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.
“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.”
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…
Read More: How Silver Spring by Rachel Carson created the environmental movement—and a