Diamond writes that “her arguments were more emotional than accurate” and dismisses the success of the book as a result of good timing and “graceful prose,” calling it the work of an era of “shrill voices.”Īfter declaring the “pesticide menace” a myth, the author’s argument shrinks in scope to merely chip away at Carson’s credibility with rhetorical questions like why “an industrialist or a scientist…would poison our food and water - the same food and water he himself eats and drinks?” His critique of her work contains more thinly-veiled sexism than scientific refutation. One of her critics wrote an editorial in this magazine in 1963 called “The Myth of the ‘Pesticide Menace.’” Edwin Diamond was a senior editor - and former science editor - of Newsweek who had originally planned to coauthor Silent Spring with Carson. She tracked the pesticides’ and herbicides’ movement through waterways as well as the food chain and alerted the public to DDT’s murderous effects on bird populations across the country.Ĭarson’s shocking scientific account met instant backlash. Silent Spring made a bold claim: “For the first time in the history of the world, every human being is now subjected to contact with dangerous chemicals from the moment of conception until death.” Carson examined studies of the effects of chemicals like DDT on the human body, citing the range of concoctions used on farmlands, roadsides, and, sometimes, sprayed liberally over vast areas. The book was an indictment of the widespread use of petrochemical-based pesticides developed during World War II in the U.S. Was she a communist? A new McCarthy? These were the strikingly antithetical allegations mounted against Rachel Carson after she published Silent Spring - an influential work of environmentalism released 55 years ago today.
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