Columbia Journalism Review August 1, 2005 The Unbroken Chain By Marla Cone As a crop-duster swooped down over a row of vegetables in California's Imperial Valley, I sat in a pickup truck, the windows rolled up. It was the spring of 1997 and I was investigating a story about efforts by Native American tribes to outlaw aerial spraying of pesticides. I was also five months pregnant, and when I embarked on the trip I rationalized that if I happened to be exposed to a single, minuscule dose of a pesticide, it wasn't going to do any harm. But at that moment, alone in the darkness, parked on a dirt road next to the field, I was having second thoughts. I knew that the fetus I was carrying was the most vulnerable life on Earth when it came to the dangers of pesticides and other toxic chemicals. Was this story worth the risk -- any risk, no matter how small? As I watched the plane unleash a trail of diluted insecticide, I noticed a fly inside the cab buzzing against the windshield. I decided that if it suddenly fell silent, I would start the ignition and take off. As absurd as it seems now, watching that fly manage to survive calmed me. At the time I chalked it up to the irrational obsession of a pregnant woman, but I now realize that the fly was my totem, a symbol straight out of Rachel Carson's Silent Spring. Oddly enough, when I began covering environmental problems in the mid-1980s, I thought that Silent Spring was an anachronism, important only as a reminder of people's profound ignorance about the environment during the post-World War II industrial age. I was starting kindergarten in September of 1962 when Carson published her epic warning about how man-made pesticides were poisoning the world. Oblivious to what Carson called the "elixirs of death," I grew up on the shoreline of Lake Michigan, in one of the nation's toxic hotspots, Waukegan, Illinois, and during the time when the "Dirty Dozen" -- the ubiquitous DDT and other toxic chlorinated chemicals -- were reaching record levels in all our urban environments, particularly around the Great Lakes. Yet by the time I was a teenager in the 1970s, the world's worst environmental problems had supposedly been brought under control. We had seen the Evil Empire and it was that of our fathers and mothers. We were the offspring of the clueless World War II generation that sprayed DDT and poisoned the Great Lakes and fouled the air. We were finding the solution to pollution. But I now realize that what Carson called the "chain of evil" -- the buildup of chemicals in our environment -- continues unbroken to this day. And even though the political firestorm Carson's book stirred up forty-three years ago burns with just as much intensity today, most of Carson's science remains sound and her warnings prescient. If we take a mental snapshot of what we know now about the dangers of chemical exposure, the questions still outnumber the answers. Yet one thing remains as certain as it was in 1962: we are leaving a toxic trail that will outlive us. The first chapter of Silent Spring, "Fable for Tomorrow," is one of the grimmest scenes in American literature, fact or fiction. "There was once a town in the heart of America where all life seemed to live in harmony with its surroundings," Carson begins. It was a glorious place. Birds chirped, fish jumped, foxes barked, trees and flowers were ablaze with color. "Then a strange blight crept over the area and everything began to change," she continues. Robins, jays, and scores of other songbirds disappeared, livestock were sickened, trees and flowers withered, streams were lifeless, children dropped dead suddenly while playing. "No witchcraft, no enemy action had silenced the rebirth of new life in this stricken world," Carson explains. "The people had done it themselves." No such town actually existed. "But it might easily have a thousand counterparts in America or elsewhere in the world," Carson writes. A nature writer and aquatic biologist with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, Carson had already written two bestsellers before she spent four years researching Silent Spring. She described in great scientific detail the dangers of DDT and its sister chlorinated chemicals, and her writings transformed how people felt about pesticides. After World War II, synthetic compounds were being invented on a daily basis, especially after the wonders of combining carbon and chlorine molecules had been discovered. DDT was first synthesized in the 1800s, and it was used in great volumes as an insecticide beginning in the 1940s. Its power was thought to be extraordinary because, although it killed bugs, it wasn't acutely poisonous and seemed relatively benign to everything but bugs. Soon, though, it became clear that DDT was dangerous in a slow, insidious sort of way. In the 1950s and 1960s, it began spreading worldwide, building up in oceans, waterways, and soil. It didn't easily break down in the environment, remaining in the food chain for decades. It collected in fat and tissues, passing from one animal to another -- from plankton to worm to fish to bird, from hay to cow to milk to human child. Silent Spring explained all that, and it became a phenomenal best seller. No other environmental book has had such a far-reaching impact. Carson was a scientist, a journalist, and a crusader, and her book scared the hell out of people. She portrayed the science of the day in such dense detail that much of the 368-page book is too unwieldy, even today, for most readers to comprehend. Yet her gift as a writer was her eloquent and shocking prose, in which she philosophized about the ramifications of the science. Her words hastened the dawn of the environmental movement in the late 1960s, and by the early 1970s, the United States and most of the developed world had banned DDT and many other chlorinated compounds. Carson's fabled world of the future, of course, has not materialized. But what's remarkable now when I reread Silent Spring is that the reality Carson described remains our own. DDT, PCBs, and related compounds remain in the tissues of virtually every living thing. They continue to spread globally, from pole to pole, via the air and ocean currents. Even eagles' eggs on Alaska's remote Aleutian Islands contain high levels of DDT despite the fact that the pesticide has never been sprayed there. When the manuscript of Silent Spring was serialized in The New Yorker in June 1962, Carson was demonized. Chemical companies, and even some of her fellow scientists, attacked her data and interpretations, lambasted her credentials, called her hysterical and one-sided, and pressured her publisher, Houghton Mifflin, to withdraw Silent Spring. Monsanto went so far as to publish a parody of Silent Spring, called The Desolate Year, in which famine, disease, and insects take over the world after pesticides have been banned. Carson is still the target of countless critiques. "DDT killed bald eagles because of its persistence in the environment. Silent Spring is now killing African children because of its persistence in the public mind," Tina Rosenberg wrote last year in a piece about malaria in The New York Times Magazine called "What the World Needs Now Is DDT." It's true that Silent Spring failed to describe the benefits of pesticides in fighting malaria, which is spread by mosquitoes, and in protecting food crops from destructive pests. Perhaps Carson believed that everyone acknowledged the benefits while ignoring the risks. Her goal, after all, was action, not contemplation. Nevertheless, accusing Silent Spring of killing children in Africa is disingenuous. Most malaria experts, including the Malaria Foundation International, aren't rallying behind DDT. They support its limited use only until cost-effective substitutes are in place, perhaps in a few years. DDT remains one of the few cheap, effective tools used in the war against malaria, which kills more than two million people a year, mostly children in Africa. But unlike the 1950s and 1960s, when up to 400,000 tons a year were sprayed from trucks and airplanes, the current practice is to spray only the interior walls of houses at risk. When Carson was writing, it was considered cutting-edge science to determine whether a chemical mutated cells or triggered tumors, which explains why Silent Spring emphasizes the cancer risk of chemical compounds, a claim that looks a bit outdated today. Carson also had a personal reason for her warnings about carcinogens. She was diagnosed with breast cancer while writing Silent Spring, and it killed her at the age of fifty-six, less than two years after her book was published. Today there is little evidence of a link between DDT in women's bodies and the rate of breast cancer. Nevertheless, the cancer link has not been dismissed. Scientists wonder if brief exposure to DDT and other chemicals in the womb, rather than the amounts accumulated over a lifetime, can trigger cancer later in life. Unbenownst to Carson, chemicals at low doses have even more insidious dangers, beyond cancer. Scientists now believe that many industrial compounds and pesticides, including DDT, assault the innermost workings of living things -- skewing brain development, sex hormones, and immune cells. Carson accused those who extolled the virtues of pesticides of dispensing "little tranquilizing pills of half truth" and "sugar coating" unpalatable facts. "The public must decide whether it wishes to continue on the present road," she insisted, "and it can do so only when in full possession of the facts." As a journalist, I know that is where I come in. For Carson, suffering from cancer, Silent Spring was her own personal heart of darkness, an excruciating journey into her own mind and the "sinister" world of chemicals. For me, writing about chemicals provokes its own inner turmoil as I seek certainty in an age of ambiguity. How do we square the risks of a chemical with its benefits? The precautionary principle, codified by the European Union, prescribes preventive measures when science is uncertain. The American philosophy prefers after-the-fact fixes rather than precautionary steps that may be excessive. I was once accused of writing with "too much of the gravity of Rachel Carson." I wonder whether that's a weakness or a strength. After all, newspapers today tend to simplify issues related to environmental health and publish pieces that tell readers essentially nothing. We shouldn't unjustifiably scare readers, but we shouldn't bore them either. Most environmental journalists writing about toxic chemicals do one or the other. Those who bore readers haven't done the homework to understand the risks of certain chemicals and consequently are incapable of explaining those risks in terms people can understand. Those who scare readers don't put the risks in perspective or fail to reveal which chemicals and which exposures matter the most. We don't have to write with the grim foreboding of Silent Spring or the intentional exaggeration of its Fable for Tomorrow, or ignore the benefits of the chemicals we rely upon today. But we do need to master Carson's skill for explaining what is at stake. Carson's readers reacted with outrage, but many people today seem to prefer to remain ignorant of the risks of the chemicals they are routinely exposed to. "It is human nature to shrug off what may seem to us a vague threat of future disaster," Carson asserted, and that, in part, explains why the American mindset remains closer to "better living through chemistry" than "better safe than sorry." I behave like any American consumer. I have resorted to sprinkling diazinon on anthills and passing over organic foods because they cost too much. I'm aware that my new mattress contains flame retardants and my nail polish has phthalates, but I bought them anyway. I haven't tossed out my polycarbonate food containers, and recently when my dentist filled a cavity, I chose an amalgam that contains a trace of mercury because it is more durable than the mercury-free alternatives. Still, after nineteen years on the beat, I certainly know that the fly buzzing at the windshield was not a valid way to assess the dangers of pesticide exposure. When it comes to low doses we encounter in our daily lives, there are no dead bodies, no smoking guns. Many scientists now say the effects on children's brains and reproductive and immune systems are subtle, virtually impossible to pin down. Sometimes I think back to family dinners at a popular fish restaurant at Waukegan Harbor, which was later declared a Superfund site because of tons of PCBs dumped there, and wonder, usually in the most abstract and impersonal of ways, what effects the contaminants of that era had on me and my generation. Use of chlorinated compounds like DDT and PCBs peaked in the 1960s and tainted all our foods, even our mothers' breast milk, and children whose mothers ate a lot of PCB-tainted fish from Lake Michigan have lower IQs and worse memories, according to ten years of research conducted in Michigan. I also wonder, as only a mother could, whether my son suffered some slight neurological damage from the pesticides and other chemicals I was exposed to. He's healthy, he's smart. But could some neurotoxin explain why his handwriting is so sloppy and he has trouble tying his shoes? Absurd, you say? These worries, though, are the inevitable spinoff of this new generation of environmental science. These private musings have driven my desire to understand and explain to readers the risks of toxic chemicals, particularly to pregnant women and their newborns. Until a few years ago, I felt reassured that the worst was over, that Silent Spring was so successful in its crusade against the most pervasive and persistent compounds that the book was no longer relevant. But I know now that other chemicals are simply taking their place. Compounds still widely used in household products, farms, and factories are building up in animal and human bodies at an extraordinary pace, and some seem to have effects similar to the PCBs, DDT, and others that were banned decades ago. We have simply exchanged one risk for another. The question we face about toxic pollutants is no longer "Do we want to save the world?" but "How safe do we want to be?" In the twenty- first century, our Fable for Tomorrow is not some disaster we are trying to avert but a vague, incalculable, and potentially serious threat to our children's health. We must remind readers that most environmental health decisions aren't a question of good versus evil. They amount to a judgment call, a trade-off. "We stand now where two roads diverge," Carson wrote in the final chapter of Silent Spring. "The choice, after all, is ours to make." Marla Cone is an environmental reporter at the Los Angeles Times, a Pew Fellow, and the author of Silent Snow: The Slow Poisoning of the Arctic (Grove Press). Copyright 2005 Columbia Journalism Review