"The history of life on earth has been a history of interaction between living things and their surroundings."
The inexhaustibly talented Rachel Carson (May 27, 1907 – April 14, 1964) was a gifted writer and biologist who wrote throughout the 1940s to the 1960s about the vicious effect of pesticides on soil, water, and air. Her work, however, received little attention outside of academic and scientific circles.
Undeterred in purpose and spurred by a vision to expand public knowledge of the toxic effect of the then-widely used pesticides, fungicides, and herbicides, Carson published her detailed and emphatic Silent Spring in 1962. It lifted humankind's understanding of nature from a resource to be used, abused, and discarded to a complexly intertwined system deleteriously affected by technological change.
Although the sudden death of thousands of fish or crustaceans in some stream or pond as the direct and visible effect of insect control is dramatic and alarming, these unseen and as yet largely unknown and unmeasurable effects of pesticides reaching estuaries indirectly in streams and rivers may, in the end, be even more disastrous.
Carson's writing included meticulously researched and annotated case studies and an enviable narrative gift. She turned tragedies into enlightenment.
In 1954 the United States Department of Agriculture and the Illinois Agriculture Department began a programme to eradicate the Japanese beetle along the line of its advance into Illinois, holding out the hope, and indeed the assurance, that intensive spraying would destroy the populations of the invading insect. The first 'eradication' took place that year, when dieldrin was applied to 1,400 acres by air. Another 2,600 acres were treated similarly in 1955, and the task was presumably considered complete. But more and more chemical treatments were called for, and by the end of 1961, some 131,000 acres had been covered. Even in the first years of the programme it was apparent that heavy losses were occurring among wildlife and in corners.
As the chemical penetrated the soil the poisoned beetle grubs crawled out on the surface of the ground, where they remained for some time before they died, attractive to insect-eating birds. Dead and dying insects of various species were conspicuous for about two weeks after the treatment. The effect on the bird populations could easily have been foretold. Brown thrashers, starlings, meadowlarks, grackles, and pheasants were virtually wiped out. Robins were 'almost annihilated,' according to the biologists' report. Dead earthworms had been seen in numbers after a gentle rain; probably, the robins had fed on the poisoned worms.
For other birds, too, the once beneficial rain had been changed, through the evil power of the poison introduced into their world, into an agent of destruction. Birds seen drinking and bathing in puddles left by rain a few days after the spraying were inevitably doomed.
Silent Spring was profound, not only because it delivered a thunderous awareness of the harm of modern farming and launched an overhaul of the farming industry but also because it imagined a new partnership between humans and nature, a belief that continues to be a foundation of the modern environmental movement.
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 moulded by the environment. [...] 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.
Like Polish poet and Nobel laureate Wislawa Szymborska, who was incredulous of the power within our microbial realms, Carson focused on the small as a window to the consequential.
So it is that only when we bring our focus to bear, first on the individual cells of the body, then on the minute structures within the cells, and finally on the ultimate reactions of molecules within these structures—only when we do this can we comprehend the most severe and far-reaching effects of the haphazard introduction of foreign chemicals into our internal environment.
Read more about the small and minute adding up to something greater than the sum of their parts in The Latent Greatness of Small Things or Things Grown Piece by Piece.
"The yolk of an egg is a single cell," informs biologist Paul Nurse in What is Life?. Chlordane, another chlorinated hydrocarbon, has all the unpleasant attributes of DDT plus a few that are peculiarly its own. Its residues are long persistent in soil, on foodstuffs, or on surfaces to which it may be applied, yet it is also quite volatile and poisoning by inhalation is a definite risk to anyone handling or exposed to it. Chlordane makes use of all available portals to enter the body. It penetrates the skin easily, is breathed in as vapour, and is absorbed from the digestive tract if residues are swallowed. Like all other chlorinated hydrocarbons, its deposits build up in the body in a cumulative fashion. A diet containing such a small amount of chlordane as 2.5 parts per million may eventually lead to storage of 75 parts per million in the fat of experimental animals.
So experienced a pharmacologist as Dr. Lehman has described chlordane as 'one of the most toxic of insecticides anyone handling it could be poisoned.' Judging by the carefree liberality with which dusts for lawn treatments by suburbanites are laced with chlordane; this warning has not been taken to heart.
Carson's science-based position in Silent Spring launched a movement of environmentalists who questioned the invisible effects of civilization on our environment. But what she believed, that we are connected with nature, wasn't new—it echoes ancient beliefs of the Stoics, the Romantics, and the 19th-century Transcendentalists. Henry David Thoreau, a founder of the Transcendental movement, wrote as early as 1839 of a society's need to protect its fish stock from overuse and damage due to industrialization.
Yet, Silent Spring was unique to 20th-century technology, which answered humankind's quest for more efficient food production with chemical solutions. Carson's evidence of the effect of that trade-off was a perfect symbiosis of compassion, beautiful writing, and meticulous science:
The contamination of our world is not alone a matter of mass spraying. Indeed, for most of us this is of less importance than the innumerable small-scale exposures to which we are subjected day by day, year after year. Like the constant dripping of water that in turn wears away the hardest stone, this birth-to-death contact with dangerous chemicals may in the end prove disastrous. No matter how slight, each of these recurrent exposures contributes to the progressive build-up of chemicals in our bodies and so to cumulative poisoning. Probably no person is immune to contact with this spreading contamination unless he lives in the most isolated situation imaginable. Lulled by the soft sell and the hidden persuader, the average citizen is seldom aware of the deadly materials with which he is surrounding himself; indeed, he may not realize he is using them at all.
Of Carson's many lessons, to care is first and foremost. To care and then to know. There is a gentle kindness in her writing, a wonder of nature, and, despite all cause for it, a lack of admonishment for those who destroy it.
A common red damselfly by nature photographer Joshua Burch."For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you," wrote Walt Whitman in his epic poem Song of Myself. This is the thesis of Silent Spring.
Unfortunately, it is still much unheard and unheeded, a tragedy eloquently expressed by American poet and farmer Wendell Berry:
The farmlands and woodlands of this neighborhood are being hurt worse and faster by bad farming and bad logging than at any other time in my memory. The signs of this abuse are often visible even from the roads, but nobody is looking. Or to people who are looking, but seeing from no perspective of memory or knowledge, the country simply looks “normal.” Outsiders who come visiting almost always speak of it as "beautiful.” But along this river, the Kentucky, which I have known all my life and have lived beside for half a century, there is a large and regrettable recent change, clearly apparent to me, and to me indicative of a drastic change in water quality, but perfectly invisible to nearly everybody else.
From Wendell Berry's Our Only World
The change Berry notes is the absence of black willow trees beside the Kentucky River, which usually co-exists in riparian settings with vigor and fortitude. Do you mourn the loss of a particular tree, wood, or nature scene? It has become almost commonplace today to witness nature as a loss, as something that once was or soon will be no more.
Photograph by Ellen Vrana.The pathos of evolving nature at the hands of humans is not modern, but it does need to be modernized, yet again, as we continue to leave more than our fair share of sinister impact. The chemicals might have changed, but technology's environmental impact from human demand has yet to. However we shift our methods, our principle focus must remain that we must first care in order to change.
Read Carson's wonderful ode to our sensual intake of nature, which was self-admittedly her favorite work, published posthumously, as well as Thoreau's short, sublime essay on walking in nature as pure freedom, and Robert Mcfarlane's search for the purest nature outside human grip. 