HISTORY
Rachel Carson : The quiet woman who ignited the environmental movement
Her vision laid bare corporate greed and government collusion in the poisoning of the world .
Don Pinnock
F ollowing the publication of Rachel Carson ’ s damning book Silent Spring , agribusiness in the US should have immediately stopped spraying deadly poisons over fields , forests and towns .
She has conclusively proved that chemical corporations were guilty of a massive die-off of insects , birds and vital soil organisms . Even cats were being killed and farmworkers were dying as deadly chemicals rained down from repurposed World War 2 planes fitted with spray nozzles .
Instead , the chemical industry attacked the messenger , calling her hysterical and “ probably a communist ”. They upped marketing campaigns , paid scientists to praise the insecticides and herbicides DDT , chlordane , heptachlor , dieldrin , aldrin and endrin . Then they increased production .
Figure 1 : World-renowned marine biologist , author and environmentalist Rachael Carson . ( Photo : Wikimedia )
Carson ’ s ideas would win in the end , but she would not have much time to savour her victory . Three years after her book ’ s publication in 1961 she died of breast cancer , quite possibly caused by what she had warned against : strontium 90 from atomic bomb tests .
Silent Spring is both scrupulously scientific and highly readable . Nobody but Carson had the literary skills to turn a 400-page book about chlorinated hydrocarbons into an international bestseller . She had spent more than six years documenting human misuse of powerful , persistent chemical pesticides that were being allowed before the full extent of their potential harm to the whole biota was known . Even today , its findings are horrifying .
Figure 2 : Rachel Carson
43 Grassroots Vol 21 No 3 November 2021