Rachel Carson

Rachel Louise Carson (May 27, 1907 – April 14, 1964) was a Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania-born zoologist and biologist whose landmark book, Silent Spring, is often credited with having launched the global environmental movement. Silent Spring had an immense effect in the United States, where it spurred a reversal in national pesticide policy.

Carson's legacy

After seven months of testimony, and despite U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service research showing DDT was thinning the eggshells of raptors such as the bald eagle, EPA Administrative Law Judge Edmund Sweeney determined, “DDT is not a carcinogenic hazard to man... The uses of DDT under the regulations involved here do not have a deleterious effect on freshwater fish, estuarine organisms, wild birds, or other wildlife... The evidence in this proceeding supports the conclusion that there is a present need for the essential uses of DDT.” However, two months later, the Republican head of the EPA, William Ruckelshaus, overturned Judge Sweeney's decision, saying that DDT was a “potential human carcinogen,” and banned its use.

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The issue of DDT use is quite different in Third World counties, where it is frequently used to control malarial insects. Supporters argue strongly for its use in selective environments. The National Academy of Sciences stated in 1965 that “in a little more than two decades, DDT has prevented 500 million deaths that would otherwise have been inevitable.” While Silent Spring remains a founding text for the contemporary environmental movement and an important work to this day, Carson has also been blamed for, in effect, reviving the malaria plague that had largely been wiped out in the Third World.

Related Topics:
DDT - Third World - Environmental movement

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