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Equally worried about contaminants invading water, air, soil, and vegetation in the late 1950s was Justice Douglas. From his imposing office at the Supreme Court he sought cutting-edge data on radioactive waste, fallout from nuclear explosions, detergents used in homes, and chemical wastes from factories. The Bureau of Land Management (BLM) was spraying public lands, Douglas believed, with toxins. Couldn’t people understand that when cattle ate grass sprayed with DDT, the milk would be contaminated? Didn’t BLM comprehend that, say, spraying DDT on sagebrush killed the willows, too? At his small ranch in Goose Prairie, Washington, Douglas—after horseback riding in the Snoqualmie National Forest, which adjoined his eight-acre spread—would write flawless prose about the degradation of the planet by big corporations.14 Nobody, in fact, cheered Carson on in her writing of Silent Spring with more fervor than Douglas. She reciprocated by quoting, in Silent Spring, from Douglas’s dissent in Murphy v. Butler (1960)—a landmark environmental case involving people on Long Island who wanted to ban the use of DDT to arrest Dutch elm disease.15 “The Great God the Dollar has sent us recklessly into chemical controls that have upset the biotic community,” Douglas scolded. “Some controls of insects are necessary, but they must be carefully designed and applied.”16

III

Peter Matthiessen called Silent Spring the “cornerstone of the new environmentalism.” The main, stunning thrust of Carson’s book was that Americans were poisoning themselves by misusing synthetic pesticides. Every farmer or outdoors worker was affected. Bringing into her narrative the ecological history of the world, plus her own bona fides as a longtime marine biologist with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and as the acclaimed author of The Sea Around Us, which was published in 1952 and won a National Book Award, Carson was a scientist with an abiding social conscience. Over the years she had accumulated powerful allies, had become a highly respected science writer, and had become a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Known for her fierce spirit, and for her abruptness, Carson had shrugged off admonishments from her peers who accused her of courting popularity. Somehow she intuited that during the cold war the reading public needed trustworthy voices to speak about the natural world. The Sea Around Us was on the New York Times list of best sellers for eighty-six weeks. By writing complex marine biology in such an accomplished way, with integrity shining forth from every line, Carson had a kind of power that transcended Lois Crisler’s livelier Arctic exploits. At the Atlantic Monthly, New Yorker, New York Review of Books, and New York Times, Carson could do no wrong.

Chemical corruption of earth was a big topic for many marine biologists to get their hands around. Carson had learned about DDT—the insect bomb—shortly after World War II. Although she didn’t write about DDT until Silent Spring, she was accumulating disturbing scientific information about its deleterious effects throughout the 1950s. Success tends to breed intense jealousy in America, particularly for a woman in what was then the male-influenced world of laboratory science. There was gossip that the mild-mannered Carson was the lesbian lover of Dorothy Freeman of Maine, that she was merely a stalking horse for the Audubon Society, and that her name was mud at the USDA. Perhaps it was all true. But who cared? The U.S. government’s reckless spraying of fire ants with toxic pesticides and its poisoning of rivers and lakes needed a whistle-blower; Carson stepped into the role with true courage. Boldly, she claimed that the pesticides were biocides and caused cancer in humans. With the stakes so high, Carson’s personal life was irrelevant. But to set the record straight, in the late 1950s Carson was taking care of her sick mother, helping to raise an orphaned five-year-old nephew, and combating a duodenal ulcer. It