Silent
Spring has come
to be regarded as an environmental classic which instigated the modern
environmental movement. The book’s warning about the dangers of pesticides
touched a nerve, but also reflected wider concerns in the emerging
counter-culture of the sixties – that modern technologies, combined with
rampant consumerism, were causing environmental problems that had otherwise not
been widely noticed or, worse, suppressed by vested interests.
Personally,
the book has a special meaning. It was one of the first books that I
borrowed when a public library opened in our village in 1962, when I was
14. How much of the book I actually read, I cannot now remember – but
what I can recall is the impact that the introduction made upon me then.
It was almost like reading the science fiction to which I was addicted at that
time:
There was once a town in the
heart of America where all life seemed to live in harmony with its
surroundings. The town lay in the midst of a checkerboard of prosperous farms,
with fields of grain and hillsides of orchards where, in spring, white clouds
of bloom drifted above the green fields. In autumn, oak and maple and birch set
up a blaze of colour that flamed and flickered across a backdrop of pines. Then
foxes barked in the hills and deer silently across the fields, half hidden in
the mists of the autumn mornings.
Among the roads, laurel, viburnum
and alder, great ferns and wildflowers delighted the traveller’s eye through
much of the year. Even in winter the roadsides were places of beauty, where countless
birds came to feed on the berries and on the seed heads of the dried weeds
rising above the snow. The countryside was, in fact, famous for the abundance
and variety of its bird life, and when the flood of migrants was pouring
through in spring and autumn people travelled from great distances to observe
them. Others came to fish the streams, which flowed clear and cold out of the
hills and contained shady pools where trout lay. Sot it had been from the days
many years ago when the first settlers raised their houses, sank their wells,
and built their barns.
Then 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 a shadow of death. The farmers spoke of
much illness among their families. In the town the doctors had become more and
more puzzled by new kinds of sickness appearing among their patients. There had
been several sudden and unexplained deaths, not only among adults but even
among children, who would be stricken suddenly while at play and die within a
few hours.
There was a strange stillness.
The birds, for example – where had they gone? Many people spoke of them,
puzzled an disturbed. The feeding stations in the backyards were deserted. The
few birds seen anywhere were moribund; they trembled violently and could not
fly. It was a spring without voices. On the mornings that had once throbbed
with the dawn chorus of robins, catbirds, doves, jays, wrens and scores of
other bird voices there was now no sound; only silence lay over the fields and
woods and marsh.
On the farms the hens brooded,
but no chicks hatched. The farmers complained that they were unable to raise
any pigs – the litters were small and the young survived only a few days. The
apple trees were coming into bloom but no bees droned among the blossoms, so
there was no pollination and there would be no fruit.
The roadsides, once so
attractive, were now lined with browned and withered vegetation as though swept
by fire. These, too, were silent, deserted by all living things. Even the
streams were now lifeless. Anglers no longer visited them, for all the fish had
died.
In the gutters under the eaves
and between the shingles of the roofs, a white granular powder still showed a
few patches; some weeks before it had fallen like snow upon the roofs and the
lawns, the fields and the streams.
No witchcraft, no enemy action
had silenced the rebirth of new life in this stricken world. The people had
done it themselves.
This town does not actually
exist, but it might easily have a thousand counterparts in America or elsewhere
in the world. I know of no community that has experienced all the misfortunes I
describe. Yet every one of these disasters has actually happened somewhere, and
many real communities have already suffered a substantial number of them. A
grim spectre has crept upon us almost unnoticed, and this imagined tragedy may
easily become a stark reality we all shall know.
It was
here that, for the first time, I was introduced to the idea of the
inter-connectedness of all living things, and the pernicious effects of
industrial development on the environment. It was a concept that sank
like a pebble in a pool, lost in my consciousness for many years, but
resurfacing a decade or so later. For someone of the ‘ban-the bomb’ generation,
reading the following passage so soon after the Cuban Missile Crisis was
particularly alarming:
The
history of life on earth has been a history of interaction between living
things and their surroundings. To a large extent, the physical form and the
habits of the earth’s vegetation and its animal life have been molded by the
environment. Considering the whole span of earthly time, the opposite effect, in
which life actually modifies its surroundings, has been relatively slight. Only
within the moment of time represented by the present century has one species
man acquired significant power to alter the nature of his world.
During
the past quarter century this power has not only increased to one of disturbing
magnitude but it has changed in character. The most alarming of all man’s
assaults upon the environment is the contamination of air, earth, rivers, and
sea with dangerous and even lethal materials. This pollution is for the most
part irrecoverable; the chain of evil it initiates not only in the world that
must support life but in living tissues is for the most part irreversible. In
this now universal contamination of the environment, chemicals are the sinister
and little-recognized partners of radiation in changing the very nature of the
world and the very nature of life. 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. Similarly, chemicals sprayed on crop lands or forests or gardens lie
long in soil, entering into living organisms, passing from one to another in a
chain of poisoning and death. Or they pass mysteriously by underground streams
until they emerge and, through the alchemy of air and sunlight, combine into
new forms that kill vegetation, sicken cattle, and work unknown harm on those
who drink from once pure wells. As Albert Schweitzer has said, “Man can hardly
even recognize the devils of his own creation.”
It took
hundreds of millions of years to produce the life that now inhabits the earth
eons of time in which that developing and evolving and diversifying life
reached a state of adjustment and balance with its surroundings. The
environment, rigorously shaping and directing the life it supported, contained
elements that were hostile as well as supporting. Certain rocks gave out
dangerous radiation; even within the light of the sun, from which all life
draws its energy, there were short-wave radiations with power to injure. Given
time – time not in years but in millennia - life adjusts, and a balance
has been reached. For time is the essential ingredient; but in the modern world
there is no time.
The
rapidity of change and the speed with which new situations are created follow
the impetuous and heedless pace of man rather than the deliberate pace of
nature. Radiation is no longer merely the background radiation of rocks, the
bombardment of cosmic rays, the ultraviolet of the sun that have existed before
there was any life on earth; radiation is now the unnatural creation of man’s
tampering with the atom. The chemicals to which life is asked to make its
adjustment are no longer merely the calcium and silica and copper and all the
rest of the minerals washed out of the rocks and carried in rivers to the sea;
they are the synthetic creations of man’s inventive mind, brewed in his
laboratories, and having no counterparts in nature.
To adjust
to these chemicals would require time on the scale that is nature’s; it would
require not merely the years of a man’s life but the life of generations. And
even this, were it by some miracle possible, would be futile, for the new
chemicals come from our laboratories in an endless stream; almost five hundred
annually find their way into actual use in the United States alone. The figure
is staggering and its implications are not easily grasped: five hundred new
chemicals to which the bodies of men and animals are required somehow to adapt
each year, chemicals totally outside the limits of biologic experience.
Among
them are many that are used in man’s war against nature. Since the mid-1940′s
over 200 basic chemicals have been created for use in killing insects, weeds,
rodents, and other organisms described in the modem vernacular as “pests”; and
they are sold under several thousand different brand names.
These
sprays, dusts, and aerosols are now applied almost universally to farms,
gardens, forests, and homes nonselective chemicals that have the power to kill
every insect, the “good” and the “bad,” to still the song of birds and the
leaping of fish in the streams, to coat the leaves with a deadly film, and to
linger on in soil all this though the intended target may be only a few weeds
or insects. Can anyone believe it is possible to lay down such a barrage of
poisons on the surface of the earth without making it unfit for all life? They
should not be called “insecticides,” but “biocides.”
Along
with the possibility of the extinction of mankind by nuclear war, the central
problem of our age has therefore become the contamination of man’s total
environment with such substances of incredible potential for harm substances
that accumulate in the tissues of plants and animals and even penetrate the
germ cells to shatter or alter the very material of heredity upon which the
shape of the future depends. . . .
What is
the legacy of Silent Spring? There are some interesting opinions
and archive materials in this discussion, hosted on The Guardian website,while the Life and Legacy of Rachel Carson can be explored
on this website.
There’s
an excellent essay, Re-Reading Silent Spring, published by Earth Island Journal that draws attention to how much
was already known in 1962 about the environmental health impacts of
petrochemicals, and how little the regulatory response to the
environmental impact of chemicals has changed, despite the advances in
scientific understanding since then:
Reading Silent
Spring today, it is disquieting to realize how much was already known
in 1962 about the environmental health impacts of petrochemicals. Even more
shocking is to recognize how little our regulatory response to these chemicals’
effects has changed, despite the past five decades’ great advances in
scientific understanding.
Best
known for its alarming account of DDT’s decimation of bird life across the
United States, Silent Spring is widely credited with sparking
the public concern that lead to the chemical’s ban in the US ten years later. “Over
increasingly large areas of the United States, spring now comes unheralded by
the return of birds, and the early mornings, once filled with the beauty of
bird song, are strangely silent,” Carson wrote, describing the toll pesticide
use had taken on American birds. Without changes in practice, brought about in
part by Silent Spring, the bald eagle (whose numbers had plummeted
to about 400 breeding pairs in the continental US by 1963) might well have
disappeared from the lower 48 states.
But
Carson also described the accumulation of synthetic chemicals in people –
including newborns – and these chemicals’ interaction with the innermost
workings of living cells. “For the first time in the history of the world,
every human being is now subjected to contact with dangerous chemicals, from
the moment of conception until death,” Carson wrote. “These chemicals are now
stored in the bodies of the vast majority of human beings, regardless of age.
They occur in the mother’s milk, and probably in the tissues of the unborn
child,” wrote Carson more than 40 years before an Environmental Working Group
study found 287 industrial chemicals in newborns’ umbilical cord blood,
and decades before the Centers for Disease Control and
Prevention began finding such chemicals in the majority of Americans
tested.
A year
ago I wrote that I had been listening to The Essay on Radio 3:
five talks on the theme ‘Before Silent Spring‘ in which five writers,
scientists and environmental campaigners reflected on how Carson built on the
work of others who had gone before her, figures whose ideas preceded Silent
Spring and laid the foundations of the contemporary environmental
movement. Read that post here.
Footnote
There’s
an excellent essay
in
the Guardian by Margaret Attwood in which she assesses the significance of Silent
Spring. Here’s an extract:
One of
the core lessons of Silent Spring was that things labelled progress
weren’t necessarily good. Another was that the perceived split between man and
nature isn’t real: the inside of your body is connected to the world around
you, and your body too has its ecology, and what goes into it – whether eaten
or breathed or drunk or absorbed through your skin – has a profound impact on
you. We’re so used to thinking this way now that it’s hard to imagine a time
when general assumptions were different. But before Carson, they were.
In those
years, nature was an “it”, an impersonal and unconscious force; or, worse,
malignant: a nature-red-in-tooth-and-claw bent on afflicting humanity with all
the weapons at its disposal. Against brute nature stood “we”, with our
consciousness and intelligence. We were a higher order of being, and thus we
had a mandate to tame nature as if it were a horse, subdue it as if it were an
enemy, and “develop” it as if it were a female bustline or a male set of
Charles Atlas biceps – how awful to be underdeveloped! We could then exploit
nature’s resources, which were thought of as inexhaustible.
Three
streams of thinking fed into this civilisation/savagery construct. The first
was biblical dominionism: in Genesis, God proclaims that man has dominion over
the animals, and this was construed by some as permission to annihilate them.
The second was informed by the machine metaphors that colonised linguistic
space after the invention of the clock, and that spread across the west during
the 18th-century enlightenment: the universe was an unfeeling machine, and life
forms too were machines, without souls or consciousness or even feeling.
Therefore they could be abused at will, because they weren’t really suffering.
Man alone had a soul, situated inside the machine of his body (possibly,
thought some, in the pituitary gland). In the 20th century, scientists threw
out the soul but kept the machine: for a strangely long time, they held that to
ascribe anything like human emotions to animals was anthropocentrism.
Ironically,
this was a direct contradiction of the granddaddy of modern biology, Charles
Darwin, who had always maintained the interconnectedness of life, and – like
any dog owner or farmer or hunter – was well aware of animal emotions.
The third
line of thinking came – again ironically – from social Darwinism. Man was
“fitter” than the animals, by virtue of his intelligence and his uniquely human
emotions; thus in the struggle for existence man deserved to triumph, and
nature would have to give way eventually to a fully “humanised” environment.
But
Carson questioned this dualism. Whatever airs we might give ourselves, “we”
were not distinct from “it”: we were part of it, and could live only inside it.
To think otherwise was self-destructive:
The
“control of nature” is a phrase conceived in arrogance, born of the Neanderthal
age of biology and philosophy, when it was supposed that nature exists for the
convenience of man. The concepts and practices of applied entomology for the
most part date from that Stone Age of science. It is our alarming misfortune
that so primitive a science has armed itself with the most modern and terrible
weapons, and that in turning them against the insects it has also turned them
against the earth.
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