Rachel Carson's Silent Spring

After the Second World War the US Department of Agriculture and chemical companies promoted DDT and other powerful chemicals to raise domestic production and fight a range of ills. DDT was sold in aerial sprays and even in insecticidal paint and wallpaper, and US production rose from 4,366 tons in 1944 to a peak of 81,154 tons in 1963. Federal law, under the Insecticide Act of 1910 and the Federal Insecticide, Fungicide, and Rodenticide Act of 1947, mainly made sure that pesticides worked as claimed and were not fraudulent. A 1952 amendment set limits on residues in food but did not regulate use.

Rachel Carson, born in 1907 in Springdale, Pennsylvania, held a master's degree in zoology from Johns Hopkins. From 1936 to 1952 she worked as a field scientist and writer for the US Fish and Wildlife Service. Her book The Sea Around Us (1951) sold 250,000 copies in its first year and won the National Book Award.

Silent Spring appeared first as excerpts in The New Yorker and then as a book on 27 September 1962. It set out how the careless spraying of pesticides and other chemicals polluted streams, killed birds and other animals and caused serious illness in people. Public interest was enormous, and so was the criticism. In a review titled Silence, Miss Carson, published in Chemical & Engineering News on 1 October 1962, William Darby recommended that the book be ignored. President John Kennedy, disturbed by the New Yorker excerpts, asked the Life Sciences Panel of his Science Advisory Committee to examine her claims. Its report on 15 May 1963 backed her call for limits on pesticide use and more research into their health hazards.

Hearings on pollution and pesticide regulation, announced by Senator Abraham Ribicoff of Connecticut, began the next day, and Carson testified on 4 June 1963. Congress then amended the 1947 pesticide law to address safety in labeling. Carson died in 1964. The new Environmental Protection Agency took over pesticide regulation, and in 1972 it cancelled the registration of DDT, citing harm to wildlife and possible risks to human health. The Stockholm Convention on persistent organic pollutants later banned DDT except for limited use against the mosquitoes that carry malaria.