William Cronon - 460 Handout 18 - Fallout of Silent Spring

Lecture #17: The Fallout of Silent Spring

Outline

I. Bombs, Radiation, and Death

The core argument of today's lecture is that fear of nuclear war hung like the shadow of a mushroom cloud over popular consciousness during the Cold War, and powerfully informed public anxieties that would feed into the emergence of 1960s environmentalism in myriad ways. The Bomb taught people to think of their world as being more fragile, more at risk on a planetary scale, than ever before. Today we'll explore further some of the specific content of the fears that the Bomb encouraged.

The Japanese cities of Hiroshima (bombed 8/6/1945) and Nagasaki (8/9/1945) were seen after the war as "experiments" in what nuclear war might actually look like...and so also served as nightmare prophecies of what a post-holocaust landscape might be in a nuclear age. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atomic_bombings_of_Hiroshima_and_Nagasaki

Atomic weapons shared certain dangers with conventional explosive armaments - blast and burn - but with much greater intensity and scale.

Stranger and more fearful were the consequences of biological disruption from radioactive assault on cells: radiation sickness, loss of hair, eventually cataracts, leukemia.

Terrible accident at Los Alamos in 1946: Louis Slotin was "tickling the dragon" in setting up a plutonium bomb when his hand slipped and he accidentally initiated a fission reaction. Although his quick action ended the chain reaction before others could be injured, he himself suffered a lethal dose of radiation and died nine days later.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Louis_Slotin

Legendary story in Japan: Sadako was exposed to the bomb's radiation in Hiroshima at the age of 2, contracted leukemia a decade later, tried to fulfill the old Japanese proverb that "If you fold 1000 paper cranes, your wish will be granted"--which in her case was simply to live. Popular novel Sadako and the Thousand Paper Cranes claimed that she died having only completed 644 cranes, though her family affirmed that she in fact achieved her goal and continued to fold another 300 cranes before she died. She became a heroine and symbol for the Japanese anti-nuclear and peace movement.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sadako_Sasaki

Beyond the Bomb's risk of disease and injury were threats to future generations in radiation damage to chromosomes: breaking, doubling, abnormal growth leading toward mutation and cancer.

Cancer became a recurring metaphor in the post-war world for abnormal growth in an atomic age: disease reflects social ills. Science fiction and horror films of the 1950s played with metaphors of uncontrolled growth from radiation with characters like Godzilla. The irradiated spider in the origin story of Marvel Comics' Spider-Man has its roots in this same history.

II. Fear of Fallout

Fear of disease from exposure to radiation was not limited to victims of direct atomic attacks. The persistence of certain radioactive isotopes and their ability to replace other elements in ordinary body chemistry and physiology provoked growing public fears.

Many of these had long half-lives, meaning that they would linger in the environment long after their initial deposition:

Iodine 131 (Thyroid): 8 Days
Strontium 90 (Bones): 28 Years
Cesium 137 (Whole Body): 30 Years
Plutonium 239 (Lungs): 24,000 Yrs

All were being dispersed in the global environment in growing quantities as a result of atmospheric nuclear testing: fallout.

These chemical properties of radioactive isotopes made them valuable in the emergence of systems ecology during the 1940s and 1950s, enabling scientists like Howard & Eugene Odum and Raymond Lindemann to study the movements of certain chemicals through the trophic levels of an ecosystem. The rise of ecosystem ecology, with its characteristic diagrams tracing flows of calories, nutrients, and other materials through and among different organisms was a direct result of this isotope-driven research.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ecosystem_ecology
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eugene_Odum
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Howard_T._Odum

US hydrogen bomb tests in Pacific Ocean atolls of the Marshall Islands generated new levels of radioactive fallout, as did the commissioning of the Nevada Test Site starting in 1951, exposing growing numbers of Americans to the downwind effects of fallout. For the Atomic Energy Commission's (AEC) 1955 pamphlet explaining the importance of these tests to Nevada residents, see:
https://www.fourmilab.ch/etexts/www/atomic_tests_nevada/

In Nevada, fallout from the test site in neighboring areas led to sheep and cattle kills and elevated childhood leukemia rates.

Farther away: Strontium 90 accumulated in soil, was concentrated by cows in milk, and ultimately accumulated in the bones of children.

This led to increasing public anxiety about the potential health effects of these accumulations, despite assurances that there was nothing to fear by the AEC and the government. Such anxieties led to mistrust of the government and of scientific authorities, and also reflected growing public struggles with the uncertainties associated with statistical causality: no clear cause-effect relationship between radiation exposure in any single instance and injuries that might or might not manifest themselves as cancer or other illnesses in the future.

Notorious episode of the radium watch dial painters starting in 1917 working with fine brushes to add radium to the hands of watches so they could be read in the dark: massive increases in cancer among such workers:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radium_Girls

1958: Dr. Seuss's The Cat in the Hat Comes Back offered a popular comic fable with a darker subtext about proliferating contaminants in the environment.

1958 saw the first voluntary test ban. In 1961 testing recommenced. Finally, in 1963, the Limited Nuclear Test Ban Treaty was signed, sending most nuclear tests underground.

One additional element just to notice: the thalidomide scandal in Great Britain in 1961, in which pregnant women were given the drug thalidomide to treat morning sickness...and many then gave birth to infants with missing limbs and other severe birth defects. Fueled public fears of invisible harms promulgated by modern science and by experts--very different from the trust in experts that was taken for granted during the era of Progressive conservation.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thalidomide_scandal

III. Rachel Carson: The Nature Writer Politicized

1962 saw the publication of Rachel Carson's Silent Spring, with its depictions of a natural world devastated by the white powder of a different sort of fallout, chemical pesticides. In her writings, public fears about the effects of radiation came together with new fears of toxic chemicals to energize a new form of environmental politics that would soon come to be called environmentalism. Her story is summarized by Wikipedia with abundant supporting details here:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rachel_Carson

Carson was born in Springdale, PA, in 1907. Her mother raised her to love nature in the nature study tradition, along with music, books, and writing. Carson wanted to write from early childhood forward, but shifted to biology while a student at the Pennsylvania College for Women, then on to an MA in zoology from Johns Hopkins. Her first job was with the Federal Bureau of Fisheries as one of the first two female scientists ever hired by that agency.

Carson's marginal status as a female scientist limited her access to research opportunities and academic employment, but also placed her in a perfect position to serve as a translator of arcane scientific knowledge into forms that could be understood and appreciated by members of the public. Again: notice the importance of writers to the emerging political movement we're studying.

Carson's career was additionally influenced by the fact that her father died in 1935, and her married sister in 1936, so that Carson and her mother became responsible for raising her sister's two children, with Carson as the sole breadwinner for the family. Although she never married, she would ultimately be responsible for raising three children (including her great nephew Roger, son of one of the nieces she raised after his mother died).

In 1937, Carson published her first piece of popular nature writing, an essay entitled "Undersea" in the Atlantic Monthly. This led to her first book, Under the Sea-Wind, in 1941, just as World War II began. During the 1940s, she shifted toward full-time editing for the government, often about issues relating to conservation.

In 1951, she wrote an introduction to oceanography entitled The Sea Around Us (serialized in The New Yorker magazine) which became a world-wide best-seller, providing Carson with financial security for the first time in her life and enabling her to retire from government employment.

In 1956, she published an article entitled "Help Your Child to Wonder" (later published in book form as The Sense of Wonder). It was written very much in the traditions of the nature study movement about the values children like her nephew Roger could learn from being exposed to the natural world and its moral universe. It's a lovely essay, a personal favorite of mine, and is available for download in its original magazine format here: https://training.fws.gov/history/Documents/carsonwonder.pdf

In Carson, the values of nature study would be politicized and applied to toxic chemical forms of fallout, with detrimental consequences both for the natural world and for human health (in the form of cancer).

IV. The War on Pests

Carson was prompted to write about the problem of pesticides by a letter she received from her friend Olga Owens Huckins, who complained that spraying for mosquitoes was killing large numbers of birds in the preserve behind Huckins' house. (Carson had become aware of the potential negative effects of pesticides on wildlife back in the 1940s and had tried to publish an essay about this topic, but couldn't find a publisher for it.)

Economic entomology emerged in the early 20th centure as a science exploring the use of toxic chemicals to control agricultural pests.

Among its chief targets were insects, both indigenous and introduced species: see, for instance, the boll weevil's arrival in southern cotton fields starting in 1892; the spread of the gypsy moth after its intentional introduction to Massachusetts in 1869; as well as the mosquito vectors we've already studied as carriers of malaria, yellow fever, and other diseases.

Early pesticides, such as lead arsenate, had high acute and chronic toxicity for humans, and because they were based on heavy metals, they accumulated permanently in the environment.

Then came the seemingly miraculous discovery of new aromatic hydrocarbon during World War II: Dichlorodiphenyltrichloroethane (DDT). It was used during the typhus epidemic in occupied Naples to de-louse GIs and Italian residents. It proved hugely beneficial for Allied war efforts in tropical and subtropical environments where mosquitoes and other insects represented serious health threats for soldiers and civilians alike. In tropical areas during and after the war, there's not much doubt that DDT saved hundreds of thousands, even millions of human lives.

After the war, DDT was used in broad-gauge attacks on insects, hailed for its astonishingly low acute toxicity in humans compared with its lethality for insects. Scientists noted in 1944 that it accumulated in milk and fatty tissues, and induced nervous disorders in rats when they were exposed to very high levels--but there were few apparent human health effects. So it was approved for public use by the FDA in 1945, and was soon being applied to a wide range of agricultural and consumer uses, including via mass aerial spraying. Sales grew rapidly, and so did its proliferation in the environment.

Wikipedia has a very detailed entry on this compound and the controversies surrounding it:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DDT

V. Storm over Silent Spring

It was against this seemingly miraculous substance that Carson mounted her attack in the book Silent Spring.

Her critique included several strands:

The tendency of DDT and other chemicals to concentrate in food chains put organisms at the highest levels of those food chains at risk: predators and large vertebrates including humans. (Note: this insight about biological accumulation of toxic materials in food chains derived from ecosystem ecology's research on trophic levels that was made possible by radioactive isotope tracing.)
Because DDT and other such chemicals accumulated in fatty tissue and degraded only very slowly, they had a significant potential for long-term chronic health consequences.
For birds, DDT accumulation led to thinning egg shells, so that a mother bird sitting on a nest crushed her own young, and fewer and fewer chicks reached reproductive maturity. As a result, the populations of certain species, especially those high in food chains like brown pelicans, peregrine falcons, bald eagles, etc., fell dramatically.
A different strand of Carson's critique was that pesticides were not even effective in meeting their own long-term goals. Insects were R-selected species, reproducing so quickly that their gene pools quickly adjusted to accommodate new toxic environments. Resistant breeds of agricultural pests yielded a self-defeating cycle of new pesticides leading to new resistance, and so on and on.
Final strand of her critique: the acute and chronic toxicity of chemical pesticides had unknown but worrisome implications for future human health effects, including nervous disorders among pesticide workers, but especially rising rates of cancer, that central metaphor of unnatural change.

The book's publication in 1962 (preceded by its serialization in The New Yorker magazine and a subsequent CBS News documentary early in 1963) led to great controversy, with widespread attacks on Carson's authority by chemical corporations.

For further details, see
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silent_Spring

Increasing public concern, including the founding of the Environmental Defense Fund (EDF) in 1967 as part of a pesticide controversy on Long Island, led the EPA finally to ban DDT in the U.S. in 1972.

VI. Closing Insights

All of this controversy was testimony to the power of the word: a nature writer who merged romanticism with rigorous science to bring her insights to the public realm of political debate. Carson and her book, by projecting public anxiety about nuclear and fallout onto the larger vision of a romantic order in nature, ushered in a new era in the history of American conservation, launching what would soon be called "the environmental movement."

Key themes:

In a post-nuclear world, public anxieties about strange new hazards meant that invisible threats to life and health, subversions of nature, became increasingly available as metaphors for expressing generalized concerns about environmental damage.
The post-WWII world saw growing suspicions of science, technology, and expert knowledge, even as all three became ever more important to the management of natural resources and the economy. This led to growing uncertainty about how to engage in democratic debate about such matters, given the inescapable importance of technical information and longstanding deference (since the days of Pinchot and Teddy Roosevelt) to the professional expert as a figure capable of offering apolitical solutions to social and environmental problems.
The publication of Silent Spring in 1962 meant that science entered the world of politics through the agency of a woman who because of her gender was on the margins of professional science, yet who was able as a supremely gifted writer to apply the themes and rhetoric of romantic naturalism onto hard policy questions about agriculture, food, and applied technology.
Finally: notice how this controversy saw the convergence of utilitarian and romantic conservation issues, since both were clearly implicated in this struggle over values and appropriate human relationship to natural world. This is a theme we'll encounter over and over again from now on: conflicts over environmental questions were rarely a simple confrontation between black hats and white hats, even though antagonists in the resulting debates sometimes depicted each other in this way. It's more useful to see these as struggles between competing goods (the clear human benefits of DDT for pest control in agriculture and public health vs. clear threats to wildlife and uncertain long-term implications for human health)─-which made the politics all the more difficult.