We are the Environment: Silent Spring’s Enduring Wisdom

Episode Transcript

Adwoa Adusei The story of the book that would changeAmerica’s relationship with the environment begins long before the author sat down to write it. It begins in the woods of Pennsylvania, at the turn of the century … with a little girl named Rachel.

Bob Musil She lives out in the woods in Pennsylvania, and is wandering around alone, and comes upon a fossil fish. She looks at this thing and says, ‘How in the world could there be a fish here in the rocky hills outside of Pittsburgh?’ And it absorbed her imagination she said there must have been a sea, there must have been stuff going on here.

Virginia Marshall That little girl is, of course, Rachel Carson, and she would grow up to become a scientist, a writer, and the best-selling author of the book that arguably started the modern environmental movement: Silent Spring.

Ayana Elizabeth Johnson When I was in, I think the sixth grade, I had a science teacher, Ms. Mulk, who assigned to all of us that we had to read a biography of a scientist.

Virginia Marshall This is Ayana Elizabeth Johnson. She’s the author of two books on climate solutions. She’s a marine biologist, a policy expert, and an activist … but before that – she was a little girl in Brooklyn who loved nature. So when she got an assignment in the sixth grade to read about a scientist, her mother knew exactly the book for her. 

Ayana Elizabeth Johnson And she handed me a book about Rachel Carson. And it really knocked my socks off for a very specific reason, because here was a person who was madly in love with nature, just completely enamored, captivated by the wonders of the natural world and so excited to share them with all of us, to help to put into words this magic that surrounds us, that enables our lives on this planet and was through the power of her pen willing to fight for that. To fight for that magic, that wonder, that splendor.

[Music]

And so, to understand at the age of twelve, the impact that one person, one woman, to have her break through and have her work lead to regulations on pesticides, the creation of the Environmental Protection Agency, all of these wonderful things. I mean, what a hero. What an inspiration for a kid who likewise loved nature. And wanted to be part of protecting that.

Virginia Marshall Rachel Carson’s gift for putting into words the magic and wonder of the world around us … it’s what made so many people fall in love with her book, and the important ideas it contained.

Assh Albinson When I was growing up in Florida, I spent a lot of time outside, in the woods, in the swamp, kayaking, hiking.

Adwoa Adusei This is Assh Albinson, a librarian at Brooklyn Public Library. She’s another person who encountered Rachel Carson at a pivotal moment in her life. She first read Silent Spring in her early 20s, and it made her see her home state of Florida more clearly.

Assh Albinson So there are times in which you can feel something so intrinsic to you spiritually, but you don't have like the exact word to describe that feeling. And seeing that in her book and being like. Absolutely mind-blown, to feel so seen to realize that the community that I was in was feeling the exact same way. We care so much about the earth, we want to do so many things, and sometimes it feels like we're fighting against so many outside forces that are not allowing us to care about the earth in the way we think that it deserves.

Virginia Marshall Assh cares so much about Rachel Carson that she actually has a tattoo of her on the back of her leg.

Assh Albinson You may or may not know that in Margaret Atwood's Oryx and Crake trilogy, she's considered a saint. And she's the Saint of the Birds. So I thought it would be so funny to have a massive portrait of her on the back of my leg in the style of a saint.

Adwoa Adusei And whenever she can, Assh recommends Silent Spring to her patrons.

Assh Albinson I really want everyone to have the moment I had when someone gave it to me. You can read this at any time, and you'll get something out of it. Where you're like today, it's 2025 and I'm still feeling it. Actually, now that we've discussed this, I wanna do a reread of it, because I feel like it's one of those books that maybe I should add it to my every couple of year reread list. Maybe it's something that I need to re-imprint upon myself.

Virginia Marshall So, Adwoa – how ‘bout it? Is it time to return to Silent Spring?

Adwoa Adusei Absolutely. For our last episode in this series, we’re returning to a book that had a profound impact on the way we see the world around us, and how we respond to climate and environmental forces that can sometimes feel outside our control. I’m Adwoa Adusei.

Virginia Marshall And I’m Virginia Marshall. You’re listening to Borrowed and Returned: revisiting the books that changed us, and changed America, too.

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Adwoa Adusei Let’s get back to the story of Rachel Carson – because at some point, that little girl who was filled with wonder about that fish fossil in the woods … eventually grew up. But she maintained that deep interest in the natural world.

Bob Musil She was going for a PhD in biology, in marine biology at Johns Hopkins.

Adwoa Adusei This is Bob Musil, who you heard in the introduction. He’s the executive director of the Rachel Carson Council, and author of several books about the environment, including Rachel Carson and Her Sisters: Extraordinary Women Who Have Shaped America’s Environment.

Bob Musil Rachel has a large extended family, poor. A mother who's getting sickly, an ne’er do well father, and it's the depression. And she's caring for all these people while working half time for two of the world's noted biologists. And she doesn't have enough money. In effect, she can't complete her PhD, and has to stop.

Virginia Marshall Carson had to give up on the PhD, but not on nature. She got a job with the Fish and Wildlife department, writing for their publications. For her first assignment, she was sent to North Carolina to do a story about the Bureau of Fisheries laboratory there.

Bob Musil Rachel goes down there, and being the imaginative, feeling, caring, sensitive soul that she is, she lies on the beach at night, listening to the sounds of ghost crabs scurrying along the sand, strange birds flying at night through the moonlight, making out groaning sounds. On like this. And then she also writes a report about what's going on in the Bureau of Fisheries. She writes it up, she sends it, she hands it to Elmer Higgins. He looks at her and says, ‘Rachel, this will never do.’

He had a twinkle in his eye and says, ‘Rachel, This is literature. I want you to send it to New York, to the Atlantic magazine, and get this published. This is just amazing writing and work.’ She did. Caught the eye of every important editor, writer, book publisher, scientist in that circle and immediately got a book contract which, she wrote her first book Under the Sea Wind at that time, came out in 1941.

Adwoa Adusei After that, the words and the books just kept coming.

Bob Musil Rachel wrote three ocean books, all of which were bestsellers. And it allowed her to start getting royalties and money so she could consider and then did. Leave government service, fish and wildlife, and become a full-time writer.

Adwoa Adusei Around the same time that Carson was establishing herself as an independent writer, something else was happening in the world of agriculture.

News announcer Remember the name: Pestroy DDT. It spells certain death to all insects I’ve mentioned so far. And others too. Used right, it is absolutely harmless to humans and animals. But to insects, it is deadly.

[Music]

Bob Musil In the late 50s, early 60s, the government, we are spraying DDT and other chemicals, toxic chemicals everywhere around the country. No restraint, anything that moved, covered with chemicals. There are photos, for example, right after the war of Jones Beach. There's a boy in one of those pictures running behind the DDT trucks that are spraying the sunbathers and bathers on Jones Beach.

Virginia Marshall The public was aware that this chemical spraying was happening, but there wasn’t a lot of understanding about its impacts. DDT killed the bugs that were eating America’s crops, the chemical companies insisted, and that was the only thing that mattered.

Bob Musil And Rachel thought, as she just typically does—I gotta do something about this.

Adwoa Adusei And it wasn’t just Rachel Carson. She was hearing from fellow environmentalists and scientists about what they were seeing in different parts of the country.

Bob Musil A close friend up in Massachusetts wrote her, the robins are dead all over my lawn. There's one that nested on our porch. I feel terrible. They're dead.

Adwoa Adusei Another to understand about Rachel Carson is that she was an avid birder, as was much of America … and the love that the American public had for birds – and for robins in particular – was thanks to another woman environmentalist.

Bob Musil These days, nobody knows who Susan Fenmore Cooper is, the dutiful daughter of this noted, early, important American novelist and writer, James Fenimore-Cooper. She studied biology with the most famous biologist in the world and ends up writing this book, Rural Hours.

And she talks about how when the robins come, it's a huge celebration and everyone starts saying, ‘The robbins are here, the robins are here!’

Virginia Marshall So when dead robins started showing up in her friend’s backyard, Rachel Carson paid attention.

Bob Musil Rachel worked with a guy at Michigan State named George Wallace, they picked up the robins and dissected and looked into it and discovered that they were dying from DDT, which was in the worms and grubs and in the ecosystems in the lawns. This is sort of the origins of Silent Spring.

There was a strange stillness. The birds, for example – where had they gone?

Adwoa Adusei  This is Assh Albinson, reading from the first chapter of Silent Spring.

Many people spoke of them, puzzled and disturbed. The feeding stations in the backyards were deserted. The few birds seen anywhere were moribund; they trembled violently and could not fly. It was a spring without voices. On the mornings that had once throbbed with the dawn chorus of robins, catbirds, doves, jays, wrens, and scores of other bird voices there was now no sound; only silence lay over the fields and woods and marsh. … No witchcraft, no enemy action had silenced the rebirth of new life in this stricken world. The people had done it themselves.

Adwoa Adusei The start of the book opened people’s hearts. And what followed was an impressive, unflinching view of the many downstream impacts of DDT—on waterways, on wildlife, and on humans.

Virginia Marshall Yeah, it’s really remarkable to go through the book and see just how much research she was pulling from. It feels like every corner of the nation had some report about the impact of DDT, and Carson managed to corral all of it.

Ayana Elizabeth Johnson She spent a lot of time researching and in the library.

Adwoa Adusei Ayana Johnson again.

Ayana Elizabeth Johnson She was trying to get to the bottom of things as a singular woman, academic, thinker, writer. And I just, in my head, when I see her, she has a bunch of index cards spread out on a table. And it's like those puzzle pieces, those Legos, those like, how do all these facts about chemistry and biology and policy and politics and nature fit together?

Virginia Marshall From the moment the book came out in 1962, it was an instant bestseller. It sold 100,000 copies in three months, and a million copies in two years. Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas and E.B White of the New Yorker both compared the book to Uncle Tom’s Cabin, in terms of the impact it made on the course of American history. Because soon after the book came out, it caught the attention of the president of the United States: John F Kennedy.

Adwoa Adusei When Kennedy was asked by a reporter if he was going to do anything about the effects of pesticides, the president said he was looking into it, thanks to Carson’s book.

Virginia Marshall Silent Spring made such an impact on the public that some regarded its success as a fluke. But it was really the opposite.

Bob Musil Rachel and her friends and colleagues have been preparing for well over a year building a campaign to make sure that when the book came out and was attacked with lawsuits, chemical companies, hack doctors on TV and all the rest, that they would be prepared and have allies who would step up and speak out on his behalf. They are also pulling together the heads of every organization that you can name, the League of Women Voters, some political figures like Frances Perkins, who was the first Secretary of Labor, Eleanor Roosevelt. All of this building attention, publicity and support, so when Rachel shows up on Capitol Hill, with her glasses and the microphones, testifying to Senator Abe Ribicoff's committee, it's not just some woman who wrote a book, wandered in there and said, you know, ‘you need to know about pesticides.’ It was a brilliant, brilliant political literary campaign. Beginnings of a powerful movement.

[Music]

Adwoa Adusei Those Senate hearings were the basis for the founding of the Environmental Protection Agency, and the eventual ban of DDT.

Virginia Marshall When we retell the story of Silent Spring … it’s often one of resounding success. People love to point to the little woman with the glasses who stared down powerful men in government, flooring them with her carefully researched facts. But Carson had her detractors, too.

Rachel Carson And so the masters of invective have been busy. I am a bird lover, a cat lover, a fish lover.

Adwoa Adusei This is Rachel Carson, speaking at a dinner hosted by the National Women’s Democratic Club shortly after the book came out. She was responding to her critics, who called her all kinds of names:

Rachel Carson I am a priestess of nature and I am a devotee of some mystical cult that has to do with laws of the universe, which my critics somehow consider themselves immune to.

Adwoa Adusei Carson was able to fire back at her critics with her measured humor, but she also had the clear-sightedness and bravery to see something much larger at work. She saw that it wasn’t just cranky chemical companies who were trying to silence her; this was a more concerted effort to suppress vital information, and she called it out.

Rachel Carson Is industry becoming a screen through which facts must be filtered so that the hard, uncomfortable truths are kept back and only the harmless morsels filter through … the screening of basic truth, is done not to suit the party line, but to accommodate to the short-term gain, to serve the gods of profit and production.

Virginia Marshall You can just barely hear it in her voice here, but at this point, Carson was actually quite ill. She was dying of breast cancer, but she was still out on the frontlines, fighting for the environment. Because to Carson, the environmental movement and her body, they were one and the same. It was one of the many ground-breaking ideas Carson helped put into the world.

Bob Musil Rachel is the first one to put them together and said, look, when you spray DDT around, it not only kills, and she wrote about, you know, mass fish kills and the mosquitoes and the gypsy moths and the fish and on and on—it harms humans, too. And that notion alone, that we are part of the same set of exposures, that we are connected to the animals and the fish. The idea that tiny molecules, pieces of chemicals, entered in through your body, through your bloodstream, through your brain, throughout, and was inside you, that the environment is inside people, was a shift in our way of thinking about ourselves that really transformed what we do, and that’s why Silent Spring is such an incredible and powerful book.

Adwoa Adusei As she neared the end of her life, Carson was asked to give the commencement address at Scripps College in California. She was in a wheelchair, and in quite a lot of pain. And she made an appeal to the young people gathered to hear her speak.

Bob Musil You must care for the environment. It is your responsibility. And it's also a shining opportunity. Urging these then kids to step up, join me, and the movement. Take your talents, your abilities, and use it for more Silent Springs, more Rachel Carsons.

Adwoa Adusei After her death and at her request, Carson’s friends founded the Rachel Carson Council, which is an advocacy group focused on continuing the fight for environmental justice and fostering new leaders of the environmental movement. And there are so many younger environmentalists who are following in her footsteps.

Rachel Frazin Silence Spring, I think, just looms large over every environmental writer. I think every person, I believe, who takes on an environment book wants to be the Rachel Carson of their issue. They want to bring the same level of awareness and interest and outrage.

Virginia Marshall This is Rachel Frazin. She’s an energy and environment reporter for The Hill.

Rachel Frazin And I am one of the authors of Poisoning the Well: How Forever Chemicals Contaminated America.

Virginia Marshall Frazin learned about “forever chemicals” her first week on the job.

Rachel Frazin The US House of Representatives was voting on a bill called the PFAS Action Act. And it seemed like it was a big deal. People were riled up about it. I had no idea what it was. But it was one of those things that, like, once your eyes are opened to it, you can't unsee it because it's everywhere. Like every week, you know, I started to see stories about, this is contaminated with forever chemicals, that product is contaminated with forever chemicals. Because these sort of nonstick, waterproof chemicals are used in so many of the things that we use, like, you know, furniture, dental floss, clothing, cosmetics, menstrual products.

Adwoa Adusei And it’s not just products that contain these “forever chemicals.” They’ve made their way to our food and water supply, too. They’re in the runoff from chemical factories, and sometimes even from the fertilizers that were being spread on food crops decades ago.

Virginia Marshall And because the chemicals don’t break down, they build up in the environment, and in our bodies, too. And here’s where we come back to the idea that Rachel Carson pointed out in 1962: that we are connected to the environment in an undeniable and biological way. That fact is still as true and important now as it was sixty years ago.

Rachel Frazin As a class PFAS have been linked to various cancers. They've been linked to immune system problems, including a reduced vaccine response. They've linked to fertility issues, things like that. I definitely think that, you know, the issues that she was writing about on DDT are still relevant today. Even though we may not be using DDT anymore, so many of the other chemicals that we use, pesticide or not, are getting into our bodies and are really creating a lot of health problems for a lot of people.

Adwoa Adusei There is some work being done to curb the spread of PFAS chemicals. The Biden administration issued drinking water regulations that will require water utilities to test for PFAS chemicals and install water filtration if necessary. Those changes would have taken place by 2029, though the Trump administration pushed that back.

Virginia Marshall And not enough is being done to help people who are currently suffering as a result of these chemicals. That’s something Rachel Frazin found out when she reported on a lower-income Black community in North Carolina downstream from a factory that was using PFAS chemicals.

Rachel Frazin And they were first starting to get their hands around this issue, and I show up as you know, just this outsider lady from the national news who was coming to their communities. I think that my presence sort of set off some alarms for some people and they started thinking and counting and they found in their small community like 130 cases of cancer. And I thought to myself, wow, you know this is why I'm doing this.

[Music]

Ayana Elizabeth Johnson I just feel like the world needs more Rachel Carson's right now.

Adwoa Adusei Ayana Johnson again.

Ayana Elizabeth Johnson Like there's a quiet, tenacious humility to her, in my understanding, that is not about the spotlight, that is the depth of understanding and commitment. I just, yeah, I think she's an incredible role model and there's so much to tap into.

Adwoa Adusei Johnson is another science writer who takes a lot of inspiration from Rachel Carson. And not just Silent Spring. Johnson and Carson both share a love of the ocean.

Virginia Marshall Johnson – like Carson – trained as a marine biologist before making the transition to science writing. For Johnson, that pivot happened when she witnessed the devastation of Hurricane Irma in 2017.

Ayana Elizabeth Johnson The eye of the storm just hovered over the island of Barbuda, where I had been working for years at the time, and just crushed so much of the infrastructure, the homes on that island. And thrashed, of course, the ecosystems as well. Watching that all get tossed by climate change, made me rethink how to do ocean conservation in the context of a climate crisis

Virginia Marshall Stepping back and rethinking something that other people just accept – that takes a unique mind, and a lot of bravery. Johnson had to learn how to see oceans differently. And instead of focusing on oceans as a danger in the climate crisis—with sea level rise and hurricanes happening  more frequently—Johnson tried to see oceans as a place for climate solutions, not just climate disasters.

Ayana Elizabeth Johnson And we know from incredible scientific research that the ocean is a place that can offer up about a third of the climate solutions that we need. And so that became something that I started to focus on, write about, gather my colleagues around. And for me as a girl from Brooklyn and someone interested in policy change, it helped me crystallize the concept for Urban Ocean Lab, which is this policy think tank I co-founded and still help to lead, which is thinking about what is the future of coastal cities in the context of climate change

Adwoa Adusei Ayana Johnson hasn’t stopped pushing the boundaries of climate science and climate activism. Her most recent book, What If We Get It Right: Visions of Climate Futures encourages everyone to use their powers of imagination to come up with something they can do or work toward to make a more livable future.

Ayana Elizabeth Johnson I think that's part of the trick of it with challenges that are so all encompassing is it can be really overwhelming to think about climate change because like, where do we begin, you know? And so there's something about laying out all the pieces, and then finding the place that's yours, the piece of it that is yours, and being confident that you're making your best contribution.

[Music]

Virginia Marshall Special thanks to the National Women’s Democratic Club for permission to use the recording of Rachel Carson, and thanks also to Jordan Kisner and Thresholds podcast for the interview with Ayana Elizabeth Johnson. Next week, we’ll be playing the full interview between Jordan and Ayana – and it’s really beautiful. So you won’t want to miss it.

Adwoa Adusei And that’s a wrap for our series! Thank you for coming on this re-reading journey with us.

Virginia Marshall It has been a journey, hasn’t it? We started with Parable of the Sower and Octavia Butler.

Adwoa Adusei Then we had The Autobiography of Malcolm X and The Snowy Day.

Virginia Marshall Then Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States, and Art Spiegelman’s Maus.

Adwoa Adusei And there are so many more books we could tell stories about. Books that helped us see the world differently, books that had a profound impact on the things we value and the stories we tell about ourselves. So, we’d love to know what you all, our listeners, want to hear next!

Virginia Marshall That’s right. So please write to us at podcast [at] bklyn library [dot] org and let us know what you think we should read next.

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Virginia Marshall Borrowed and Returned is a production of Brooklyn Public Library. It’s written and produced by me, Virginia Marshall, and co-hosted with Adwoa Adusei. You can read a transcript of this episode and our show notes at BKLYN Library [dot] org [slash] podcasts.  

Adwoa Adusei Brooklyn Public Library relies on the support of individuals for many of its most critical programs and services. To make a gift, please go to BKLYN Library [dot] org [slash] donate. Our Borrowed advisory team is made up of Fritzi Bodenheimer, Robin Lester Kenton, and Damaris Olivo. Jennifer Proffitt and Ashley Gill run our social media. Laurie Elvove designed our logo.