Silent Spring's 50-Year History of Selective Data

Rachel Carson, more than any other person, created the

politicized science that afflicts today's public policy
debates.
Ronald Bailey|Sep. 26, 2012 10:30 am

This week Silent Spring will turn 50.

Rachel Carson’s jeremiad against pesticides is credited by many as launching the modern
environmentalist movement, and the author, who died in 1964, is being widely lauded for
her efforts. "She was the very first person to knock some of the shine off of modernity,"
says environmentalist Bill McKibben in a New York Times Magazine article from this
past Sunday.

"The hostile reaction to Silent Spring contained the seeds of a partisan divide over
environmental matters that has since hardened into a permanent wall of bitterness and
mistrust," writes William Souder, author of a new biography of Carson, On A Farther
Shore. He adds, "There is no objective reason why environmentalism should be the
exclusive province of any one political party or ideology." That conclusion is flatly
wrong.

In Silent Spring, Carson crafted a passionate denunciation of modern technology that

drives environmentalist ideology today. At its heart is this belief: Nature is beneficent,
stable, and even a source of moral good; humanity is arrogant, heedless, and often the
source of moral evil. Rachel Carson, more than any other person, is responsible for the
politicized science that afflicts our public policy debates today.

First, let’s acknowledge that Carson was right about some of the harms that extensive
modern pesticide use could and did cause. Carson was correct that the popular pesticide
DDT did disrupt reproduction in some raptor species. It is also the case that insect pests
over time do develop resistance to pesticides, making them eventually less useful in
preventing the spread of insect-borne diseases and protecting crops. In fact, the first cases
of evolving insect resistance were identified in California orchards in at the beginning of
the 20th century, when species of scale insects became resistant to the primitive
insecticides lime sulfur and hydrogen cyanide. By 1960, 137 species of insects had
developed resistance to DDT. To preserve their usefulness, pesticides clearly needed to
be more judiciously deployed.   

Carson, however, realized that tales of empty birds' nests and bug and weed-infested
crops were not enough to spur most people to fear the chemicals she opposed. The threat
had to be made more immediate and intimate. Carson biographer Souder notes, "In 1960,
at the halfway point in writing Silent Spring, just as she was exploring the connection
between pesticide exposure and human cancer, Carson was herself stricken with breast
cancer." Given the sorry state of medicine in the 1950s, few diseases were scarier than
cancer. And deaths from cancer had been rising steeply. Carson cited government
statistics showing that cancer deaths had dramatically increased from 4 percent of all
deaths in 1900 to 15 percent in 1958. 

"The problem that concerns us here is whether any of the chemicals we are using in our
attempts to control nature play a direct or indirect role as causes of cancer," wrote
Carson. Her conclusion was that "the evidence is circumstantial" but "nonetheless
impressive." She added the claim that in contrast with disease germs, "man has put the
vast majority of carcinogens into the environment." She noted that the first human
exposures to DDT and other pesticides were barely more than a decade in the past. It
takes time for cancer to fester, so she ominously warned, "The full maturing of whatever
seeds of malignancy have been sown by these chemicals is yet to come."

But hinting at cancer doom decades away was not enough. Carson was convinced that
pesticides could wreak their carcinogenic havoc much sooner rather than later. As
evidence she cited various anecdotes, including one about a woman "who abhorred
spiders" and who sprayed her basement with DDT in mid-August. She died of acute
leukemia a couple of months later. In another passage, Carson cites a man embarrassed
by his roach-infested office who again sprayed DDT and who "within a short time …
began to bruise and bleed." He was within a month of spraying diagnosed with aplastic
anemia.

To bolster these frightening anecdotes, Carson cited data that deaths from leukemia had
increased from 11.1 per 100,000 in 1950 to 14.1 in 1960. Leukemia mortality rose with
pesticide use; suspicious, no? "What does it mean? To what lethal agent or agents, new to
our environment, are people now exposed with increasing frequency?," asked Carson.
Fifty years later the death rate from leukemia is 7.1 per 100,000. Half of what Carson
cited in Silent Spring. In fact, the incidence rate is now 12.5 per 100,000.

Carson surely knew that cancer is a disease in which the risk goes up as people age. And
thanks to vaccines and new antibiotics Americans were luckily living much longer; long
enough to get and die of cancer. Average life expectancy was 46 in 1900 and the annual
death rate was 17 out of 1,000 Americans. By 1960, life expectancy had risen to nearly
70 years and the annual death rate had fallen to 9.5 per 1,000 people. Today, life
expectancy is 78 years and the annual death rate is 7.9 per 1,000 people. Today, although
only about 12 percent of Americans are over age 65, they account for 56 percent of new
cancer diagnoses and 69 percent of cancer deaths.

Did cancer doom ever arrive? No. In Silent Spring Carson cites data showing that
American farmers were then applying about 637 million pounds of pesticides to their
crops. The most recent Environmental Protection Agency estimate is that farmers used
1.1 billion pounds in 2007.  (The amount of insecticide applied to crops has been falling
recently, as farmers adopt genetically enhanced insect-resistant crop varieties.)
What happened to cancer incidence rates? According the Centers for Disease Control and
Prevention, age-adjusted incidence rates have been dropping for nearly two decades.
Why? Largely because fewer Americans are smoking and lots of women stopped using
hormone replacement therapy, which researchers have now concluded significantly
increased the risk of breast cancer.

Back in the early 1990s, based on sketchy research, environmentalists began pushing the
hypothesis that past exposure to organochlorine pesticides, such as DDT, was fueling a
breast cancer epidemic. However, after years of research a major review article in 2008 in
the journal Cancer found that exposure of organochlorine compounds like DDT "is not
believed to be causally related to breast cancer."

With regard to overall cancer risks posed by synthetic chemicals, the American Cancer
Society in its most recent report on cancer trends concludes, "Exposure to carcinogenic
agents in occupational, community, and other settings is thought to account for a
relatively small percentage of cancer deaths – about 4 percent from occupational
exposures and 2 percent from environmental pollutants (man-made and naturally
occurring)." What factors really do increase cancer risk? Smoking, drinking too much
alcohol, and eating too much food. In fact, while overall cancer incidence has been
falling, cancers related to obesity — e.g., pancreatic, liver, and kidney — have risen
slightly.

The first notable triumph of environmentalism occurred in 1972. Ten years after Silent
Spring, William Ruckelshaus, Administrator of the barely two year-old Environmental
Protection Agency, banned DDT, overruling an administrative law judge's fact finding
after months of scientific testimony that "DDT is not a safety hazard to man when used as
directed" and that its benefits outweighed its costs. As part of the justification,
Ruckelshaus noted in his decision, "Public concern over the widespread use of pesticides
was stirred by Rachel Carson’s book, Silent Spring."

Carson biographer Souder oddly concludes that the fierce opposition from chemical
companies, agricultural interests, and their allies in government "put Rachel Carson and
everything she believed about the environment firmly on the left end of the political
spectrum. And so two things – environmentalism and its adherents – were defined once
and forever." He gets it backwards.

Carson described the choice humanity faced as a fork in the road to the future. "The road
we have long been traveling is deceptively easy, a smooth superhighway on which we
progress at great speed, but at its end lies disaster," she declared. "The other fork of the
road – the one 'less traveled by' – offers our last, our only chance to reach a destination
that assures the preservation of our earth." This kind of apocalyptic rhetoric is now
standard in today's policy debates. In any case, the opposition to Silent Spring arose not
just because Carson was attacking the self-interests of certain corporations (which she
certainly was), but also because it was clear that her larger concern was to rein in
technological progress and the economic growth it fuels.
Through Silent Spring, Carson provided those who are alienated by modern technological
progress with a model of how to wield ostensibly scientific arguments on behalf of
policies and results that they prefer for other reasons. It is this legacy of public policy
confirmation bias that Yale law professor Dan Kahan and his research colleagues are
probing at the Yale Cultural Cognition Project.

In a recent study on how Americans perceive climate change risk published in Nature
Climate Change, Kahan and his colleagues find that people listen to information that
reinforces their values and ignore that which does not. They observe that people who are
broadly identified as being on the political left "tend to be morally suspicious of
commerce and industry, to which they attribute social inequity. They therefore find it
congenial to believe those forms of behavior are dangerous and worthy of restriction." On
the other hand, those broadly considered as being on the political right are proponents of
technological progress who worry about "collective interference with the decisions of
individuals" and "tend to be skeptical of environmental risks. Such people intuitively
perceive that widespread acceptance of such risks would license restrictions on
commerce and industry."

As trust in other sources of authority – politicians, preachers, business leaders – has

withered over the past 50 years, policy partisans are increasingly seeking to cloak their
arguments in the mantle of objective science. However, the Yale researchers find that
greater scientific literacy actually produces greater political polarization. As Kahan and
his fellow researchers report, "For ordinary citizens, the reward for acquiring greater
scientific knowledge and more reliable technical-reasoning capacities is a greater facility
to discover and use—or explain away—evidence relating to their groups’ positions." In
other words, in policy debates scientific claims are used to vindicate partisan values, not
to reach to an agreement about what is actually the case. This sort of motivated reasoning
applies to partisans of the political left and right, who both learned it from Rachel Carson.