Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring, published 50 years ago this month, effectively marked the birth of the modern environmental movement. ‘Silent Spring came as a cry in the wilderness, a deeply felt, thoroughly researched, and brilliantly written argument that changed the course of history,’ wrote Al Gore in his introduction to the 1994 edition.
Mr Gore reprised this theme on his website earlier this year, proudly comparing Carson’s call to arms over pesticides to his own campaigning on the issue of climate change. He frequently compares the resistance he meets, and Carson met, to that which impeded the battle to establish the link between cancer and cigarette smoking. He accuses industry of ‘sowing doubt [about global warming] even more effectively than the tobacco companies before them’.
The tobacco companies, said Mr Gore last year, ‘succeeded in delaying the implementation of the surgeon general’s report for 40 years — 40 years! In every one of those 40 years the average number of Americans killed by cigarettes each year exceeded the total number of Americans killed in all of World War II: 450,000 per year. My sister was one of them … It was evil, evil, evil.’
Mr Gore may not be aware of a startling irony here. Carson’s mentor — the man who was the source for much of her case that synthetic pesticides, and DDT in particular, were devastating bird life and causing widespread cancer in people — was himself a fervent denier of the link between tobacco smoking and lung cancer.
His name was Wilhelm Hueper. An immigrant to the United States from Germany (who shook off an embarrassing but brief enthusiasm for Nazism that led him to seek a job back in Hitler’s Germany), he became the first director of the environmental cancer section of the US National Cancer Institute.
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