Did Rachel Carson Get It Right?

 
Rachel Carson is widely credited with kick starting the environmentalist movement following publication of Silent Spring back in 1962. She pointed out the dangers of widespread use of DDT and promoted the idea that synthetic chemicals can cause cancer.

Many scientists take issue with the "facts" in her book and they believe that she may have done more harm than good. If you care about scientific accuracy then you must be skeptical about her claims, even if you admire her goals.

Carson was born on May 27, 1907 and last month marked the 100th anniversary of her birth.

For a summary of where she went wrong you might as well start with a recent New York Times article by John Tierney [Fateful Voice of a Generation Still Drowns Out Real Science]. Tierney outlines the case very well and he has attracted a lot of attention by not pulling his punches.

For Rachel Carson admirers, it has not been a silent spring. They’ve been celebrating the centennial of her birthday with paeans to her saintliness. A new generation is reading her book in school — and mostly learning the wrong lesson from it.

This is the kind of science journalism that I admire but, as you might imagine, Tierney has come under fierce attack from those people who value superstition over rationalism. Tierney has attempted to deal with those attacks on his website [Synthetic v. Natural Pesticides].

There are many issues here but one of the most interesting is whether the essence of Carson's claim is accurate. Is it true that a large percentage of cancers is caused by synthetic chemicals in the environment? That certainly seems to be the general perception both inside and outside the scientific community.

Does this controversy remind you of the framing debate? It's clear that Rachel Carson used very effective framing in advocating her opposition to chemicals in the environment. The metaphor of a "Silent Spring" being only one of many examples. At the time there may have been many scientists who agreed with her about the dangers of DDT and, by extension, many other synthetic chemicals.

However, it's clear that there were also scientists who disagreed, as John Tierney points out in his New York Times piece. The problem is that once scientists start down the framing pathway they open a Pandora's Box that's very hard to close. I think that scientists have to be very, very, careful about abandoning objectivity and skepticism in order to push a political agenda. Once they jump on the bandwagon it's very hard to jump off if the scientific evidence fails to support the agenda. And that hurts the credibility of science.