As West Nile virus spreads across the United States, people debating whether to spray disease-carrying mosquitoes find themselves referring to a book published 40 years ago - either to blame its long-dead author for the virus' victims or to repeat her warning that widespread use of pesticides is poisoning the planet, and us as well.
The controversy would be all too familiar to Rachel Carson, the biologist-turned-writer whose seminal work, Silent Spring, hit the bookstands Sept. 27, 1962. Its publication helped launch the modern environmental movement and stirred a furor that continues today over the hazards of chemicals.
"More than any other [book], it changed the way Americans, and people around the world, looked at the reckless way we live on this planet," Philip Shabecoff wrote in his history of U.S. environmentalism, A Fierce Green Fire.
At a time when the Cold War seemed about to erupt into nuclear holocaust, Carson - best-selling author of three earlier books about marine biology - suggested that people should worry about perishing from a more insidious threat - synthetic chemical pesticides.
"Elixirs of death," she called DDT and the thousands of other compounds increasingly used since World War II to exterminate unwanted insects and weeds. The nation's soil and water were becoming tainted with insecticides, she warned, causing fish and bird kills, interfering with animal reproduction and threatening many species - possibly even humans - with extinction.
"How could intelligent beings seek to control a few unwanted species by a method that contaminated the entire environment and brought the threat of disease and death even to their own kind?" she wrote.
Aided by advance publication of excerpts in The New Yorker, the book caused a sensation and rocketed onto the best-seller list. Though hailed by many, her contentions were disputed by the chemical industry; a Harvard University professor dismissed them as "baloney." A former agriculture secretary even suggested she was "probably a Communist."
Yet the book's clarion call against misuse and overuse of pesticides eventually led to the enactment of federal environmental laws and regulations. A decade after its publication, DDT was banned in the United States, chiefly on the threat it posed to eagles and other birds. Research indicated DDT ingested by the birds may cause a fatal thinning of their eggshells.
Carson did not live to see any of that. She died in 1964 after a long battle with breast cancer - an illness she never publicly blamed on pesticides, though in Silent Spring she suggested that growing exposure to toxic chemicals may be behind an increase in cancer rates.
Perhaps her reticence on that score stemmed from her intense sense of privacy. She never seemed quite comfortable with her celebrity, limiting her public appearances and telling interviewers she was no crusader.
"The beauty of the living world has always been uppermost in my mind - that, and anger at the senseless, brutish things that were being done," she wrote a friend. "Now I can believe that I have at least helped a little."
More than a little, judging by the accolades her work has received in the decades since her death. Time magazine, which initially panned Silent Spring as emotional and alarmist, later named her as one of the 100 most influential people of the 20th century.
Shy and bookish as a child growing up in Springdale, Pa., Carson forged a career out of her twin passions for writing and nature. An English major in college, she earned a master's degree in zoology at the Johns Hopkins University and taught briefly at Hopkins and the University of Maryland before taking a job with the federal Bureau of Fisheries.
She supplemented her meager government income by free-lancing feature articles for The Sun - making her debut as a professional writer under the byline of R.L. Carson. "It'll Be Shad Time Soon" was her first piece in 1937, for which she was paid $20, according to Witness for Nature, a biography by Linda J. Lear.
She went on to publish three books about the sea and the wonders beneath it, two of which were best sellers. That financial success enabled her to retire from the government and pursue writing full time.
But, by the late 1950s, she resolved to write a different kind of book after hearing from biologists at the federal Patuxent Wildlife Research Center and elsewhere about huge bird kills and reproductive problems that seemed linked to pesticide exposure.
The book's title, Silent Spring, came from her fear - outlined in the opening chapter - that pesticides and other toxic chemicals would deplete bird populations to the point that communities would no longer hear the songs of robins, warblers and other birds to herald the end of winter.
"She was tremendous and very effective in getting this information out, and we're all indebted to her," says David Pimentel, professor of ecology and agricultural sciences at Cornell University and president of the Rachel Carson Council, a group based in Silver Spring dedicated to minimizing pesticide use.
Despite Carson's eloquent warning, Pimentel says, chemical insecticide use has continued to grow since 1962, with 1 billion pounds applied in the United States and more than 5 billion pounds worldwide. He contends that 70 million birds are killed annually by pesticides, and millions of people worldwide poisoned, while crop losses have grown - suggesting, as Carson predicted, that chemicals are growing less effective at killing pests.
Yet modern-day critics, while acknowledging Carson's eloquence, contend that Silent Spring created a paranoia about pesticides that exaggerates their hazards and prevents their use in controlling deadly insect-borne diseases, such as malaria and West Nile.
"She does have some blood on her hands," says Alex Avery, director of research for the Hudson Institute's Center for Global Food Issues.
Avery contends that research has never shown DDT caused cancer or any other human health problem. He contends that there are questions about whether DDT is to blame for the steep decline in eagle, osprey and other raptor populations in the 1940s, 1950s and 1960s.
DDT remains one of the most effective tools for fighting mosquitoes in developing countries where malaria is rampant, Avery says. Yet the pesticide's bad reputation - popularized by Silent Spring - has kept international agencies and foreign leaders from advocating its use.
People concerned about the spread in this country of West Nile virus also have blamed Carson for the government's reluctance to resort to widespread spraying of mosquitoes.
But environmental health specialists and wildlife researchers say the evidence against DDT remains strong. "It does not have a clean bill of health," says Ellen Silbergeld, professor of environmental health sciences at Hopkins' Bloomberg School of Public Health. Research has linked DDT exposure in humans with reproductive, developmental and physiological problems, she says.
And Pete Albers, a federal wildlife research biologist, says "the overwhelming weight of evidence" remains that DDT caused the eggshell thinning that prevented eagles and other birds from reproducing.
On one point, both sides seem to agree. Carson's larger message in Silent Spring was that people have a right to know, to speak up and to question what substances are being used in their communities and how they might affect human health and the environment - to question progress, in a sense.
"We're all much more sensitive to the environment," agrees Avery. "And a lot of that credit goes to Rachel Carson."
The Enoch Pratt Central Library, at 400 Cathedral St., has an exhibit on Carson through Dec. 8, plus a series of lectures and presentations. Information: 410-396-5430.