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SILENT SPRING In understanding that a war against Nature was really a war against ourselves, the biologist Rachel Carson felt compelled to speak out, says Marcia Phillips. By Marcia Phillips Almost 50 years have passed since the first publication of Silent Spring, igniting a firestorm of controversy that raged in both the print and television media. For well over a year television, newspapers and magazines in the United States were filled with charges and countercharges. It was front-page material and it triggered a public debate that ricocheted from living room to board room and became the focus of presidential and congressional investigations. Silent Spring was published in the United Kingdom the following year by Hamish Hamilton and was eventually translated into more than 15 languages, becoming a worldwide publishing phenomenon. In the half-century since its first publication the title has never gone out of print and the debate inspired by its contents has never gone away. Why did this happen? How did Silent Spring seize its moment in history and capture the attention of the world? The answer is to be found in the character and commitment of its author, Rachel Carson, a visionary scientist and lyrical writer who was able, as no one before her, to express the ecological view of life and to bring that view, of the membership of humanity in the living world, into the minds and hearts of her readers. Prior to the writing and publication of Silent Spring, Carson was already a famous, best-selling author, and a well-known public figure. And her previous works, taken as a whole, amount to a love letter to the encircling sea: In Under the Sea-Wind (1941) she allowed readers to enter into the experience of living in the sea as a fish or a bird. She wrote: "On the fourth night after the blizzard, the moon glow was strong on the surface of the water. The wind broke the glow into myriad facets of reflected light, and all the ceiling of the bay was aglow with dancing flakes and shaking streamers of light. That night the trout saw hundreds of fish moving into the deep channel above them and passing seaward as dark shadows beneath the silver screen." The Sea Around Us (1950) was a poetic sojourn into the physical character of the sea. In it she described the sea as a unifying global power: "For the globe as a whole, the ocean is the great regulator, the great stabilizer of temperatures. It has been described as ‘a savings bank for solar energy, receiving deposits in seasons of excessive insolation and paying them back in seasons of want.’ Without the ocean, our world would be visited by unthinkably harsh extremes of temperature. For the water that covers three-fourths of the earth's surface with an enveloping mantle is a substance of remarkable qualities." The Edge of the Sea (1955) gave readers a sense of living involvement with the creatures of the shore. Carson captured this instant in time: "Once, exploring the night beach, I surprised a small ghost crab in the searching beam of my torch. He was lying in a pit he had dug just above the surf, as though watching the sea and waiting. The blackness of the night possessed water, air, and beach. It was the darkness of an older world, before Man. There was no sound but the all-enveloping, primeval sounds of wind blowing over water and sand, and of waves crashing on the beach. There was no other visible life — just one small crab near the sea. I have seen hundreds of ghost crabs in other settings, but suddenly I was filled with the odd sensation that for the first time I knew the creature in its own world — that I understood, as never before, the essence of its being." In all of these works Carson combined scientific knowledge with a sense of the deeper significance, the richness of meaning, embedded within that knowledge. The underlying message was that we are all Earth creatures — the crab and the snail, the gull and the human being. In the fullness of time, after decades of contemplation and description of the wholeness of the natural world, she became aware of the accelerating assault upon the planet in the name of pest control and intensive agriculture. As few in her time did, she understood that a war was being waged against Nature, a war that could never be won, for it operated in ignorance of the structure and function of Nature. A commitment stirred within that she must speak out; she must present the true costs and failures of pesticide use. Silent Spring was the result. In Silent Spring she wrote: "Under primitive agricultural conditions the farmer had few insect problems. These arose with the intensification of agriculture — the devotion of immense acreages to a single crop. Such a system set the stage for explosive increases in specific insect populations. Single-crop farming does not take advantage of the principles by which Nature works; it is agriculture as an engineer might conceive it to be. Nature has introduced great variety into the landscape, but man has displayed a passion for simplifying it. Thus he undoes the built-in checks and balances by which Nature holds the species within bounds." So many things have been written, broadcast and spoken of since Silent Spring was first published: charges and countercharges, information and misinformation, a veritable tempest of invective and adulation. So, what did the book actually say? Silent Spring focused on the issue of environmental contamination with toxic chemicals, specifically pesticides and herbicides. In clear, expository prose, the book detailed the consequences of releasing these poisons into the natural world. One by one Carson examined the issues: • Millions of people were being exposed to these toxins without their consent and often without their knowledge. • The poisons were actually biocides; they killed far more than the target species. • Many beneficial species were killed along with the target species. • Water, air, and soil are one vast interconnected system. As a result, poisons aimed at one species actually ended up everywhere in the system. Human beings, embedded within this system, were poisoning themselves. • Toxins accumulated in food chains in such a way that a tiny concentration applied to a lake, for example, became magnified. At each step in the chain, greater and greater quantities of poisons accumulated. Humans existed near the top of the chain. • As if the above weren't enough, pesticides eventually backfired. Over and over again, pest species would rebound and develop resistance. Recurring outbreaks led to an arms race of ever deadlier poisons and ever more resilient insects. • There is an alternative, an alternative that emerges from an understanding of the natural world, which is a world of relationships, connection and interdependence. The answer lay in becoming aware that human beings are a part of Nature and as a result a war against Nature was a war against ourselves. The book Silent Spring was a crystal-clear distillation of an enormous body of scientific evidence. Meticulously researched, it was documented and supported by more than 50 pages of cited references. It presented the essence of the ecological world view in language that was accessible to everyone. As such it was a first in the modern world. It put into the hands of every member of the reading public a powerful, coherent argument for both the integrity of the natural world and our ultimate dependence upon it. Its broader message went way beyond its specific focus on pesticides. Rachel Carson managed to present the deepest lesson that emerged from a lifetime of natural observation: the world does not belong to us — we belong to the world. Today, in a world struggling with GMOs (genetically modified organisms) and climate change, her message has never been more relevant. Yes, the scale of the damage has grown wider and deeper since her time; yes, we live in a world in crisis — but with each passing moment, more and more human beings around the Earth are moving into the light of understanding. Together we can, and we will, create a future where we return home into the warm embrace of a living Earth. – Third World Network Features. -ends-
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