It was 50 years ago that a book spurred the first major environmental movement in the United States. Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring hit the book stores on September 27, 1962 to catalogue the hazardous effects of the pesticide DDT—banned 10 years later in the U.S.1—and questioned man’s faith in technological progress.2 After four years of carefully researching the topic, Carson was able to describe in detail how DDT entered the food chain and accumulated in the fatty tissues of animals to cause cancer and genetic damage. Yet for all of Ms. Carson’s scientific meticulousness, she never became so bogged down in scientific terminology that she lost her audience. The book’s most haunting and famous chapter, “A Fable for Tomorrow,” depicted a nameless American town. The idyllic, quintessentially American setting was the easiest for readers to relate to. The American Dream was jeopardized by our reliance on technology to constantly increase productivity until all life—from fish to birds to apple blossoms to human children—had been “silenced” by the disastrous effects of DDT.3
For me, Rachel Carson’s writings still stand out as some of the most important and relevant articulations for the current environmental movement. Not only are her warnings about the dangers of toxics still relevant today, but her character and writing style, with its eloquent mix of scientific research, lyrical prose, and literary references, are things that I believe more environmental writers should look to for inspiration.
The Extraordinary Courage of Rachel Carson
When Silent Spring was released in 1962, Carson’s critics were anything but silent about it. The most quoted criticism was voiced by a spokesperson for the chemical industry in the 1960s who proclaimed: “If man were to faithfully follow the teachings of Miss Carson, we would return to the Dark Ages, and the insects and diseases and vermin would once again inherit the earth.”5 The chemical company Monsanto launched a campaign called “The Desolate Year” in response to Silent Spring and distributed thousands of brochures outlining the importance of chemical pesticides for agriculture and protecting humans from disease.6 Even worse, Carson, already suffering from breast cancer that would take her life only a couple years after Silent Spring was published, was also forced to contend with charges that she was a spinster who lacked integrity and sanity.7
However, Carson’s careful preparation paid off. Over the four years that she wrote the book, she had compiled over 55 pages of notes and a list of experts who vetted the manuscript. When Carson came under attack several noted scientists came to her defense and in 1963, President John F. Kennedy ordered the President’s Science Advisory Committee to examine the issues raised by Carson.9 The Committee thoroughly vindicated both Silent Spring and Rachel Carson, and as a result DDT was eventually banned from use in the U.S. by the EPA in 1972.10
Rachel Carson as a Visionary and Inspiration
Despite of the bleak content in Silent Spring, many find the book to be surprisingly engaging and literary. From Carson’s early books—Under the Sea Wind, The Edge of the Sea, and The Sea Around Us—it is clear that she saw environmental nonfiction as an opportunity to express and share her sense of wonder rather than as just an exercise in dry description. In The Edge of the Sea Carson begins with the idea that man’s quest to understand the meaning of life inevitably leads us to sandy beaches:
It sends us back to the edge of the sea, where the drama of life played its first scene on earth and perhaps even its prelude; where the forces of evolution are at work today, as they have been since the appearance of what we know as life; and where the spectacle of living creatures faced by the cosmic realities of their world is clear.11
Most importantly, her lyricism and philosophical insights are not included in an attempt to sound clever. As she later remarked: “If there is poetry in my book about the sea, it is not because I deliberately put it there, but because no one can truthfully write about the sea and leave out the poetry.”12Silent Spring was equally poetic. This, I believe, was what made it so compelling. As Al Gore recently commented, when Silent Spring was first published, “‘environment’ was not even an entry in the vocabulary of public policy.”13 Carson was a naturalist and she was a scientist, but above all she was a humanitarian. Conservation had never raised much broad public interest, for few people really worried about the disappearance of wilderness. But the threats Carson had outlined—the contamination of the food chain, cancer, genetic damage, species extinction—hit much closer to home.
The Relevance of Carson Today
15Environmentalism still relies on the same strategies today that it did in the 1960s. Of course, one needs facts in order to mobilize the public to take notice of an “environmental” issue. But one also needs to establish that the issue isn’t just one of “science” or “nature.” The recognition that humans are physically and spiritually connected to the natural world is what made Silent Spring such a brilliantly written piece. The human connection—established both through poetry and through a discussion of human health implications—made for an argument that was able to “change[] the course of history.”14
Although DDT was banned in the early 1970s, if Rachel Carson were still around I’m sure she would think that there is more to be done. Just before her death from breast cancer in 1964, Carson remarked:
Man’s attitude toward nature is today critically important simply because we have now acquired a fateful power to alter and destroy nature. But man is a part of nature, and his war against nature is inevitably a war against himself… we’re challenged as mankind has never been challenged before to prove our maturity and our mastery, not of nature, but of ourselves.16
Rachel Carson made a radical proposal—that, at times, technological progress is so fundamentally at odds with natural processes that it must be curtailed. With the looming threat of climate change, Silent Spring‘s message resonates loudly today. We must break the pattern of destroying the natural world in the name of ‘progress.’
