On a Farther Shore (54 page)

After Dorothy made a four-day visit to Silver Spring—they both agreed it had been wonderful—Carson more objectively assessed her future. She felt that she’d talked too much about her illness and how little time she likely had left. There was scarcely a place anywhere on her body that didn’t hurt now.
One of her doctors had lately reminded her that she’d lived with cancer for three years. Carson said she thought he wanted to add—but didn’t—that she shouldn’t expect much more time now.
Only a few days after Carson told Dorothy this, Stan Freeman died of a heart attack at the kitchen table in West Bridgewater as he watched birds come to a feeder he’d just filled.

Carson was crushed by the news.
She said she regretted burdening Dorothy with her own health worries. She added that she was “going to be around for quite a while” and planned to spend as much of that time as possible taking care of Dorothy. Carson went up to West Bridgewater for the funeral. One ray of happiness during this somber visit was getting better acquainted with Stanley, Jr., and his wife, Madeleine.
Carson told Dorothy how impressed she was that the father’s “sweetness and gentleness” lived on in his son. When Stanley, Jr., took Carson to the airport to go home, he told her that whatever his father would have done for her, he was now prepared to step in and do. She told Dorothy she was fortunate to have such a fine son.

Two months later, it was early spring in Maryland when one of Carson’s doctors stopped in at the house for what he said was “just a social call.” He endorsed Carson’s plan to go soon to see Barney Crile at
the Cleveland Clinic. The cancer had spread to Carson’s liver, and during the several weeks she was hospitalized in Cleveland she was near death.
She told Dorothy about an out-of-body experience she had that was pleasant.
In early April she was strong enough to go home, though hardly well. Dorothy came down for a visit.
When she got home after a couple of days she told Carson she was glad that she could now picture what the days were like for her. On the morning of April 14, 1964, Dorothy wrote to Carson, telling her that she felt “a great sense of peace” and that her first thought every morning was to wonder how Carson had slept the night before. She said how nice it was that birds sang every morning outside the house in Silver Spring.
Later that same day, Carson’s heart stopped. She died before the sun went down. She was fifty-six years old.

Among the things Carson left behind was the letter for Dorothy that she had written over the course of several days about a year earlier. It was full of goodbyes and Carson’s wish that Dorothy remember not the sadness of their last times together, but the many joys that had come before. “I think you must have no regrets in my behalf,” Carson wrote. “I have had a rich life, full of rewards and satisfactions that come to few, and if it must end now, I can feel that I have achieved most of what I wished to do.”

Carson was cremated.
Her brother, Robert, insisted on burying some of her ashes next to their mother’s grave and reluctantly agreed to let Dorothy Freeman spread the remainder on the ocean at Southport Island.

On May 4, 1964, the tide at Newagen was high at five in the morning. Dorothy drove down to that end of the island at six thirty to catch the ebbing tide. The day was calm and clear, and the ground swell broke against the rocks like the pulse of the ocean. Dorothy found a cleft in the granite where the water rose up with each wave and she poured the ashes into the edge of the sea, followed by a white hyacinth. She realized she had no idea what to do next. It was so lovely. Dorothy sat down and stayed there a long time, watching the birds and the blue ocean, until the tide turned again.

I
n the half century since the publication of
Silent Spring
, America has embraced the book’s central message unevenly—the country’s efforts to protect the environment have been a mix of progress, partisanship, and pigheadedness that Rachel Carson would find familiar. It’s hard to imagine her in this world now. She would like writing on a computer—there’s nothing like Microsoft Word for an obsessive reviser—and she would find the ability to retrieve almost any kind of information from the Internet a joy. The great breakthroughs in biology that have unlocked the inner workings of the cell and the genome at the molecular level would astonish and delight her. Other changes would be less comfortable. It’s likely she would be dismayed by e-books and smartphones and social networking and that she’d be mortified by the steady demise of the great newspapers and magazines that were so large a part of the culture of her times. She would struggle to comprehend the newly virulent resistance to science that now clouds issues such as evolution and climate change—which she would surely see not as “issues” at all, but as facts not open to disbelief.

While compiling information for Carson’s obituaries, Anne Ford—who was head of publicity at Houghton Mifflin—wrote down her recollections of the author. She remembered Carson once being described as a “nun of nature.” It was an odd thought, but one that matched up with Ford’s memory of Carson’s bedroom, an “austere” cell in which she said it was easy to see that its occupant craved simplicity and order—and the peace and quiet that came in the bargain.

Because the environmental movement survived the end of the
Cold War, the context in which it was born, Carson can be credited not only with putting the movement into motion but for doing so in a way that would allow it to eventually stand on its own.
Silent Spring
was many things—plea and polemic and prayer—but most important it was right. This was eventually conceded even by some early skeptics. In the fall of 1963, Secretary of Agriculture Orville Freeman invited Carson to join President Kennedy in dedicating the Pinchot Institute for Conservation Studies in Milford, Pennsylvania, at the ancestral home of Gifford Pinchot.

Carson declined.

During the Pinchot Institute’s first year of operation in 1963, experiments at another facility, the new wildlife pathology lab at Patuxent, demonstrated that sublethal doses of pesticides in the food supplies of waterfowl and upland game birds caused drops in reproductive success and led to mortality. The researchers at Patuxent were also studying the long-term, multigenerational effects of pesticides in fish and were monitoring “serious” accumulations of pesticide residues in the tissues of ducks, geese, bald eagles, deer, and other wildlife.

In the spring of 1964—just days before Rachel Carson died—Secretary of the Interior Stewart Udall told Senator Ribicoff’s committee that evidence of such widespread pesticide contamination was so compelling that a nationwide pesticide monitoring program was needed. Udall also said it was time to end the use of highly toxic chemical pesticides in applications that could not be controlled. This was an acknowledgment that, despite the claims of manufacturers and government regulators, some pesticides were unsafe even when used as directed. Udall said his department had mounting evidence that episodes of pesticide contamination in wildlife—including some of the appalling fish kills on the lower Mississippi—were the result of “normal” pesticide use. Udall said ways had to be found to limit the movement of persistent toxic compounds everywhere throughout the environment, or there was no alternative but to stop using them altogether.

This, of course, was the point Carson had made in
Silent Spring—
poison one corner of the environment and you risk poisoning the whole thing. In the fall of 1964,
Udall exercised his considerable authority over most federal lands and issued tough new rules for pesticide use on more than 550 million acres under the jurisdiction of the U.S. Department of the Interior. In general, the guidelines made chemical pesticides a last resort control method and called for the most limited applications and the lowest possible doses whenever they were used. He instructed all the agencies involved to avoid using pesticides—including DDT, chlordane, dieldrin, and endrin—that were known to accumulate in living organisms.
Two months later, the FWS issued a notice declaring the agency’s serious concern for bald eagles, which were building up alarming body burdens of DDT wherever they were studied.

For a decade and more, the dangers of pesticides were the focal point of a broadening environmental movement that led to the enactment of the Clean Air Act (1963), the Clean Water Act (1972), and the Endangered Species Act (1973). On April 22, 1970, environmental activists organized by Wisconsin senator Gaylord Nelson—a fan of Aldo Leopold’s
Sand County Almanac
and Rachel Carson’s
Silent Spring
—held the first Earth Day, and millions attended rallies across the country. Later that spring, Secretary of the Interior Walter Hickel formalized Stewart Udall’s earlier policy on pesticide use on federal lands, formally banning the use of DDT, aldrin, dieldrin, heptachlor, lindane, and several others.

Shortly after his inauguration in 1969, President Richard Nixon established the Council on Environmental Quality in his administration. In April 1970—as the Earth Day rallies were being organized—Nixon was advised to create a new agency with formal regulatory control over environmental matters, including the registration and use of pesticides under FIFRA. In July, Nixon asked Congress to authorize the Environmental Protection Agency—which opened for business the following December. Among the first orders of business for the new agency was the removal of many pesticides from general use, starting with DDT. A young, eager legal staff took on the
mission of canceling pesticide registrations and during the 1970s the EPA ended the domestic use—but not the manufacture for export—of DDT, aldrin, dieldrin, chlordane, heptachlor, and endrin. The United States thus joined Sweden—where Paul Müller had received his Nobel Prize—as one of the first countries to ban DDT.

Those early days of swift, aggressive action against environmental contaminants gave way to a slower, softer EPA in the years since, under both Democratic and Republican administrations. More sophisticated chemical and biological assay techniques have made it possible for pesticide makers to game the system by overwhelming the EPA with study after study, dragging out renewal registrations for suspect chemicals for years while they stay on the market. That may change as the agency begins looking more closely at chemicals that interfere with or mimic hormones.

In 1996, the field of toxicology was turned upside down with the publication of a book called
Our Stolen Future
, which described emerging evidence that some chemicals—including pesticides such as DDT and their by-products—bind to specialized receptors in cells that are meant to recognize hormones like estrogen, but which can be fooled by a chemical mimic. The result can be disease, reproductive problems, and birth defects—the same problems that now turn up in epidemiological studies of people living in areas with high exposures to pesticides. For many people,
Our Stolen Future
was seen as a sequel to
Silent Spring
. The same year it was released, Congress directed the EPA to develop new assays to detect endocrine-disrupting properties in chemicals.

It took until the fall of 2009 for the first of those test procedures to be approved—and when they were, one of the first chemicals that tested positive as an endocrine disrupter was the pesticide atrazine, a weed killer that for many years was the most heavily used herbicide in the world. Banned in the European Union in 2003, atrazine had a long, long history of continued use in the United States while the EPA went in circles with the manufacturer over whether it was safe. In 1988, Congress ordered the EPA to reregister older pesticides, including
atrazine. Atrazine was then selected for “special review” in 1994. Twelve years and one million pages of documents later, the EPA ignored evidence that atrazine was an endocrine disrupter and issued the new registration. Three years later, after its own new assays confirmed potential problems with atrazine, the EPA reopened the case.

In 2006, the World Health Organization announced its endorsement of the use of DDT to combat malaria, mainly in Africa. The WHO had never lifted its approval of DDT for this purpose, but that year the agency decided an affirmative commitment to the insecticide was needed. The move was backed by most environmental groups—as it certainly would have been by Rachel Carson had she been alive to do so. But the myth that Carson wanted a total end to the use of chemical pesticides persists.

Carson would be less tolerant of the lack of action to reverse or at least slow global warming caused by fossil fuel consumption. George W. Bush had promised during his campaign for the presidency in 2000 that he wanted carbon dioxide emissions regulated by the EPA as a greenhouse gas pollutant. Within weeks of taking office in 2001 he reversed his position. Bush also announced the United States would not sign on to the Kyoto Protocol, an international agreement intended to limit greenhouse gases. In June 2001, the National Academy of Sciences—which Bush had asked to look into the global warming question—reported to the president that global warming was real, that human activity was the main cause, and that things were getting worse. Bush did nothing then, and little—apart from improvements in automobile fuel consumption—has happened since. Rachel Carson would find nothing new in the unwillingness to confront this problem. Human arrogance and disregard for the collateral damage we inflict upon the environment was a story she knew well.

Roger Christie went to live with Paul Brooks and his wife, whom Carson had named in her will as prospective guardians—along with
Stanley Freeman, Jr., and his wife. Inexplicably, she had never discussed this with either family.

In 1968 Dorothy Freeman married a longtime family friend who lived year-round on Southport Island. Her second husband died two years later, but Dorothy remained at Southport, dividing her time between the house and the cottage at Dogfish Head.
In 1975 she gave a talk about Carson at the University of Southern Maine in Gorham. She told the audience that Rachel Carson had been her “closest friend” and that she believed Carson felt the same about her. “Because of the eleven years that I knew her,” Dorothy said, “I feel that my whole life was enriched beyond understanding.” Dorothy Freeman died in 1978 at the age of eighty.