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| Activist and author Rachel Carson, whose book "Silent Spring" led to a study of pesticides, testifies before a Senate Government Operations Subcommittee in Washington, D.C. on June 4, 1963. Carson urged Congress to curb the sale of chemical pesticides and aerial spraying. (AP Photo) |
Published on Sept. 27, 1962, Rachel
Carson’s ground-breaking book, “Silent Spring,” ignited modern U.S.
environmentalism and resulted in new laws for environmental and public
health protection in the United States. Two days earlier, President John
F. Kennedy signed his approval for the so-called “rainbow herbicides”
(Agents Orange, White, Purple, Green, Pink and Blue, named for the
colored bands on the herbicide barrels ) to be sprayed on Vietnamese
food crops.
President Kennedy read “Silent Spring” in a
serialized version for The New Yorker in the summer of 1962; and, like
millions of others, he was compelled by her message and had Carson
invited to the White House. And, yet, what Carson exposed and condemned
in our environment — the indiscriminate chemical war on nature with
insecticides and herbicides as weapons — did not apply to Vietnam. The
preoccupation of his administration was “image” — lest the United States
be seen by the world as conducting chemical warfare in Southeast Asia.
As the war widened in 1965 under President Lyndon B. Johnson, spraying
increased exponentially, creating intensive and widespread environmental
abuse that gave rise to the term “ecocide.” Search-and-destroy tactics
in rural hamlets during Johnson’s ground war years resulted in millions
of refugees flooding Saigon, relegated to slums and extreme poverty —
precisely the conditions in U.S. cities that he hoped to overcome with
his vaunted Great Society and War on Poverty programs.
By 1966, more than 5,000 American scientists,
among them Nobel prize winners, condemned the use of chemical warfare
agents in Vietnam. The U.S. herbicide program ended in 1971 when Nixon’s
administration was forced to disclose covered-up research data,
revealing that one of the herbicides in Agent Orange caused birth
deformities in lab animals.
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