A
Living With Rachel
Carson’s Legacy
By Lynne Peeples
Illustrations by Ellen Weinstein
As you read this, a menagerie of
chemical pollutants is coursing
through your body. What you do and
how you live doesn’t matter. You have
inhaled them, you’ve eaten them,
you’ve absorbed them through your
skin. You’re doing it right now.
If you are an average American,
your personal chemical inventory
— embedded in your blood, your
breath and your bones — will include an alphabet soup of phthalates, mercury, perfluorinated
compounds, bisphenol A, and assorted chemical flame retardants.
If you are a new mother, you are
passing these chemicals to your
child through your breast milk. If
you are pregnant, you are delivering
them through your umbilical cord.
These inescapable realities of
modern life — realities that have
vexed environmental advocates
and worried scientists for years
— are not new. They were all foreseen, with sometimes chilling accuracy, 50 years ago this summer,
when an unassuming marine biologist from Springdale, Pa., named
Rachel Carson began publishing a
series of articles in The New Yorker. Carson’s essays, which accused
the chemical industry of calculated deception and American
regulators of wanton disregard for
the proliferation of pesticides and
other chemical pollutants released
into the environment, would ultimately be published as the book
Silent Spring — considered by
many to be the clarion call of the
modern environmental movement.