all their implications,” with a board of editors including Niels Bohr and Robert Oppenheimer. Carson would never complete this book on evolution, as she was increasingly unsettled by the hazards of DDT, the arrogant destruction of nature, and the hijacking of science as an instrument of political and military power.
Carson confided in Dorothy that this problem had rendered her “mentally blocked for a long time” as she struggled to figure out how to celebrate life in an authentic way against the dark backdrop of its destruction—a disconnect that troubled her more and more as she witnessed the advent and subsequent misuse of atomic science. She wrote:
Some of the thoughts that came were so unattractive to me that I rejected them completely, for the old ideas die hard, especially when they are emotionally as well as intellectually dear to one. It was pleasant to believe, for example, that much of Nature was forever beyond the tampering reach of man.
Carson had witnessed the terrible aftermath of the atomic bomb, which had decimated not only innumerable human lives but entire ecosystems. The detonation in Japan immediately killed every living thing within a seven-kilometer radius and melted the serene stone countenance of every Buddha at the local temples. Radioactive fallout tainted the oceans and the skies, permeating the soil in which plants grew, invading the cells of the animals that subsisted on them, and lodging itself in the very body of nature.
It had all begun one November day twenty years earlier, not with the impulse for destruction but with the purest impulse of science—that hungry fusion of wonder and curiosity with which we seek to understand the universe. It had begun, of course, long before that, for every beginning is an arbitrary point stabbed into the continuum that binds all events and all ages.
26
BETWEEN THE SCALE OF ATOMS AND THE SCALE OF WORLDS
On a bright July morning in 1901, at a plaza named for Beethoven in Vienna’s old city, a pale young woman presents herself at a distinguished boys’ school, elated exhaustion encircling her large dark eyes. At twenty-three, she is about to take the Matura—an examination boys must pass before being admitted to a university; boys, because until this summer, Austrian universities have been closed to women. But Lise Meitner is ready. It has been nine years since the end of the only formal education available to her. She has labored tirelessly, compressing eight years’ worth of mathematics, logic, literature, Greek, Latin, zoology, botany, and physics into twenty months in preparation for the Matura now that she is finally permitted to take it.
Meitner aced the exam and went on to study at the University of Vienna with the physicist and philosopher Ludwig Boltzmann, whose visionary statistical mathematics furnished the first predictive model of how the properties of atoms shape the properties of matter. Months after Boltzmann’s death, Meitner received her Ph.D., becoming one of the first women in the world with a doctorate in physics.
Despite her credentials, the only job offer she received was from a gas lamp factory. She declined and left Vienna for Berlin, hoping to study with the quantum theory pioneer Max Planck. But she seemed to have entered a time machine—German universities still had their doors bolted to women. The achingly shy Meitner had to beseech for special permission to attend Planck’s lectures.
Months after Rachel Carson’s birth, twenty-nine-year-old Lise Meitner met Otto Hahn—a progressive German chemist her own age, unopposed to working with women, and cut of the same cloth: Both scientists were restless about the multitude of unanswered questions at the smallest scale of reality, defiant of the notion that they might be unanswerable, and determined to answer them—together. But women were prohibited from entering, much less working at, Berlin’s Chemical Institute. In order to collaborate, Meitner and Hahn had to work in a former carpentry shop converted into a laboratory in the basement of the building. Hahn was allowed to ascend to the upper floors, but Meitner was not—a metaphor not worth belaboring.
Over the course of their thirty-year collaboration, the two scientists would fill each other’s gaps with their respective aptitudes—Meitner, trained in physics, was a brilliant mathematician who thought conceptually and could design highly original experiments to test her ideas; Hahn, trained in chemistry, excelled at punctilious lab work. Eventually, Meitner branched out on her own, publishing an astounding fifty-six papers between 1921 and 1934. Her reputation as a pioneer of nuclear physics and one of the preeminent experimentalists of her time prompted Einstein to herald her as the Marie Curie of the German-speaking world.
