Volume 6, No. 1

Promoting Cooperation to Maintain and Enhance
Environmental Quality in the Gulf of Maine

By Jon Percy

Almost half a century has elapsed since Rachel Carson began gathering the evidence for her literary broadside against an overzealous pesticide industry, callous government regulators and an applied entomology research community that she felt was practicing "stone-age" science. Published in 1962, Silent Spring has been proclaimed as one of the twentieth century's most influential books. Carefully researched and elegantly presented, the book revealed the widespread abuse of pesticides of "enormous biological potency," with startling accounts of their effects on wildlife. Silent Spring informed, angered and galvanized a generation. Her warning, "if we are going to live so intimately with these chemicals ... we had better know something about their power," was a clarion call to many budding scientists in the 1960s.

From the Rachel Carson scrapbook of Perter Wells, a Carson bibliophinle.

One of those who responded to her challenge was Peter Wells, who is now a research scientist and ecotoxicologist with the Canadian Wildlife Service of Environment Canada in Dartmouth, Nova Scotia. Since 1988, he has served on the Joint Group of Experts on the Scientific Aspects of Marine Environmental Protection (GESAMP), an international marine advisory body of the United Nations. He is the co-chair of the Gulf of Maine Council's environmental monitoring committee.

Wells first read Silent Spring soon after its publication, while he was still in high school. A few years later while taking an ecology course at Montreal's McGill University, he revisited the book, paying keen attention to its chilling details.

Its revelations presented with such obvious passion, Wells says, had a "great influence on my professional and personal life." He shared the widespread anger aroused by the book's depictions of fragile ecosystems being systematically poisoned by chemicals used in largely ineffective assaults on insect pests and weeds.

At right, Peter Wells.

More importantly, the book kindled an interest in the problem of environmental degradation by pollution. Carson's descriptions of the complex chemical interactions and of the tangled network of biological interrelationships both fascinated and concerned him. This literary encounter was pivotal in his decision to become a toxicologist. He launched what was to become his life's work by enrolling in graduate studies in zoology and aquatic toxicology at the University of Guelph in Ontario.

During the ensuing years, Wells read Carson's earlier books Under the Sea Wind, The Sea Around Us, and The Edge of the Sea, and his appreciation and respect for her writing style and her intimate knowledge of the ways of the ocean only deepened. He found her well-crafted, inspirational and informed prose, "a welcome respite from the day-to day technical reading of a scientist." For Wells, reading Carson was "pure enjoyment."

A self-confessed "Carson bibliophile" Wells has collected first editions and later editions of all seven of her books which have become "personal treasures." His library also boasts a number of biographical volumes, reflecting an intense interest in her life as well as her writings. He regards Carson as an "incredibly brave person," struggling against gender bias throughout her early career and then, while writing Silent Spring, battling the cancer that finally claimed her life at the age of 57, only two years after the book's publication. And to the end, she withstood well-funded, aggressive campaigns by the chemical industry to stifle her findings and discredit her and her work.

Forty years after the publication of Silent Spring and with almost three decades of applied research, teaching and writing in ecotoxicology behind him, Well's respect and admiration for Carson remains fervent. Although some of Silent Spring's science is now dated, it nonetheless introduces many facets of environmental toxicology that are still germane today. Carson first brought to the public's attention the serious problem of pesticide poisoning. As well, her book summarized the slowly emerging knowledge about the complex ecological effects of pesticides: their mimicking of hormones, accumulation in food chains, bio-magnification, synergistic effects, complex transformations in the soil, indirect effects on wildlife and insidious ramifications for human health. Carson also made the case for using more natural, non-toxic ways of regulating pests, particularly the use of biological controls such as predators, parasites and microorganisms. Such varied aspects of the problem remain areas of great interest and active research.

"Silent Spring was a pivotal contribution to both environmental literature and environmental policy," Wells says. "It changed the views of both individuals and governments and helped initiate the environmental movement."

He adds that much of the pollution control legislation of the 1970s in North America and Europe was in response to concerns first raised by Carson. The book's most enduring legacy has been its impact on the way many industries, governments and the general public treat the environment. Wells says that Silent Spring helped to "set the bar to measure our commitment and progress on toxic chemical issues." While substantial progress has been made, Wells says, much research, monitoring, education and environmental regulation remains to be done before we can say with any certainty that future springs will still resonate with the songs of birds.