Friday, May 04, 2007

Born and raised in Pennsylvania, Carson was educated as a scientist, though from an early age she used her gift for writing. She worked for many years as an editor at the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service, and when circumstances allowed, devoted herself solely to writing. She wrote three books about the sea, and one, The Sea Around Us, won the 1952 National Book Award and the John Burroughs Medal.

But it is through her 1962 book, "Silent Spring," that Carson sparked the public's environmental consciousness and impacted U.S. policy. She gives us an articulate and graceful tale, based on scientific evidence, of how the indiscriminate use of synthetic chemical pesticides, including DDT, was harming wildlife, ecosystems and humans. Forty-five years after "Silent Spring," we have a large body of evidence of the wide-ranging effects of synthetic pesticides on human cancers, reproduction, and the nervous system. We have limited our reliance on indiscriminate aerial spraying. We have banned DDT. We have enacted many laws to protect the environment.

Yet, despite this progress, today we use over 5 billion pounds of pesticides per year in the U.S. We douse our lawns with 10 times the amount applied per acre to farms. Many of our foods contain pesticide residues and we all carry pesticide burdens in our bodies. The 10 most commonly used pesticides in the U.S. all have toxic effects on humans and wildlife. And those are just the pesticides. There are thousands of other potentially hazardous chemicals in widespread use today -- in our air, water, household products, food, even our bodies -- that are as inadequately tested and regulated as DDT was in 1962.

Readers of "Silent Spring" told Carson how she inspired in them a new sense of personal responsibility. The writer Terry Tempest Williams calls Carson a "model for a true patriot, one who not only cared to define democratic principles as ecological ones, but demanded through her grace and fierce intelligence that we hold corporations and our government accountable for the health of our communities, cultured and wild."

Carson died in 1964. But her legacy is significant and calls us to action -- to demand that we understand the health risks of synthetic chemicals before we approve them for use, that we rely on independent scientific evidence rather than the word of industry-paid experts and lobbyists with undue political influence and that we act morally in stewardship of all forms of life to do the least harm possible.

Gail Carlson is a Visiting Assistant Professor in the Environmental Studies Program at Colby College.

For more on Rachel Carson, Colby offers a free public event this weekend, Celebrating Rachel Carson and the Natural World (www.colby.edu/Environ/RachelCarson/

RCarson.html).