60 Years of Noise from a Silent Spring: Part I.
The legacy of Rachel Carson's courage, writing, and wisdom
Sixty years ago this month, Silent Spring was published in the US and became an instant bestseller.
It’s sort of hard to imagine that a book, ostensibly about the impact of pesticides, would become a bestseller, but of course it was about so much more than that. It explained, really for the first time to a general audience, the interconnectedness of nature and of humanity.
The book challenged, with equal parts poetry and science, the dominant mindset of ‘control’ over nature, and instead implored us to see ourselves as a part of Earth’s ecosystem. (A new word to most people at that time).
The New Yorker had begun to publish excerpts from the books in June of 1962, so there was already considerable interest by the time the book itself hit the shelves in September. And it clearly struck a nerve with the chemical industry, but it just as clearly tapped into a low-grade anxiety about the negative impacts to wildlife and other aspects of nature that ‘regular citizens’ were already beginning to witness.
And from the very opening passage of the book: -
“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 color that flamed and flickered across a backdrop of pines. Then foxes barked in the hills and deer silently crossed the fields, half hidden in the mists of the fall mornings.”
—Carson connected with the almost visceral value that Americans’ placed on ‘their’ land. This is a genius of the book and one that isn’t lost on me as I write these pieces for Earth’s Next Chapter. Painting the ‘good’ picture first allows us to more clearly see and appreciate what we want to save or aspire to, rather than starting only with destruction and mayhem.
I’m not sure I know of another book that directly or indirectly led to such policy shifts: the Clean Air Act (1963), the Wilderness Act (1964), the National Environmental Policy Act (1969), the Environmental Protection Agency (1970), and the the Clean Water Act and the Endangered Species Act (both 1972) - all were created on the heels of the understanding and concern Carson initiated through Silent Spring.
It’s hard to overstate Carson’s impact in this respect.
But Silent Spring could not have been written without Carson’s foundation in other writing. She also wrote ‘Under the Sea-Wind’ in 1941, and ‘The Sea Around Us’ in 1951 - a book that stayed on the New York Times best seller list for an incredible 86 weeks - as well as other articles and poetry, and another book, ‘The Edge of the Sea’ in 1955.
She had already captured the hearts and minds of American readers through her poetic and scientific appreciation of nature, especially in the tide-pools and rocky shorelines of her house in Maine.
Here is a passage from ‘Under the Sea-Wind’:
“To stand at the edge of the sea, to sense the ebb and the flow of the tides, to feel the breath of a mist moving over a great salt marsh, to watch the flight of shore birds that have swept up and down the surf lines of the continents for untold thousands of years, to see the running of the old eels and the young shad to the sea, is to have knowledge of things that are as nearly eternal as any earthly life can be.”
As Jill Lepore wrote in the New Yorker in 2018: “Political persuasion is a strange measure of the worth of a piece of prose whose force lies in knowledge and wonder.”
In my view, this is the real lasting legacy of Carson. Silent Spring surely did give rise to our modern idea of environmentalism, but I think it laid the groundwork for much more than: a total re-evaluation of our place in the natural world. A re-evaluation we are still undergoing….
…..Part II in this series of Carson’s legacy will be posted next week.
Beautiful.....