Silent Spring at 50 by Morriss Andrew Desroches Pierre Meiners Roger

Author:Morriss, Andrew, Desroches, Pierre, Meiners, Roger
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: ebook, book
Publisher: Cato Institute
Published: 2012-09-10T16:00:00+00:00

9. Agricultural Revolutions and Agency Wars: How the 1950s Laid the Groundwork for Silent Spring

Roger E. Meiners and Andrew P. Morriss

Silent Spring has acquired iconic status in the history of the environmental movement. Rather than just a popular science writer, Rachel Carson is virtually a secular saint, having been martyred by her death from cancer shortly after completing her magnum opus.1 A half-century after publication of the book, most people agree that Carson and Silent Spring appear to have changed public opinion about pesticides in general and DDT in particular.

But, as Desrochers and Shimizu discuss in Chapter 3, debates about pesticides began long before Carson’s book. In this chapter, we will show that Silent Spring is a populist expression of a struggle over the regulatory authority governing American food production between two federal agencies with dramatically different visions: the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and the federal Department of Agriculture (USDA). This struggle took place at the same time as important technological changes in food production and delivery were remaking rural America. Just as agriculture underwent a dramatic productivity revolution that changed the face of American farming, marketing, new home appliances, and increased participation in the labor force by women radically changed the kinds of food Americans ate. The consumption of processed foods increased significantly, and, concomitantly, concern about the purity of those foods increased as well. (Food purity was central to the “guinea pig muckraking” discussed in Chapter 3.)

The combination of these trends with the agencies’ turf conflicts created the conditions in which powerful parties with conflicting interests in pesticide policy would have clashed regardless of whether Carson had written Silent Spring. Institutional entrepreneurs at the FDA used public concern over food safety, and the processing industry’s desire for protection from public perception of food safety threats, to gain advantages in its struggle for power with USDA. This conflict aided in the organization of environmental pressure groups already coalescing over opposition to publicly funded pesticide spraying. Silent Spring was one more expression of conflicts unleashed by larger changes in agriculture.

DDT provided a particularly convenient target for both the FDA and the nascent environmental pressure groups because it was in widespread use. Its ubiquity and cheapness meant there were few organized interests to defend it. As a commodity in the 1950s, DDT was a low-margin product that competed successfully with higher margin, less effective, and more dangerous products.2 As a result, agricultural chemical producers had little interest in spending resources to protect DDT. The primary costs of restrictions on DDT were ultimately borne not by American agricultural interests but by residents of developing countries where malaria and other diseases are persistent problems. Being poor, nonwhite, and far away, those people had little influence in the debate over DDT. Indeed, some environmentalists ultimately argued against DDT’s use even for malaria control precisely because it lowered death rates in developing countries.3

In this chapter, we first sketch out the larger changes in agriculture and federal regulation of agriculture that set the stage for the debate over DDT in the late 1940s and 1950s.

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