On a Farther Shore (39 page)

By the fall, Carson sounded like a writer with a terrific but daunting story that was going to be hard to contain. She told Dorothy that she was “
actually happy and excited” about it. The subject, though unpleasant, was intellectually challenging, and she was corresponding with many brilliant people who stimulated her thinking as the work went along. She said she continued to worry about having enough
time uninterrupted by family obligations to throw herself completely into writing, but that her general feeling about it was good.

Within weeks of this optimistic moment, Carson’s mother, Maria, who was now eighty-nine and in poor health, began to fade.
On November 22, 1958, she suffered a minor stroke and subsequently developed pneumonia.
By the end of the day on November 30, she was unconscious inside an oxygen tent in her bedroom at the house in Silver Spring. Carson sat up next to her mother’s bed through the night. Around five thirty the next morning Carson walked out into her darkened living room and peered at the sky from the picture window. Orion was up and the Milky Way shone brightly, much as it had on a snowy night of sledding back at PCW so many years before. She went back to her mother’s room, and Maria died a few moments later with her daughter at her side, holding her hand. They had come this far together, not knowing that it was the beginning of the last chapter of Carson’s own life.

Brooks waited a couple of months while Carson grieved and adjusted to the terms of her life once more before he asked her for a progress report. As he must have expected, the book was going to be longer and more complex than anyone had thought—certainly more than fifty thousand words—and rigorously documented. She told Brooks that the book they’d all had in mind the preceding summer would have been “
half-baked at best.” In the months since then, Carson said it had become increasingly clear to her that the threat to human health from synthetic pesticides—which she had always wanted to emphasize—really was the center of the story. She thought it was striking that, as a matter of policy, the American Medical Association and the U.S. Public Health Service maintained the idea that pesticides could be used safely—while routinely publishing findings that argued the opposite. She said the main problem with respect to human health wasn’t acute poisoning—which usually resulted from either accidents or negligence and ignorance of the dangers of handling
such compounds. Rather it was the still unknown long-term effects of lifelong exposures to pesticides, which linger in the environment, become embedded in food chains, build up in the tissues of the population at large, and, perhaps most frighteningly of all, were transmitted from mothers to their offspring.

But Carson was not immune to the kinds of scientific temptations that were behind assurances that DDT was safe and had earned its creator a Nobel Prize.
She told Brooks she was intrigued by newly created manmade insect diseases that might be used as pesticides—a kind of “biological control” she believed could be formulated so as to target a single species and have the added advantage of leaving no residues in the environment. Another interesting idea—further off in the future but no less tantalizing—involved neutralizing specific hormones necessary for insect metamorphosis. This would effectively prevent a targeted species from reaching sexual maturity and thus interrupt its reproductive cycle—an outcome that, if achieved, would be a kind of “Utopia,” Carson said, though it was still an open question whether the effects of such a hormone-based pesticide could ever be limited to just one species of insect. A hormone that killed off fire ants or gypsy moths wouldn’t be much of an improvement over DDT if it also killed honeybees and butterflies.

As usual, the science of extermination proceeded faster than anyone’s ability to anticipate unintended consequences. One ironic new technology being developed for controlling certain insects was the deployment of radioactively sterilized males of the species into the environment. Decades later, such biological controls would be found to have unexpected limitations and dangers—including the same collateral damage problems that plagued poisons such as DDT. But for now it was important to Carson that there be plausible alternatives to the use of synthetic pesticides.

Carson said she hoped this update would give Brooks a clearer picture of the shape of the book. She said she felt she was at last on the right track, but added without apology that she would “
not be so rash as to predict when you will have the manuscript.” Carson sent
an almost identical letter to William Shawn at the
New Yorker
. Brooks wrote back to say that he was horrified by the pesticide situation but heartened by the direction the book was taking.

In the summer of 1958, Marjorie Spock had forwarded to Carson a large file of materials relating to the Long Island lawsuit—which the plaintiffs had lost that spring and were now planning to appeal.
Over the course of the sixteen-day trial the residents had failed to convince a federal judge—it wasn’t a jury trial—that the spraying campaign had done any real harm other than to a few fish and crabs. The plaintiffs argued that the DDT had contaminated milk in dairy herds and that it also posed a potential—if unspecific—threat to their own health. They testified that spray planes dropping the DDT-and-fuel-oil mixture sometimes made multiple passes over the same area—making it certain that the application rate in some places was higher than intended.

A surprise witness who appeared on behalf of the residents was Dr. Malcolm Hargraves, from the Mayo Clinic in Minnesota. Hargraves, who specialized in blood diseases, told the court he was convinced that DDT and other chlorinated hydrocarbon pesticides played a role in the development of leukemia and lymphoma, and that while the Mayo Clinic did not formally endorse this position most of the doctors there believed it was true. Hargraves—in testimony Carson could not have failed to notice—also said that the more that was learned about the effects of DDT on human health, the more dangerous it looked, a situation that paralleled what was being learned about human exposure to atomic radiation.

The key witness for the government turned out to be Dr. Wayland J. Hayes—the same Dr. Wayland J. Hayes who four years earlier had dismissed concerns about DDT in the
American Journal of Public Health
, even though it then contaminated almost everything Americans ate when they went to a restaurant. Hayes pointed to two studies. In one, employees at a plant that manufactured DDT had shown no ill effects despite continuous exposure to the pesticide over long periods. In another, a group of prisoners volunteered to swallow large
doses of DDT for eighteen months. Again, Hayes said, nobody got sick. Hayes thought these results put the Long Island residents’ puny exposure to DDT into perspective. “The amount of DDT which was absorbed by humans as a result of the gypsy moth spray program was so small as to not be measurable,” Hayes testified.

Before the judge could issue his decision, however, the State of New York said it was canceling the spraying program for 1958—the same thing it had said the preceding fall, but about which there had been conflicting reports since. New York officials said that while the program had been effective against the gypsy moth, the state wanted to find different pesticides that would be less persistent in the environment. The state also said it wanted improved flight programming, so that spray planes did not make repeated applications to the same areas, and that it would stop paying pilots by the gallon of pesticide applied—an obvious temptation to overdo it.

In June the court issued a broad ruling that said not only had the government acted legally in its spraying campaign, but that the evidence was “overwhelming” that the spraying had, in fact, succeeded in eradicating the gypsy moth from the area in the process—a key finding in that it tipped the balance between the public purpose of controlling the moth and the unproven private concerns that the residents had been put at risk. In a twenty-four-page decision, the judge, Walter Bruchhausen of the federal district court in Brooklyn, chastised the plaintiffs as whiners whose only real complaint was their annoyance with spray planes flying over their properties:

Whether an imported leaf-devouring pest such as the gypsy moth could rationally be called “evil” was debatable. The moth was brought into the country in the 1860s for use in a scientific experiment from which it escaped and then spread—a story so plain and predictable that a biologist would have seen it as routinely opportunistic on the moth’s part. The judge’s allusion to a “police” power for federal and state agriculture officials must have galled the residents on Long Island who believed their community didn’t need such protection. But Carson was less interested in the outcome of the lawsuit—which the plaintiffs would lose again on appeal—than she was in Marjorie Spock’s reports on some of the latest and most damning research on DDT. One set of findings stood out—research by an ornithologist named George J. Wallace at Michigan State University. As it happened, the campus of Michigan State in East Lansing had been undergoing annual spring DDT spraying operations against Dutch elm disease since 1954.
Wallace and his graduate students had studied the effects of the treatments on local bird populations—especially robins. Every year Wallace and his team recovered dozens of dead or dying birds after spraying operations. The birds captured while still alive routinely showed the classic symptoms of chlorinated hydrocarbon poisoning.

More recently, Wallace had begun conducting a careful bird census on one part of the campus in order to determine the overall effect of DDT use on annual bird numbers. His findings were startling. Spraying operations were causing a
total
elimination of robins in the treated areas. As in past studies at Patuxent, Wallace could not be sure that some birds didn’t simply fly out of the area to avoid the sprayers. But he discovered something that put any such exodus into perspective: The number of dead or dying robins they recovered exceeded the number of robins that had been present in the area in the early spring, before the spraying operations began. This could only mean that robins living outside the sprayed areas converged there after the treatments and had been poisoned by DDT residues present in the environment.

Tissue analysis of the dead birds showed high levels of DDT. This
included brain tissue, where DDT was found at levels comparable to those in experimental lethal poisonings. Wallace would eventually find DDT residues in some forty species of birds in the treated areas. Aerial feeders such as swallows and nighthawks appeared to be free of DDT contamination. So were transient species that passed through the treated areas in the fall. As might have been expected, Wallace also observed a long-term general decline in the population of robins on campus. He suspected reproductive issues, and sure enough, annual inspections of nests showed that some robins built nests but did not lay eggs in them. In other cases, the birds laid eggs that did not hatch. Tissue analysis showed DDT loads in the birds’ testes and ovaries.

Wallace and other researchers pieced together a story that showed the insidiousness of DDT’s entrapment in the food chain and the role it played in the demise of the robins. Heavy spraying of the elms with an emulsion of DDT killed the bark beetles that transmitted Dutch elm disease from tree to tree—along with all the other insects present, both the “good” ones and the pests—and left the foliage coated with the persistent poison. The leaves fell to the ground in the fall, where they were consumed by earthworms that feed on leaf litter. This, of course, killed some of the worms, while the ones who survived picked up a heavy body burden of DDT, which they stored through the winter. In the spring the robins returned, ate the toxic worms, and succumbed to the poison used in the
previous year’s
spray program. Tests on worm tissues indicated that as few as eleven earthworms could provide a lethal dose of DDT to a robin—about as many as the bird consumes every minute while it is feeding.

Carson thought this toxic cycle through the food web over time demonstrated the unusually sinister nature of DDT contamination. Unlike a poison whose toxicity could be measured by a single dose, DDT lingered in the environment, where it became concentrated in the reproductive organs and the food sources of wildlife that were never its intended targets. Deadly and enduring, a little DDT went a long way.

Wallace had been studying the effects of DDT on birds as the U.S. Department of Agriculture continued to urge citizens to participate in a campaign against Dutch elm disease.
Locating and dealing with infected trees was the responsibility of landowners, who in some states—New York was a model example—were assisted by “scouts” from state agencies who were on the lookout for trees in need of spraying. The Agriculture Department recommended spraying three or four gallons of a 12 percent DDT emulsion on every infected elm—and on the deadfall from trees that had already been killed by the disease.

Carson was intrigued with her new letter-writing friend Marjorie Spock. An unusual woman and younger sister of Dr. Benjamin Spock—the famed pediatrician and later antiwar activist—Spock held an advanced degree from Columbia and had worked as an educator and school administrator in New York before moving to Long Island to take up “biodynamic gardening,” one of several disciplines belonging to a cultish philosophy called “anthroposophy.” As a young woman, Spock had studied with the founder of anthroposophy, Rudolf Steiner. Steiner believed that true knowledge resided in a spiritual dimension that was accessible by way of inner thought processes disconnected from the literal world.

Anthroposophy was the underlying principle of a form of dance Spock also practiced called “eurythmy,” an all but unfathomable art form in which the performers—though visible in ordinary time and space to the audience—supposedly entered an “etheric” or “supersensory” realm outside of conventional reality. The movements were cryptically linked to tones, time signatures, the alphabet, and the signs of the zodiac. Anthroposophy also figured in the interdisciplinary educational doctrines employed in the popular Waldorf private schools. Biodynamic gardening, another of Steiner’s spin-off movements, was essentially a variation of organic gardening that emphasized the proper fermentation of compost heaps, supposedly achieved by
interlayering special medicinal herbs with manure and other organic matter. Spock devoted herself to Steiner’s methods, which she shared with her live-in partner,
a woman named Mary Richards who went by the nickname Polly.