[00:00:02.98] [gentle string music]

[00:00:29.24] Dear Dorothy, this is a postscript to our morning at Newagen. Something I think I can write better than say. For me, it was one of the loveliest of the summer's hours and all details will remain in my memory-- the blue September sky, the sound of the wind in the spruces and the surf on the rocks. The gulls busy with their foraging, alighting with deliberate grace. But most of all I shall remember the monarch butterflies, that unhurried drift of one small winged form after another, each drawn by some invisible force.

[00:01:12.93] We talked a little about their life history-- would they return? We thought not. For most at least, this would be the closing journey of their lives.

[00:01:24.63] But it occurred to me this afternoon, remembering, that it had been a happy spectacle, that we had felt no sadness when we spoke of the fact that there would be no return. And rightly, for when any living thing has come to the end of its cycle, we accept that end is natural.

[00:01:46.12] For the monarch butterfly that cycle is measured in a known span of months. For ourselves the measure is something else, the span of which we cannot know, but the thought is the same. When that intangible cycle has run its course, it is a natural and not unhappy thing that a life comes to its end.

[00:02:17.88] That is what those brightly fluttering bits of life thought me this morning and I found deep happiness in it.

[00:02:29.45] So I hope may you. Thank you for our morning.

[00:02:38.07] [gentle string music]

[00:02:57.65] I'm not ready to go, I never will be.

[00:03:02.51] We should've left weeks ago.

[00:03:03.73] I haven't been able to pull myself away.

[00:03:10.10] Roger of course is delighted. He's a normal 11-year-old boy. He'd much rather be out there on the rocks than back at school. We leave tomorrow and I can't change my mind again because everything is set. I've hired a driver and he'll be here tomorrow at 7 AM.

[00:03:31.41] Got to pack up this house, as usual I've put it off till the last minute. It's my home, it's only a summer cottage, it's small, there's no heat.

[00:03:45.68] The water will be turned off in a few weeks. Rog!

[00:03:50.41] But to me, it's the dream of my life. I am perched here on the rocky coast of Maine, overlooking the Sheepscot Bay.

[00:03:59.79] When I look out my window, I'm steps away from the dark line of high tide.

[00:04:07.08] This place fills me with peace, and this solitude far away from public clamor.

[00:04:18.50] To stand here at the edge of the sea, to sense the ebb and flow of tides, to feel the breath of the mist over the great salt marsh, to watch the flight of shore birds that have swept up and down these continents for untold thousands of years, to see the running of the old eels and the young shad to the sea, is to have knowledge of things that are as nearly eternal as any earthly life can be.

[00:04:50.26]

[00:04:56.19] I hate leaving.

[00:04:58.53] We've got to get back to our winter home outside of Washington, to our winter schedules, to our more public selves. For Roger it means school, for me it means facing the continued uproar over my last book, "Silent Spring." Silent Spring has been a sensation since it was published a year ago. I knew that if I were to write honestly about chemical contamination, I would be plunging myself into a sort of war with the chemical industry. But I never imagined the full force of the industry's fury. Hundreds and thousands of dollars have been spent attempting to discredit not only the book, but the hysterical woman who wrote it. Fortunately, the attack seemed to have backfired, creating more publicity than my publishers ever could have afforded.

[00:05:57.78] The controversy's been exhausting.

[00:06:01.61] Is it any wonder I don't want to leave the state of Maine?

[00:06:13.68] Roger keeps hoping I'll think up another excuse to keep us here. "Just one more week!"

[00:06:20.73] His answer to leaving is to stay out there. He says, "If we don't pack, we can't go." He's probably collecting more things. When he was little, six or seven, it was the end of summer and I told him, "Go on, go on and get your room organized, get your duffle bag packed." And he came back in here hours later with his fists full of clothes, and he plopped them on the table.

[00:06:50.69] "I don't have room for these," he said. And I said, "What do you mean you don't have room for them? Your duffle bag is gigantic." Well, he looked down at the floor and exhaled, and he put his hands on his hips and he exhaled some more and then he looked me in the eye and he said, "Trust me." I could hardly keep from laughing, he was so serious. But I said, "All right." And he beelined it out the door and I, of course, went to check his duffle and he was right, it was full.

[00:07:29.92] There were jars of saltwater and fresh sea air, there were little shells wrapped in socks, and big shells in sweatshirts. There were boxes of rocks and pebbles, mica, garnets, pinecones. There was no room for clothes. If I was going to take that little boy... If I was going to take that little boy out of the state of Maine, he was going to take the state of Maine with him.

[00:08:07.15] Roger's my son.

[00:08:09.43] He's also my great nephew. I adopted him six years ago when his mother, my niece Marjorie, died of pneumonia. There was no question I would take him in as my own. His mother had been a daughter to me, he'd already lost his father.

[00:08:27.06] It wasnt easy, I should have been 20 years younger.

[00:08:30.98] My mother, who lived with me, was 88 and very frail. Roger had just turned five, I was nearly 50. I have learnt a great deal from that little boy. Boundless energy. The first time I came to Maine, we were sitting in here and reading by the fire, and the sounds from the outside seemed to swell and invade our evening quiet.

[00:09:01.00] And no one with the slightest awareness of the natural world cannot fail to be conscious to some degree of the insect chorus that fills the night with throbbing rhythm from midsummer until frost, but of the individual voices or the instruments that make up that elemental earth orchestra.

[00:09:21.48] My ignorance was complete and abysmal, but that night Roger and I sat here transfixed by those sounds.

[00:09:30.17] And then without a word between us, we slipped on our jackets and set out into the night to discover just what was out there. After a couple of weeks of walking about in the dark, our ears became attuned, we were able to separate the instruments, even locate most of the players.

[00:09:51.27] Our favorite was the one we called the "Fairy Bell Ringer." We've never found him, not sure I want to.

[00:09:59.35] His voice is so ethereal, so delicate, otherwordly. Perhaps he should remain invisible as he has through all the nights we searched for him.

[00:10:11.64] Our passport was a flashlight, our visa a suddenly awakened curiosity about those insect voices which we had heard and yet not heard all our lives.

[00:10:26.69] A child's world is fresh, it's new, it's beautiful, full of wonder and excitement.

[00:10:35.03] It's our misfortune that for most of us that clear eyed vision, that true instinct for what is beautiful and awe- inspiring is dimmed, even lost before we've reached adulthood.

[00:10:49.89] If I had influence over the good fairy, who's supposed to preside over the christening of all children, I should ask that her gift to each child in the world be a sense of wonder, so indestructible that it would last throughout life as an unfailing antidote against the boredom and disenchantment of later years, the alienation from the sources of our strength.

[00:11:21.64] If the children are not fortunate enough to meet the good fairy, they need the companionship of at least one adult who can help them

[00:11:30.23] keep alive their inborn sense of wonder. I've tried to be that for Roger, my mother was for me.

[00:11:40.38] Rog!

[00:11:45.81] He'll never come back now.

[00:11:51.99] It's a hermit thrush. It's beautiful.

[00:12:02.57] My mother taught me the names of all the birds and the flowers, and then she taught me music and literature.

[00:12:10.47] She embodied Schweitzer's "reverence for life" more than anyone I've ever met, and she gave to me her love of nature as a gift.

[00:12:21.66] We were very close.

[00:12:24.92] She delighted in my desire to write, did everything she could to help me including typing all my manuscripts. But she did much more than that. She cherished me, and what I was trying to create as well.

[00:12:46.91] Her only real frustration with me was my scientific analysis of everything around me. She was the daughter of a minister.

[00:12:56.69] I remember her saying, "Rachel, the Bible tells us that God created the world," and I answered, "Yes, Mother. And General Motors created our automobile, but how is the question."

[00:13:15.93] I could irritate her.

[00:13:24.61] It wasn't that I planned on being a scientist. It never entered my mind.

[00:13:30.10] Since I'd been a little girl, I'd always assumed I'd be a writer.

[00:13:35.16] No idea why. There were no writers in my family.

[00:13:39.56] But I won a scholarship, I went off to college, I majored in English, joined the literary club. I did all the things I thought one did to become a writer.

[00:13:50.48] Surprise came the end of my sophomore year when I was reminded that I had to fulfill a basic science requirement. Reluctantly I signed up for a course in biology, only to discover that it fascinated me. By the end of my junior year, I'd switched my major. Few understood my change of heart.

[00:14:10.93] Fewer encouraged me. Women didn't go to college in 1926 to major in biology.

[00:14:19.58] But I graduated magna cum laude, went right off to the Woods Hole Laboratories to study marine biology. Roger.

[00:14:27.69] It's the first time I ever saw the ocean. I dreamed of it, I longed for it. I read all the sea literature I could find.

[00:14:40.84] There was something deep within me that told me that my path led to the sea, but I'd never seen it. From Woods Hole I went to Johns Hopkins. I did my graduate work in zoology.

[00:14:54.96] While I was there, my parents moved to Baltimore to live with me. It was the Depression, our money was very tight, and my father was quite ill.

[00:15:05.23] I started going to school part-time so I could work.

[00:15:08.12] It took me four years just to complete a Masters.

[00:15:14.67] My father died. Mother was 65 with no means of support. I was teaching a class at John Hopkins and another at the University of Maryland, so we had enough to get by.

[00:15:31.80] But about that same time my sister died and she left two little girls, Marjorie and Virginia.

[00:15:41.62] Mother and I took the girls in and we raised them. Marjorie was Roger's mother. Well, I realized that I needed a real job, I needed a permanent position, a secure salary. There were four of us, and I was the only one who could support us.

[00:16:03.35] I was very lucky. I was hired as a marine biologist for the federal government's Fish and Wildlife Service.

[00:16:10.66] I'd just started my new job, extremely proud, when my chief asked me if I could write something, of a general sort, about the sea.

[00:16:19.72] I set to work at once. Somehow the material rather took charge of the situation, and my article turned into something that was perhaps unusual for the department. My chief read it, he handed it back to me and said, "This will not do at all. You'll have to start it again." As he turned to leave, he had a twinkle in his eye.

[00:16:47.07] "You'll be sure to send this one off to The Atlantic, wont you?" Eventually, I did.

[00:16:54.59] And to my amazement, The Atlantic accepted it. That was the beginning of my writing career.

[00:17:00.29] Simon and Schuster contacted me wondering if I'd be interested in writing a book. I started at once. I was a biologist by day and a writer by night. I'd come home from work and I'd raise up stairs, I'd leave poor mother alone with the girls and I'd lose myself completely in my book.

[00:17:21.33] Finally, I was a writer that I'd always dreamed of becoming.

[00:17:26.29] I thought that I'd abandoned my writing for science, but it was the study of science that was making my literary career possible. I'd had to become a biologist in order to find the material about which I wanted to write. "Under The Sea Wind," my first book. Took me three years to write it, and the world received it with superb indifference.

[00:17:55.01] Needless to say, I didnt rush to start the next one. It was a full decade before "The Sea Around Us" was published. I was totally unprepared for the response that it received. Within a month it was on top of the bestseller lists where it stayed for 86 weeks, winning all sorts of honors and awards. It was translated into 32 languages. Then, I was catapulted into the role of public figure. It was very exciting, and it was difficult.

[00:18:25.95] All of a sudden, I was being asked to make public appearances and speak before large groups, but I didn't know if I could do it.

[00:18:35.76] I was delighted that people wanted to read my books, but it had never occurred to me that they would want to get to know me. I might be sitting under a hair dryer in a beauty shop and this perfect stranger came up to me, he switched off my dryer, lifted the lid and said, "Excuse me, I hope you don't mind, but there is someone here that would like to meet you." There were pin curls in my hair and a wet towel around my neck. And another time in a motel, this woman pushed passed my mother into our room and presented me, who was asleep in the bed, with books for autographing.

[00:19:15.13] "The Sea Around Us" changed my life completely, took away all sense of privacy.

[00:19:20.54] But it gave me financial independence, and I wanted to write full time. I wanted my own place at the edge of the sea.

[00:19:35.52] My nieces were grown, they were out on their own. It was just mother and I.

[00:19:39.95] I finally had the courage to resign from the Fish and Wildlife Service, I'd been there almost 16 years. And we bought this land, built the house and I set right to work on my third book, "The Edge Of The Sea."

[00:20:01.49] People always comment with surprise at them, that these books of science should have such a large popular appeal.

[00:20:07.72] But the notion that science is something that belongs in a separate compartment apart from everyday life is one I challenge.

[00:20:14.46] We live in a scientific age, and yet we assume that the knowledge of science is the perogative of only a small number of human beings, isolated and priest-like in laboratories.

[00:20:25.28] It isn't true. The aim of science is to discover and illuminate truth and that I take it is the aim of literature. My own purpose was always to portray the subject of this sea with fidelity and understanding.

[00:20:45.59] I never stopped to consider whether I was doing it scientifically or poetically. I wrote as the subject demanded. The winds, the sea, the moving tides, they are what they are. If there is wonder and beauty and majesty in them, science will discover these qualities.

[00:21:04.87] If they're not there, science can't create them.

[00:21:09.68] If there is poetry in my books about the sea, it's not because I deliberately put it there, but because no one can write truthfully about the sea and leave out the poetry.

[00:21:30.81] A writer must not impose himself upon a subject, he must come to know it intimately, understand its every aspect, let it fill his mind.

[00:21:40.64] Then at some turning point, the subject will take command and the true act of creation begins.

[00:21:50.82] In some mysterious way I believe that the subject chooses the writer, not the other way around. I'm not getting anywhere, I haven't even finished one room.

[00:22:13.61] For the last three years, I've battled with cancer successfully.

[00:22:21.48] But my doctors tell me now that every month is precious and that my body will begin to fail me.

[00:22:30.12] I don't look particularly ill, I'm still able to care for Roger.

[00:22:34.77] I do the cooking, the household chores, I keep up with my work.

[00:22:41.45] I believe in the old Churchillian determination. You fight each battle as it comes, and I believe the determination may well postpone the final battle.

[00:22:58.53] But for how long?

[00:22:59.07]

[00:23:04.49] That's why we're going back.

[00:23:05.48] Got to get things settled.

[00:23:17.35] I haven't started.

[00:23:24.15] I didn't know what to do with Roger.

[00:23:34.96] There's no one to raise him.

[00:23:36.98]

[00:23:44.94] I haven't even told him.

[00:23:52.70] I've lectures to give, I've articles I'm contracted to write.

[00:23:58.03] I have bags of mail, all requiring some kind of a response.

[00:24:08.56] There's so much to be done.

[00:24:09.64]

[00:24:14.14] And there's so much that could be accomplished right now. If only I'd reached this point in my career 10 years ago.

[00:24:22.70] Now, when there is an opportunity for me to do so much, my body falters.

[00:24:26.27]

[00:24:39.50] No, if the truth were known,

[00:24:43.20] I've spent these last weeks pacing this little room, wishing I had nothing to do, that I had no responsibilities to anyone.

[00:24:58.07] I'd like to stay here.

[00:24:59.93]

[00:25:11.52] President Lincoln said,

[00:25:18.19] "To sin by silence, when they should protest, makes cowards out of men." Pack up your house, Rachel.

[00:25:41.58] One more trip into the public arena, and a little boy who needs me. I'm going to go out and get him,

[00:25:50.92] or I'll never get this place finished.

[00:26:01.57] [gentle string music]

[00:26:03.97] [gentle string music]

[00:26:25.80] I'm trying to write a speech I'm giving next week, but I read an article this morning that so annoys me I'm having difficulty concentrating.

[00:26:35.66] It was an editorial written by a senior editor from Newsweek comparing me to Senator Joseph McCarthy and accusing me of stirring up the latent demons of paranoia. I've been called so many unpleasant things this past year you'd think I'd be used to it.

[00:26:53.29] I am, but there is often this initial irritation at the stupidity.

[00:27:02.65] Hopefully by tonight I'll find it amusing. add it to my list of other favorite quotations on Carson.

[00:27:11.90] Here's the chemical industry's chief spokesman.

[00:27:17.28] "Rachel Carson doesn't write as a scientist but as a fanatic defender of the cult of the balance of nature."

[00:27:26.05] "Her book is more poisonous than the pesticides she condemns."

[00:27:31.40] In Time magazine-- "Many scientists sympathize with Miss Carson's love of wildlife, even with her mystical attachment to this balance of nature. But they fear that her emotional and inaccurate outburst in Silent Spring may do harm by alarming the non-technical public." From CropLife, "the business paper

[00:28:00.81] for the farm chemical industry."

[00:28:04.07] "If man were to faithfully follow the teachings of Rachel Carson, we would return to the Dark Ages, and the insects and diseases and vermin would once again inherit the Earth."

[00:28:24.47] I'm feeling better already. You should have seen the reviews for Silent Spring. The book actually offended a relatively small segment of our society, but a very rich one.

[00:28:40.05] The chemical and other related industries such as food processing, and the federal government's immensely powerful Department of Agriculture-- to these formidable foes I'm a publicity problem to be dealt with by any means at hand.

[00:28:54.18] Lawsuit, slander, you name it.

[00:28:57.57] Of course the attacks are not pleasant, but they don't really get to me. The difficult part for me was writing the book, and that's done with.

[00:29:14.67] Do you remember my saying that the subject chooses the writer? Silent Spring's a perfect example.

[00:29:25.38] I didn't want to write it. I was planning a book on children and nature based on Roger, and out of the blue I received a letter from an old friend, Olga Hawkins, about an aerial spraying of DDT which had devastated her Massachusetts bird sanctuary. She wrote in detail about the death of the birds, how they had died horribly, each in the same way with their bills gaping opened, their splayed claws drawn up to their breasts in agony.

[00:29:56.19] The mosquitoes, the reason for the spray, remained, but the grasshoppers, visiting bees, other harmless insects were all gone.

[00:30:05.72] Olga hadn't wanted her property sprayed to begin with, and now the State was proposing to spray it again. She wanted help.

[00:30:13.13] Had she no rights under our laws to protect her own land and a sanctuary from poison? The letter obviously concerned me.

[00:30:29.59] And I set out looking for any information that might help.

[00:30:32.46] I found other similar cases-- livestock that had been poisoned, milk that'd been tainted, bee colonies destroyed, whole watersheds contaminated. There was a growing body of evidence showing that we were causing massive destruction to wildlife, to plant life, even endangering human life. In eastern Florida, they were trying to eliminate the sand fly.

[00:31:04.33] 2,000 acres were treated with dieldrin, one of the most violently poisonous hydrocarbons-- five times as toxic as DDT.

[00:31:14.90] After the spraying the State Board of Health surveyed the area and reported that the effects of the dieldrin on the life of the water had been catastrophic.

[00:31:25.55] Everywhere, dead fish littered the shores.

[00:31:29.86] No species were spared.

[00:31:31.70] The crustaceans were exterminated, the entire crab population destroyed. 1,175,000 fish were killed immediately.

[00:31:45.88] They weren't trying to eradicate the fish, only the sand fly.

[00:31:55.34] In Lansing, Michigan, there was a study linking the death of the robin population to the spraying of the elm trees.

[00:32:04.39] The elms, which were being treated for dutch elm disease, were sprayed in the spring and again in July with two to five pounds of DDT per tree.

[00:32:16.07] The poison killed the insects, good and bad, and formed a film over the the leaves and the bark that could not be washed away by rain.

[00:32:30.16] In the autumn the leaves fell, and as they decomposed the earthworms fed on them, accumulating and concentrating the DDT in their bodies. Some of the earthworms died, but those that survived became biological magnifiers of the poison.

[00:32:51.70] In the spring the robins returned and they ate the worms. 11 large earthworms can transfer a lethal dose of DDT to a robin.

[00:33:04.27] A robin can eat 11 worms in as many minutes. Not all the robins ate the lethal dose, but the few that survived were unable to produce a single living offspring.

[00:33:37.51] How did it get to this?

[00:33:47.48] I think until very recently the average citizen assumed that someone was looking after these matters, that some little understood but carefully relied-upon safeguards stood like shields between each person and harm.

[00:34:06.21] We're experiencing a rather rude shattering of those beliefs. The more I read, the more alarmed I became.

[00:34:15.83] I decided I would write an article. I couldn't find a magazine that would publish it. They were afraid of losing their advertisers. Many of them were connected to the oil companies or their satellites, the petrochemical companies.

[00:34:30.49] Well, if a magazine article couldn't be published due to advertising restraints, then a book would be written. It was really quite simple.

[00:34:40.46] Except I wasn't going to write it.

[00:34:46.18] My mother was ill. She was dying.

[00:34:51.06] Roger had been with me less than a year. He needed all of my attention.

[00:34:58.01] I didn't have the time to commit to anything more than an article, and I didnt want to. A book about pesticides would be a book about poison and death. I want to write about life.

[00:35:12.95] So I contacted other writers, each well qualified for the task.

[00:35:19.07] They didn't want to write it any more than I did. E. B. White's refusal was the hardest. I was certain he would be the one.

[00:35:25.64] He could've found a style that would have reached everyone.

[00:35:35.14] I didn't know what to do.

[00:35:38.50] All that was clear to me was that the information had to get out. People had no understanding of the risks they were being asked to take.

[00:35:46.43] It was only my years as a government biologist that had taught me about these chemicals.

[00:35:55.78] They are nonselective poisons.

[00:35:58.68] They had only been used during wartime and for the emergency control of insects.

[00:36:04.86] They had never been tested for large-scale agricultural use.

[00:36:10.36] And yet within 12 years, since World War II, their use has become commonplace. They've made our farming efficient, profitable. They clear our yards, our forests, our homes of unwanted pests. We use them in our kitchens, we rub them on our skin.

[00:36:37.68] They coat our shelf paper.

[00:36:39.44] We sleep under moth-proof blankets impregnated with deodorant, hang strips saturated with lindane in our closets. We coat our lawns, our gardens with lethal sprays and dusts, and every meal we eat carries its load of chlorinated hydrocarbons, DDT, other related chemicals. We'd all been made so well aware of the benefits of these pest controls.

[00:37:06.91] But why had no one alerted us to their potential dangers? The question I ask is so simple. Is it possible to lay down this barrage of poison on the surface of the earth without making the earth unfit for all life?

[00:37:33.54] I decided to write the book. It was May of 1958, I signed a contract with Houghton Mifflin.

[00:37:43.46] It would be a short book.

[00:37:45.17] It would be written, and edited, published by the end of that year.

[00:37:49.43] Seven months is all I would give it.

[00:37:56.41] Wishful thinking. Two and a half years later I was still researching. I hadn't even started to write.

[00:38:05.51] The book just kept growing.

[00:38:07.10] There were mountains of material,

[00:38:09.88] and new data almost appeared daily.

[00:38:12.23] The facts all had to be checked and rechecked, and the clues had to be tracked down.

[00:38:19.87] The job was far larger than anything I'd imagined, and far more complex. I was dealing with the most recent research in both biology and chemistry.

[00:38:34.87] Without enormous help from scientists, physicians, field experts from all across the world, it would've been impossible.

[00:38:46.20] I was pulling together all of these widely scattered facts that had... It's important.

[00:38:55.54] I was pulling together all of these widely scattered facts that had never previously been considered in relationship to one another.

[00:39:06.14] The ramifications were enormous.

[00:39:10.16] The evidence against the use of the chemicals was damning.

[00:39:23.86] Meanwhile, my personal life was in havoc. My mother died the first year.

[00:39:32.37] That shook me to my core.

[00:39:34.61] Roger was a very lonely little boy, my focus was on the book.

[00:39:40.31] I developed an ulcer, started having heart problems, got arthritis in my hand so badly I couldn't write.

[00:39:46.31] A whole catalog of illnesses. But I was able to keep working because the material was fascinating. It was as if I were putting together the pieces of an enormous jigsaw puzzle. Then in 1961 I found out about the cancer, and I had to begin treatments at once. The radiation exhausted me, and I couldn't keep up with the work.

[00:40:17.92] I was horribly discouraged, I wanted to give it all up.

[00:40:21.16] I'd no idea where the end lie. But the treatments ended, my energy returned,

[00:40:27.43] I found my way back.

[00:40:30.70] It was like one of those bad dreams

[00:40:32.64] where one tries to run, can't.

[00:40:35.90] Drive a car, it won't go.

[00:40:37.50] I was unable to write a few hours a day, and I was baffled by the mounting obstacles to what I was so determined to accomplish.

[00:40:50.52] Finally when the end came into sight, I was exhilarated. It was as if I were riding the crest of a wave of enthusiasm and creativity.

[00:41:00.95] Once again I could write late into the night, start up again at dawn, and nothing was going to stop me.

[00:41:10.74] Nothing did.

[00:41:14.88] Last year, after four and a half years, I finished.

[00:41:25.90] Joseph McCarthy.

[00:41:29.77] I'll never forget the night Mr. Shawn telephoned me.

[00:41:35.03] William Shawn is the editor of The New Yorker magazine.

[00:41:41.07] He had decided that he wanted to publish large sections of the book in serial form. He had just read my manuscript, and he telephoned me saying everything I could have asked or hoped for.

[00:41:54.92] That night after Roger was asleep, I came back in here, I put on the Beethoven violin concerto, it's one of my favorites.

[00:42:14.27] And suddenly the tension of the four years was broken, and I let the tears come.

[00:42:26.93] That night the thoughts of all the birds and other creatures, all the loveliness that is in nature came to me with such a surge of deep happiness.

[00:42:46.67] I had done what I could.

[00:42:50.01] I'd been able to complete it, and now it had its own life.

[00:43:02.42] I have to write... I have to write this speech.

[00:43:05.02] I want it done before Roger gets home. The rest of my week is so busy.

[00:43:13.20] I'm going all the way to California to deliver it, if I ever get it written.

[00:43:21.77] They've promised me a trip to the redwoods.

[00:43:24.24] I've never seen them. In a wheelchair, my doctor tells me, eternal optimist that he is. It's so ironic--

[00:43:36.23] I'm getting all of these invitations to travel now to foreign lands, all expenses paid, and I have to pass them up. Even my awards have to be accepted by someone else. Hardly seems fair.

[00:44:04.20] I forgot my tea.

[00:44:11.34] I just don't have energy anymore. I'm back on the radiation. After a few hours I'm no good to anyone.

[00:44:25.34] I still haven't told people about the cancer. I've been afraid that they would concentrate on the illness instead of what it is I'm saying.

[00:44:39.33] Last week I missed an air pollution conference. The Morning Paper carried a a fairly conspicuous article under the heading,

[00:44:49.63] "Author of Silent Spring Silenced by Cold."

[00:44:56.50] It was good news in the chemical circles.

[00:45:03.04] I'm reaching that state of eminence where my sniffles, like the President's, amuse. Speaking of our President, last winter, when Silent Spring was at the height of controversy, President Kennedy and his scientific advisory committee set up a special panel to study pesticides.

[00:45:28.79] And their report, which was issued this last spring, criticized both the industry and the agencies of the federal government and vindicated Silent Spring's thesis completely.

[00:45:44.78] That was the turning point.

[00:45:48.79] And it was immediately followed by congressional hearings, which are underway today, examining what legislative action is required to deal with this pesticide problem.

[00:46:02.59] We're witnessing

[00:46:09.14] the creation of federal policy to safeguard the environment.

[00:46:15.44] It thrills me.

[00:46:20.77] The book made a difference and I am enjoying every bit of its success.

[00:46:27.25] Now I have to write my speech.

[00:47:10.66] I don't know why I'm making it so difficult. One of the few advantages of growing older is that one has the opportunity of achieving a philosophy. Just simply state it as your speech.

[00:47:37.41] I believe that natural beauty has a necessary place in the development of any individual or any society. I believe that whenever we destroy beauty, whenever we substitute something manmade and artificial for a natural feature of this Earth, we've retarded some part of man's spiritual growth.

[00:48:06.41] In contemplating the exceeding beauty of this earth, I have found calmness and courage. For there is symbolic as well as actual beauty in the migration of the birds, in the ebb and flow of tides, in the folded bud ready for the spring. There is something infinitely healing in the repeated refrains of nature.

[00:48:36.89] The assurance that dawn comes after night, and spring after winter.

[00:48:45.74] Mankind has gone very far into an artificial world of his own creation. He has sought to insulate himself in his cities of steel and concrete away from the realities of earth, water, the growing seed.

[00:49:05.51] And intoxicated with a sense of his own power,

[00:49:10.26] he seems to be going farther and farther into experiments toward the destruction of himself and his world.

[00:49:20.97] There is certainly no single remedy for this condition,

[00:49:24.14] and I can offer no panacea.

[00:49:29.16] But it seems reasonable to believe--

[00:49:32.21] and I do believe--

[00:49:34.35] that the more clearly we can focus our attention on the wonders and the realities of this universe about us,

[00:49:48.87] the less taste we shall have for its destruction.

[00:49:59.26] That's what I want to say. That's it. That's all I want to say. [gentle string music]

[00:51:00.16] [gentle string music]

[00:51:59.23] [gentle string music]

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[00:53:54.04] [gentle string music]