Rachel Carson’s book Silent Spring represents the origins of both contemporary environmentalism and the contrarian backlash to it. In Silent Spring, Carson showed that commonly used pesticides like DDT can severely damage wildlife and crucial ecosystems across the globe. This showed the public that, beyond simply preserving natural areas for aesthetic purposes, society also needs to regulate which toxic substances its members can release into the environment. In other words, Silent Spring convinced environmentalists to stop focusing on aesthetics and start fighting for regulation.
Yet Silent Spring also carried a troubling implication for Americans during the Cold War: it showed them that an unregulated free market is environmentally unsustainable. This is why free market fundamentalists, who believe that all regulation brings society a step closer to tyranny, have made Rachel Carson one of their primary targets even several decades after her death. After all, discrediting her would be a way for the “merchants of doubt” (politically influential scientists) to undermine the entire modern environmentalist movement.
Silent Spring Quotes in Merchants of Doubt
The Kennedy PSAC report, Use of Pesticides: A Report of the President’s Science Advisory Committee, is notable in hindsight as much for what it did not do as for what it did. The scientists did not claim that the hazards of persistent pesticides were “proven,” “demonstrated,” “certain,” or even well understood; they simply concluded that the weight of evidence was sufficient to warrant policy action to control DDT.
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Both science and democracy worked as they were supposed to.
So Sri Lanka didn’t stop using DDT because of what the United States did, or for any other reason. DDT stopped working, but they kept using it anyway. We can surmise why: since DDT had appeared to work at first, officials were reluctant to give it up, even as malaria became resurgent. It took a long time for people to admit defeat—to accept that tiny mosquitoes were in their own way stronger than us. As a WHO committee concluded in 1976, “It is finally becoming acknowledged that resistance is probably the biggest single obstacle in the struggle against vector-borne disease and is mainly responsible for preventing successful malaria eradication in many countries.”
Accepting that by-products of industrial civilization were irreparably damaging the global environment was to accept the reality of market failure. It was to acknowledge the limits of free market capitalism.
Silent Spring Symbol Timeline in Merchants of Doubt
