CHAPTER & VERSE — Silent Spring

Rufus McCrae: Evening, all, and welcome to Chapter and Verse, my reading group down the pub. Tonight the crisps are organic, purely out of guilt. Our book is Silent Spring, Rachel Carson, nineteen sixty-two, the one they say started the whole environmental movement, and it was brought in by Doc Sullivan, our science correspondent, who has checked the beer garden for pesticides twice and the menu once. With him is Arthur Nightingale, who heard there was a chapter about songbirds and bought tissues in bulk. Murray Kessler, our money man, is here to speak up for the chemical industry, which honestly needs a friend tonight. And Sir Reginald Blackwood tells me DDT went to war before it ever went to the garden centre, and he wants his say. And up in the balcony, where nothing has been sprayed on them since nineteen seventy-one but disappointment, it's Humphrey Thwaite and Mortimer Finch.

Humphrey Thwaite: Disappointment is a natural product, Rufus. No additives.

Mortimer Finch: Speak for yourself. I've been preserved in bitter since the Callaghan government.

Humphrey Thwaite: Which is why he hasn't decomposed.

Mortimer Finch: Nor will I. Out of spite.

Rufus McCrae: Right, Doc, you brought it, so you're in the dock. Pitch me. Why does a book about crop-dusting from nineteen sixty-two deserve a Wednesday night in twenty twenty-six?

Doc Sullivan: Because it's the best detective story I've ever read, and the murderer is us. Speaking as the science man, here's what she actually does. She takes DDT and its chemical cousins and follows them from the spray plane into the soil, into the worm, into the robin, into the river, into the fish, onto your dinner plate, and into you. Scientists knew bits of it. Nobody had joined the dots out loud for ordinary readers. She joined them in ink.

Rufus McCrae: A food-chain whodunnit. Humphrey, I can hear you sighing from here.

Humphrey Thwaite: I was promised a book that changed the world. I got a hundred pages about weedkiller.

Mortimer Finch: You finished it, though.

Humphrey Thwaite: I finish everything. It's a character flaw. I finished a council leaflet on bin collections last Thursday.

Mortimer Finch: I knew in ten pages. Page one is a fairy tale, and by page ten she's got you by the collar. It's an honest book. Furious, but honest. You can always tell when somebody's angry because they're right.

Rufus McCrae: Murray, you've got a face on like somebody's put a tax on your crisps.

Murray Kessler: Because I'm the only one at this table who'll point out that the people who made these chemicals thought they were feeding the world, and to be fair they partly were. I love this book. I just don't want us canonising it in the first five minutes.

Rufus McCrae: Noted. Canonisation postponed till the second pint at the earliest. Arthur, before the fight starts, who was she? I'll be honest, I had her down as a stern woman in a cardigan wagging her finger at farmers.

Arthur Nightingale: Oh, Rufus, no. She wanted to be a writer first. She was born in nineteen oh seven in Springdale, Pennsylvania, a little river town. She went to college to study English and switched to biology because she fell head over heels for it. She got a master's in zoology from Johns Hopkins. Then the Depression hits and she ends up holding the family together. She supported her mother, then her nieces, and later an orphaned great-nephew she took in herself. So she takes a government job at the Bureau of Fisheries, writing radio scripts. About fish. Don't, Mortimer.

Mortimer Finch: I wasn't going to say anything. Radio scripts about fish. That's this show with more scales.

Arthur Nightingale: And from there she writes The Sea Around Us, which became an enormous bestseller in nineteen fifty-one. She was a nature writer, a lyrical one. She wrote about the sea the way Humphrey pretends not to read poetry.

Humphrey Thwaite: Slander. Actionable slander.

Arthur Nightingale: Then in nineteen fifty-eight a letter arrives. A friend, Olga Owens Huckins, in Duxbury, Massachusetts, writes about the birds dying around her place after the mosquito spraying. Carson thinks somebody has to write this. She tries to get other writers to take it on. Nobody will. So she does it herself, and it takes her four years. Partway through, she's diagnosed with breast cancer and has a radical mastectomy in nineteen sixty. The cancer spreads. She tells almost nobody, because she knows exactly what the chemical companies would say: sick woman, personal grudge. So she's writing a book about what chemicals do inside the human body while her own body is failing her, and she hides it to protect the argument.

Rufus McCrae: Right. That's the cardigan gone, then. Sir Reginald, you've been twitching since somebody said DDT.

Sir Reginald Blackwood: Because DDT went to war long before it went to the lawn. As a military historian I can tell you the Allies treated it as a miracle. In the winter of nineteen forty-three into forty-four, typhus broke out in Naples. Lice carry it. They dusted over a million people with DDT powder, and the epidemic stopped. Troops in the Pacific were sprayed against malarial mosquitoes. And the Swiss chemist who discovered it kills insects, Paul Müller, won the Nobel Prize in nineteen forty-eight. You can imagine, Murray, what a Nobel does for sales.

Murray Kessler: So it comes home a war hero.

Sir Reginald Blackwood: And nobody interrogates a war hero. That's rather Carson's point. She notes that some of the newer insecticides came straight out of chemical-warfare research. The organophosphates are close kin to the nerve gases. We built the weapon and then pointed it at the rose bed. Humphrey's gone pale.

Humphrey Thwaite: Peace dividend. Dead thrushes.

Rufus McCrae: Arthur. The opening. Read it the way she wrote it.

Arthur Nightingale: The book opens with what she calls 'A Fable for Tomorrow.' It's an imaginary town in the heart of America, all orchards and foxes and blossom, and then something goes wrong. This is it. ... 'There was a strange stillness. The birds, for example—where had they gone? Many people spoke of them, puzzled and disturbed. The feeding stations in the backyards were deserted. The few birds seen anywhere were moribund; they trembled violently and could not fly. It was a spring without voices. On the mornings that had once throbbed with the dawn chorus of robins, catbirds, doves, jays, wrens, and scores of other bird voices there was now no sound; only silence lay over the fields and woods and marsh.' ... And then the last line of the fable: 'No witchcraft, no enemy action had silenced the rebirth of new life in this stricken world. The people had done it themselves.'

Rufus McCrae: ... Arthur Nightingale. Blimey.

Mortimer Finch: 'The people had done it themselves.' She doesn't even raise her voice.

Rufus McCrae: Not everybody had a little cry, mind. Murray, you've brought the hate mail.

Murray Kessler: I have, and it's vintage. Time magazine, nineteen sixty-two, called the book 'unfair, one-sided, and hysterically overemphatic.' Doc, I can see your eyebrow from here.

Doc Sullivan: Hysterically. Mark that word.

Murray Kessler: Oh, it's marked. Then there's Robert White-Stevens, a chemist from American Cyanamid, who said: 'If man were to follow the teachings of Miss Carson, we would return to the Dark Ages, and the insects and diseases and vermin would once again inherit the earth.'

Mortimer Finch: The vermin inheriting the earth. Some of us have been to Westminster, mate. Done and dusted.

Murray Kessler: My favourite is Monsanto. Their company magazine ran a parody of her opening fable called 'The Desolate Year.' Same set-up, but it's a town without pesticides, overrun by bugs, crops eaten, disease everywhere.

Rufus McCrae: A chemical company writing fan fiction. That's a niche.

Murray Kessler: Hostile fan fiction. And then there's the one that tells you what was really going on. Ezra Taft Benson, a former Agriculture Secretary, reportedly wondered why a spinster with no children was so worried about genetics, and concluded she was probably a Communist.

Humphrey Thwaite: Ah, yes. The classic scientific rebuttal: she isn't married. Doc, back me up.

Doc Sullivan: That's the tell, isn't it? Nobody laid a glove on her data. President Kennedy's Science Advisory Committee went through the issue and largely backed her in nineteen sixty-three. So they went for the woman instead. Hysterical, spinster, Communist. Three words and not one bit of chemistry.

Rufus McCrae: And the modern lot? The Goodreads crowd?

Doc Sullivan: Mostly adoring. But the grumble you hear again and again, and it's fair, is that the middle drags. Chapter after chapter of chemical names, spraying campaigns, dead fish counts. Mortimer's nodding.

Mortimer Finch: It drags. I'll say it. There's a stretch where I thought I was reading the minutes of a parish council in hell.

Humphrey Thwaite: That's the point, you philistine. She's piling up the bodies so you can't look away. The repetition is the prosecution. Real harm is boring. It's the same thing, over and over, in every county.

Mortimer Finch: Look at him. He's defending a list of herbicides.

Humphrey Thwaite: I'm defending rigour.

Mortimer Finch: You're defending a list of herbicides, Humphrey. With feeling.

Rufus McCrae: Murray, you promised me a fight. Go on.

Murray Kessler: Here's the charge, and serious people make it, not just cranks. The argument runs that the campaign Carson inspired turned DDT into a pantomime villain, and poorer countries lost a cheap weapon against malaria. Mosquitoes kill people, enormous numbers of people. So rich Americans fretted about robins and poor children paid for it. That's the charge, Doc.

Doc Sullivan: And it's wrong, Murray, and the book itself proves it. She never called for a total ban. She writes it in black and white: 'It is not my contention that chemical insecticides must never be used. I do contend that we have put poisonous and biologically potent chemicals indiscriminately into the hands of persons largely or wholly ignorant of their potentials for harm.' Indiscriminately. That's her word.

Murray Kessler: Fine. But an author doesn't control what a movement does with her book.

Doc Sullivan: And look at what she actually warned about, the thing that really did cripple malaria control: resistance. If you spray everything everywhere, the insects evolve. She has a whole chapter on it. She was trying to save these chemicals for where they mattered. And for the record, the American ban in nineteen seventy-two covered agricultural use, and international rules still allow DDT for fighting malaria.

Murray Kessler: You're making her sound like an industry consultant.

Doc Sullivan: She'd have been a brilliant one. They couldn't have afforded her. Ask Sir Reginald what happens when you trust a miracle too much.

Sir Reginald Blackwood: I'll say this first. I won't hear a word against what that powder did in Naples. A typhus epidemic was stopped in a city.

Doc Sullivan: Nor will I. Nor would she. That's my whole...

Sir Reginald Blackwood: But I'll grant you this. Once we'd found a miracle, we stopped asking what it cost. Armies are very good at that, Murray, and I suspect so are markets.

Murray Kessler: And so are movements. That's my real worry. I'm not worried about Carson. I'm worried about Saint Carson. The minute she's a saint, nobody reads the sentence Doc just read out. They read the poster.

Rufus McCrae: ... Alright. That's actually a good point, Murray, and I hate it.

Murray Kessler: Write it down. First time this year.

Rufus McCrae: So, the big one. Can one book really change the world? Doc?

Doc Sullivan: Look at the timeline. The New Yorker serialises it in the summer of sixty-two. Kennedy gets asked about pesticides at a press conference and mentions Miss Carson's book before it's even in the shops. The book comes out that September. The Science Advisory Committee reports in nineteen sixty-three, and she testifies before the Senate. In nineteen seventy the Environmental Protection Agency is created, and in nineteen seventy-two DDT is banned for agricultural use in America. You're shaking your head, Murray.

Murray Kessler: As the money man, I'll tell you one book doesn't do that. A book plus television does that. In April nineteen sixty-three CBS ran an hour on her, 'The Silent Spring of Rachel Carson,' and some of the sponsors pulled out. Millions watched her sitting there, calm and precise, and then watched the industry's man in his white lab coat. The audience could decide for themselves who sounded hysterical.

Rufus McCrae: So it's a book with a very good publicist.

Murray Kessler: Luck, timing, and a villain who wouldn't stop talking.

Rufus McCrae: Mortimer, you've gone quiet. That's worrying.

Mortimer Finch: Because nobody's told me what happened to the birds. Don't give me agencies. Give me birds.

Doc Sullivan: The birds, Mortimer. DDT breaks down into a compound that thins eggshells. Eagles, ospreys and peregrines were sitting on eggs that cracked underneath them. After the bans, they came back. The bald eagle, America's own bird, came off the endangered list in two thousand and seven.

Mortimer Finch: So the national bird of America owes a woman a pint.

Humphrey Thwaite: A woman they called a Communist. Marvellous country, eh, Reginald?

Sir Reginald Blackwood: The eagle on the Great Seal, saved by the spinster. I'd buy a ticket to that ceremony.

Rufus McCrae: So, Humphrey, one book?

Humphrey Thwaite: One letter about birds, and one woman who wouldn't be quiet. It isn't an argument that books change the world. It's an argument for not shutting up. The book is just where she did it.

Rufus McCrae: Takeaways, then. One each, and only from those who've earned it. Murray, surprise me.

Murray Kessler: Read the footnotes of anything that's making somebody rich. Every industry I've ever covered had a Silent Spring buried in its accounts: a cost that's real but lands on somebody else's books. Carson was the accountant for the costs nobody was booking.

Rufus McCrae: Arthur, you're welling up already, and I haven't even asked.

Arthur Nightingale: I always am. Mine is 'The people had done it themselves,' because it cuts both ways. If we did it, we can undo it. The eagles are the proof. It's the most hopeful accusation I've ever read.

Rufus McCrae: Humphrey, what's the final word from the balcony?

Humphrey Thwaite: Before the book starts, before the fable, before any of it, she puts two lines of Keats at the front. 'The sedge is wither'd from the lake, and no birds sing.' ... I've read that poem a hundred times. A knight under a spell, waiting by a dead lake. I never once thought it was about a real lake. ... She was dying while she wrote this, and she knew it. She hid it so they couldn't use it against her. The book came out that September, and she died in April nineteen sixty-four. In the spring. ... She spent her last spring fighting for everyone else's.

Mortimer Finch: ... Well. He'll be useless for the rest of the night now. I'll have to drive.

Humphrey Thwaite: You don't drive.

Mortimer Finch: Then I'll learn. ... Mine's simpler. What we spray comes back to us. Tomorrow morning, before you put the kettle on, open the back door and listen. Whatever's singing out there, a robin, a blackbird, some pigeon with a smoker's cough, that isn't nothing. Somebody fought for that noise. Go and hear it.

Rufus McCrae: Silent Spring, then. It's a masterpiece with a saggy middle, so bring a sandwich for the herbicide chapters. And it's one of the very few books that genuinely moved the world, not because it shouted, but because it showed its working. Here's what I keep coming back to. Miners used to take a canary down the pit, and when the bird went quiet, you got out. Rachel Carson heard the birds going quiet all over America, and instead of running she stood in the tunnel and sang, ill and hiding it, until somebody listened. Read it if you've got a garden, a kid, a dinner plate, or a pair of lungs. Which is everybody. Read the actual book, though. Don't just listen to us bang on about it. That's Chapter and Verse. See you next week.