麻豆传媒

TWO years after my father died, I came home for the wedding of a childhood friend. Mom gave me the north-facing room, my old bedroom. While hanging my bridesmaid dress in the closet I pushed a box of books out of the way and accidentally tipped it over. And there it was. Pale-green cover with a black line drawing. Silent Spring, just as I had remembered. It was the book that had united my life with my father鈥檚, the text that changed both of our lives.

For my father, Silent Spring had been an antidote to wartime thinking. Dad served as a teenage soldier in Italy, near Naples, where the pesticide DDT was first deployed to halt a typhus epidemic. The motto of his anti-tank unit 鈥� seek, strike and destroy 鈥� might as well have been the advertising slogan for DDT and other pesticides that had been developed for use in warfare and were aggressively marketed to farmers, housewives and suburban homeowners after the war ended. Returning GIs were urged to grab a bottle of poison and go after dandelions, mosquitoes and grubs.

My father had no stomach for waging war in his backyard. The garden was a respite from command and control. It was a place for puttering, experimenting and nurturing. He enjoyed learning about non-chemical techniques of pest control and trying new tricks he鈥檇 read about in gardening magazines. He revered praying mantises and ladybugs. To him, organic gardening was enlightened, scientific and sensible. So when Rachel Carson wrote, 鈥淭he 鈥榗ontrol of nature鈥� is a phrase conceived in arrogance, born of the Neanderthal age of biology and the convenience of man鈥�, her message resonated with my father. Silent Spring was his armistice.

I did not actually read the book until I was a college professor, but for me Silent Spring was the reason I left the laboratory and became a science writer. By the late 1980s, Carson had been resurrected as the patron saint of a newly radicalising breast cancer movement. Taking a lesson from the AIDS activists of the mid-1980s, breast cancer activists began demanding more research into cancer prevention and towards explaining the environmental links to the disease.

Carson鈥檚 own hidden life as a breast cancer patient was part of her allure for breast cancer activists. Here was a scientist who had not only assembled formidable evidence for the harm of pesticides but who had done so while undergoing chemotherapy herself. Here was a scientist who, without even the assistance of a cancer registry or a toxics-release inventory, had correctly documented an increase in the prevalence of human cancers that corresponded with the rapid chemicalisation of our economy after the second world war.

In 1993 I left my job in Chicago and moved to Boston, where, with the help of a postdoctoral fellowship at Harvard, I hoped to begin writing a book examining environmental links to human cancers. The day after my arrival, I attended a political rally organised by breast cancer activists. Someone handed me a sign to carry. At that very moment, a photographer from the Boston Herald snapped my picture. The next day, the newspaper ran a quarter-page photo of me squinting resolutely into the sun and holding a placard that read, 鈥淩ACHEL CARSON WAS RIGHT!鈥�

I thought of sending the clip to my father, but by then he was suffering severe dementia and I told myself he wouldn鈥檛 understand. In truth, I was fearful of his disapproval. For my father, Rachel Carson was less Che Guevara and more Charles Darwin, quietly and objectively amassing evidence and presenting it before a curious public. A lifelong Republican, he did not associate the demure and dignified Carson with protest marches, for which he had little patience. My father鈥檚 armistice was my call to arms.