The Cancerous Legacy Of Rachel Carson
June 6, 2002
CHURCHVILLE, VA—Six women in one of my neighbor families have breast cancer. Statistically, only one woman in eleven will contract it. The family told the local newspaper that it must be the pesticides sprayed by nearby farmers.
This is the cancerous legacy of Rachel Carson. She set people against their neighbors, their own food needs and the preservation of wildlands.
As we approach the 40th anniversary of Rachel Carson’s famous book, Silent Spring, we know that this brilliant writer and marine biologist did us a terrible disservice. She went beyond science to make predictions about the awful risks she believed would be found in the use of modern pesticides—and she was wrong.
My neighboring cancer-beset family rejects the idea of a genetic linkage in their cancers, though research shows an important genetic factor in breast and ovarian cancer.
They prefer to blame farmers, though science shows no linkage between cancer and today’s pesticides. The only pesticide ever approved for U.S. farm use that is proven to cause cancer in humans was a ‘natural’ pesticide (a highly toxic mixture of lead and arsenic) which was displaced by much safer synthetic pesticides 40 years ago.
The family also rejects the uncomforting laws of probability, which say that some families and communities will get more than their “fair share” of cancers—some of them much more.
The cancer-stricken family, in its grief and anger, is attacking its neighbors—farmers who help produce the safest, most abundant food supply in history, even as their high yields preserve millions of acres of bird and wildlife habitat from the plow.
In fact, most of the local farms mostly raise beef and dairy cattle on grass pastures and hay, with very little pesticide use. Of course an external cancer cause would affect more than one family and farm families, as a group, have lower cancer rates than other members of the population.
Rachel Carson said that many of the pesticides then in use by farmers would be proven to cause cancer in humans. None of them have. The Environmental Protection Agency keeps talking about “likely human carcinogens.” They’ve now even included one of the organic pesticides, pyrethrum, in this category. But the label simply means the compound causes tumors in laboratory rats at ultra-high doses. The dose makes the poison. The National Research Council and the National Cancer Institute agree that Ms. Carson was wrong and the pesticide residues are safe.
Her well-meant bad advice has now blighted millions of lives, most of them malaria victims in the tropics whose homes are not protected from the deadly mosquitoes by whitewashing the inside walls with cheap and effective DDT. They suffer and die without much attention from American
media. The July 29, 2000 issue of the British medical journal Lancet carried two articles confirming the cost-effective malaria control of DDT, and the lack of any toxic human effects. The impact of DDT on birds has never been resolved; after DDT was banned, no eco-activist wanted any tests done that might exonerate it.
Ms. Carson believed that pesticides would destroy the birds and wildlife, and wanted the chemicals eliminated. But without pest protection, our lush high-yielding crop fields would simply become weed-infested cafeterias for insects, bacteria and fungi. Pesticides have made it possible to feed the world’s growing population without taking any more land from Nature. Without the high yields, most of U.S. forests east of the Mississippi would already have been plowed for crops.
U.S. raptor bird populations are recovering and expanding, not because we banned DDT but because concerned citizens demanded an end to such once common practices as poisoning eagles to protect lambs, and pole-bombing ospreys to protect fishing.
Fortunately, other scientists have been truer to their calling than Rachel Carson. They keep working on provable causes of cancer and what we can do about it. For example, new research has identified an inherited pattern of abnormal copies of the BRCA1 or BRCA2 genes—along with a 50 to 85 percent lifetime risk of breast cancer. The women with the BRCA1 gene also have a 20 to 40 percent higher risk of ovarian cancer, and those with the BRCA2 gene a 10 to 20 percent higher ovarian cancer risk than the general public.
Along with the bad genetic news, there is good news. Recent studies show that women with a genetically elevated risk of breast and ovarian cancer can radically reduce their health risks by having their ovaries surgically removed after their childbearing years. In a retrospective study of 551 women by the University of Pennsylvania, ovary removal reduced the risk of ovarian cancer in the women with the abnormal genes by 96 percent and cut their breast cancer risk in half. Previously, breast removal was the only strategy, and far less effective.
There will be many media tributes to Rachel Carson in the coming weeks, as the media pay tribute on the 40th anniversary of Silent Spring. For myself, the kindest thing I can say is that I’m sure she never meant to cause mindless fear for a billion people, cruel suffering and death for millions of malaria victims, or the elimination of the high-yield farming systems that must protect most of the world’s wildlife.
DENNIS T. AVERY is a senior fellow for Hudson Institute of Indianapolis and the Director of the Center For Global Food Issues. He was formerly a senior policy analyst for the U.S. Department of State. Readers may write him at Post Office Box 202, Churchville, VA
This article was published by Knight Ridder Tribune
Dennis T. Avery is based in Churchville, Va., and is director of global food issues for the Hudson Institute of Indianapolis.
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