All language subtitles for American Experience S29E04 Rachel Carson.en

Narrator :
It was 1962, the height of the Cold War,

a moment when unrelenting
anxiety about the future

was leavened by an abiding faith
in the power of science

to secure our safety and prosperity.

Then came an incendiary book
that sowed seeds of doubt.

MAN (on film) :
This is one of the nation's best sellers,

first printed on September 27, 1962.

Up to now,
500,000 copies have been sold,

and Silent Spring has been called

the most controversial book of the year.

Narrator :
At the eye of the storm was Rachel Carson,

one of the most celebrated
American writers of her time.

With her first three books,

a lyrical trilogy about the sea,

Carson had opened people's eyes
to the natural world.

Now, in Silent Spring,
she delivered the dark warning

that they might soon destroy it.

CARSON :
If we are ever to solve the basic problem

of environmental contamination,

we must begin to count the many hidden costs

of what we are doing.

MAN (on film) :
Miss Carson maintains that the balance of nature

is a major force
in the survival of man.

Whereas the modern chemist,
the modern biologist,

the modern scientist believes

that man is steadily
controlling nature.

MAN :
It was sort of the gospel at the time

that human ingenuity
would triumph over nature.

What Carson was arguing
was for caution.

She really confronted
the orthodoxies of her time.

WOMAN :
She was accused of being a Communist,

of being a hysterical, female Luddite.

The reaction was to attack the messenger.

Narrator :
Carson was an unlikely heretic.

Dutiful, demure,
and so jealous of her solitude

that her most intimate relationship

was conducted mainly through letters.

She'd thrust herself into the public eye,

all the while harboring a secret
that was literally killing her.

To some, Silent Spring was an act of heroism;

to others, an irresponsible breach

of scientific objectivity.

But there could be no dispute

that with her rebuke
to modern technological science,

Carson had shattered a paradigm.

MAN :
Rachel Carson not only changed

the kind of questions we ask
about the environment,

I think she caused us to start
to ask those questions.

She's the instigator.

(guns booming)

Narrator :
In mid-July 1945,

as the Second World War
ground on in the Pacific

and weary Americans scanned
the morning's headlines

for the word "victory,"

Rachel Carson was trying
to call attention

to what she believed
was a war against the Earth.

Carson was 38 that summer, and restless.

A writer by inclination
and a biologist by training,

she'd spent much of the previous decade

in the employ of the
U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service,

overseeing publications
about its conservation work.

The job paid the bills, but Carson craved a wider audience.

Now, the agency had undertaken a study

she felt warranted public attention.

As she put it in a letter to
the popular monthly Reader's Digest :

"Practically at my back door in Maryland,

an experiment of more than
ordinary interest and importance

is going on."

On a vast, forested tract
at the Patuxent Research Refuge,

not far from Carson's home
in Silver Spring,

Fish and Wildlife scientists
had begun to examine

the environmental impacts

of a relatively new
chemistry lab creation:

a so-called synthetic pesticide
known as DDT.

WILLIAM SOUDER :
Dichlorodiphenyltrichloroethane, DDT.

It was first synthesized back in the 19th century

and it sat on lab shelves for decades.

Nobody knew if it did anything,
if it had any useful purpose,

until 1939, when a Swiss chemist
named Paul Muüller

discovered that it was
a very potent insecticide

and killed all kinds of bugs
very readily.

Film Narrator :
Absorbed through the feet or other parts of the body,

DDT affects the nervous system
and motor coordination

of the insect.

Several hours elapse
before symptoms develop.

Then in sequence follow
restlessness, tremors,

convulsions, paralysis,
and death.

DEBORAH BLUM :
Farmers have been doing war with insects and other pests

for a long time,

and they had been using what we think of now

as almost obviously homicidal poisons

to do that.

But for the first time,

we have a sort of new-generation pesticide.

It's a whole new fascinating
kind of chemical formula

that's not obviously toxic to people,

and insects are dying all over the place.

Narrator :
After the bombing of Pearl Harbor,

the U.S. military had rushed DDT
to the battle zones

in an effort to protect
American troops

from insect-borne diseases
such as typhus,

which was spread by lice
and, left untreated, could kill.

Film Narrator :
This was Naples, Italy, shortly after the Allied occupation.

Its crowded population lacked
almost everything

for the safeguarding
of public health:

the perfect set-up for epidemic.

DAVID KINKELA :
Naples is really a city under siege.

And typhus spreads quickly
under those kinds of conditions.

So they set up spray stations in the cities,

spraying thousands of people
a day with hand sprayers,

people who wanted to get sprayed,

people who didn't want to get sprayed,

children, elderly.

Film Narrator :
Next, the 40,000 Italians

dwelling in the jam-packed
air raid shelters

were deloused.

Narrator :
In all, more than a million people were dusted with DDT,

and the epidemic was stopped in its tracks.

Neapolitans,
The New York Times reported,

are now throwing DDT at brides
instead of rice.

Meanwhile, in the tropical Pacific theater,

where more soldiers
had been sidelined by malaria

than by gunshot wounds,

entire islands were saturated with DDT.

MARK LYTLE :
General Douglas MacArthur once said

that in war, an army commander
had three divisions,

one in the front fighting,
one in reserve,

and one in the rear
being refitted.

He said, "I have one
in the front, one in reserve,

and one in the hospital,"
because of malaria.

But with DDT, that problem
diminished substantially.

It was considered to be
a miracle substance,

in that it saved
hundreds of thousands of lives.

Narrator :
By the middle of 1944,

TIME magazine had pronounced DDT

"one of the great scientific
discoveries of World War II."

To Reader's Digest,

Rachel Carson was offering a new angle:

a piece exploring DDT's potential

to cause collateral damage to wildlife.

NAOMI ORESKES :
Biologists for the Fish and Wildlife Service

begin to see pretty quickly

that when DDT is used in certain areas,

there's evidence of problems.

There's evidence of fish kill or bird kill,

and they see that,

and like any expert, they publish it in a place

where other experts will read it.

But how that information

then filters out to a larger public

is a very big question.

SOUDER :
Carson understood the implications of this.

She wanted to write a story warning people

that, "We need to be
a little bit careful with this.

This looks like it's a great thing,

but we maybe need to be
cautious in how we use it,

how much of it we use."

LINDA LEAR :
But Reader's Digest doesn't want this article.

They essentially say,

"Oh, housewives would be
just turned off by this.

"They wouldn't want to know
about this terrible stuff,

so no-- no, thank you."

(crowd cheering)

Film Narrator :
The victory-flash-electrified Times Square

keyed to the bursting point,

as the magic word of complete
surrender came through.

Narrator :
Just weeks later, the war in the Pacific finally was won,

and credit for the victory went

to the twin weapons of modern science:

the atomic bomb and the
so-called insect bomb, DDT.

LYTLE :
America's actually healthier

and the death rate went down
during World War II,

even if you include soldiers
in the equation.

And so people considered this

a real triumph of human ingenuity

over the old pestilences of nature

that had made life nasty, brutish, and short.

BLUM :
So people just went, "Wow.

"We have this incredibly potent compound,

"doesn't cause any harm to anything but bugs.

We'll just use it everywhere."

MAN (on film) :
I consider this amazing chemical

MAN (on film) :
the most valuable contribution

of our wartime medical research program

to the future health and welfare

not only of this nation,
but of the entire world.

Narrator :
Carson's misgivings about DDT were not assuaged.

But she was in no position to spend time

on a story she couldn't sell.

LEAR :
She really is pretty certain

that synthetic pesticides are
not good for the environment,

and that they have
a power to destroy,

which is not being
made clear to anybody.

But Reader's Digest doesn't think so.

So she gives it up.

She puts it away.

But it really doesn't go away.

CARSON (dramatized) :
I can remember no time, even in earliest childhood,

when I didn't assume
I was going to be a writer.

Also, I can remember no time

when I wasn't interested
in the out-of-doors

and the whole world of nature.

Those interests, I know,

I inherited from my mother
and have always shared with her.

Narrator :
She was, from the very beginning, her mother's child.

A former schoolteacher
of stern Presbyterian stock,

Maria Carson had given up
her career

for marriage and motherhood,

only to find herself
alone among strangers.

Her husband, Robert,
while well-meaning,

had never managed to provide
more than a meager existence.

The family's clapboard house,

on the Allegheny River
just north of Pittsburgh,

lacked both central heating
and running water

throughout the 29 years
the Carsons occupied it.

Maria's two older children
already were school-aged

when their younger sister
was born,

and already showed
a marked lack of interest

in their mother's passions.

Rachel would be different.

SOUDER :
Maria Carson was an educated woman

and a woman who enjoyed reading.

She enjoyed music.

She was a person
who, to some degree,

lived a life of the mind.

ROBERT MUSIL :
She focused and passed this all on to Rachel.

She was ambitious for her daughter.

This was her youngest, brightest,

frankly, favorite child,

and so she wanted her to get a good education.

Narrator :
Inspired by a popular educational movement

which held that children should
"study nature, not books,"

Maria made the surrounding woods
and fields

Rachel's first classroom.

Learn to love the natural world,
the theory went,

and one will wish to protect it.

LYTLE :
Rachel and her mother

would spend their afternoons
together exploring.

She learned to identify
wild things

and the songs of birds,

and she could recognize the
nests, and the flora and fauna.

Her mother taught her to be
rigorous in her observation,

but it also, of course,

deepened her relationship
with her mother.

Narrator :
She was the solitary sort of girl

who greeted the birds on the way
to school in the morning

and was partial to the
companionship of books.

At the age of eight,
she was writing stories of her own.

At ten, at her mother's urging,
Rachel entered a contest

sponsored by the popular
children's magazine St. Nicholas

and became a published author.

By 14, she was submitting
her work to magazines for sale.

MUSIL :
If we picture a girl in a small farm

in Nowhere, Pennsylvania,

who is transported
through literature

and can imagine being elsewhere,

I think she was led to see that
as something that she could do,

and it was constantly reinforced.

LEAR :
Maria Carson had always wanted to go to college and couldn't,

so she was going to be
quite sure that this daughter,

this smart daughter,
was going to go to college.

Narrator :
When Rachel won a scholarship to Pennsylvania College for Women,

Maria sold off
even the family china

to help cover
her daughter's expenses,

then made the 30-mile round trip
to Pittsburgh most weekends

to visit her.

SOUDER :
She was the star pupil.

Everyone realized right away
what a talented writer she was

and also saw that
this was her ambition in life,

that she wanted to be a writer.

So it came as a great shock when
she fell in love with biology.

The science of life
just struck a chord in her

that I think she didn't realize
was there.

Narrator :
Thrilled by the prospect of understanding the natural world

she'd been taught
to so closely observe,

Carson changed her major
from English to biology

and announced her intention
to go on to graduate school.

She spent the next two years

taking courses in zoology,
physiology, anatomy.

But her true interest

only revealed itself
after graduation,

when she landed
a coveted research spot

at the Marine Biology Laboratory
in Woods Hole, Massachusetts,

and for the first time in her life

laid eyes on the ocean.

LEAR :
She's moved beyond just the ordinary person would be moved

who would have seen the ocean
for the first time.

The sea taught her everything

that she later came
to want to understand

and want the world
to understand,

that everything was connected
to everything else.

SOUDER :
If you study biology

and if you look at how all life
on Earth has evolved,

eventually you begin
to see everything in totality.

You can't divorce yourself
or any other living thing

from the environment
that we all share.

And Carson was fascinated by that.

LYTLE :
It was one of the most liberating,

expansive experiences
she ever had in her life.

One of her overriding lessons
was that the sea,

with all of its massive expanse
and its varieties of creatures,

was beyond the controlling hand
of man.

Narrator :
Had it not been for the Depression

and her family's dire
financial straits,

Carson might have become
a marine biologist.

As it was,

she'd barely started her
graduate work at Johns Hopkins

before her parents, her
older sister, and her two nieces

came to live with her
in Baltimore.

Full-time study gave way
to part-time study

and part-time work.

Then, when Carson was 28,
her father died suddenly.

Not long after, her sister died,
as well,

leaving two daughters
in Rachel and her mother's care.

Now the family's
sole breadwinner,

Carson left Johns Hopkins
with her master's degree

and took a job with
the U.S. Bureau of Fisheries,

writing an assortment
of publications

about the bureau's
marine conservation work.

SOUDER :
As she's looking over the press releases she's writing,

she realizes
that some of these subjects

are kind of interesting

and could be turned
into feature stories

for a local newspaper.

So she starts selling stories
to The Baltimore Sun

that are based
on some of the work

that she's seeing being done
at the Bureau of Fisheries.

Narrator :
From time to time,

Carson omitted her first name
from her signature,

believing certain pieces
would have more credibility

if they were presumed to have
been written by a man.

Still, as she later said,
"It was a turning point.

"I had given up writing forever,
I thought.

It never occurred to me

that I was merely getting
something to write about."

SOUDER :
She has at last found this way

to combine her two passions in life.

Biology and writing merge,

and I think really
from that time forward,

she never thinks of them
as being separate things.

What she is is someone
who writes about science.

Narrator :
In 1937, a piece Carson published in The Atlantic

came to the attention of Simon & Schuster,

which offered her
a small advance

for a book about the sea.

Hopeful the opportunity
would help her

make the leap
to full-time writer,

she poured three years' worth
of nights and weekends

into the book,

a kind of literary triptych

about the lives
of three sea creatures.

Under the Sea-Wind earned early critical praise,

but the rush to the bookstore
Carson had dreamed of

never happened.

(bombs streaking and exploding)

SOUDER :
A few weeks after the book is released,

the Japanese attack
Pearl Harbor,

and everybody's attention
shifts from books,

certainly from slight books,

like a book about creatures
that live in the ocean.

And Under The Sea-Wind went
just kind of vanishes without a trace,

never sells even 2,000 copies.

Narrator :
For Carson, there would be no escape from her day job.

The Bureau of Fisheries by then
had merged with another agency

to become the
U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service,

but Carson's position
was essentially unchanged.

And though she excelled in it,
it was not work that she loved.

By the time the war came
to an end, in 1945,

she was back
to pitching feature stories

and frustrated beyond measure.

What she was,
as a friend put it,

was a "would-be writer

was a "would-be writer

who could not afford the time
for creative work."

LEAR :
I don't think Rachel sees that there's much alternative.

She's got a good job,
she's got family to support.

So she's really stuck.

She felt she'd come
to an obstacle

that didn't have
any easy way around.

Really for the first time
in her life,

I think she really didn't see
the way forward.

And, I think, she was in the "now what?" phase for several years.

ANNOUNCER :
Headlines in Chemistry.

ANNOUNCER 2 :
And here is our first headline.

Science can now rid the country of mosquitoes.

ANNOUNCER 3 :
The mosquito is doomed!

And so is the tiny bloodthirsty black fly.

These biting insects can now
be completely wiped out

by man-made fogs
loaded with DDT.

Narrator :
Not long after Reader's Digest declined Carson's DDT piece,

the "miracle pesticide"
was released for civilian use.

For the first time,
the insect-borne scourges

that spread disease
and ravaged crops

seemed subject to man's control.

LYTLE :
Most people were inclined to think of humans

as the superior, apex species,

and that the rest of the animal,
plant kingdom

existed for our convenience,

and that man's function was to dominate

and, in a sense, bend nature to his purposes.

And so the ethos of science and technology

is that humans could improve on nature.

SOUDER :
DDT was going to end diseases like malaria and typhus.

It was going to greatly increase
agricultural output.

DDT was thought to be
so important

that Paul Muüller won the
Nobel Prize for discovering DDT.

Narrator :
Cheap and long-lasting, DDT was rushed into widespread use

practically overnight.

In the southeastern United States,

where malaria was rife,

a coalition of state and
local health agencies

treated some 4 1/2 million homes with DDT.

By 1951, malaria had been eliminated

from the entire country.

(engine buzzing)

The U.S. Department
of Agriculture,

meanwhile, promoted DDT to farmers

and, in conjunction
with the military,

sold thousands of decommissioned
planes as crop dusters,

boosting agricultural yields
across the country.

SOUDER :
It's hard to understand now

because it seems instinctive to us.

But the idea that a chemical

might present a hazard
to your health

or to the well-being
of the natural environment,

this was not front-of-mind
for anybody at the time.

There was really no rigorous
testing of these chemicals

to ensure their safety.

There was much greater attention paid

to whether they were effective.

BLUM :
Nature was big, and dark, and scary, and dangerous

in profound ways
through much of human history.

So when people looked at nature,

they saw that the world would be safer

if they could master it.

And when you get something
that looks like a tool,

a "magic bullet,"

you want the magic bullet.

Narrator :
Spurred by the success of DDT,

chemists soon created a host
of new pesticidal compounds:

endrin, dieldrin, toxaphene.

Over the decade to come,
all would be weapons

in the struggle
to master nature.

KINKELA :
So you see an explosion of American science

that has the potential to solve
deep-seated problems

of famine and disease
around the world.

And so there's this sense
of a quest.

We have the tools,
we have the technology,

we have the know-how,
and this is our moment.

Narrator :
On an overcast morning in July 1949,

Rachel Carson found herself

in a boat
off the coast of Miami,

staring down
into the storm-churned waters

of Biscayne Bay.

After five years spent
making the best of her job

at the Fish and Wildlife Service,

she'd begun to toy with the idea

of writing another book
about the sea,

and this time,
she was determined

to experience her subject firsthand.

SOUDER :
She probably didn't let on that she was a very poor swimmer.

She didn't like boats.

You know, she was happy being in up to about her knees,

and beyond that she really
wasn't very comfortable.

But she felt that if she could
somehow muster the courage

to go under the surface,

that it would be illuminating
and helpful to her

in her writing.

Narrator :
From her desk in Maryland,

it had seemed critical
to her research

that she make this dive.

But now, on the boat,

the prospect of simply
getting into the water

seemed impossibly daunting.

The diving helmet alone
weighed 84 pounds.

Carson, at 5 feet, 4 inches tall, weighed all of 120.

Trembling, she managed
to descend about eight feet,

to the bottom
of the boat's ladder,

staying just long enough to note
the presence of seaweed

and a few vibrantly colored fish.

She never once let go
of the ladder's rung.

SOUDER :
Her face mask kind of clouded up.

She was breathing heavily,
she was terrified.

But she spent a few minutes there

and then climbed back up the ladder

and

and went home.

Narrator :
Carson judged the dive a success,

because she'd at least been able

to glimpse the ocean's surface from below.

But as research,
it was largely irrelevant:

the new book was to be based
not on firsthand observation,

but rather on the surfeit
of oceanographic studies

that lately had been piling up
on her desk.

ORESKES :
Up until World War II, nobody really worried much

about what happened
below the waves.

But in World War II,

submarine warfare becomes
important for the first time,

and the only way you can operate
in the submarine environment

is with a very, very detailed
understanding of the ocean.

And so we start learning
a tremendous amount

about the ocean and
about the life in the deep ocean

that had been quite mysterious
before that.

And the idea that there was

all this amazing diverse life in the ocean

that we didn't really know about

and that is existing as a kind of parallel universe,

I think that that really captured her.

LEAR :
Carson wanted to be the biographer of the ocean.

She wanted certainly to tell
about its beauty

and about how intricate
nature was.

It's the same question
that she approached

in Under the Sea-Wind,

only now there was
all this information

that she could tap.

She had access
to confidential information.

She had access to war records.

She had access
to submarine research.

She was a master synthesizer.

She could take information
from this place and that place

and then see how it went together

in ways that I don't think very many people can do.

SOUDER :
Carson's technique was to identify

the leading experts
in the field,

ask a few harmless questions
about their work,

and then once she got
her foot in the door with them,

to expand the questioning

so that she could really pick
their brains.

Narrator :
In the evenings, after a full day at the office

and dinner with her mother,

Carson cloistered herself in her study

and worked on her book,
sometimes until dawn.

DEBORAH CRAMER :
Once you have all these hundreds and hundreds of papers,

you need to shape them
in some kind of narrative,

and that requires
a very different prose style

than what she was reading.

And so when you go about
taking that material

and transforming it,
but still being true to it,

it's just an extraordinarily difficult thing,

because when you choose different words to describe it,

you run the risk

of mistranslating what you're reading.

LEAR :
It was a painstaking process because she was a perfectionist.

She had to get
the first sentence right

before she could go
to the second sentence.

And then she'd revise.

It takes a long time for her
to get something that she likes,

and then in the morning,
she's likely to revise it again,

so things go very slowly.

Narrator :
Determined that this book would not languish

as Under the Sea-Wind had,

Carson signed on with a literary
agent named Marie Rodell,

who sold the volume
to Oxford Press

even before it had a title.

"Current suggestions

from irreverent friends
and relatives," Carson joked,

"include Out of My Depth and Carson at Sea."

By the spring of 1950,
the manuscript,

now bearing the title The Sea Around Us,

was nearly finished.

Hoping to foster advance
interest in its publication,

Rodell began shopping excerpts
to magazines.

15 turned the material down

before it finally made its way
to William Shawn,

editor of The New Yorker,

who offered to publish ten
of the book's chapters.

SOUDER :
This is the turning point in Carson's career.

The New Yorker is a very prestigious,

widely read, widely respected magazine,

and so to be serialized in The New Yorker,

to have your work preview there

ahead of its publication as a book

is almost a guarantee of success.

Narrator :
Carson would clear more from The New Yorker serialization

than she did from an entire year

at the Fish and Wildlife Service.

"I am still in a daze," she cabled Rodell.

"All I know is how lucky I am to have you."

By the time Carson's book went
to print in the spring of 1951,

the world seemed to be cleaving in two.

The Soviet Union had shaken
Americans' sense of security

with the successful test
of an atomic bomb.

Communist forces had triumphed in China.

Now there was a pervasive feeling

that the struggle to stem the red tide

would be unremitting.

ANNOUNCER :
From the White House in Washington, D.C.,

President Harry S. Truman.

TRUMAN :
My fellow Americans,

I want to talk to you plainly tonight

about what we are doing in Korea

and about our policy in the Far East.

In the simplest terms,
what we are doing in Korea

is this: we are trying
to prevent a third world war.

Narrator :
Against the backdrop of war, both hot and cold,

Carson worried
that her second book

would founder like the first.

But thanks to The New Yorker serialization,

readers snapped it up
all across the country

and found in its pages
an antidote to anxiety.

READER :
"The whole world ocean extends

over about three-fourths
of the surface of the globe.

If we subtract the shallow
areas of the continental shelves

and the scattered banks
and shoals,

where at least the pale ghost
of sunlight

moves over the underlying
bottom,

there still remains
about half the Earth

that is covered by miles-deep,
lightless water,

that has been dark
since the world began."

Narrator :
Drawing upon all that was then known about the ocean,

Carson told the story
of its life over the eons

and revealed a natural realm
largely indifferent

to the rhythms of man.

SOUDER :
It's a book that is jammed with news from the natural world.

It's about currents,
about the propagation of waves,

about storm systems, about the
ocean's relationship to climate.

You have to remember
that this is all new.

Nobody knows
what the ocean is like.

So there's a lot
of really compelling information

that transcends that term.

It's not just information,
it's revelation.

It's this immersive experience.

Narrator :
"It is a work of science," one critic raved.

"It is stamped with authority.

It is a work of art:

It is saturated
with the excitement of mystery.

It is literature."

CRAMER :
What she has done is to take a very complicated subject

and distill it into its essence,

and bring the reader right there.

So science, which can be

extraordinarily impersonal and dry,

has suddenly become immediate and very important.

Narrator :
Three weeks after it appeared in bookstores,

The Sea Around Us made The New York Times bestseller list.

Amid the near-universal praise for the book,

there occasionally emerged
a distorted portrait of Carson

as a working scientist
with rare literary gifts,

or as an experienced diver
who'd come to know her subject

at a depth of a hundred feet.

Thrilled about the book's success

but dismayed at the attention
focused on its author,

Carson did nothing
to correct the misconceptions.

SOUDER :
Critic after critic

would remark in some way,
either off handedly or directly,

how amazing it was

that a woman understood
these technical matters

and wrote so beautifully
about them,

particularly because the ocean
was such a hostile place,

where, you know,
presumably only men could go.

So Carson had to endure that.

And so I think
letting this fiction stand

was her little way
of kind of getting even

with the people that doubted her
or doubted her gender.

I think it amused her.

Narrator :
By early September, The Sea Around Us

had reached number one
on the bestseller list.

There it would remain
for an astonishing 32 weeks.

When it at last dropped a notch,
it was joined on the list

by a re-issue
of Carson's first book,

in what The New York Times called

a "publishing phenomenon as rare
as a total solar eclipse."

At 44, Rachel Carson,
the one-time "would-be writer,"

had two of the country's
non-fiction bestsellers.

LYTLE :
The Sea Around Us was

one of the bestselling
science books of all time.

It sold almost two million copies

in its initial publication.

It was also translated into,
I think, 30 foreign languages,

so it was an international bestseller.

It won the National Book Award.

So it really made her
a public figure

with a very large following.

Narrator :
"We have been troubled about the world,

and had almost lost faith in
man," one reader wrote Carson.

"It helps to think about
the long history of the Earth,

and of how life came to be.

When we think in terms
of millions of years,

we are not so impatient

that our own problems
be solved tomorrow."

MILITARY SPOKESMAN :
You have a grandstand seat here

to one of the most momentous events

in the history of science.

This is the first full-scale
test of a hydrogen device.

If the reaction goes,
we're in the thermonuclear era.

MAN (on loudspeaker) :
It is now 30 seconds to zero time.

Put on goggles or turn away.

MAN (on loudspeaker) :
5, 4, 3, 2, 1.

(explosion booming)

LEAR :
Carson was always aware, I think,

from, especially,
her time in government,

that some people looked at science

as discovering
something beautiful and new,

and some people
looked at science

as discovering ways
in which to wage war,

to destroy things,
not to create things,

that by the time
of the Cold War,

there are really two sciences
going on in the United States.

Narrator :
World War II had raised the profile of American science.

Now the Cold War made it soar.

KINKELA :
The atom was used in a very destructive way,

but it also suggested in many ways

that science was at the
forefront of something grand.

This is the way in which we will
solve the problems of the world.

Narrator :
The laboratory was no longer merely the source

of the nation's military might.

It was also, ever increasingly,

a font of ingenious chemical tools

that gave mankind an edge

against its enemies
in the natural world.

KINKELA :
For any sort of question that deals with nature,

what is emerging
in the postwar period

is that chemicals
will solve the problem.

So if your question is about
crop production, more chemicals.

If your question is about
public health, more chemicals.

If your question is about,

"How do I protect my home from these unwanted pests?"

More chemicals.

BLUM :
People are worshiping at the altar of science and technology

because finally it's making us
the human masters of the planet,

and we're taking
this incredibly dangerous,

un-nurturing landscape,

and it is now under our control.

Science is rewriting
the way we live on Earth.

And so there was
very little questioning.

Narrator :
Rachel Carson was less sure.

To her, there seemed something
dangerous about a world

in which human ingenuity
knew no limits.

LEAR :
She sees human beings in their post-World War II form

as being arrogant,

that human arrogance
outruns human wisdom,

and we ought to try
to put them back together

as equals again.

Narrator :
When the demands of promoting The Sea Around Us

threatened to overwhelm her,

Carson escaped to Maine,

to a remote stretch
of the central coast,

where slivers of land reach out
into the ocean

and the tides rise higher
than anywhere

along the Atlantic seaboard.

A research trip had
first brought her to the area

some years before,

and it had since been
her ambition,

as she'd put it to a friend,

"to be able to buy a place here

and then manage to spend
a great deal of time in it."

Now, flush from the sales
of two bestselling books,

she purchased a plot
on Southport Island

and built a summer cottage
of her own.

SOUDER :
At the edge of her property,

there's this large area
of rocky shelf tableland

that at high tide
is under the water,

but at low tide is exposed.

And so this exposes
all the crevices

and nooks and tidal pools

where starfish and periwinkles
and sea anemones live.

All these creatures
of this intertidal zone

that so fascinated Carson
and always had,

that's all available to her
right there.

MUSIL :
She identifies with the creatures who live on the edge,

this borderland
between the power of water

that could also crush you,

and its ability to release life and to create new life.

Rachel wanted to be still, to feel and to imagine,

and this was the place
that would allow her to do that.

Narrator :
Before her house was even habitable,

Carson received a letter
from a Mrs. Dorothy Freeman,

whose family owned a cottage
a half-mile up the shoreline

from Carson's property.

Dorothy's husband, Stanley,

had been given a copy of The Sea Around Us

for his birthday.

MARTHA FREEMAN :
My grandparents had read it out loud to each other

sailing or on the porch of their cottage,

and had adored it.

It really spoke to a lot of
what they cared about in life.

My grandmother read
about Rachel coming

in the local newspaper,

and sent her a little
welcoming note in 1952,

and she got a note back.

Narrator :
Despite all the attention

that recently had been showered upon her,

requests for interviews,
speaking invitations,

mountains of fan mail,

Carson felt isolated

and more than usually burdened by her family.

Maria Carson, as she aged,
had grown demanding and jealous

of Rachel's time and attention.

And then
there was niece Marjorie,

who had taken up
with a married man

and become pregnant.

LYTLE :
Carson and her mother arranged

to have the woman
admitted to a special home,

where she had the baby and
kept it out of the public eye,

and sort of protected her from
the rumor mill and whatnot.

Carson once wrote, she said,

"If ever I was bitter
about anything,

I was bitter about that."

The problems with her niece
really detracted

from the joy and the wonderful
sense of success she felt

for The Sea Around Us.

Narrator :
Having finally resigned her position

at the Fish and Wildlife Service

to dedicate herself to writing,

Carson lacked even
the companionship of colleagues.

The friendship that bloomed
with the Freemans

was a revelation to her.

The couple shared her love
for nature and the sea,

and enthusiastically joined
in her tide pool explorations,

Dorothy marveling
at the unseen life

that teemed at the shoreline,

while Stanley took photographs.

But of the two, it was Dorothy
to whom Carson felt most drawn.

FREEMAN :
I think Rachel had the same experience in a way

that I had with my grandmother,

in that she was just so present,
so much herself,

so comfortable in herself,

that she was really open to
seeing who you were, listening.

You totally felt heard
and understood.

I did, anyway,
and I believe Rachel did.

She was just a very comfortable
person to be with,

a really wonderful friend
to have.

SOUDER :
Dorothy Freeman and Rachel Carson had,

almost from the beginning,

this deep, deep,
emotional connection

that they would later describe
as the ability

to know exactly what
the other one was thinking

about everything,

to feel as though they were
inside the other person's head

at all times.

Everything they each loved about the world

hit them in the same way.

Narrator :
Dorothy was 55, the mother of a grown son,

a new grandmother,
a devoted homemaker and wife.

Now, as the summer turned to fall

and Southport was abandoned for the season,

she became the confidante

that Carson, at 46,
had never had.

CARSON (dramatized) :
Darling Dorothy,

I don't suppose anyone
really knows

how a creative writer works

or what sort of nourishment
his spirit must have.

All I am certain of is this:

that it is quite necessary
for me

to know that there is someone

who is deeply devoted to me
as a person,

and who also has the capacity
and the depth of understanding

to share vicariously
the sometimes crushing burden

of creative effort.

Last summer I was feeling,
as never before,

that there was no one
who combined all of that.

And then, my dear one,
you came into my life!

SOUDER :
They started writing letters to each other,

and the letters became
more and more frequent,

and they very quickly escalated

to include a level
of personal affection

that was surprising to everyone
except to them.

Before they ever see each other
in person again,

they've declared their love
for each other.

Carson never really had
any relationships.

She never dated.

I think she knew
that Dorothy was the one person

who really was the one person,
the soulmate.

And the beauty is that Dorothy
feels the same thing in her way,

to the extent that she can.

Narrator :
In phone calls and occasional visits,

and in letter after letter,

Carson poured out to Dorothy

the challenges
of completing her third book,

an Atlantic shore guide

she'd agreed to write
for Houghton Mifflin

even before The Sea Around Us
had been published.

Freed at last to do nothing
but write,

Carson found the task
nearly impossible.

Again and again, her approach
to the guide changed.

Entire chapters were laboriously
revised,

and what was meant to be
a two-year project

soon stretched into four.

CARSON (dramatized) :
Maybe the easiest way for me to write a chapter

would be to type "Dear Dorothy"
on the first page!

As a matter of fact,

you and your particular kind
of interest and appreciation

were in my mind a great deal

when I was rewriting parts
of the section on rocky shores.

SOUDER :
Once they're together,

and they're rarely physically together,

they're almost always in different places

writing letters to each other,

once they're together, they're never apart.

There's never any question between them.

FREEMAN :
There's a huge amount of affection.

I mean, it is love.

It is the love
of kindred spirits.

They wrote to each other
three, four, five times a week.

So their relationship was always
this caring at a distance.

They knew each other
for about 12 years,

and I think I added it up
at one point

that they were probably
in each other's presence

for, at most, 60 days.

Narrator :
When The Edge of the Sea,

the widely-acclaimed
third volume

in Carson's marine trilogy,

finally hit bookstores
in the summer of 1955,

it would be dedicated
not to her mother,

as The Sea Around Us had been,

but to Dorothy and Stanley Freeman.

(theme song playing)

ANNOUNCER :
Let's face it: the threat of hydrogen bomb warfare

is the greatest danger
our nation has ever known.

Enemy jet bombers
carrying nuclear weapons

can sweep over a variety
of routes

and drop bombs on any important
target in the United States.

The threat of this destruction
has affected our way of life

in every city, town, and village
from coast to coast.

These are the signs
of the times.

(air raid siren blaring)

KINKELA :
You can imagine what it might be like

to be thinking and hearing
almost all the time

that you could die at any moment, right?

That the Soviet Union will attack.

There's going to be no warning,

and the only way that you could
protect yourselves

is to duck and cover yourselves

with whatever you have around you.

The threat was incredibly palpable.

Narrator :
More and more,

when Rachel Carson raised her eyes

to take in the man-made world around her,

what she felt was a quiet rage.

The Cold War had become

a macabre game
of one-up's man ship,

a high-stakes standoff

fueled by the threat
of nuclear destruction.

Then, on March 1, 1954,

the United States pressed
for the lead

with the test of a dry-fuel
hydrogen bomb,

code-named "Shrimp."

SOUDER :
Everything goes right with this test

except the things that go wrong,

and the things that go wrong
are really big problems.

The explosion
was much more powerful

than the scientists
had predicted,

about 2 1/2 times more powerful
than it was supposed to be;

largest explosion
that had ever occurred

on the face of the Earth

that wasn't a volcano.

Narrator :
Radioactive fallout scattered

over more than
5,000 square miles

and then drifted downward,

settling on open ocean,
inhabited islands,

and a hapless
Japanese fishing boat

named Lucky Dragon Number 5.

SOUDER :
This gray, snow-like ash begins to fall out of the sky

and it coats the ship
from stem to stern.

It gets on every surface.

And it coats the men.

It gets in their eyes.

They're tasting it to see if
they can figure out what it is.

That becomes apparent
within a couple of days,

because very soon,
everybody on the ship is sick.

Narrator :
By the time the Lucky Dragon returned to port,

everyone on board had succumbed
to radiation poisoning,

their skin blackened, their hair
falling out in clumps.

Their ordeal made headlines
all over the world.

SOUDER :
For the first time, people realized

that the real danger in nuclear war

was not
the explosions themselves,

but the fallout,

this total contamination
of the Earth

that had the potential
to wipe out

every living organism
on the face of the Earth.

Narrator :
The Atomic Energy Commission and other government agencies

now issued a flurry
of reassurances

that atmospheric testing
was safe,

and that fallout constituted
no appreciable danger

outside of the test zone.

FILM ANNOUNCER :
The atomic cloud, like a giant vacuum cleaner,

has sucked up dirt and debris
from the Earth

and is full
of radioactive particles.

Is it dangerous?

Yes, right now it is.

You wouldn't want to go into it,

but neither would you
deliberately walk

into a blazing fire.

You have to use common sense.

BLUM :
It's really easy for us to look back

at something like above-ground nuclear testing

and think, "Well, that was a primitive moment."

But people had just suffered
through a really terrible war.

Tens and tens and tens
of thousands of young Americans

had died abroad.

And so you can also say
to yourself, as they did,

"We have to have the weapon
that ends all wars."

Right?

"And if there's some sacrifice
involved,

well, you know,
that's for the greater good."

KINKELA :
People were not dying because of nuclear tests.

And that is tied to the question
of how people understood harm.

And throughout much
of the 20th century

and into the early 1950s,

it was really about sort of
the question of,

does this kill you?

Very simple.

Is it acutely toxic, and if so,

how much
can a human body withstand

before it kills somebody?

Narrator :
Carson framed the question differently,

and her doubts about the vector
of modern technological science

now began to harden
into a certainty.

LEAR :
Now she has to come to grips with the fact

that humans can destroy nature.

So her mission, if you will,
is to show the world

what a perfect thing
the natural systems are

and how easily the hand of man
can muck it up.

And that becomes a theme
in everything

that she starts to write.

It's the undercurrent.

Narrator :
By the close of 1954,

Carson had a title in mind, Remembrance of Earth,

and a vague idea for a book
that would illuminate

the relation of life
to its environment.

But months gave way to years,

and she made no progress
with it.

Then, in early January 1957,

her niece Marjorie contracted
a pneumonia so severe

she had to be hospitalized.

Two weeks later,
Marjie was dead,

and her five-year-old son Roger
became Carson's responsibility.

ROGER CHRISTIE :
Rachel kind of had a hard life that way.

You know, first she had to raise
my mother and my mother's sister

because their parents died
when they were very young,

and then the same thing repeated itself

just when she was getting out from under it.

She was very considerate
of my feelings all the time,

sometimes to the detriment
of her own work.

Narrator :
In the spring, on the heels of her 50th birthday,

Carson legally became
Roger's adoptive mother

and tried to resign herself
to her changed circumstances.

But as she confessed to Dorothy,

she could not entirely
keep herself

from feeling a dark resentment.

She was all but convinced

she'd never again have the time
to write.

Then, friends told her

about a U.S. Department
of Agriculture program

to eradicate the fire ant,

and more than a decade after

she'd proposed the piece
about DDT to Reader's Digest,

pesticides came roaring back
into her consciousness.

ANNOUNCER :
The fire ant is believed to have entered this country

from South America in 1925.

The destructive insect has
brought heavy losses to crops

in Alabama, Mississippi,
and Louisiana.

Once they swarm across a field
like this, nothing survives.

LYTLE :
The fire ant was the perfect invasive species

for the Cold War era.

They were red,
they snuck into the country,

they were subversive,
and they were mostly annoying.

For some reason,
the Department of Agriculture

got it into their head that,
scientists there,

that this would be
a perfect demonstration

of the power of pesticides
to solve a nagging problem.

Narrator :
The enthusiasm for DDT and other synthetic pesticides

had given way to the conviction
that science could do far more

than control insects
and other unwanted pests.

The objective now
was eradication.

KINKELA :
It meant extermination, extermination of the species.

So in 1955, you see the advent

of the World Health Organization's

Malaria Eradication Program,

which was in many ways designed
to exterminate

not the problem of malaria,
but the problem of mosquitoes.

The Fire Ant Eradication Program
was the same idea.

Scientists are convinced that
this is the right way to go.

And if we fail, then
we're going to fail humanity.

It becomes this all-or-nothing
equation.

ORESKES :
And so what we see in the 1950s is tremendous amounts of money

going into studying
pest killing,

not so much money
going into studying

broader questions
of wildlife biology,

broader questions
of environmental health,

broader questions
of environmental toxicity.

LYTLE :
The people involved, the scientists and whatnot,

who are inventing pesticides,

think they're doing God's work,

and that they are also helping
the United States keep its edge

in the Cold War environment.

The Department of Agriculture
and the chemical industry say,

one of the reasons that we have
such a rich material life

is that we have found ways
to control these problems,

to maximize food
and fiber production,

and it's one of the things
that distinguishes

the U.S. and its allies
from the Communist bloc.

Our standard of living
is so much higher

and we owe it
to human ingenuity.

Narrator :
In 1957, in the U.S.D.A.'s all-out war

against the fire ant,

some 20 million acres
in the South

were doused with pesticides,
killing not only ants,

but blackbirds and meadowlarks,
armadillos and opossums.

The sprayed areas,

as one Alabama agricultural
official reported,

"reeked with the odor
of decaying wildlife."

LYTLE :
The hunting-fishing community was outraged.

County agricultural agents

dropped their support
for the project

and it really was a black eye

for the Department of Agriculture,

but it was a warning for Carson.

Narrator :
What concerned Carson was not merely

that synthetic pesticides
had unintended consequences,

but that substances
about which so little was known

were now practically ubiquitous.

Widely employed
by government agencies

to protect
health and agriculture,

as well as American interests
abroad,

synthetic pesticides also were
sold directly to consumers,

who, by 1957, could choose

from an array of some 6,000
different products.

SOUDER :
You could get shelf paper for your kitchen cabinets

that was impregnated with DDT.

You could get paints and
varnishes that had DDT in them.

One of my favorite devices,
and my father owned this,

was a cylinder about the size
and shape of a beer can,

and it had DDT in it.

It attached to the muffler
of your lawn mower,

so the hot exhaust gas
would volatilize the DDT

and spray a fog out
across your yard.

So if you were having
company over for a picnic later,

you could poison the grass
before they got there

and nobody would get
a mosquito bite.

(engine slowly starting)

Narrator :
Although manufacturers were required by law

to register
new chemical compounds,

the government mandated

no independent safety testing
of those compounds

and placed no limitation
on their sale or use.

So long as the label provided
safe-use instructions,

the product was deemed
to be safe under the law.

ORESKES :
That's, of course, reinforced

by the manufacturers
of the pesticides.

The companies
that are manufacturing DDT

focus on this question of
immediate short-term toxicity.

They say,
"Well, look, it's not toxic.

"We applied it on all
these soldiers in World War II

and they were all fine, so
that proves that this is fine."

KINKELA :
You had examples of people digesting spoonfuls of DDT

just to prove how safe it was.

At the same time,
birds are dying en masse,

fish are dying,

and I think Rachel understood

that something radically
transformative was happening,

this sense that scientists had
been asking the wrong question.

Scientists had been thinking about

the question of acute toxicity,

rather than, what are
the long-term impacts

of this chemical world
that we're creating?

LEAR :
Carson is not eager to take on pesticides.

She's too busy
and life is too complicated,

but there's this story there,
so she knows there's a story.

On the other hand,
it's also the fact

that it is the story
about human hubris.

CARSON (dramatized) :
It was pleasant to believe that much of Nature

was forever beyond
the tampering reach of man.

He might level the forests
and dam the streams,

but the clouds and the rain
and the wind were God's.

But I have now opened my eyes
and my mind.

I may not like what I see,

but it does no good
to ignore it,

and it's worse than useless
to go on repeating

the old "eternal verities"
that are no more eternal

than the hills of the poets.

Narrator :
Rachel Carson had long known that scientists were divided

on the issue
of synthetic pesticides

and that conclusions
about their safety

depended on who was asked.

ORESKES :
You have scientists who are working closely

with the Department
of Agriculture

and with the chemical industry,

and are part of a mindset,
a worldview that says,

"I've got a pest, I've got
a boll weevil or a gypsy moth,

"and I want to kill that pest,
and I want to kill effectively,

without killing the person who
is applying it to the crops."

And so almost all the attention

is either on the killing
of the pest

or the non-killing
of the farmer.

But on the other hand,
you have wildlife biologists

who are not linked
to any particular industry,

they're out in nature,

they're thinking
about the interrelations

between fish, birds,
pollinators, plants,

chemicals, and the environment,

and so they see
there's evidence of problems.

Narrator :
For Carson, it began with research,

a gathering of bits
of information

excavated from technical reports
and obscure scientific journals.

What soon became clear
was that pesticides such as DDT

accumulated in the organisms
exposed to them,

and grew ever more concentrated
as they moved up the food chain.

According to one study,
earthworms were still so toxic

a full year after exposure
to DDT

that they poisoned the robins
that fed upon them.

Another demonstrated

that when birds were fed
a miniscule amount of DDT daily,

both their fertility and
the survival rate of their young

dramatically declined.

Most troubling of all
was the evidence

that insect populations
very quickly

developed resistance
to synthetic pesticides.

ORESKES :
If you dump large amounts of pesticides in a field,

you will kill
many of the insects

you intend to kill,

but there'll be some fragment
that survive

because for whatever reason,

they happen
to be more resistant.

That sub-population lives on,

they breed, they pass on
to their offspring

whatever that resistance is
that they have,

and pretty soon you have

a pesticide-resistant
population.

Carson fully understood

that ultimately this strategy
was going to fail,

and the farmer would be
in the position

of either needing
a different pesticide

or using more and more and more.

And so then you have a kind
of arms race of pesticide use.

You use more pesticides,
insects become more resistant,

more resistance,
more pesticides,

more resistance, and now you're
trapped in an escalating cycle,

and it's a damaging cycle,

because meanwhile you're also
killing fish and birds

and other things that you like
and that you want.

Narrator :
In isolation, each study Carson read

was little more
than an anecdote.

Taken together,
they offered compelling evidence

that synthetic pesticides had
potentially grave disadvantages,

none of which
were yet fully understood.

LYTLE :
She was not against the wise use of pesticides.

She saw the need for that.

But what she was against

was the indiscriminate spreading
of poisons

that had untold
and unanticipated consequences

for all living things,
humans included.

Narrator :
"I realized that here was the material for a book,"

Carson later recalled.

"Everything which meant most
to me as a naturalist

"was being threatened,
and nothing I could do

would be more important."

In May 1958,

she signed a contract
with Houghton Mifflin

for what her friend and editor
Paul Brooks had dubbed

"the poison book."

It was slated to be a short
volume, perhaps 50,000 words,

of which William Shawn of The New Yorker

already had offered
to publish two excerpts.

Only Dorothy had misgivings.

LEAR :
It's a book about death, and it's a book about destruction,

and Dorothy's not comfortable,

and she's not comfortable
with Rachel writing that,

using her talent for beauty
and beautiful words

to write
about the elixirs of death.

She had Rachel before

when she's writing about tide
pools and beautiful things.

She can't follow her
in this research.

CARSON (dramatized) :
You do know, I think,

how deeply I believe in the
importance of what I am doing.

Knowing what I do,

there would be no future peace
for me

if I kept silent.

LEAR :
She wants to tell that story, and try to tell it fairly,

and tell it scientifically,

but she's got an argument
from the beginning.

It isn't, "Well, let's talk

about the good and bad of pesticides."

And the first titles of this book

are Man Against the Earth
and Man the Destroyer.

Carson's underlying anger
is right there.

LYTLE :
In a sense, she was going public with a lot of data

that was somewhat inconclusive
or premature.

On the other hand, she felt,

what is the morality of remaining quiet

when you have a huge amount
of circumstantial evidence

that points to a substance
being toxic or dangerous?

You know, advocacy is not something

scientists of the time were wont to do,

but for Carson,
it became a crusade.

Narrator :
On November 22, 1958,

with Carson deep
into the research for her book,

Maria, now 89,
suffered a stroke.

When she died on the morning
of December 1,

Rachel was at her bedside,
holding her hand.

"More than anyone else I know,

she embodied a reverence for life," Carson told a friend.

"And she could fight fiercely

against anything
she believed wrong,

as in our present crusade!

Knowing how she felt about that
will help me

to carry it through to completion."

Just weeks later,
Carson was back to work,

driven by the growing certainty

that manmade pesticides menaced
not only the environment,

but human health.

LEAR :
Carson is convinced that there is this link

between pesticides and cancer in humans.

And that is going to be
an explosive part to this book

that she didn't initially plan,

and she has to be very careful
of how she puts that out.

Narrator :
Once again, the evidence was preliminary,

much of it as yet unpublished.

It was also well outside

Carson's training as a biologist,

and therefore difficult for her to parse.

But the more she learned,
the more focused she became

on the parallels
between synthetic pesticides

and radioactive fallout.

SOUDER :
They operated in much the same way.

They were widely dispersed.

You could absorb a body burden
of both of them.

Both of them were being linked
to cancer and birth defects.

Things would happen years,
even decades after the exposure.

These were long-range problems

that you didn't know
were happening

when they were happening.

Narrator :
Events soon bolstered Carson's case.

In the spring of 1959,

government officials
publicly admitted

that they had underestimated
the hazards of nuclear fallout.

Of particular concern was
the radionuclide strontium-90,

which had made its way
into the nation's dairy supply

and was now thought to cause
leukemia, bone cancer,

and birth defects.

LYTLE :
This is the height of the Baby Boom,

and so you have a nation focused

on its child and family life

being potentially poisoned
by this by-product

of the nuclear testing regime.

Narrator :
As Carson's editor, Paul Brooks, told her,

"All this publicity about fallout

"gives you a head start
in awakening people

to the dangers of chemicals."

Then, just before
Thanksgiving 1959

came the so-called
cranberry scare.

LYTLE :
People of my generation

remember the Thanksgiving
with no cranberry sauce.

Farmers in Oregon

had sprayed their cranberry bogs
with a pesticide,

but they did it
in the wrong growth cycle,

so that it got into the berries themselves

and then into the national food supply.

SOUDER :
It was potentially a cancer-causing agent.

This might have been one of
the first public demonstrations

of the hazards
of chemical pesticides.

Of course,
this alarmed the public,

who wanted their cranberries
but didn't want to be poisoned,

and it greatly distressed
the cranberry industry.

To Carson,
this was just exhibit A

in a story she'd already formed
in her own mind

and was ready to tell.

Narrator :
With shipments of cranberries being seized for inspection

and panicked grocers pulling
cranberry products from shelves,

Oregon's bad berries
were on the verge

of ruining a $50 million crop.

Growers in other states
cried foul,

and government officials
went into high gear

to shore up the industry.

Secretary of Agriculture
Ezra Benson

had himself photographed
eating cranberries.

On the presidential
campaign trail,

Senator John F. Kennedy quaffed
a cranberry juice toast,

while his opponent,
Vice President Richard Nixon,

swallowed down
four full helpings

of the supposedly tainted fruit.

SOUDER :
Whether the public was reassured by that, we can't know.

But it demonstrated
that there was

this inherent coalition,
this inherent partnership

between the government
and its clients in industry--

the chemicals industry,
the agricultural industry--

that would be very resistant
to the ideas

that Carson was going to propose,

that she was going
to come head-to-head

with the massed might

of the U.S. economy
and the U.S. government

if she tried to prove
to the public

that they were being poisoned.

Narrator :
"I think you know,"

one of Carson's
research contacts warned her,

"how grim this struggle
with the U.S. government

and the whole chemical industry

is bound to be."

Initially, she'd thought it
a nuisance:

first, in early January 1960,
a painful ulcer,

then a sinus infection
that laid her low for weeks,

then two lumps
in her left breast,

discovered during an examination
in March.

LEAR :
Carson is making progress.

She knows she's going to finish this book.

And suddenly she's got
this catalogue of illnesses

that happen to her.

She was never very good
at facing up to limitations.

Probably none of us are,
but she's in denial

and she hides it
under the covers of herself,

and to herself,

and just tries
to plow through it.

Narrator :
Carson had a history of breast tumors

and twice had had them
surgically removed.

This time, one tumor
was "suspicious enough"

to require a radical mastectomy.

Still, the surgeon assured her

that no malignancy
had been found,

so Carson sought
no further treatment.

It was only when she discovered

a hard lump on her rib,
months later,

that she sought
a second opinion

and learned that the surgeon
had withheld the truth.

According to the pathology report,

the removed tumor had in fact
been malignant,

and it had metastasized
to her lymph nodes.

SOUDER :
It was common at the time for doctors in such situations

to discuss a diagnosis,
a prognosis, a treatment

with a woman's husband,

who they believed would be better able

to handle this information, process it,

make decisions
if decisions had to be made.

LYTLE :
It may also be that the cancer

was sufficiently
far enough advanced

that he figured,

"Well, there's nothing much
we can do about this.

We've done what we can."

But, you know, in the process,

he denied her six months
of potential treatment

that might have mitigated the cancer

or might have extended her life.

Narrator :
Carson's first thought was for her privacy.

"Somehow I have no wish

to read of my ailments
in literary gossip columns,"

she told a friend.

"Too much comfort
to the chemical companies!"

SOUDER :
She was sure that she would be accused

of having written the book
as a retribution

against the chemical industry

on the unfounded allegation
that pesticides caused cancer.

She understood
this was a serious risk

and this would be
a point of attack against her.

Narrator :
The months that followed were excruciating:

radiation treatments,
a flare-up of her ulcer,

a staph infection that progressed

to septic arthritis in her knees and ankles.

By the end of January 1961,
she was unable to walk

and could barely stand.

CARSON (dramatized) :
Darling,

you know my high hopes

for the goal I might meet by March,

hopes I entertained last October!

Now I look back

at the complete and devastating
wreckage of those plans,

not only no writing for months,
but the nearly complete loss

of any creative feeling
or desire.

Sometimes I wonder whether
the Author even exists anymore.

CHRISTIE :
I think she handled it as well as she could.

You know,
the only negative thing

I would have to say about it
in retrospect was,

she wasn't honest enough
with me about it,

although who knows whether
that would've been a good thing?

You know, but that's all
I remember about it,

just that it was kind of
a broken time.

Narrator :
To her research files on cancer,

Carson now began
to save clippings

on experimental treatments
and improbable miracle cures.

She would never be truly healthy again,

but as soon as the radiation
treatments were finished,

she went back to work.

CHRISTIE :
The book became a race for her to finish.

That was the one time
where it would impact on us

in that, you know,
she would say,

"I have to go and lock myself in the study

"and you have to go amuse yourself,

and that's just the way it is."

And that got more and more
intense as time went on.

Narrator :
In late January 1962,

nearly four years
after she'd begun to write it,

Carson finally submitted
the bulk of the manuscript

to both Houghton Mifflin and The New Yorker.

It was, she wrote Dorothy,

"like reaching the last station
before the summit of Everest."

William Shawn called as soon
as he'd finished reading it.

Silent Spring, he told her,
was "a brilliant achievement."

That night, while listening
to her favorite violin concerto

alone in her study,

Carson wept.

CARSON (dramatized) :
Darling, I could never again listen happily to a thrush song

if I had not done all I could.

And last night the thoughts

of all the birds
and other creatures

and all the loveliness
that is in nature

came to me with such a surge
of deep happiness,

that now I had done
what I could.

I had been able to complete it.

Now it had its own life.

Narrator :
On June 16, 1962,

as the elements of Silent Spring

were being prepared for publication,

the first New Yorker installment
arrived on the newsstands,

and with its opening paragraphs

lured readers
into a fertile world of plenty.

READER :
"There was once a town in the heart of America

where all life seemed to live

in harmony
with its surroundings.

The town lay in the midst

of a checkerboard
of prosperous farms,

with fields of grain
and hillsides of orchards

where, in spring,
white clouds of bloom

drifted above the green fields."

LYTLE :
The birds sing, and the woods are filled with living things,

and it's an abundant, happy place.

And then suddenly the residents
discover the birds are gone

and the animals have died

and many of the plants
have withered.

SOUDER :
People start to get sick for reasons that can't be explained.

Livestock have stunted offspring.

Everything goes bad.

READER :
"In the gutters under the eaves

and between the shingles
of the roofs,

a few patches of white granular
powder could be seen.

Some weeks earlier, this powder
had been dropped, like snow,

upon the roofs and the lawns,
the fields and the streams.

No witchcraft, no enemy action

had snuffed out life
in this stricken world.

The people had done it themselves."

ORESKES :
She creates an image of silence.

"What would it be like
if you woke up in the morning

and you went outside

and instead
of hearing birds chirp or sing,

you heard nothing?"

And that's
so amazingly powerful, right?

And it just, you know,
it stops you in your tracks.

Narrator :
In the zealous quest for mastery, Carson argued,

synthetic pesticides
had been used indiscriminately,

excessively, heedlessly,

upsetting the delicate balance of nature

and putting all life at risk.

LYTLE :
She felt that proponents of widespread pesticide use

were conducting an experiment
with life itself

without having done
adequate testing or research

to determine
what the consequences might be.

And that the citizenry
weren't being informed

because the proponents
of pesticides

were telling them
only one side of the story

and the one that benefited
their own interests.

And so all these things are part

of the Cold War consensus
by which Americans lived:

the benevolence of corporations,
the authority of science.

Well, Carson's challenging
all of those things.

Narrator :
The furor arose even before

the second and third
installments of Silent Spring

hit the newsstands.

The New Yorker was deluged with letters.

So, too, was the U.S.D.A.

Most of those who wrote,

an agency spokesman told The New York Times,

expressed "horror and amazement"

that the use
of such toxic chemicals

was even permitted.

CRAMER :
She raised the level of awareness

of the general public

of all of these chemical applications

and why we need to think
about their implications.

People were deeply moved
and frightened by what she said.

Narrator :
Scientists for the chemical industry and the U.S.D.A.

were incensed
by Carson's assertions.

What, they wondered publicly,
was the death of a songbird

against the possibility

of ending malaria
or world hunger?

As one industry chemist put it,

"DDT alone has saved
as many human lives

"over the past 15 years

as all the wonder drugs combined."

LYTLE :
The proponents of pesticides argued

that you have to take risks
to go forward.

That's very much part

of our scientific, technological culture.

BLUM :
They saw themselves

as doing something in the higher good.

They were fostering human development.

They were killing plagues.

They were making the world a better place.

ORESKES :
Carson herself acknowledged

there was this benefit
through the use of pesticides.

But the whole point of her argument

is that there's been a kind of
an assumption and a rush.

The benefits were obvious,
so people rushed

to take advantage
of those benefits,

but there were
these other problems

that were maybe not as obvious,

but actually might outweigh the benefits.

Narrator :
By August, with the publication of the book

still more than a month away,

the controversy over Silent Spring

had reached the nation's capital,

and a special
Science Advisory Committee

had been convened

to review all federal policies
on pesticides.

On August 28, the subject
even found its way into one

of the president's regular
televised press conferences.

REPORTER :
There appears to be growing concern among scientists

as to the possibility

of dangerous long-range side effects

from the widespread use
of DDT and other pesticides.

Have you considered asking
the Department of Agriculture

or the Public Health Service

to take a closer look at this?

Yes, and I know that they already are,

I think particularly, of course,
since Miss Carson's book,

but they are examining the matter.

SOUDER :
You can only imagine how worried

the people who made
these pesticides were.

When President Kennedy said,

Yeah, we're going to look into this.

We're going to reach in
to the private sector

and see if we need to
regulate these products

in a different way,"

that was a threat.

That's a threat to the bottom line.

That's a threat to the business
that these companies were in.

LYTLE :
They formed essentially a war council

to get together and develop
a propaganda campaign

to discredit Carson,

to discredit the science in her book,

and to defend their practices.

Narrator :
From public relations departments

throughout the chemical industry

now came a flood
of bulletins and brochures

which emphasized
the benefits of pesticides.

The Monsanto Company,
an industry leader,

papered news outlets
across the country

with a spoof of Silent Spring's opening chapter,

in which a pesticide-free world

loses millions
to yellow fever and malaria...

FILM NARRATOR :
She dines on healthy blood,

and in payment leaves
the chills and fever of malaria.

Narrator :
...and crop-ravaging insects drive humanity

to the brink of famine.

Silent Spring, critics charged,

was a "high-pitched, emotional,

scientifically indefensible" screed.

To heed Carson's call
for restraint, it was argued,

meant nothing less than
"the end of all human progress."

KINKELA :
There is this sort of real tension

between this understanding
of chemical sciences

as a sort of hyper-masculine,
lab-intensive research

that produces
these wonderful technologies

and these scientists
who work in nature,

who examine issues
over the long term,

but who really
aren't scientists.

They're sort of like a cult.

And having a woman
at this particular moment

being the lead spokesperson
of that kind of idea

really chafed,

and made the chemical scientists
really angry.

ORESKES :
The idea that this woman,

you know, this woman with what,
a master's degree,

that she knows something
that we don't know?

You know, you just see their
condescension towards her

in their just really dismissive approach

and their misrepresentation of her work.

They try to accuse her
of rejecting modernity,

of being unrealistic, of
wanting to ban all pesticides,

none of which are true,

but it's a way to try
to discredit her

and discredit the argument,

and it's a way to not even
have the argument.

Narrator :
Concerned the attacks from industry scientists

created the impression

that the science was "all on the other side,"

Carson prevailed upon Houghton Mifflin

to publish a rebuttal to her critics.

LYTLE :
The commercial, monetary, political resources

that the agencies and the businesses

that were arrayed against her
could command

were daunting indeed.

But many scientists
strongly supported Carson

and accepted her case
and even contributed to it.

ORESKES :
The worst thing you could say about Silent Spring

is actually a compliment:
It's not a work of science.

And that's true,
it's not a work of science.

It's a work
of science communication.

She is communicating to us
what scientists have to say

and she's communicating the meaning

of that scientific work.

She makes clear what's at stake,
and that's her great gift.

Narrator :
In the end, Silent Spring flew off the shelves.

Within two weeks of its official publication, on September 27,

65,000 copies had been sold.

Before long,
it was a runaway bestseller.

Every major publication in
the country reviewed the book.

More than 70 newspapers
also ran editorials.

Carson, meanwhile,
was the subject

of so many magazine articles
and cartoons

that she and Roger began
to collect them.

Absent from all the publicity
was the fact

that Carson's cancer had spread
to the right side of her body

and that she was once again
undergoing radiation treatments.

Inundated with interview requests,

Carson agreed that fall

to only two
that involved cameras:

a profile in LIFE magazine

and an appearance on CBS Reports

with Eric Sevareid.

For both, she wore a heavy, dark wig

she'd purchased at Elizabeth Arden.

The two-day interview session with CBS

at her home in Silver Spring

was so taxing
that it became plain to Sevareid

that Carson was ill.

Get the piece on the air as soon as possible,

he urged his producer.

"You've got a dead leading lady."

LEAR :
Carson was determined as a young girl.

She was determined to get an education.

She was determined to be a writer.

She was determined to find
something to write about.

And with Silent Spring,

she was determined
that this message would get out.

She's willing to endure
almost everything

to get that message out.

CARSON :
My text this afternoon is taken

from The Globe Times
of Bethlehem, Pennsylvania,

a news item in the issue
of October 12.

After describing in detail
the reactions to Silent Spring

of the farm bureaus
in two Pennsylvania counties,

the reporter continued:

"No one in either county farm
office who was talked to today

had read the book,

but all disapproved of it heartily."

(audience laughing)

Narrator :
In early December 1962,

in an address to
the Women's National Press Club,

Rachel Carson finally answered
her critics.

Challenging the industry's
contention

that "chemicals are never used

unless tests have shown them
to be safe,"

she reminded her audience

that pesticide manufacturers
financed the studies

of their own products' safety.

I know that many thoughtful
scientists are deeply disturbed

that their organizations are
becoming fronts for industry.

Is industry becoming a screen

through which facts
must be filtered

so that the hard, uncomfortable
truths are kept back

and only the harmless morsels
are allowed to filter through?

The tailoring, the screening
of basic truth

is done to accommodate
to the short-term gain,

to serve the gods
of profit and production.

LEAR :
She is calling for the population

to understand that money
has a great deal to do

with what is done in science.

She says, "We need to ask
who speaks and why.

What is done in the name of science

and why doesn't the public
have a right to know?"

These are not just
scientific questions.

These are questions that
a social revolutionary asks.

CARSON :
These are matters

of the most serious importance
to society.

And I commend their study
to you

as professionals
in the field of communication.

Thank you.

(audience applauds)

Narrator :
Unable to silence Carson,

the chemical industry lobbied hard

to muzzle the forthcoming
CBS special on Silent Spring.

In March, just weeks before
the program was slated to air,

the network was flooded

with mimeographed letters urging fairness,

a campaign orchestrated, CBS assumed,

by the chemical industry lobby.

Then, just days before the broadcast,

two of the show's five
commercial sponsors pulled out,

followed swiftly by a third.

CBS was undaunted,

and on the evening
of Wednesday, April 3, 1963,

"The Silent Spring
of Rachel Carson"

was beamed into living rooms
all across the country.

Good evening.

We are living in what has been
called the synthetic age.

The age of the atom,
the missile,

the frozen TV dinner.

In the next hour, you will hear

that this is also the age
of the wormless apple

and the calculated risk.

Do you know how long

the pesticides persist in the water

once they get into it?

Not entirely.

Do you know the extent
to which our groundwater

may be contaminated right now
by pesticides?

We don't know that, either,
nor do we know...

Narrator :
As the program unfolded,

a welter of scientists
and government officials,

as well as Carson herself,

argued the pros and cons
of synthetic pesticides.

In the end, one fact was clear:

For every scientific certainty,

there was a host
of unanswered questions.

CARSON :
We have to remember

that children born today
are exposed to these chemicals

from birth.

Perhaps even before birth.

Now, what is going to happen
to them in adult life

as a result of that exposure?

We simply don't know.

Because we've never before
had this kind of experience.

SEVAREID :
A spokesman for the chemical industry,

Dr. Robert White-Stevens.

Miss Carson is concerned

with every possibility
of hazard and danger,

whereas the agricultural school
has to concern itself

with the probability,
the likelihood of danger,

and to assess that
against utility.

If we had to investigate
every possibility,

we would never make
any advances at all,

because this would require

an infinite time
for experimental work,

and we would never be finished.

CARSON :
We've heard the benefits of pesticides.

We've heard a great deal
about their safety,

but very little
about the hazards,

very little about the failures,
the inefficiencies,

and yet the public was being
asked to accept these chemicals,

was being asked to acquiesce
in their use

and did not have
the whole picture.

So I set about to remedy
the balance there.

LEAR :
CBS Reports becomes almost a second publication of the book.

People who hadn't read it and
probably wouldn't have read it

can see that Rachel Carson
is a very calm, rational woman

who is not frothing at the mouth
and is not a raving Communist.

She's giving the public credit

for being able
to understand science.

Narrator :
With an audience estimated at between ten and 15 million,

"The Silent Spring of Rachel Carson"

catapulted the environment

to the top
of the political agenda.

The next day,
Senator Abraham Ribicoff,

chair of the subcommittee
on government operations,

was charged with conducting
a broad congressional review

of environmental hazards,
including pesticides.

Then, on May 15,
came the long-awaited report

from the president's
Science Advisory Committee.

ORESKES :
And they say in more prosaic language

what she has essentially
already said in Silent Spring,

which is, "Yes, there are some
benefits to using pesticides,

and no, we probably don't want
to outlaw and ban

all pesticides tomorrow,

but there is substantial scientific evidence

that the indiscriminate use of pesticides,

the overuse of pesticides,

and particularly certain
persistent pesticides like DDT

may be problematic."

Narrator :
"I think it's a splendid report,"

Carson told a journalist.

"It's strong, it's objective,

and, I think, a very fair
evaluation of the problem.

I feel that the report has vindicated me

and my principal contentions."

By now, Carson knew
she didn't have long to live.

Despite ongoing radiation treatments,

the cancer had spread and spread again,

to her collarbone, her neck, her shoulder.

Though often in pain,

she kept her call for change insistent,

appearing in late May on the Today Show

and in early June before
Ribicoff's Senate committee,

where she delivered 40 minutes of testimony

to a rapt, capacity crowd.

We have acquired technical skills

on a scale undreamed-of
even a generation ago.

We can do dramatic things
and we can do them quickly.

By the time damaging
side effects are apparent,

it is often too late or impossible

to reverse our actions.

LEAR :
She's aware that there will be changes coming

because of her words,
because of her book,

so she's at peace,
comfortable in some ways

with the fact that she's done
the work that she set out to do.

If we are ever to solve
the basic problem

of environmental contamination,

we must begin to count
the many hidden costs

of what we are doing

and to weigh them
against the gains or advantages.

SOUDER :
Now we enter into a period of time

in which everyone understands

that the environment
is an important subject,

that it's something
we should talk about,

something we should consider

when we are using new technologies

that might adversely affect it.

It puts the government squarely into the middle

as a regulating authority,

as a force that can restrain technology.

This hadn't been part
of the dialogue before.

CARSON (dramatized) :
It seems strange, looking back over my life,

that all that went
before this past decade

seems to have been merely
preparation for it.

Into that decade have been
crowded everything

I shall be remembered for.

Narrator :
There was for Carson one last summer at Southport,

a summer filled with birdsong

and the sound of the wind
in the spruce trees.

There were walks along the shore
with Dorothy,

slow and ginger now on account
of Carson's constant pain,

and bittersweet hours spent
watching the surf

crash against the rocks.

FREEMAN :
I don't think the kids, my brother and Roger and I,

understood that this was
some big last deal.

But it was Rachel's last summer
at Southport,

and she was unable to go down
to the beach.

And yet, we all still had
a lovely summer day going down

and bringing little creatures up to the cottage

for her to look at
and talk to us about,

and then instruct us
that they had to go back

where they came from.

I think I like that

as a quintessential
and last memory,

because that was her essence,
and there it was.

Narrator :
The cancer spread to her pelvis,

then to her upper back and arms.

By October,
back in Silver Spring,

Carson was spending
most of her time in bed.

LEAR :
She had all these other ideas of what she wanted to write.

I think she comes to terms with the fact

that she will lay down her pen
without having done them all.

Um, but the biggest thing,
of course,

is what to do with Roger.

To face the fact that when she dies,

which she doesn't really face well,

Roger needs a family,

and she can't seem
to come to grips with that.

CHRISTIE :
She tried to shield me from how serious it was,

and it was never...

You know, well, "I'm going to die."

I don't know how she expected it
to work really,

beyond, you know, making
provisions for me in her will.

It's not something
we talked about.

FREEMAN :
The best she could do was add a codicil to her will

that said it was her wish that
either the Paul Brooks family,

Paul Brooks being her editor
at Houghton Mifflin,

or my parents would take Roger in
and would adopt Roger.

I think in the end she punted.

She just, wherever she was
in her life,

the end of her life,

she didn't want to
or couldn't make that decision.

Narrator :
By spring, the cancer had spread to her brain.

Dorothy still wrote nearly every day,

but Carson no longer wrote back.

When Dorothy came for a visit
in early April,

Carson was only dimly aware
that she was there.

On April 14, 1964,
Rachel Carson died.

She was 56 years old.

Some of her ashes were buried
next to her mother's grave.

The rest Dorothy Freeman spread

over the ocean
at Southport Island.

BLUM :
There's a Before Rachel and After Rachel

in the way we think
about what matters

in protecting the environment.

There are not very many people
who you say,

"That person drove
a paradigm shift,"

but she did.

And it's post Silent Spring

that you start seeing
genuine environmental regulation

in a way
that didn't exist before.

It's like a rain
on a dry landscape.

That book was it.

LEAR :
Silent Spring was the book that changed the world.

It taught us
that life was fragile,

that it was mutable,

that science was not omniscient.

Her message was
that there's an ongoing story.

It doesn't just stop
with the removal of pesticides.

LYTLE :
Many business and political types

who can't stand
environmental regulation

have since been trying
to discredit Rachel Carson.

They feel if they can discredit her,

they can in a sense deconstruct
the environmental apparatus.

And they're still doing it.

It has not gone quiet.

ORESKES :
Rachel Carson begins a conversation

that we needed to have,
that we weren't having in 1963,

and that we still haven't
really figured out

how to have in an
appropriate way even today.

It's a conversation about
the pros and cons of technology.

It's a conversation about
the role of nature in our life

and about whether or not
we make our lives better

through technological
innovations

or whether we do damage
that outweighs the benefits.

SOUDER :
Carson said, "Let's try to look

at life from the other side.

Let's try to look
at the natural world

as if we were actually
a part of it."

That's a different way
to understand things

than anyone had ever proposed before.

You're not separate.

You're human, but you're not
separate from this living world.

♪

American Experience