2012.06.25 雷切尔-卡森的《寂静的春天》诞生50周年

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Rachel Carson's Silent Spring Turns 50
A half-century later, the conservationist's warnings are as pertinent as ever.

By Elizabeth Grossman
JUNE 25, 2012
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Fifty years ago this month The New Yorker began publishing Rachel Carson's Silent Spring. A series of three articles—excerpts from the book that would be published that September—appeared on June 16, 23, and 30, 1962. Under the banner of "A Reporter at Large," Carson's account of environmental peril resulting from the overabundant use of petrochemical-based pesticides unfolded between cartoons and genteel ads for airlines, tasteful upscale merchandise, hotels, and restaurants. It's impossible for anyone not then an adult to imagine what it would have been like to read these pieces in 1962, a time when such chemicals were generally regarded as a modern miracle for home gardeners and industrial agriculture alike. "We thought these things were safe," said my mother, who read Silent Spring as it rolled out in The New Yorker.


Reading Silent Spring today, it is disquieting to realize how much was already known in 1962 about the environmental health impacts of petrochemicals. Even more shocking is to recognize how little our regulatory response to these chemicals' effects has changed, despite the past five decades' great advances in scientific understanding.

Best known for its alarming account of DDT's decimation of birdlife across the United States, Silent Spring is widely credited with sparking the public concern that lead to the chemical's ban in the US ten years later. "Over increasingly large areas of the United States, spring now comes unheralded by the return of birds, and the early mornings, once filled with the beauty of bird song, are strangely silent," Carson wrote, describing the toll pesticide use had taken on American birds. Without changes in practice, brought about in part by Silent Spring, the bald eagle (whose numbers had plummeted to about 400 breeding pairs in the continental US by 1963) might well have disappeared from the lower 48 states.

But Carson also described the accumulation of synthetic chemicals in people—including newborns—and these chemicals' interaction with the innermost workings of living cells. "For the first time in the history of the world, every human being is now subjected to contact with dangerous chemicals, from the moment of conception until death," Carson wrote. "These chemicals are now stored in the bodies of the vast majority of human beings, regardless of age. They occur in the mother's milk, and probably in the tissues of the unborn child," wrote Carson more than 40 years before an Environmental Working Group study found 287 industrial chemicals in newborns' umbilical cord blood, and decades before the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention began finding such chemicals in the majority of Americans tested.

Now almost every day brings a new report detailing health hazards associated with synthetic chemicals. Exposure to some of these substances has been linked to increasingly widespread chronic health problems, among them diabetes, obesity, and reproductive and neurological disorders. We've learned that some chemicals' adverse effects can be prompted by exceptionally low levels of exposure that occur before birth and that these biochemical alterations can be so profound that a single exposure may affect several generations. That synthetic chemicals are found routinely in human blood samples and throughout our food and water supply has become a commonplace.

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We also know that chemicals like those Carson chronicled can build up in fat tissue. We know that timing of a chemical exposure is critical to its effects on health and that children are uniquely vulnerable to such exposures. The details of our knowledge of toxicity have expanded immensely but Carson described many of these effects as well: "While the quantities so received by human infants would normally be small, they are not unimportant because children are more susceptible to poisoning than adults. This situation also means that today the average individual almost certainly starts life with the first deposit of the growing load of chemicals his body will be required to carry thenceforth." Fifty years later our chemicals management policies are struggling to accommodate this reality.

"There are vast gaps in our knowledge," Carson acknowledged. She also warned that a lack of information could not be taken as proof of safety. "However, there is every indication of long storage in the human body, where deposits may lie dormant like a slumbering volcano," she wrote. "There has been no such parallel situation in medical history. No one yet knows what the ultimate consequences may be."

Carson wrote all of this in 1962—a time so different technologically and socially that it now almost seems a universe away. John F. Kennedy was president. The Cuban Missile Crisis was looming. The escalation of US military personnel in Vietnam had begun, growing from about 700 to more than 11,000 in the course of the year. In 1962, James Watson and Francis Crick were awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for their work describing the double-helix structure of DNA. It was a year before Martin Luther King Jr.'s "I Have a Dream Speech" and three years before passage of the Voting Rights Act. Chubby Checker and Elvis Presley topped the Billboard Charts, with the Beach Boys and Peter, Paul and Mary bringing up the rear. In Vietnam, Operation Ranch Hand (originally called Operation Hades) was underway, conducting aerial spraying of defoliants—largely the dioxin-laden herbicide known as Agent Orange—across the countryside. The Clean Air Act, Clean Water Act, and Endangered Species Act did not yet exist, nor did the Occupational Safety and Health Administration. There was no such thing a Superfund site. Industrial plants were not required to account for their releases of toxic pollutants. There was no federal law to protect communities from hazardous waste or to protect Americans' right to know the chemicals to which they might be exposed. U.S. law did regulate how pesticides were labeled but it did not yet regulate their use. And imperfect as it has been, there was not yet a Toxic Substances Control Act to regulate chemicals in commerce. Silent Spring and the outcry it prompted—among the public and lawmakers—helped give rise to the modern American environmental movement and led to passage of our landmark pollution prevention laws.

"It is not my contention that chemical insecticides must never be used," Carson wrote. "I do contend that we have put poisonous and biologically potent chemicals indiscriminately into the hands of persons largely or wholly ignorant of their potentials for harm. I contend furthermore that we have allowed these chemicals to be used with little or no advance investigation of their effect on soil, water, wildlife, and man himself. Future generations are unlikely to condone our lack of prudent concern for the integrity of the natural world that supports all life."

Thousands of chemicals have entered commerce since Carson wrote. We continue to allow the commercial use of chemicals without full knowledge of their effect on soil, water, wildlife or human health. Chemical manufacturers argue that their products are thoroughly tested and safe for intended uses, but there are enormous gaps in health and safety-testing. Vast quantities of chemical information—including about chemicals destined for food contact, cosmetics, and personal care products—are publicly inaccessible due to legally protected confidential business information provisions. And we've institutionalized a system that regulates chemicals one at a time, thus allowing for the substitution of one hazardous substance with another.

Writing in Chemical & Engineering News in October 1962, National Academy of Sciences member William Darby said would appeal largely to "readers who are as uncritical as the author, or to those who find the flavor of her product to their taste. Those consumers will include the organic gardeners, the antiflouride leaguers, the worshipers of natural foods, … pseudo-scientists and faddists." Given Carson's "scientific qualifications in contrast to those of our distinguished scientific leaders and statesmen, this book should be ignored," wrote Darby. He dismissed Carson's understanding of toxicity, saying her analysis ignored safety levels set by pesticide manufacturers. "Any harm that is caused by the use of pesticides is greatly overcompensated by the good they do," the National Agriculture Chemicals Association commented shortly after Silent Spring's publication. Echoes of these arguments are heard on Capitol Hill today as lobbying to prevent regulatory restrictions of products long known to be toxic to human health continues unabated.

Many of the chemicals Carson detailed in Silent Spring are now targeted for global phase-outs by the Stockholm Convention on persistent organic pollutants. Reams of peer-reviewed scientific studies support what Carson described but arguments continue to rage about the efficacy of DDT, and the blogosphere is rife with her detractors. Meanwhile many scientists argue that our control of harmful chemical exposures remains far from adequate.

Fifty years after Silent Spring, spring has not been silenced, but signs of severe and subtle disturbance are everywhere. Scientists are now watching natural systems and cellular feedback loops that have evolved over millennia begin to falter or go off course in response to chemical wrenches we've introduced into the global environment. The litany of potential environmental health hazards stemming from our use of fossil fuels and petrochemicals seems endless. As a society we often seem to respond, not by leaping into action, but by hitting the "snooze" button. Yet important changes are afoot. The demand for food free from petrochemicals, and for materials and products that are safe for the environment and human health, has grown far beyond the realm of "faddists."

While science always needs to know more, and the practical challenges of creating commercially successful chemically-safe products and revamping our current chemicals management policies are enormous, we have the information and expertise needed to launch a new generation of chemical products without perpetuating their predecessors' problems. "The road we have long been traveling is deceptively easy, a smooth superhighway on which we progress with great speed but at its end lies disaster. 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," wrote Carson in the final chapter of final chapter of Silent Spring. Whether we fully choose that "other" path remains to be seen. That we have such a choice at all, we have Rachel Carson to thank.

A longer version of this essay was originally published by Earth Island Journal.

Elizabeth Grossman's work has appeared in Scientific American, The Washington Post, The Nation, Mother Jones, The Pump Handle, and other publications. Her books include Chasing Molecules and High Tech Trash.




雷切尔-卡森的《寂静的春天》诞生50周年
半个世纪后，这位保护主义者的警告一如既往地贴切。

作者：伊丽莎白-格罗斯曼
2012年6月25日

50年前的这个月，《纽约客》开始出版雷切尔-卡森的《寂静的春天》。1962年6月16日、23日和30日发表了三篇系列文章--该书的节选，该书将于当年9月出版。在 "在逃记者 "的旗帜下，卡森对过度使用石化杀虫剂所造成的环境危险的描述，在漫画和航空公司、有品位的高档商品、酒店和餐馆的优雅广告之间展开。任何当时还没有成年的人都不可能想象在1962年阅读这些作品时的情景，当时这种化学品被普遍认为是家庭园艺师和工业农业的现代奇迹。我母亲说："我们认为这些东西是安全的，"她在《纽约客》杂志上读到了《寂静的春天》。


今天，在阅读《寂静的春天》时，意识到1962年人们对石化产品对环境健康的影响已经有了很多了解，这让人感到不安。更令人震惊的是，尽管过去五十年来在科学理解方面取得了巨大的进步，但我们对这些化学品影响的监管反应却几乎没有改变。

寂静的春天》以其对DDT在美国各地的鸟类灭绝的惊人描述而闻名，它被广泛认为引发了公众的关注，导致十年后该化学品在美国被禁用。卡森写道："在美国越来越多的地区，春天的到来并没有预示着鸟儿的回归，曾经充满鸟鸣之美的清晨也变得奇怪的寂静"，描述了使用杀虫剂对美国鸟类造成的损失。如果没有 "寂静的春天 "所带来的做法上的改变，秃鹰（到1963年，其数量在美国大陆已经骤减到约400对繁殖）很可能已经从美国48个州的南部消失了。

但卡森也描述了合成化学品在人体内的积累--包括新生儿--以及这些化学品与活体细胞的最内部运作的相互作用。"卡森写道："在世界历史上第一次，每个人现在都要与危险的化学品接触，从受孕的那一刻起直到死亡。"这些化学品现在储存在绝大多数人的身体里，不分年龄。它们出现在母亲的乳汁中，也可能出现在未出生的孩子的组织中。"在环境工作小组的一项研究发现新生儿脐带血中含有287种工业化学品的40多年前，在美国疾病控制和预防中心开始在大多数美国人的测试中发现此类化学品的几十年前，卡森就写道。

现在，几乎每天都有新的报告，详细说明与合成化学品有关的健康危害。接触其中一些物质已经与越来越广泛的慢性健康问题有关，其中包括糖尿病、肥胖、生殖和神经系统疾病。我们已经了解到，一些化学品的不利影响可以由出生前发生的特别低水平的接触引起，这些生化改变可能是如此深刻，以至于一次接触可能影响几代人。在人类血液样本中以及在我们的食物和水供应中经常发现合成化学品，这已成为一种普遍现象。

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我们也知道，像卡森所记录的那些化学品可以在脂肪组织中堆积。我们知道，接触化学品的时间对于其对健康的影响至关重要，而且儿童特别容易受到这种接触的影响。我们对毒性知识的细节有了极大的扩展，但卡森也描述了许多这些影响。"虽然人类婴儿如此接受的数量通常很小，但它们并非不重要，因为儿童比成人更容易中毒。这种情况也意味着今天的普通人几乎肯定是带着他的身体从此以后需要携带的越来越多的化学品的第一笔存款开始生活的。" 50年后，我们的化学品管理政策正在努力适应这一现实。

卡森承认："我们的知识存在着巨大的差距"。她还警告说，不能把缺乏信息作为安全的证明。"她写道："然而，有各种迹象表明，在人体中长期储存，沉积物可能像沉睡的火山一样处于休眠状态。"在医学史上还没有出现过这样的平行情况。还没有人知道最终的后果可能是什么。"

卡森在1962年写下了这一切--一个在技术和社会方面如此不同的时代，现在看来几乎是一个宇宙的距离。约翰-F-肯尼迪是总统。古巴导弹危机迫在眉睫。美国在越南的军事人员已经开始升级，在这一年里从大约700人增加到11000多人。1962年，詹姆斯-沃森和弗朗西斯-克里克因其描述DNA双螺旋结构的工作而被授予诺贝尔生理学或医学奖。那是小马丁-路德-金的 "我有一个梦想演讲 "的前一年，也是《投票权法案》通过的前三年。Chubby Checker和Elvis Presley在Billboard排行榜上名列前茅，而Beach Boys和Peter, Paul and Mary则排在后面。在越南，"牧场之手 "行动（最初称为 "哈迪斯行动"）正在进行中，在全国范围内进行空中喷洒脱叶剂--主要是含有二恶英的除草剂，即橙剂。当时还没有《清洁空气法》、《清洁水法》和《濒危物种法》，也没有职业安全与健康管理局。当时没有 "超级基金 "这一说法。工业工厂没有被要求对其排放的有毒污染物进行说明。没有联邦法律来保护社区免受危险废物的影响，也没有联邦法律来保护美国人了解他们可能接触的化学品的权利。美国法律确实规范了杀虫剂的标签，但它还没有规范它们的使用。而且，虽然不完善，但当时还没有《有毒物质控制法》来规范商业中的化学品。寂静的春天 "和它在公众和立法者中引起的强烈反响，帮助催生了现代美国环境运动，并导致了我们具有里程碑意义的污染防治法的通过。

卡森写道："我并不主张永远不使用化学杀虫剂，"。"我确实认为，我们把有毒的、具有生物效力的化学品不加选择地交给了那些基本上或完全不了解其潜在危害的人。我还认为，我们允许使用这些化学品，却很少或没有事先调查它们对土壤、水、野生动物和人类本身的影响。后代人不可能宽恕我们对支持所有生命的自然世界的完整性缺乏谨慎的关注"。

自从卡森写下这篇文章后，成千上万的化学品已经进入商业领域。我们继续允许在没有充分了解化学品对土壤、水、野生动物或人类健康影响的情况下，对其进行商业使用。化学品制造商争辩说，他们的产品经过彻底的测试，对预期的用途是安全的，但在健康和安全测试方面存在着巨大的差距。大量的化学信息--包括用于食品接触、化妆品和个人护理产品的化学品--由于受法律保护的商业机密信息的规定而无法公开获取。而且，我们已经建立了一个制度，对化学品逐一进行监管，从而允许用一种危险物质替代另一种。

1962年10月，美国国家科学院院士威廉-达比（William Darby）在《化学与工程新闻》中写道，这本书在很大程度上会吸引 "那些和作者一样不加批判的读者，或者那些发现她的产品味道符合他们口味的人。这些消费者将包括有机园丁、反酸剂联盟、天然食品的崇拜者、......伪科学家和狂热者"。鉴于卡森的 "科学资格与我们杰出的科学领袖和政治家相比，这本书应该被忽略，"达比写道。他否定了卡森对毒性的理解，说她的分析忽略了农药制造商设定的安全水平。"全国农业化学品协会在《寂静的春天》出版后不久评论说："使用杀虫剂所造成的任何伤害都被它们所带来的好处大大补偿了。这些论点的回声今天在国会山听到了，因为游说阻止对早已知道对人类健康有毒的产品进行监管限制的活动继续有增无减。

卡森在《寂静的春天》中详述的许多化学品现在已成为《关于持久性有机污染物的斯德哥尔摩公约》的全球淘汰目标。大量经同行评议的科学研究支持卡森所描述的内容，但关于DDT功效的争论仍在继续，博客圈里充斥着她的诋毁者。同时，许多科学家认为，我们对有害化学品暴露的控制仍然远远不够。

寂静的春天 "过去50年后，春天并没有沉寂下来，但严重而微妙的干扰的迹象却无处不在。科学家们现在正看着进化了几千年的自然系统和细胞反馈回路开始动摇或偏离轨道，以应对我们引入全球环境的化学干扰。由于我们使用化石燃料和石化产品而产生的一连串潜在的环境健康危害似乎无穷无尽。作为一个社会，我们似乎常常不是通过跃跃欲试的行动来应对，而是通过按下 "打盹 "按钮。然而，重要的变化正在酝酿之中。对不含石化产品的食品，以及对环境和人类健康安全的材料和产品的需求，已经远远超出了 "狂热者 "的范畴。

虽然科学总是需要了解更多，而且创造商业上成功的化学安全产品和改革我们目前的化学品管理政策的实际挑战是巨大的，但我们有必要的信息和专业知识来推出新一代的化学产品，而不延续其前辈的问题。"我们长期以来所走的路是骗人的，是一条平坦的超级高速公路，我们在上面飞快地前进，但在它的尽头是灾难。另一条岔路--'少有人走的路'--提供了我们最后的、唯一的机会，以达到确保保护我们地球的目的地，"卡森在《寂静的春天》的最后一章中写道。我们是否完全选择那条 "另一条 "道路，还有待观察。我们能有这样的选择，我们要感谢雷切尔-卡森。

这篇文章的较长版本最初发表于《地球岛报》。

伊丽莎白-格罗斯曼的作品曾出现在《科学美国人》、《华盛顿邮报》、《国家》、《琼斯母亲》、《泵柄》和其他出版物上。她的书包括《追逐分子》和《高科技垃圾》。