In September of 1962, Silent Spring arrived on bookshelves. It was an instant hit.
Rachel Carson (1907-1964) did not simply describe the unintended consequences of the widespread use of pesticides, and DDT in particular, but linked to public concern over open-air atomic testing. Throughout the 1950s the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission (AEC) detonated dozens of atomic devices in south-central Nevada and the Marshall Islands in the South Pacific-dispersing radioactive debris far and wide.
In a letter penned in 1958, Carson confided:
“I suppose my thinking began to be affected soon after atomic science was firmly established. Some of the thoughts that came were so unattractive to me that I rejected them completely, for the old ideas die hard, especially when they are emotionally as well as intellectually dear to one. It was pleasant to believe, for example, that much of Nature was forever beyond the tempering reach of man-he might level the forests and dam the streams, but the clouds and the rain and the wind were God’s.”
In the atomic age the clouds, the rain, and the wind serve as transit for radioactive substances evoking injury in a slow, languishing manner.
Indeed, Carson evoked images of fallout, radioactive and chemical, to describe the indiscriminate imposition of harmful substances upon the public. It is an anxiety often overlooked when writers recount the rise of the contemporary American environmental movement.
What the Scientific Revolution bequeathed to humanity was a view of nature as pliable and amenable to a breakdown of its constituent parts to reassemble in pursuit of practical aims, in pursuit of mastery, and dominion. It is a mechanistic conception of the nonhuman world, and it is a vision as otherworldly as any animistic notion as to spirits residing in trees, lakes, or mountains that Enlightenment scholars so virulently scorned. Carson argued:
“As crude a weapon as the cave man’s club, the chemical barrage has been hurled against the fabric of life – a fabric on the one hand delicate and destructible, on the other miraculously tough and resilient, and capable of striking back in unexpected ways. These extraordinary capacities of life have been ignored by the practitioners of chemical control who have brought to their task no ‘high-minded orientation,’ no humility before the vast forces with which they tamper.”
The indelible entanglement of human activity with a vibrant natural world is a central lesson of Silent Spring.
It is the principle of connectivity and therefore contingency, complexity, and change. Connectivity may appear simplistic, but it is profound in its implications. Feedback, equilibrium, disruption, succession, reciprocity, non-linearity, mutation, and emergence stem from connectivity and run counter to a worldview predicated upon separation, linearity, reductionism, and mechanistic determination.
Carson depicted connectivity not simply as a principle of the natural world but impinging upon the community, the family, and the individual. And she tied her argument to the controversy over strontium-90-a by-product of the fission process. She noted:
“Strontium 90, released through nuclear explosions into the air, comes to earth in rain or drifts down as fallout, lodges in soil, enters into the grass or corn or wheat grown there, and in time takes up its abode in the bones of a human being, there to remain until his death.”
Learning to “see” the connectivity of humanity and nature is key to making sense of the hidden costs of unrestrained science and technology. But Silent Spring also highlights the often slow and cumulative pace of contamination. Strontium-90 and other long-lived radionuclides, as well as DDT and other synthetic chemicals, can cause acute but more often injury only over an extended period.
“Slow violence” is the phrase Rob Nixon employs in describing adverse effects imposed incrementally and lacking the spectacular visual images sufficient to garner sustained media attention. He argues Carson clarified a new typology of injury:
“By slow violence I mean a violence that occurs gradually and out of sight, a violence of delayed destruction that is dispersed across time and space, an attritional violence that is typically not viewed as violence at all.”
In contrast to what many of her critics claim, Carson was not anti-science. But she was brash enough to argue oversight of science and technology cannot be left solely to corporate and governmental actors. The public has a right to contribute to such debate.
Rachel Carson died in 1964, ravaged by cancer at just 56 years old, but Silent Spring illustrates an enduring appeal. It illustrates modernity is characterized by scientific and technological prowess but an antiquated cultural worldview and the socio-ecological principles Carson highlighted are important lessons for understanding the intertwining of human societies and the nonhuman world.
These principles include connectivity as opposed to human detachment from, and omnipotence over, nature and the agency of nonhuman entities, processes, and things in effecting change.
Moreover, the struggle to reign in the hubris and reckless abandon of the atomic industrial complex during the Cold War mirrors the many dilemmas we face today in controlling the worst impulses of industry. Carson insisted:
“If the Bill of Rights contains no guarantee that a citizen shall be secure against lethal poisons distributed either by private individuals or by public officials, it is surely only because our forefathers, despite their considerable wisdom and foresight, could conceive of no such problem.”
(Chasing the mosquito man spraying DDT…)
For more information:
Rachel Carson, Silent Spring (Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin, 1962).
Letter from Rachel Carson to Dorothy Freeman dated February 1, 1958, Pp. 406-408 in Letters of the Century: America 1900-1999, edited by Lisa Grunwald and Stephen J. Adler (NY: The Dial Press, 1999).
Ralph H. Lutts, “Chemical Fallout: Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring, Radioactive Fallout, and the Environmental Movement,” Environmental Review 9, no. 3 (1985): 210-225.
Linda Lear, Rachel Carson: Witness for Nature (NY: Houghton Mifflin, 2009).
William Souder, On a Farther Shore: The Life and Legacy of Rachel Carson (NY: Broadway Books, 2012).
Rob Nixon, Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2011).