No subject

time, there has been the closest possible interdependence between the
physical environment and the life it sustains. The conditions on the young
earth produced life; life then at once modified the conditions of the earth,
so that this single extraordinary act of spontaneous generation could not be
repeated. In one form or another, action and interaction between life and
its surroundings has been going on ever since.

The historic fact has, I think, more than academic significance. Once we
accept it we see why we cannot with impunity make repeated assaults upon the
environment as we do now. The serious student of earth history knows that
neither life nor the physical world that supports it exists in little
isolated compartments. On the contrary, he recognizes that extraordinary
unity between organisms and the environment. For this reason he knows that
harmful substances released into the environment return in time to create
problems for mankind....The branch of science that deals with these
interrelations is Ecology....We cannot think of the living organism alone;
nor can we think of the physical environment as a separate entity. The two
exist together, each acting on the other to form an ecological complex or an
ecosystem.13

Such complex, evolving ecosystems were highly dynamic entities.
Consequently, the changes they were undergoing were frequently unforeseen
until it was too late.

Throughout her work Carson stressed the evolutionary character and
interconnectedness of the natural world. It was this that gave her
naturalistic writings their breathtaking quality. In an insightful analysis
of Carson’s sea trilogy—Under the Sea Wind (1941), The Sea Around Us (1951),
and The Edge of the Sea (1955)—together with Silent Spring, Mary McCay has
traced this quality in Carson’s writing to her fundamental concept,
introduced early on in her work, of “material immortality.” As Carson wrote
in 1937 in her article “Undersea,”! the various forms of life are
“redissolved into their component substance,” as a result of “the inexorable
laws of the sea.” Consequently, “individual elements are lost to view, only
to reappear again and again in different incarnations in a kind of material
immortality.” As a scientist, Carson approached the natural world from a
materialist standpoint, rejecting all non-naturalistic explanations. Once
when her mother said to her that God had created the world, she replied,
“Yes and General Motors created my Oldsmobile. But how is the question.” The
evolution of a complex web of life was everything.14

Ecology as a Radical Force

Carson’s intense study of ecosystem ecology in the context of her work on
Silent Spring heightened this materialist understanding and turned it into a
radical force. At the time of her death she had a book contract to undertake
a philosophical examination of ecology and she was collecting material for a
scientific study of evolution. The two subjects were obviously connected in
her mind and were undoubtedly to form the basis of a thoroughgoing critique
of the present human relation to the earth.15

This put her in direct conflict with the powers that be. For the dominant
economic interests, as her editor and biographer Paul Brooks observed, “the
really scary thing” was that Carson “was questioning the whole attitude of
industrial society toward the natural world. This was heresy and this had to
be suppressed.” Carson herself was well aware that her radical ecological
perspective was placing her at odds with a system geared to expansion of
private production at all costs. In the process of writing Silent Spring she
studied John Kenneth Galbraith’s Affluent Society, which had raised the
question of private wealth and public squalor, i.e., the external
diseconomies of the market system, whereby social and environm! ental costs
were imposed on society and nature.16

In responding to the attacks on Silent Spring,Carson complained of the
“enormous stream of propaganda” blocking rational science and ecological
values. She railed against the tax subsidies given for corporate lobbyists,
and attacked the large private grants to universities through which
corporations tried to purchase a “scientific front” for their operations.
Behind all of this lay the question she continually raised: “What
happens...when the public interest is pitted against large commercial
interests?”

Carson had no doubt that there was an irreconcilable conflict between
economic and environmental interests within contemporary society. Thus she
complained of the promotion of extreme “intensivism” in production in the
search for greater profits, particularly as it related to the maltreatment
of animals. The economic system, she emphasized in line with Rudd, was
geared toward “overproduction” at the expense of the environment. In our
society, dominated by material acquisition, life was destroyed because
business was “blinded by the dollar sign.” Indeed, “the modern world,” she
declared, “worships the gods of speed and quantity, and of the quick and
easy profit, and out of this idolatry monstrous evils have arisen.” She
added that “the struggle against the massed might of industry is too big for
one or two individuals...to handle”—a view that clearly called for the
formation of an environmental! movement to counter the power of industry.17

What appeared to anger the chemical industry more than anything else about
Rachel Carson’s book was that she chose to begin Silent Spring with a
literary device: “A Fable for Tomorrow”; the tale of “a town...where all
life seemed in harmony with its surroundings,” and which unthinkingly,
almost unbeknownst to itself, introduced chemicals of destruction into its
midst. For Carson “a grim specter” was haunting modern industrial,
acquisitive society, threatening to silence the spring. Her fable was
clearly “for tomorrow” in two senses: it represented both an unprecedented
threat to all life, and the possibility of overcoming it. The worst society
could do would be to stand still in the face of such a threat. Giving
evidence of her broad progressivism, she wrote elsewhere: “the changes and
the evolution of new w! ays of life are natural and on the whole desirable.”
18

Today many of the same problems that Carson pointed out persist, often in
more potent forms. This has to be the case for a system that by its very
nature must grow (at a rate exceeding population growth) in order to stay
out of severe crises, and in which producing more and more profit is the
motive force propelling the economy. An example of how economic priorities
override ecological approaches can be seen in the case of strawberry growers
in California, who can’t make as much money if they rotate crops and take
land out of strawberries. Thus, they “need” to use a biocide, methyl bromide
(which also acts to deplete the protective atmospheric ozone layer at fifty
times the level of CFCs), in order to kill soil-borne pests that would be
well taken care of by a more ecological approach to growing strawberries. To
give an idea of how significant the problem of pesticide use continues to
be, in 2006 so! me 64 percent of the fresh produce and 59 percent of the
processed fruits and vegetables tested by the U.S. Department of Agriculture
contained detectable levels of pesticide residues.19

Likewise, producers of agricultural animals using factory farms in which
animals are crowded together under inhumane conditions “must,” we are told,
routinely use antibiotics (a form of pesticide, of course) to try to keep
the animals growing reasonably fast. This leads not only to antibiotic
residue in meat but also to the development of antibiotic-resistant
microbes. Raising animals in a less dense and more humane system, only using
antibiotics when animals actually get sick, leads to higher production costs
and hence is rejected by market principles—what Carson called “the gods of
profits and production.” Although there is a developing public interest in
organically raised agricultural products and “humanely” raised animals these
are still niche markets.

The U.S. government has been particularly sympathetic to the desires of
business to maintain as free a hand as possible in continuing to introduce
new chemicals into the environment. It has therefore opposed mandating the
removal of potential hazards. As pointed out in a recent New York Times
article: “The United States has held on to its original 30-year-old chemical
regulatory systems, which make it difficult for agencies to ban chemicals or
require industry testing. While the government has worked with the industry
on a voluntary basis to study as many as 2,000 chemicals and phase out
certain ones, it has required the study of only 200 chemicals and restricted
the use of only 5 since 1976.”20

Beyond these persistent problems associated with the introduction of
synthetic chemicals into our environment, there remains the wider set of
ecological perils that Carson addressed. It was this larger ecological
critique that challenged the whole nature of the modern production system
that represented her most enduring contribution. Far from being the quiet,
demure, establishment figure that we often hear of today, Carson in reality
represented a defiant, radical voice. As a scientist and a writer she went
beyond the bounds of what is allowed in “polite circles” and thus alerted
and energized the public. When attacked by industry, she stood her ground,
and went to the root of the issue. She urged us, and particularly those
responsible for raising and educating children, to reject “the sterile
preoccupation with things that are artificial, the alienation from the
sources of our strength.”21

Carson spent most of her adult life discovering and lovingly describing the
“sea around us.” But as her ecological critique developed, perceiving the
destructiveness of the social encounter with the environment, she sought not
merely to explain the world, but to change it.

--

Notes

1.   Rachel Carson, Lost Woods (Boston: Beacon Press, 1998), 210, Silent
Spring (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1994), 13; Mark Hamilton Lytle, The Gentle
Subversive (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007).
2.   Lytle, The Gentle Subversive, 184; Carson, Silent Spring, 277–97;
Appendix IV, “Recommendations of the President’s Scientific Advisory
Committee on the Use of Pesticides,” in Robert L. Rudd, Pesticides and the
Living Landscape (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1964), 297.
3.   Data on pesticide active ingredients referred to here refers simply to
“conventional pesticides” (herbicides and insecticides) and excludes wood
preservatives (fungicides) and other ingredients on the EPA’s expanded
list.Carson, Silent Spring, 8; Shirley A. Briggs, “Thirty-Five Years with
Silent Spring,” Organization & Environment, 10:1 (March 1997), 73–84; Al
Gore, “Introduction,” in Carson, Silent Spring, xv–xxvi; Carson, Lost Woods,
218, 244; Dan Fagin and Marianne Lavelle, Toxic Deception (Monroe! , Maine:
Common Courage Press, 1999); Theo Colborn, et. al., Our Stolen Future (New
York; Dutton, 1996); “Sperm in the News,” Rachel’s Environment and Health
Weekly, January 18, 1996; Audubon, “Reduce All Pesticides But Eliminate
Those Used on the Lawn,”
http://www.audubon.org/bird/at_home/ReducePesticideUse.html.
4.   Carson quoted in Paul Brooks, The House of Life (Boston: Houghton
Mifflin, 1989), 301–02; Carson, Silent Spring, 211, Carson, Lost Woods,
106–09.
5.   Carson, Silent Spring, 36–37. On the mutagenic effects of
organochlorines, including some pesticides, see Joe Thornton, Pandora’s
Poison (Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press, 2000), 84–85.
6.   Loren R. Graham, Science and Philosophy in the Soviet Union (New York:
Alfred A. Knopf, 1972), 451–53; H. J. Muller, “Lenin’s Doctrines in Relation
to Genetics” (1934) in Graham, Science and Philosophy, 463; Elof Axel
Carlson, Genes, Radiation, and Society (Ithaca: Cornell University Press,
1981). Muller was a controversial figure in another respect, because of his
lifelong advocacy of “progressive eugenics.” His overall humanistic
commitments, however, were evident. In 1963 he received the “humanist of the
year award” from the American Humanist Association.
7.   H. J. Muller, “Silent Spring” (review), New York Herald Tribune,
September 23, 1962.
8.   Barry Commoner, Science and Survival (New York: Viking, 1966); Joel B.
Hagen, An Entangled Bank (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press,
1992), 100–07, 115–18; Richard Rhodes, Dark Sun (New York: Simon and
Schuster, 1995), 541–42; Tokue Shibata, “The H-Bomb Terror in Japan,”
Monthly Review 4, no. 2 (June 1954): 72–76; Eugene P. Odum, Fundamentals of
Ecology (Philadelphia: Saunders, 1959), 467; Carson, Lost Woods, 108–09,
237–38; “U.S. Nuclear Testing Program in the Marshall Islands,”
http://www.nuclearclaimstribunal.com; Helen Caldicott, Nuclear Power is Not
the Answer (New York: New Press, 2006), 64, 73.
9.   Virginia Brodine, Green Shoots and Red Roots (New York: International
Publishers, 2007), 3–10; Carson, Lost Woods, 232, 240. Briggs was editor of
the CNI/CEI’s publication Nuclear Information (later Science and Citizen)
from 1962 to 1969.
10. A. G. Tansley, “The Use and Abuse of Vegetational Concepts and Terms,”
Ecology 16, no. 3 (July 1935): 299, 303–04. In developing his ecosystem
concept Tansley was influenced by the dialectical systems analysis presented
by the British Marxist mathematician Hyman Levy in The Universe of Science
(New York: The Century Co., 1933).
11. Charles Elton, The Ecology of Invasions by Animals and Plants (London:
Methuen and Co., 1958), 137–42; Carson, Lost Woods, 190; Silent Spring, 155.
12. Robert L. Rudd, “The Irresponsible Poisoners,” The Nation (May 30,
1959), 496–97, “Pesticides: The Real Peril,” The Nation (November 28, 1959),
399–401, Pesticides and the Living Landscape, 154–55, 284–91; Frank Graham
Jr., Since Silent Spring (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1970), 167–69; Linda
Lear, Rachel Carson (New York: Henry Holt, 1997), 331–32; Murray Bookchin
(under the pseudonym of Lewis Herber), Our Synthetic Environment (New York:
Knopf, 1962), 55–61; Carson, Lost Woods,, 244–45.
13. Robert M. Hazen, Genesis (Washington D.C.: John Henry Press, 2005),
85–90; J. D. Bernal, The Origin of Life (New York: World Publishing Co.,
1967); Rachel Carson, The Sea Around Us (New York: Oxford University Press,
1989), 7; Carson, Lost Woods, 230–31.
14. Mary McCay, Rachel Carson (New York: Twayne Publishers, 1993), 23–24,
42–43, 109.
15. Carson, Lost Woods, xi.
16. Brooks quoted in Shirley A. Briggs, “Rachel Carson,” in Gino J. Marco,
et. al., ed., Silent Spring Revisited (Washington, D.C.: American Chemical
Society, 1987), 6; Lear, Rachel Carson, 334.
17. Carson, Lost Woods, 162, 194–95, 218, 220–21, Carson, Silent Spring, 9;
Carson quote in Lytle, 178–79.
18. Carson, Silent Spring, 1–3; Lost Woods, 89.
19. U.S. Department of Agriculture, Pesticide Data Program, Annual Summary,
Calendar Year 2006 (December 2007), x, http://www.ams.usda.gov.
20. “Meythyl Bromide Still Finds its Way into U.S. Fields,” San Francisco
Chronicle, November 24, 2007; “Everyday Items, Complex Chemistry,” New York
Times, December 22, 2007.
21. Rachel Carson, The Sense of Wonder (New York: Harper and Row, 1965), 43.

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