On the Ground: The Vet and 100 mysterious deaths

It's 1963 in the village of Smarden and all around the vet, Douglas Good, the animals have started to behave erratically. They pace the ground, run away, or become overly thirsty. Then, they fall down dead. 

What he does next will make this story one of the strangest of the chemical age. 

Read the research:  Pesticides, pollution and the UK's silent spring, 1963–1964: Poison in the Garden of England by John Clark

The Chemical Empire by Sabine Clarke, the University of York

Follow host Laura Cole on LinkedIn.

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Transcript

SPEAKER_01 0:00

This episode contains descriptions of chemical weapons and death. Discretion is advised.

SPEAKER_02 0:06

This perhaps started in January of 1963, when an employee of a factory in Smarten called in the local veterinary surgeon Douglas Good, and he asked Good to look at two of his dogs who had died.

SPEAKER_01 0:25

Douglas Good lived in the rural village of Smarden, Kent. All around him, the animals started to behave erratically. They might pace the ground, run away, or become overly thirsty, and then they'd die.

SPEAKER_02 0:37

Several months later in May, he's called to several farms. Animals have died. Goats have died, sheep have died, some of them are in the throes of death when he comes. And he discovers from another local vet, Jones, who has visited a farm again, this time a farm with cows, Frisians. The cows again are displaying similar symptoms, are in the throes of death, and some of them die shortly thereafter.

SPEAKER_01 1:08

Whatever was killing them left no trace, and it terrified the people in the village of Smarden. One housekeeper described what happened to her dog. At 1 a.m. he jumped onto my bed, a thing he never does, his eyes staring and big, trembling a little and teeth bare as he panted and seemed mad. I was frightened. I let him out of the bedroom, and he fell downstairs, stumbles out of the doors, and went on to the green. There he fell over, head bent backwards, and his legs kicking as he gasped for air. A horrible noise came from his throat, and his eyes were very big. Then he got up, looking wildly around, and shot away. And we did not see him alive again. Douglas Good added to the report, the foxhound's actions were suggestive of fearful hallucinations. The following morning he was found drowned in a pond. The postmortem revealed nothing unusual. The farmer even rejected Douglas Good's official postmortem certificate, death by drowning. Historian and author John Clark.

SPEAKER_02 2:04

And the vets decide that this is too much of a coincidence. And he has his suspicions as to what is causing this.

SPEAKER_01 2:12

Douglas Good would eventually take to the papers to describe what he called the perfect poison. He writes, Criminologists are continually on the alert for new types of poisons which might be used in irresponsible hands for committing the perfect murder. Some of the requirements for such a poison include the following. First, it should be inconspicuous, particularly in regard to odor and taste. Second, it should be sufficiently stable to withstand rather drastic conditions, such as suspension in hot tea or boiling coffee. Third, it should operate with a delayed action in order that the murderer cover his tracks before death occurs. Fourth, the poison should induce no obvious pathological changes, which could be spotted at post-mortem examination. And lastly, fifth, there should be no reliable means of analysing for residual traces of that poison in the body of the victim.

SPEAKER_02 3:03

The other thing that's very important to mention is between January when Good first looks at these dogs, and then May when he sees other farm animals, he most likely reads Rachel Carson's Silent Spread. It's published in the UK in February 1963.

SPEAKER_01 3:26

A vet, a book, and more than 100 mysterious animal deaths combine to form a sensational and national story. When it reaches its peak, ten government institutions have to get involved. My name's Laura Cole, and this is On the Ground by Geographical Magazine. Strangely, Douglas Good had actually seen these kinds of effects on animals before.

SPEAKER_02 3:52

I was astonished by the coincidences that started to come to the fore.

SPEAKER_01 3:59

Before he lived in Kent, he'd actually worked in South Africa with a scientist named D.G. Stein. Stein was a pioneer researcher on plant poisonings in South Africa. His work resulted in the recognition and then the avoidance of many South African plants, which can cause similar behaviors in animals before they die. A plant they probably looked at, Giftblah, is Afrikaans for poison. Today it still causes an outsized number of cattle deaths. Stein, his former colleague, was an expert on the active chemical component of these plants, a fluorine compound, which would shut down the vital organs of animals.

SPEAKER_02 4:34

So he's had this exposure, if you like, to fluorine compounds and the effects they've had on domesticated animals prior to what happens in Smart.

SPEAKER_01 4:46

So when he's visiting these farms, he's looking for plants that all the fields might have in common. He notices that the grasses are blackened, but he notices the fields have something else in common a series of drainage ditches that ultimately connect to an unassuming-looking building, a factory.

SPEAKER_02 5:02

So they start to suspect it's something at the factory that's poisoning these animals. And they contact their regional veterinary officer, who in turn then calls in the Ministry of Agriculture.

SPEAKER_01 5:16

The small factory had been run by a company called Rentikill for three years, who were using it for the light manufacture of pesticides and rodentials. He immediately calls the Kent River Board, who have a duty to prevent the pollution of streams. Good then goes directly to Rentikill about the deaths. The manager tells him, We're not discharging any chemical effluent to ditches on our property, but are casting all effluents away or evaporating them to dryness. I consider it impossible that even in cases of gross negligence or carelessness, any chemical effluent could be discharged from here. In other words, it's not us. So this is starting to happen in the 1960s, and at that time, British farming is going through a pretty intense transformation. And chemicals were a big part of it.

SPEAKER_02 6:04

The UK is leading in Western Europe in terms of its embrace of intensive farming. And by intensive farming I mean the application of machinery. And really, if you think about it, think about agribusiness in a sense. We talk about farms disappearing and certainly small farms start to disappear, but large farms start to proliferate. And if you want to manage those large farms and monocultures, machinery and chemicals seem perfect because you can also have a reduction of labor. You don't need as many hands to work the farm. If you have these chemical fertilizers, if you have machinery, and then subsequently, chemical fertilizers seem to work pretty well, you have these chemicals in terms of pesticides. And I think it's important to think about that context too. This is part of a business. This is agribusiness.

SPEAKER_01 7:01

This embrace of tech and chemicals means the UK is in the lead per capita in terms of production, second only to the Netherlands. Between 1930 and 1970, cereal production increases threefold. It's in this scene that pesticides are really becoming mainstream. Numbers vary depending on crops, but according to John, in general about 90% of cereals, vegetables, fruit trees, and bushes were being treated with them.

SPEAKER_00 7:24

I think one thing we can read from it is just how many different chemicals are in use by the time it gets to the early 1960s. Sabine Clark, pesticides historian at the University of York. So we've gone from DDT in 1945, and um ICI had a product called BHC, which is very similar to DDT. So there are two of these brand new synthetic chemicals on the market. And then by the time we get to about 1960, there's about 500. So there's been this massive explosion in the number of chemicals that chemical companies are now marketing to farmers and to householders and gardeners and all sorts of people.

SPEAKER_01 8:26

This was the market that Rentakill was in. There's kind of a crazy story within a story here.

SPEAKER_02 8:31

If I give you an anecdote I shouldn't give, the one of the guys who was initially just in the process of setting up Lentokill in 1920, early 1920s, uh Harold Maxwell Lafroy, he was an entomologist who worked at Imperial College.

SPEAKER_01 8:45

He was working on an insecticide for houseflies, but he hadn't ventilated the lab. So he ended up poisoning himself. And then he rallied a little bit between the poisoning and dying.

SPEAKER_02 8:55

And at the inquest, the person who had found him was giving evidence, and they said, Did he have any last words? He said, Yes, he did. He said, The little beggars got me this time.

SPEAKER_01 9:05

Wow.

SPEAKER_02 9:06

Yep.

SPEAKER_01 9:07

I've never heard that story before. There was an industry in Britain for chemicals called fluoracetates.

SPEAKER_02 9:14

It is it is a toxin. Part of the legacy of a lot of these pesticides goes back to uh chemical warfare, and that's where this chemical was largely developed.

SPEAKER_01 9:24

During the late 1930s, a group of Polish scientists were looking at tear gases made with iodine, except it kept resulting in giveaway purple clouds, which could have worn troops in a battlefield scenario. They swapped it out for fluorine and tested its tear gas capabilities on the eye of a rabbit. There was no tearing, but the rabbit died, so attentions turned to fluorine compounds. The workers tested it on a range of animals and found it was highly toxic. After a small wait of 30 minutes to an hour, it would result in heart failure, convulsions, and breathing problems, then death during the war. The Polish scientists fled to Britain and shared their work with the secret unit at Cambridge University. Once the war was over, the group would discover what was so toxic about fluoracetates. Fluoracetate is not toxic as it is. It's a Trojan horse substance. The time lag for symptoms to set in is down to the fact it changes in the body to fluorocitrate, and it gets everywhere, and in doing so blocks a vital cycle for cells. Cells are constantly cycling through energy in this engine room called the citric acid cycle, which you can imagine as a ferris wheel of chemical reactions. Fluorocitrate mimics natural citrate and takes its place. The natural citrate has nowhere to go, so it builds up in the body. The buildup is deadly. The citrate can affect or stop the heart beating. Meanwhile, cells are starved of the energy they need to survive. It leads to organ failure. It wasn't used in a war scenario, but reading some of their papers, what keeps being repeated is that it's hard to detect, pervasive in the environment, and there's no antidote. In Smarden, they still didn't know what was entering the water. Do you know if they said at any point any of the government ministries said to the farmers in Smarden that they shouldn't be continuing to produce milk or consuming of the livestock would be unsafe?

SPEAKER_02 11:18

No, it's it's a really good question. And it is interesting this story because the government seems to be almost contradictory. They want to be done with it quickly, but at the same time, they don't want to make too many public declarations for fear of litigation from the pesticide firm. They also, you think of all the ministries that are involved, once you start reading the papers that exist, you realize they're trying to keep the Ministry of Health from the limelight.

SPEAKER_01 11:53

Here's where it gets a bit interesting. Douglas Good starts to do his own investigation. He enlists the help of a lab who arrive on the scene with a black box and apparently declare within minutes that it's fluoresetamide in the water. It's kind of an unusual thing to do. This lab uses something called radionics. It wasn't respected at the time, and it's since been seen as a kind of quack endeavour. At the same time, he's still talking about it to the British Veterinary Association and the local press, but on the ground, it doesn't seem like there's much movement. No one seems to have any answers. It's probably worth at this point talking about the legal context. How would the government tackle a mysterious poisoning like this? The context is actually nuisance, which sounds like a silly word, but it carried a lot of weight in the 19th century around smoke pollution, and it continued being the defining environmental legislation even by the 1960s.

SPEAKER_02 12:51

Nuisance has a legal meaning, but we can just reduce it to it doesn't smell or it doesn't make noise. And because this chemical doesn't smell and it doesn't make a noise in terms of its production, it's probably okay. Which again tells you something about grappling with toxins in the environment, poisons in the environment. People are used to thinking about what they can see, what they can feel, what they can smell. Um it's these hidden dangers that they're grappling with now. There's always a biding clause in much of this legislation that says, you know, they can act against them if they haven't taken the best practicable means to mitigate the pollution. Well, that that's pretty hard to pin down. So even in 1962, 63, 64, when they go in and look at the factory, when they inspect, the factory isn't even fully functioning. So it's not up and running when they inspect. But they look at all the machinery and they say all the machinery constitutes best practicable means to mitigate pollution. So they're okay.

SPEAKER_01 14:06

There's also a chemical notification scheme, which was introduced in around 1955.

SPEAKER_00 14:11

It's relatively new. But I think what's key about the British approach, which does make Britain different to a lot of other countries, is this is all entirely voluntary. So it relies upon an informal agreement between British manufacturers and government.

SPEAKER_01 14:28

What was that relationship like?

SPEAKER_00 14:29

Almost a cliche here, but there was this incredibly cosy relationship between government officials and you know, the sort of um people who work for companies such as ICI. So we're talking until the 60s, we're talking about a chemical manufacturing sector in Britain, which is largely British-based firms. So there's almost like a national chemical industry, if you like. And so the people who work in those companies are really good friends with people who work in Whitehall. And so you see, you see records in the archives of people having dinners together or going to their club and having drinks. And I think while it's it sort of looks really problematic, I think there was a belief at the time that this incredibly close and very friendly relationship was a positive. That it was it was much better to work with the manufacturers in this positive and non-combative and non-adversarial way. And and government was much more likely to use gentle persuasion to get them to do the right thing than, if you like, the threat of legal action and so forth. And also, I think, you know, it had the advantage of keeping a lot of controversy out of the public gaze, right? And so with fluorocetamine, there's every likelihood they had a conversation that said this project could be dangerous. However, you know, if you use it like this, it will be fine. So it's quite laissez faire, essentially. Maybe we could say they were shockingly happy to wait for something terrible to happen before they resorted to more substantial forms of intervention.

SPEAKER_01 16:14

In July, the Ministry of Agriculture, Fisheries and Food discover the factory has only recently begun to cart its waste away. Before that, there was clear evidence that the land at the back of the factory had been used as a general dumping ground. There were rusting metal drums, black sludge, all near to the ditches that were connecting to this farmland. The inspection takes water samples, but it would take several months to process. Renterkill denies everything that they had ever dumped any waste from the manufacturer of fluorocetamide. They claimed no knowledge of this being done by an employee without their authority. It also seems there's a lack of awareness about the variation between these chemicals.

SPEAKER_02 16:58

They send in the chief medical officer from the Ministry of Health, as I'm not sure he fully grasps. I think Good grasps more correctly, and Good's aware that this is an organic fluorine compound.

SPEAKER_01 17:14

The medical officer seems to think it's an inorganic fluorine compound, like the sodium fluoride in toothpaste.

SPEAKER_02 17:20

He was saying no problem at all. You can ingest all kinds of this stuff.

SPEAKER_01 17:24

Minister for Housing is saying it's a one-off incident that couldn't have been foreseen.

SPEAKER_02 17:29

It's done, it's over. And of course it's not done, and it's not over.

SPEAKER_01 17:34

One night, at the end of September, the residents of the Welsh town of Merthitville were settling in for the weekend. Through the night, almost 100 pets fell down dead. Reportedly, one owner lost 14 corgies. In another house, two full grown Alsatians died, with seven puppies out of a litter of twelve. The Sunday mirror described the animals dying in agony, some of them collapsing after racing wildly through the streets. It's a big story in Sunday papers up and down the country. The National Canine Defense League offers fifty guineas for whoever first identified the exact cause of death. There's an amplified fear of containing whatever is affecting the animals, and the police chase a greyhound for miles over one of the mountains. The day before, the town's medical officer, Thomas Stevens, warned the town on the radio about the possibility of it being raw meat, cautioned anyone from using utensils that had had any contact with pet food. They managed to pare down their investigation to a single source, horse meat from the local pet shop, where the owner was none the wiser. He says, quote, It is a mystery. I'm very worried about the whole business. Because Smarden's Douglas Good have been talking so broadly about his concerns, he gets a call from the vet Douglas Phillips and Mertha Tidfelt. Together the vets contact the veterinary laboratory at Weybridge, which finds that the pony died from ingesting an organic fluorine compound. Good then advises the medical officer, Thomas Stevens, that it's probably fluoresetamide. It's figured out to have been rat poison from a local dump. That the pony must have eaten. So everything starts to compound here. You've got these two poisoning events on completely different sides of the country, in different contexts. These shocking stories add real-world local examples of to a book that's come out, Silent Spring. The book starts with A Fable for Tomorrow, where it reads, A strange blight crept over the area and everything began to change. Some evil spell had settled on the community. Mysterious maladies swept the flocks of chickens, the cattle and sheep sickened and died. Everywhere was the shadow of death.

SPEAKER_02 19:38

It's been called Toxic Consciousness that people start to have this toxic consciousness by the 1960s.

SPEAKER_00 19:45

Her book really informed the public. And I think what it did is it gave them a really powerful rhetoric that they could deploy of chemicals washing over the countryside, come straight out of Carson. And you see it used in speeches which are made in Parliament, for example.

SPEAKER_01 20:05

Sabine says there's a file in the National Archives under the Ministry of Agriculture, Food and Fisheries called Silent Spring. And it's huge.

SPEAKER_00 20:13

And it is full of letters from members of the public directly to officials, and they are quoting Silent Spring.

SPEAKER_01 20:21

This wasn't the public's introduction to the idea of strong pesticide chemicals. Unlike the US, which was more associated with crop spraying of DDT, the UK was more attached to seed treatments, particularly with dealdrin, and this had already caused a wildlife scandal where first pigeons and pheasants started dying. Then eventually foxes ate those birds and started to die too. But these poisoning cases went from wildlife to field and into people's houses.

SPEAKER_00 20:47

I think it so obviously demonstrates to the public how dangerous these chemicals can really be.

SPEAKER_01 20:53

To John, it feels like these poisonings gave the previous arguments a new urgency.

SPEAKER_02 21:04

Because in many ways, if you look at it, we're talking probably about a toxic spill. But that's not how this is contextualized. That's not how this is understood. People start to understand this as part of the mass application of insecticides.

SPEAKER_01 21:18

Just a few days later, BBC Radio News conducted an interview with the then director of Toxicology Research Unit to inform the public about fluorocytamide, particularly. He emphasized the variability of toxicity among different species of animals, but when questioned whether it could kill a human being, he confirmed that it could if the dose was large enough. More significantly, though, the idea of chain poisoning was being passed around by the Ministry of Agriculture, Fisheries and Food, where they talked about the risk of poison being passed from cow to milk to child. The government, at this point, is internally at least, annoyed that the public is connecting these two incidences.

SPEAKER_02 21:57

And when you look again at the government correspondence. They're privately bemoaning the fact. They're saying, well, you know, it was okay when it was farm animals, but now that a dog has died, everything has broken loose.

SPEAKER_01 22:13

Then something a little bit weird happened. Maybe it's a bit of an about face for Rentikill.

SPEAKER_02 22:18

The operator of the dump said, I didn't use fluoroacetamide in the dump. Or at least the local council said we didn't use fluoroacetamide in the dump in the tip. We used um warfarin as a rat poison. And Rentikill said, actually, we just sold that local council a huge consignment of fluoroacetamide.

SPEAKER_01 22:41

Smarden still has to deal with the possibility of the chemical's persistence. The final eleven out of the original 26 dairy cow herds was dead. One of the government ministries suggests that the farmers burn the carcasses, and a resident describes seeing the smoke column for miles. An officer from the government's animal health division suggests to the farmer that he put on protective gear and bury the animals to six feet. The officer said in his report, the knowledge or assumption of non-destruction by cremation of the substance fluorocetamide was held, but not raised by or conveyed to the owner.

SPEAKER_02 23:17

In other words, We're pretty certain that burning won't get rid of the fluorescetamide, but we're not about to tell the farmer this.

SPEAKER_01 23:24

It gets worse. They get two test cows from outside the area and put them on the land. They don't give them access to the water, they're trying to see if the soil on the grass is going to still be poisonous. The cows die in December. Then to verify that the cows have died from this poison, they feed the meat to the dogs. The dogs die. Four of them. But the headlines are now entirely anti-chemicals, anti-ministries, and they go overboard.

SPEAKER_02 23:52

Aaron Ross Powell They report that these dogs have been murdered and the numbers just get inflated. So we have two dogs, we have twenty dogs, we have a lorry load of dogs.

SPEAKER_01 24:02

Do you think overall this is a sign that these ministries were just unprepared for these kinds of chemicals? Do you think this is a sign they just didn't have a way to deal with it?

SPEAKER_02 24:13

Aaron Ross Powell Well, they don't, do they? And it's it's interesting because by the time it's done, it's astonishing how many different ministries of the government are involved. Um, and coordinating them is very difficult. Uh because, yes, there is no, for instance, designated minister of the environment. So they're also struggling with the fact that they don't really have the mechanisms legislatively to deal with it. And they get rather creative.

SPEAKER_01 24:43

Some of the ministers discussed how there isn't really a legislation that means they can that means they can charge or even stop rent a kill from continuing. Their workaround is that local government deny consent for rent a kill's manufacturing of another chemical they had in the pipeline.

SPEAKER_02 25:01

And they say, well, you know, the owner of the factory could appeal this and they'd probably win. Because they have consent for the light manufacture of a chemical. And light manufacture, as far as they're concerned, means it doesn't cause a nuisance.

SPEAKER_01 25:22

There wasn't room for any more tension between the government and the public. Then a factory worker got sick. He lived, and it seemed like he had bronchitis. But with everything that had happened, it became a natural crisis point. That February, fluoresetamide was banned as an agricultural and commercial insecticide. Given the chemical is so persistent, 2,000 tons of condemned soil were piled in metal drums, sailed out to the Bay of Biscay, and dumped in the sea. What would you say is the legacy of something like Smarden?

SPEAKER_00 25:55

I think it did generally frighten manufacturers. I think it really did. And I think it's the closest we got in the period before 1980 to having statutory legislation. So there was serious discussion about introducing a licensing scheme in Britain. And the manufacturers were up for it because of SMARDIN. And the reasons why we didn't, it's just not clear why at the last minute that idea was abandoned. I think perhaps because it was believed by government that manufacturers were so alarmed about the impact on their reputations of Smarden that legislation wasn't needed, right? That they were gonna self-regulate much better than they had done previously. But yeah, I think it really, I think it really, really alarmed chemical manufacturers who really thought that their increasingly precarious reputation in the eyes of the British public would be fatally undermined by Smarden.

SPEAKER_01 27:00

Along the way the story had transformed and had become that fable of potential ruin of pesticides. Do you think coupled with Silent Spring, it changed the debate about these chemicals?

SPEAKER_00 27:12

I think the answer is it did not start any debate about insecticides. But what it did do, I think, was bring together a rather disparate range of people who were concerned.

SPEAKER_01 27:26

So being less socialist politicians, people from the organic farming movement, and then also people from the more conservative country landowners and gamekeepers who were critical of insecticides because of the way it's harming game.

SPEAKER_00 27:38

One individual who deserves far greater attention than she normally gets is the MP Joyce Butler, who was a Labour and Cooperative Party MP for Wood Green in North London. And she's the person who gets the farm and garden chemicals bill. Basically, her bill gets make sure that all labels have to name the active ingredient. And that doesn't sound like a big deal, but what she ensured was that any consumer in Britain who now knew the name of a dangerous chemical because they had read silent spring could now look at the label of gardening products and know if that chemical was in the product. Like two years beforehand, quite possibly it wasn't mentioned.

SPEAKER_02 28:29

And I think trust is sort of an undercurrent in this entire story. And it's the ebbing away of trust and trust in our experts in the 60s. And you're seeing experts now conflicting with one another. Um, and people don't know who to trust. Who do you trust? Can you trust science anymore? I think it was part of parliamentary debates, and someone asked a question when they were going to dump uh the soil in the sea, and he said, we relied upon the experts in the first instance, and that got us into this mess. Now you're asking us to trust the experts that it's okay to dump this in the sea. What are we supposed to do? Who can we trust? And I think that is the essence of some of this story is just the erosion of trust. And that's only become greater in the decades that have intervened. And I don't think it's a simple reason. I think a uh a lot of things lie behind that, but but it's unfortunate where we've we've ultimately led.

SPEAKER_01 29:38

Douglas Good cuts a bit of a complicated figure. He's a scientist, but he has outlandish methods. He's got this moment of relying on pseudoscience with the black box to identify fluoresetamide. The deduction probably came from his previous work with plants, or more likely from talking to locals about the factory, but he was right in the sense of talking about how dangerous they could be. I wanted to know if John sees any connection to the waves of anti-expertise we sometimes see today.

SPEAKER_02 30:10

There's nothing wrong with suggesting or imploring experts, that includes scientists, to openly take responsibility and to be uh answerable. I don't think there's anything wrong with that. I think the thing that was happening post-Second World War and really took off in the 60s as part of the overtly counter-cultural movement was that people started to be much more critical of scientific expertise. And in a sense, we're lost if we start to again suggest that what we believe is somehow equivalent to empirical evidence. And I think that's where we've uh landed in a sense. People can now say, you know, they believe or don't believe in climate change. Well, is it a belief or is it something based on empirical evidence? Gut instinct isn't good enough. And yet this was the beginning of that in a sense. And I don't think uh yeah, we contained that one well once the genie got out of the ball.

SPEAKER_01 31:33

Aaron Ross Powell It's complicated because, on the other hand, he's very much a hero. He keeps demanding accountability and he keeps pushing for more information and disseminating that.

SPEAKER_02 31:42

Aaron Powell Well, in that sense, he he is a hero, right? Could is a hero in that sense. He is holding people accountable, and I think that was important. Uh I I, you know, you could do counterfactual history. What would have happened if Could hadn't pressed this? Initially they said nothing like this could have happened because we carted away to a quarry. Well, they weren't doing that. And even when the civil servants came, they said, seriously, there's rusting drums, there's evidence of sludge all around the factory. We know what happened here. So, yeah, if if Good hadn't come in, what would have happened? I mean, this could have been much larger if it continued to occur.

SPEAKER_01 32:23

Following summer, taking direct inspiration from Rachel Carson, Douglas Good told a story on BBC Radio. In a similar way, he sets himself up as a storyteller between science and experience. He writes, The House Martins never came this spring, and there was no bird song in the hedgerows. The only rabbits were a few young ones picked up dead in ditches. The subject of Rachel Carson's Silent Spring had become a reality here in the heart of the Garden of England. Let us know what you think of On the Ground. We're brand new, and we'd love to hear your comments or a star review on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you like to listen.