Have you ever read Rachel Carson in high school? I saw an article recently about activists who were able to lobby for tighter regulations on pesticide drift in Hawaii. And then I remembered Carson sounded the alarm about DDT in the 1960s. A marine biologist and writer, Carson was awarded an MA degree from Johns Hopkins in 1932, when few women earned degrees. While working for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service she wrote The Sea Around Us in 1951 but is best known for the book Silent Spring published in 1962, exposing the dangers of the widespread use of pesticides.I think today Rachel Carson's ecological critique shows us that many of the problems she pointed out persist, often in more potent forms.
A fable for tomorrow is Carson's future vision. In this short story which forms the opening chapter of Silent Spring, Carson paints a picture of a village that had a rare natural beauty and its ecosystems existed in harmony with the human presence there which planted apple orchards. The birds migrated through the area and rested in the trees of the roadsides. A variety of life existed in densely wooded forests where people walked through paths. Streams “flowed clear and cold out of the hills.” The human observer standing at the edge of the stream saw with her eyes shimmering sunlight from the water's surface as it formed ripples. The roadsides were filled with a huge diversity of flowers and insect species so people from other cities traveled to witness the wildlife from their vehicles or to fish in the abundant streams.
However in the peak of this beauty, doom fell over the town: cascading environmental failures make the roadsides desolate. the soil, depleted. Strange illnesses afflicted the birds and other wildlife who disappeared from the roadsides. And there were then no fruit on the apple trees because there were no bees to pollinate.
“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.”
“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.”
Carson suggests that it was too late for people in the village to change how they were polluting the environment, if they had even recognized a connection between the loss of life and the pollution they created. What existed as a harmonious relationship with the ecosystem ended in a rift between actions of humans living there and nature. The powder in the gutter of the roofs could be many things – crop dusting, aerosols – but what is certain after reading this is that human action had caused the death of this city. The white granular powder - society's toxics released into the environment – threatening us all, the effects truly unknown.
Carson's picture of environmental destruction is so extreme that it may not have actually happened yet in our history. “I know of no community that has experienced all the misfortunes I describe,” she wrote. “Yet every one of these disasters has actually happened somewhere, and many real communities have already suffered a substantial number of them. A grim specter has crept upon us almost unnoticed, and this imagined tragedy may easily become a stark reality we all shall know.”
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In George Mitchell's 'two children in a future world' he envisions a 21st century where ozone pollution affects children's everyday lives -- Luisa and Eric.
Luisa lives in Mexico City some thirty years from now. “She looks up at a polluted sky in this future world and sees no sun at all.” But imagine, Mitchell suggests to the reader, the sight of the Valley of Mexico when the Spanish conqueror Diego de Ordaz became the first European to see it and his actions would set in motion events that would transform the valley. Fifty years before Luisa was born, in the 1990s, nearly 20 million people lived in Mexico City driving three million motor vehicles. By the year 2000, the beginning of the century which Luisa was born into, 30 million people lived in Mexico City and drived nine million vehicles.
“The Valley of the Aztecs, that high plateau of such surpassing beauty, had become a valley of death,” Mitchell wrote. “Now, near the middle of Luisa's century, a dark, gray-brown shroud hanging low over Mexico City is a daily fact of life. It makes each breath an irritating effort and it shuts out the sun. … Luisa's world is not only without sun but without hope. There are now too many people crammed into her city, living too closely together. It is doubtful in this teeming environment that she will live to be thirty-five. Two of her brothers and many of her friends have already died. It doesn't seem fair to her that people should be dying so young and that the sky should be so dark.”
Eric is a nine-year-old child from South Dakota who Mitchell imagines can't even go outside to play baseball because it is too hot outside -- there is too much radiation. Boys such as Eric rarely see the sun during their summers – they are confined indoors where they play games. what were once considered rites of passage for children, such as camping outdoors or riding a bike down the road for leisure, are disappearing from the culture as it is shaped by the climate.
Do humans today discount the value of Luisa's generation several decades from now? The capitalist class profits from degradation of our climate, they collect billions directly and indirectly from the fossil fuel economy. To answer the question, yes today humans place a high discount rate on the future. Human pollution threatens the sunlight which once filled the valley of Mexico and which Luisa can no longer see. Corporations and their shareholders profit from exploitation of land and resources today in a manner not unlike Diego de Ordaz who battled the Aztec. Humans have a choice to value the future more today and to anticipate the climate change consequences of a fossil fuel capitalist economy and culture of personal mobility, and to avert catastrophe by making radical changes aimed at the irreconcilable conflicts between economic and environmental interests in society. Keeping carbon in the ground and putting into place a global carbon tax that has the effect of sharply curtailing fossil fuel usage in the Global North countries are transition strategies needed now. Ecological revolution is our obligation to Luisa and Eric's generation.
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What happened to Carson's idyllic village is quite similar to Mitchell's description of the transformation of a pristine valley in Mexico into a valley of death and pollution that blocks the sun. We see how the environment shapes culture, the limits and planetary boundaries humanity approaches, and how even life expectancy and the climate are connected, in the stories above. one must appreciate the urgency of their message, interpreting their warning as a call to action. Carson did not merely want to describe the world, but to change it – as she was to demonstrate through her years of environmental activism on nuclear issues and pollution in the ocean.
In closing, Carson's Silent Spring is still today a clarion call for ecological revolution. in a world where the literature on the environment is somewhat muddled, let Carson's writings suggest an ecological critique that is appropriate for our times. Environmental writers like Carson and Mitchell help us to understand the symptoms of health and sickness in living things. In Silent Spring, the opening chapter is the situation humanity faces today. The writers compel our imaginations to consider the environmental consequences of the choices we make and how we live.
teglin
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Sources
[1] http://core.ecu.edu/soci/juskaa/SOCI3222/carson.html
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_J._Mitchell