Forty-two years ago, a government biologist and science editor helped launch an environmental revolution. In Silent Spring, Rachel Carson untangled scientific jargon and unmasked industry spin to catalog the ways toxic chemicals commonly used in insecticides are reconfiguring cellular processes in plants and animals, altering the soil, the water and the air, and changing the relationship of humans to the Earth itself.
She challenged the public and the government, in essayist Linda Lear’s words, “to regulate our appetites — a truly revolutionary stance — for our self-preservation.”
Carson would not know the extent to which her challenge succeeded in raising public consciousness and rousing government action. And she could not know that over the next four decades the stakes would go higher and the challenges would get steeper. Silent Spring was published in 1962. Carson died of breast cancer 18 months later.
An aquatic biologist for the federal Bureau of Fisheries, later to become the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, Carson became editor of the agency’s publications. She already had published popular books on oceanography for the general reader, including the best-seller The Edge of the Sea, before she began taking notice of environmental damage caused by widespread aerial spraying of DDT and other pesticides.
“There was a strange stillness,” Carson wrote in “A Fable for Tomorrow,” the opening chapter of Silent Spring. “The birds, for example — where had they gone? Many people spoke of them, puzzled and 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.”
The birds, Carson argued — and the fish and the animals — are harbingers. She went on to link pesticide exposure to human cancer and genetic deterioration. “It is ironic,” she wrote, “to think that man might determine his own future by something so seemingly
trivial as the choice of an insect spray.”
Much has happened since the publication of Silent Spring. A wider environmental movement was born, which organized the first nationwide Earth Day in 1970. The Environmental Protection Agency was created. Use of DDT was banned in the United States. The federal government approved laws governing protection of water, air, land and endangered species.
James Gustave Speth was inspired by this environmental action, much of it in the 1970s, and by Rachel Carson. “But,” he writes in Red Sky at Morning, “we should also acknowledge that the cause to which she summoned us is still at best half-won.”
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. - Rachel Carson, Silent Spring, 1962
Speth’s research, published this year, is a significant extension of Carson’s premise. His reference pertains to the continued worldwide use of chemical pesticides. But his book catalogs a wider array of ways in which humans are altering their world, and for the worse.
He posits his own challenge, too: Protection of the world’s ecology is no longer a local issue only; it must go global. Human activity has begun to adversely affect the polar ice caps, the oceans and world climates. And such changes are happening at a more rapid pace than was generally imagined in Carson’s time.
“The destruction of the environment as a by-product of human enterprise is not new, but for most of our history it remained a localized and limited problem. The many forms of damage to the earth and its creatures increased in severity and scope during the Industrial Revolution,” he writes. “Yet it was not until just after World War II that the fast-forward button was pushed down and held.”
We are, he argues, sailing into disastrous waters, the storm is gathering — hence the sailors’ warning in the title. The question he asks is, can this fragile ship be saved? Or will we change forever the world as we know it?
Speth is dean of the School of Forestry & Environmental Studies at Yale University. He served as an adviser on environmental issues for Presidents Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton, and as chief executive officer of the United Nations Development Programme. And he was awarded the Blue Planet Prize for bringing global warming to wide attention.
In Red Sky at Morning, Speth documents the loss of forests, wetlands and species under human stewardship, but he calls our impact on the global climate machine the most risky “commandeering of natural systems.”
“The best current estimate is that, unless there is a major world correction, climate change projected for late this century will make it impossible for about half the Amer-ican land to sustain the types of plants and animals now on that land.”
Concentrations of carbon dioxide play a critical role in trapping heat in the earth’s atmosphere. And this increase in so-called greenhouse gases corresponds to increasing global use of fossil fuels — the oil, natural gas and coal used to run automobiles, light homes and power factories.
Most scientists don’t dispute this; many politicians do.
Speth details efforts at international solutions to environmental problems — success in shrinking the atmos- pheric ozone hole after the Montreal agreement, the U.S. hangup over carbon dioxide reductions in the Kyoto agreement. Overall, he believes international governments are inadequate for the rapid response now required.
He looks, instead, to a new gener-ation of environmental activists to effect change. He worries, though, that the dangers are more abstract and diffuse than in Carson’s time, making it more difficult to move the public — and government.
Still, he has plenty of suggestions. At the least, global warming should become part of this nation’s policy, including fuel efficiency and the use of alternative forms of energy.
We need an environmental revo-lution for the 21st century, he writes. “To despair when confronted with the challenges we have created would only assure a human and natural calamity we still have the power to avoid.”
Peggy Boyer Long can be reached at Peggyboy@aol.com.
Illinois Issues, July/August 2004
