Rachel Carson |
By Molly Bennet, In These Times, May 22, 2012
Fifty years ago, America was on its way to being the kind of place few
species would want to inhabit. Toxic waste flowed into rivers, soot floated out
of smokestacks and pesticides were driving some species to the brink of
extinction. Then, amid the turbulence of the 1960s and early 1970s, people
began to realize that the earth might be something worth protecting. The result
was our modern framework of environmental advocacy and regulation: Congress
created the Environmental Protection Agency and passed landmark legislation
like the Endangered Species Act, the Clean Air Act and the Clean Water Act;
advocacy groups like Greenpeace, Environmental Defense Fund and the National
Resources Defense Council were born; and older organizations like the Sierra
Club were reinvigorated. On April 22, 1970, about 20 million people
participated in the first Earth Day. The healing began.
It’s a familiar narrative – and would be a happy one if it ended
there. Instead, today we face the gravest environmental threat that humanity
has ever known – a threat that our system of environmental protection, so
painstakingly constructed, is powerless to address. It’s been 24 years since
NASA scientist James Hansen’s testimony before Congress brought global warming
to the public’s attention. Yet despite the ceaseless work of activists and
scientists, the carbon-fueled industrial economy that is wreaking havoc on the
climate is still firmly in place. Neither the government nor the public evinces
the will to confront it.
At such a critical moment, it is worth considering the book that first
snapped the country out of its complacency and set the environmental movement
in motion. In 1962, Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring asked us to reconsider the
blind rush toward what the industrial world called progress. Carson warned us
that by destroying the environment, humans would destroy themselves.
Somewhere along the way, her message has been lost.
The web of life
Silent Spring begins with an allegory about a pastoral town, alive
with blooming flowers, flowing streams and singing birds. All is well in this
village, until suddenly it isn’t. Bad things start to happen: The birds
disappear, livestock starts dying, the countryside turns brown and dry, and
children fall sick and die from a mysterious illness. Carson goes on to
explain, in descriptions that are rigorously scientific and at times moving,
how the effects of organochlorine pesticides, including DDT, reverberate far
beyond their intended targets, disrupting the dynamic between species and their
habitats and even making people sick. “No witchcraft, no enemy action had
silenced the rebirth of life in this stricken world,” Carson wrote. “The people
had done it themselves.”
First serialized in The New Yorker in June 1962, Silent Spring is
credited with changing the way we understand the natural world and our place in
it. The natural world is not, Carson explained, populated by independent
organisms. Rather, each element – microbes, soil, insects, plants and animals –
functions in a complex relationship with the others. The way the inhabitants of
these systems play off one another is breathtaking, but caution is required;
altering a single piece could trigger a chain of destruction.
Though common knowledge now, Carson’s ecological view of the world was
a revelation to most readers. And she emphasized how we humans are part of this
system. “Man is a part of nature,” Carson told an interviewer, “and his war
against nature is inevitably a war against himself.”
“What Silent Spring did,” the environmental writer and activist Bill
McKibben says, “was to cause people to start questioning, for the first time,
and in a big way, whether modernity was quite as shiny as they’d assumed. Or
whether there were deep hazards hidden right in the middle of the huge
industrial enterprise.” McKibben, the founder of the environmental organization
350.org – 350 parts per million of carbon dioxide is the upper limit of what
can safely exist in the atmosphere, according to many scientists; we’re
currently at about 394 – has led the campaign against the Keystone XL pipeline.
“It wasn’t just DDT that people were reacting to. It was the idea that things
were not what they seemed, that they often came with a shadow attached. That’s
a notion that’s grown, and it turns out that the biggest shadow of all is
attached to the most ubiquitous chemical of all – CO2.”
“The modern world,” Carson wrote in 1963, “worships the gods of speed
and quantity, and of the quick and easy profit, and out of this idolatry
monstrous evils have arisen. … As for the general public, the vast majority
rest secure in a childlike faith that ‘someone’ is looking after things – a
faith unbroken until some public-spirited person, with patient scholarship and
steadfast courage, presents facts that can no longer be ignored.”
Carson was referring to Ruth Harrison, a British animal-rights
activist whose 1964 exposé of industrial livestock production, Animal Machines,
Carson had agreed to preface. She was also, of course, referring to herself.
But Carson never got the chance to see Silent Spring’s impact reach as
far as it did; she died of breast cancer in April 1964, at the age of 56. She
may not have been altogether surprised, however – Carson carefully calibrated Silent
Spring to achieve maximum effect, and in the two years following publication
the book and its author were the subject of countless news stories, and even
cartoons, as well as an episode of CBS Reports. Carson was invited to testify
before a Senate subcommittee on the potential dangers of pesticides, and
President John F. Kennedy asked his Scientific Advisory Committee to
investigate the matter.
No one would have picked Carson out as the instigator of a
wide-ranging social movement. Trained as a biologist, she was, according to her
biographer Linda Lear, practical and reserved. She spent much of her career
working for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, where her aptitude for
explaining complex scientific concepts in lucid prose led to her writing
wildlife guides for the public. Meanwhile, she began selling stories to local
newspapers about things like the oyster farms of the Chesapeake Bay.
In 1937, an article Carson published in The Atlantic Monthly titled
“Undersea” caught the attention of an editor at Simon & Schuster, and in
1941 Carson published her first book, Under the Sea-Wind: A Naturalist’s
Picture of Ocean Life. A second book, The Sea Around Us, followed 10 years
later. Initially serialized in The New Yorker, the book made Carson famous and
won her the National Book Award. It was also a bestseller, as was her third
book, The Edge of the Sea.
But as advances in science and technology sped forward, something
changed for Carson, and describing the wonders of the sea no longer sufficed.
She became unsettled by the unknown costs of so much change. In a letter to a
friend written in 1958, as she was preparing to begin work on Silent Spring,
Carson explained what drove her to take on the project:
"It
was pleasant to believe, for example, that much of Nature was forever beyond
the tampering reach of man … . These beliefs have almost been part of me for as
long as I have thought about such things. To have them even vaguely threatened
was so shocking that … I shut my mind – refused to acknowledge what I couldn’t
help seeing. But that does no good, and I have now opened my eyes and my mind."
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