This Book Helped Save the Planet—but Created a Very Harmful Myth
Reading Time: 7 minutesIt radically shifted the way the world looked at the environment, but created a wave of misinformation we’re still dealing with today., How Silent Spring by Rachel Carson created the environmental movement—and a worldwide fear of chemicals.
In one of my all-time favorite Parks and Recreation episodes, Leslie Knope excitedly tells the camera that the city of Pawnee will finally get fluoride in their water thanks to a merger with neighboring Eagleton. Unsurprisingly—if you know anything about the people of Pawnee or Knope’s nemesis, dentist Jeremy Jamm—this doesn’t go over well. Jamm makes a living on the high-cavity citizens of the town, so he goes on a local TV show to rail against the effort. ‘Councilwoman Leslie Knope wants to put fluoride—which is a chemical—in your water. You know what else is a chemical? Strychnine. And Cyanide.’
What Jamm is capitalizing on—albeit absurdly—is something many of us have fallen prey to at some point: chemophobia. As the name suggests, chemophobia is ‘an irrational fear of chemicals,’ and it’s exploited in countless ways. If you believe that organic pesticides are inherently safer than nonorganic pesticides, that sodium chloride is different from table salt, or that ‘plant-based’ necessarily means ‘nontoxic,’ you have been duped by chemophobia. I’m not judging—I went through an ill-fated ‘natural’ deodorant phase myself.
The irony of all this is that chemophobia has roots in the heart of the modern environmental movement. On Sept. 27, 1962, biologist Rachel Carson published Silent Spring, a book that would radically shift how the nation thought about the effect of pesticides on human health and the environment. The book led to sweeping, critical environmental reforms and awareness. It also, however, planted its own destructive seed: the notion that synthetic chemicals are inherently something to fear. Over the decades, that seed has grown into a wild and unruly tangle of misinformation and hysteria, amply pollinated by social media, wellness influencers, and a lack of science literacy.
Carson focused much of the book on DDT, the first modern synthetic insecticide. DDT was commonly used for insect control in agriculture, gardens, and homes. In countries plagued by insect-borne diseases, it was remarkably effective at reducing rates of diseases like malaria. Carson was the first to note the harmful effects of DDT on the environment and, she believed, humans.
She wrote about these harms in a vivid and terrifying illustration using another global fear at the time: nuclear radiation. ‘Chemicals are the sinister and little-recognized partners of radiation in changing the very nature of the world … [they] lie long in soil, entering into living organisms, passing from one to another in a chain of poisoning and death,’ she wrote.
Silent Spring was a massive success. President Kennedy asked the Life Sciences Panel of the President’s Science Advisory Committee to investigate her claims. The book helped inspire the creation of the Environmental Protection Agency, the Clean Air Act, and the National Toxicology Program, among other advances. Carson’s message resonated beyond the political realm; it bled into pop culture, energizing celebrities and the general public. In 1970, Joni Mitchell released her hit song ‘Big Yellow Taxi,’ with the lyric, ‘Hey, hey, farmer, put away that DDT/ I don’t care about spots on my apples, leave me the birds and the bees, please.’ Two years later, the United States banned the pesticide; throughout the ’70s, other countries did the same.
Not all of the fear generated from Silent Spring was warranted. Andrea Love, a microbiologist and immunologist who debunks pseudoscience and misinformation in her newsletter Immunologic, told me, ‘People started thinking, ‘If DDT is bad, then we should be scared of all of these other chemicals that have a similar mechanism of action,’ even though they’re completely different substances.’ (Not all of the claims Carson made about DDT have been proven, especially regarding human health, but it undoubtedly had downstream environmental effects.)
It didn’t help the country’s burgeoning chemophobia that in the late 1970s and throughout the 1980s, a series of high-profile chemical spills and environmental disasters caused significant harm to both wildlife and people. For example, in 1977, residents of the Love Canal suburb in Niagara Falls learned that they were living on and around 22,000 tons of toxic waste dumped in the unfinished canal decades earlier by Hooker Electrochemical Company.
Among the 80 chemicals detected in the Love Canal dumpsite was benzene—a well-established human carcinogen. According to a report on the New York Department of Health’s website, benzene and other substances were leaching into the water, soil, and air. Babies were especially vulnerable to these toxicities, resulting in high rates of infants with birth defects and illnesses. Women in the area were one and a half times more likely to experience a miscarriage than the general population.
Understandably, incidents like Love Canal and the publicity they generated underscored and amplified the public’s fear of synthetic chemicals as potentially, and perhaps even inherently, harmful to human health. But that assessment ignores one of the core principles of toxicology: The dose makes the poison.
Residents of the Love Canal weren’t just exposed to hazardous chemicals—for years, they were exposed to chemicals at levels as much as 5,000 times what’s considered safe.
But people don’t always think of these incidents as the outliers they are. ‘They don’t tend to think, ‘This chemical is harmful at a high dose,’ ‘ Love said. Instead, they think, ‘If something bad happened with this chemical, I better not use it at all.’
Part of the problem is our associations with the word ‘chemical.’
The word ‘has a negative connotation in our popular lexicon; ‘natural’ has a positive connotation, when those words are not inherently negative or positive,’ Ryan Marino, a medical toxicologist and physician, told me. ‘Similarly, many believe synthetic or manufactured chemicals are inherently harmful. When in reality, nature is trying to kill us all the time. Uranium is natural. Ricin is natural.’
This is a form of cognitive bias called the ‘appeal to nature fallacy,’ which is the false assumption that ‘natural’ chemicals or products are inherently less toxic or dangerous than their man-made counterparts. However, it’s ‘easily disprovable with any one of a zillion examples,’ George Zaidan, a chemist and author of Ingredients: The Strange Chemistry of What We Put in Us and on Us, told me in an email. ‘Salmonella is natural. Soap is human-made. Should we stop washing our hands with soap, because we expose ourselves to ‘unnatural’ chemicals made by combining fats with sodium hydroxide?’
Yet, in Silent Spring, Carson laments, ‘The chemicals to which life is asked to make its adjustment are no longer merely the calcium and silica and copper … they are the synthetic creations of man’s inventive mind, brewed in his laboratories and having no counterparts in nature. … Such ingenious manipulations have produced a battery of poisons of truly extraordinary power.’
Carson’s implication that tinkering with ‘natural’ chemicals results in ‘poisons of truly extraordinary power’ has been—and continues to be—capitalized on by advertisers, wellness influencers, and a plethora of industry lobbyists.
For example, many Americans associate the word ‘organic’ with safer and healthier products; a survey published by the International Food Information Council found that nearly half of Americans mistakenly believe organic food is produced without pesticides. But organic food can be produced with organic pesticides, which Love says are sometimes more toxic and less effective than synthetic ones.
‘Organic pesticides are merely pesticides that cannot be chemically altered. You can’t tweak the chemical structure to improve specificity, allow them to be more stable, or increase how quickly they biodegrade,’ she explained. She points out that copper sulfate, a common organic pesticide, can be ‘at least 15 times more toxic’ than some synthetic alternatives and remains in the ‘soil and groundwater longer, too.’
She adds that, societally, a preference for ‘natural’ or ‘organic’ products without understanding the chemistry behind the ingredients and whether or not they’re truly safer creates ‘resistance to implementing technologies and science to improve our lives; it has tangible impacts in terms of hindering the development of science, technology, and medicine.’
The anti-vaccination movement is a prime example of the kind of harm that can arise from chemophobia. In 2019, researchers at McMaster University found that anti-vaccine content on YouTube was significantly more likely to include the words ‘chemical’ and ‘toxic.’ That anti-vaccination content is favored over pro-vaccination content. It’s well established that social media algorithms amplify content that sustains engagement on the platform. Often, this results in highlighting content that engages the user emotionally by fostering outrage. And what’s more likely to prompt outrage: a nuanced discussion of the relationship between dose and toxicity or a post that screams that we’re being poisoned by fluoride in tap water?
‘Like with the anti-vaccination movement, people think that a disease is better for you than a killed disease, which is just purely illogical,’ Marino said.
It may be illogical, but it’s certainly profitable. Mistrustful of the pharmaceutical industry and convinced of the superiority of ‘natural’ treatments, consumers spend billions a year on ‘herbal’ and dietary supplements they perceive to be safer and more effective than other treatments. Herbal and dietary supplements, however, aren’t regulated for safety, efficacy, or quality. Profits in the supplement industry continue to rise: In 2023, consumers in the United States spent more than $15 billion on herbal and dietary supplements—an increase of $533 million from 2022. This is despite the fact that unregulated supplements can often be harmful. Research suggests that herbal and dietary supplements are the cause of as much as 20 percent of hepatotoxicity (chemical-driven liver damage) in the United States.
It’s no surprise, then, that wellness influencers like Gwyneth Paltrow and Andrew Huberman capitalize on chemophobia-based mistrust of conventional science by selling ‘natural’ supplements. For $60, you can get a bottle of Goop’s ‘DTF’ supplement, which purportedly ‘supports healthy sexual arousal in women,’ and consists of three plant-based extracts. Huberman’s podcast has long been sponsored by Athletic Greens, which makes AG1, a supplement powder with 75 ingredients advertised as ‘carefully curated to nourish all of the body’s systems holistically,’ though many of its claims are unproven.
When Carson published Silent Spring, the chemophobia that arose was largely a product of a lack of science literacy. This phenomenon exists today, but the external forces perpetuating chemophobia have diversified.
‘I think it’s a ‘mistrust of institutions’ problem,’ Zaidan said in an email. ‘Science used to be broadly trusted. But today, that trust has significantly eroded.’
Compounding the problem is that sensationalism is more likely to get clicks than nuanced stories. But, Zaidan adds, ‘the problem isn’t just journalism. Scientists are probably more likely to do an experiment that leads to a clickable result, and journals are probably more likely to publish sensational results.’
And as humans, we respond more to certainty than uncertainty, which is bad for responsible science.
‘People want us to say ‘This causes cancer. This doesn’t cause cancer. This is toxic. This isn’t toxic.’ But in reality, everything is and isn’t,’ Love said. ‘Responsible scientists are cautious in how we communicate because we’re learning new things every day and never want to eliminate even a rare possibility. … When you have wellness influencers, they’re going to make very definitive statements, and those are going to be more attention-grabbing than nuanced reality.’
Or, in the words of Jeremy Jamm, ‘In conclusion: fluoride, chemical, tiny genitals, misinformation, panic, death, Jenny McCarthy.’
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