Rachel Carson's Silent Spring

...On a larger scale, Carson downplayed the political implications of her account through a consistently elliptical capping of its descriptions of irrational pesticide use...

...Her discussion of a new carcinogenic chemical used against mites and ticks requires a stream of nonspecific designations: "a chemical," "this chemical," "the chemical," "the product," "the suspected carcinogen," and so on, rather than Aramite, the product's name...

...In this essay, however, I want to consider how Silent Spring's success depended on its politics and, relatedly, its conception of nature...

...Elsewhere she describes how "funds for chemical control came in never-ending streams, while the biologists . . . who attempted to measure the damage to wildlife had to operate on a fmancial shoestring...

...Carson's silence on these questions buries the problem of the democratic control of science, technology, and production...

...Her call for new attitudes is a reasonable, even inspiring, repudiation of human arrogance in favor of an attitude of cautious "guidance," reasonable "accommodation," sensitive "management," and an ethic of "sharing" rather than "brute force...

...0 Notes 1 Quotations are from a review by John Osmundsen in the New York Times Book Review, May 19, 1963, p.28...

...The resort to weapons such as insecticides to control it is a proof of insufficient knowledge...

...The dynamics of the competitive free market pressured farmers, suppliers of farm technology, and food processors toward pesticide use...

...She herself describes the repeated bypassing of forms of biological control known to be cheap, effective, and harmless in favor of harmful chemicals...

...And she knew that for decades prior to World War Two, before they were eclipsed by faster acting and profit-producing insecticides, biological methods had been investigated and adopted not because they offered a more "natural" or ethically superior solution but because they were cheap and effective...

...Carson's nature—a "complex, precise, and highly integrated system" characterized by relations of "interdependence and mutual benefit," and regulating checks and balances— was the new science of ecology's rendition of a conception that goes back to antiquity...

...Bookchin makes a different use of the past in his somewhat broader and more forthright account of how vested interests have shaped the directions taken by modern agriculture...

...Why the marginalization of effective biological control...

...contention about specific culprits, Carson felt, would have distracted from her central message...

...Rather than seeking to understand the intricate life cycle and ecology of this tiny insect, scientists invented a scheme that would allow them, by infiltrating the very heart of their natural reproductive cycle, to sever the link between generations...

...most were recognized decades before Silent Spring was published...

...The existing "system of 540 • DISSENT Reconsiderations relationships between living things," she claimed, "cannot be safely ignored any more than the law of gravity can be defied with impunity...

...Through these she taught her readers to see pesticide problems as resulting from oversight and carelessness, or at the most arrogance, rather than from greed or systemic structural factors...

...For example, she enthusiastically endorses the dispersal of X-ray-sterilized male screwworms and heralds the "complete extinction of the screw-worm in the Southeast" as a "brilliant success" and "a triumphant demonstration of the worth of scientific creativity...

...For example, the cost of approving a new pesticide and the demand for "organic" produce have both grown to a point where alternative forms of pest management are now becoming economically feasible...

...Our nostalgia," he claims, "springs from a growing need to restore the normal, balanced, and manageable rhythms of human life—that is, an environment that meets our requirements as individuals and biological beings" (emphasis mine...

...Brought out by a major trade press, this book charted the tremendous increase in the production and use of these chemicals since World War II, and documented their failings...

...banned, only used very selectively...

...But an avoidance of overt politics was also a strategic choice, one of several Carson made in carefully shaping a defensible challenge of pesticide practices...

...a sound ecological practice was synonymous, for Bookchin, with shaping a satisfying social life...

...After the appearance of the New Yorker articles, for example, Louis A. McLean, secretary and general counsel of Velsicol, the sole manufacturer of chlordane and heptachlor, sent a five-page registered letter to Houghton 542 • DISSENT Reconsiderations Mifflin suggesting that it might want to reconsider publishing Silent Spring...

...This, I believe, is a large part of what allowed her work to be so broadly accepted...

...In addition, pesticides were first tested and mass produced during a period when priorities were skewed by wartime agendas...

...A similar negative formulation lessens blame even as it assigns it...

...This range of assaults to human well-being and nature, claimed Bookchin, were of a piece, and originated in unviable social arrangements...

...there is no excuse for scientific conceit here (243...

...the discrepancy between budgets for inventing chemicals and for studying their damage...

...Chemical hazards to human food supplies other than pesticides (synthetic hormones, antibiotics, and additives) were described in detail, as was the degradation and erosion of soil by large-scale agriculture, and the deterioration of the nutritional quality of crops raised on synthetic fertilizers...

...The book's muted political stance was in part a consequence of its author's background...

...What enabled Silent Spring's critique of pesticides to become so broadly accepted in middle-class America...

...The book's broad acceptance gave it considerable if circuitous political-economic impact...

...FALL • 1995 • 541 Reconsiderations Bookchin's analysis in Our Synthetic Environment, which didn't rest on notions of "the balance of nature," is spared these particular paradoxes...

...A second guiding metaphor in the book is the related notion of an "ecological web of life" whose "threads" "bind" together organisms and their environment so that even minute changes in one area reverberate over space and time...

...She tells, for example, of farmers who chose to spray crows rather than switch to a variety of corn that didn't attract birds because they "had been persuaded of the merits of killing by poison" (emphasis mine...

...Why did spraying take place nonetheless...

...But although it provided Carson with a versatile conceptual framework and familiar stirring images, there are difficulties in founding a treatment of environmental destruction on a depoliticized notion of "nature...

...Carson mentions some of these early successes as well as several contemporary "shining models" of nonchemical methods of pest control in her chapter on biological control...

...11-12...

...By pastoral here I am referring to what Leo Marx points to as the most long-lived Western model for an appropriate relation to nature, which proposes a middle ground between the wild and the overcivilized...

...Similarly, while it is clear from her remarks in interviews and from her collaboration with the politically outspoken director of the U.S...

...We need a more high-minded orientation and a deeper insight, which I miss in many researchers...

...4 Jay Feldman, 'Thirty Years after Silent Spring, the Choice Is Clear," Global Pesticide Campaigner 2(4) (1992), iv...

...Similar questions could be asked about each of the biological control technologies Carson celebrates: juvenile hormones, chemical attractants, repellent sounds, microbial and viral infection of insects, introduced predators and parasites...

...A few months later, however, in three June issues of the New Yorker magazine and then in the fall as a book, Rachel Carson's critique of pesticides was published...

...3 Could this "surely" be Carson allowing herself a touch of irony...

...Her excision of the subject here closes down a crucial line of inquiry...

...FALL • 1995 • 539 Reconsiderations Also contributing to the book's success were Carson's standing and skills as a gifted writer and her biological training, which Herber lacked...

...She seemed to believe that it was enough to present the facts and let public opinion take over...

...spraying continues because of "entrenched custom?' or "surely, only because the facts are not known...

...Is this intervention— which Carson notes in passing kills not only the target species but at least forty other species in the scarabaeid family—more respectful of the balance of nature than certain pesticides...

...Life is a miracle beyond our comprehensions, and we should reverence it...

...Many innocent groups are financed and led into attacks on the chemical industry by these sinister parties...

...Nature whole is the basis for Silent Spring's unsettling tidings of balance lost...

...Note that having forgone biological nature as a guide for human action, Bookchin immediately recovers another nature: the "normal" and "balanced" rhythms of human life...

...But it did frighten people, link health to nature for the first time as a topic of heated public debate, and draw on familiar conceptions of nature to undermine the postwar aura of pesticides as a marvelous technical achievement and cast them as sinister and stupid instead...

...Terms like the "natural," or the "balance of nature" can obscure the social relations and priorities that go into evaluating environmental practices...

...Humbleness is in order...

...Herber's unnoticed book can scarcely serve as a model for a more politically desirable intervention, but it does highlight another conception of politics and nature that was possible, if not broadly acceptable, in that moment...

...This term reifies judgments about the respective benefits and costs—to humans—of these methods, creating internal contradictions in Carson's account...

...The science of range-management," she says in the last sentence of chapter six, "has largely ignored [the] possibility [of biological control of weeds by plant-eating insects] although these insects . . . could easily be turned to man's advantage...

...But even in the absence of potential legal action, claims Linda Lear, Carson might not have mentioned specific names...

...For example, her extended description of the biological havoc caused by pesticide wastes dumped over the course of ten years by "a chemical plant" doesn't say which...

...These changes, the author stressed, should not jeopardize nutrition and the American economy, and pesticides should not be This is an abbreviated version of an essay to appear in David Macauley, ed., Ecological Thinkers (working title), Guilford, 1995...

...Yet Carson had evidence suggesting that humility and artifice alone often did not determine the choice of pest control methods...

...Politics, and Its Avoidance The massive adoption of synthetic pesticides in the postwar decades in America was facilitated by a densely interrelated network of factors...

...His letter built up to the following statement: Unfortunately, in addition to the sincere opinions by natural food faddists, Audubon groups and others, members of the chemical industry in this country and in Western Europe must deal with sinister influences whose attacks on the chemical industry have a dual purpose: (1) to create the false impression that all business is grasping and immoral, and (2) to reduce the use of agricultural chemicals in this country and in the countries of Western Europe, so that our supply of food will be reduced to east-curtain parity...

...Day after day, in huge "fly factories," technicians bombarded male insects with mutagenic radiation and then, using 20 light planes working 5 to 6 hours daily, these insidious carriers of genetically altered material were dispersed over huge areas...

...And in her next chapter, on the problems of chemical control, she describes prominent early disasters and the intensification of pesticide side effects in the late fifties...

...Repeatedly she argued that the instances of spraying she describes were not only harmful to humans and wildlife, but unjustified even in terms of biological effectiveness or economic payoff to farmers...

...Once again, she has juxtaposed facts that pose a pointed question: why has a problematic form of pest control replaced an ef544 • DISSENT Reconsiderations fective one...

...his description of the eclipse of sane ways of doing things points his readers to the political struggle necessary to establish and uphold these...

...On the thirtieth anniversary of Silent Spring's publication the executive director of the National Coalition Against the Misuse of Pesticides could still describe America as standing at the crossroads between "promoting safer alternative pest management techniques or simply substituting less toxic inputs into conventional pesticideintensive practices...

...they were institutionally and culturally entrenched at the war's end...

...She concludes another section with the observation that "there is no dearth of men who understand these things . . . but they are not the men who order the wholesale drenching of the landscape with chemicals...

...It prompted a debate that led to legislation banning some pesticides and tightening the procedures for testing, registering, and using others...

...This prosperous town is far from the trouble of cities, but also safely removed from wild nature, signified by the barking of foxes in the distant hills...

...The book flopped...

...These notions—the balance of nature, the ecological web, "the natural"—do a tremendous amount of persuasive work...

...In its explicitly theological eighteenth-century form, for example, the harmony and order underlying nature's economy had a divine source: God's providence ensured a system of perpetual balance among all living things, in which each creature had its allotted place...

...The ease with which a creative triumph becomes a tragedy of technological hubris highlights the instability of the categories of natural and unnatural...

...Carson had been warned of the hostility her pesticide work would invoke...

...2 Frank Graham, Jr., Since Silent Spring (Houghton Mifflin, 1970), p. 49...

...She was able to offer a terrifyingly eloquent portrait of what it would mean to inhabit an increasingly toxic landscape...

...Carson offers the biological control of pests as the technical manifestation of this more humble attitude...

...Pushing the Limits Silent Spring presented facts that brought its readers to the threshold of difficult questions about how pest control might be guided by biological knowledge and democratically determined priorities, rather than the logic of capital accumulation...

...Carson's scenarios demand an answer, but hers is vague or often lacking altogether...

...A broadly understandable and persuasive challenge to the pesticide paradigm had both to criticize and placate, to extend and maintain existing worldviews...

...Existing standards and legal procedures were not fitted to enforce the regulation and testing of this new technology, nor to establish liability for damages it caused...

...It embodies the pastoral vision of enjoying the best of human artifice and inventiveness while preserving a closeness to natural cycles and creatures...

...By not grappling head on with the political and economic factors that led to the entrenchment of pesticides in postwar America, and by centering its arguments instead on conceptions of natural balance and the web of life, the book was made palatable to a wide audience...

...There was much praise, as well as angry rebuttal and attacks, including a fierce and well-funded campaign by the chemical industry to counter Carson's message...

...It is standard in the historiography of environmentalism to speak of the book as a—perhaps the—watershed of the modem environmental movement...

...Carson came to her book as a biologist, as an author immersed in the nature writing tradition since adolescence, and as a former writer and editor of public information publications for the Fish and Wildlife Service...

...Building on postwar anxieties about technological excess and radioactivity, Carson's novel descriptions of our vulnerability to new chemicals that acted in eerie and unexpected ways were shocking and galvanizing...

...Nor were the many problems that plagued chemical pesticides (resistance, resurgence, toxicity, bioaccumulation) a surprise that surfaced with their widespread agricultural use in the postwar years...

...Destruction of the environment stems from people's failure to "read" the "open book" of the landscape...

...I doubt many of you have heard of its author, Lewis Herber, or remember its title, Our Synthetic Environment...

...2 In such a climate even some members of the Sierra Club's board of directors opposed the appearance of a positive review of Silent Spring in the Club Bulletin...

...Unsuspecting females mated with these seemingly normal products of the laboratory...

...Individual action or even remedial legislation were not, in his mind, sufficient to get at the heart of these problems...

...Here she offers the book's sole explicitly structural analysis, consisting of the two paragraphs about chemical industry funding for university research mentioned earlier, whose impact is soon diluted with more idealist explanations...

...Carson brought a tone of elegy into conventions of wonder by introducing her reader to the unseen dynamics and relations of the natural world (a hidden sea of groundwater, invisible bird flyways and fish migration paths, teeming microscopic soil life) through portraying their disruption by pesticides...

...They demanded a return to rural and agricultural communities of human scale through deindustrialization, decentralization, and a reining in of the profit motive, so that the "most pernicious laws of the market place" were not "given precedence over the most compelling laws of biology...

...It allowed Carson to invert a tradition of nature writing that celebrated harmony and connectedness to cast pesticides as unnatural and sinister...

...Bookchin's pill was clearly too big, bitter, and unfamiliar for most Americans to swallow at that time...

...Her Silent Spring contained in amplified form every one of the charges against pesticides I have just listed for Herber's work, but no substantially new ones .Yet Carson's critique created an immediate storm of media and governmental attention...

...A more forthrightly "political" analysis would probably not have survived to have Silent Spring's political impact...

...facts about pesticides' destructiveness are denied out of "shortsightedness...

...Within a year of its publication, Silent Spring had prompted programs for scientific research into the hazards of pesticides, brought significant changes in their regulation, spurred public debate on environmental practices more generally, inspired a younger generation of environmental activists, and made ecology a household word...

...In the face of these forces, the underfunded and mismanaged biological control methods that had shown great promise in the decades prior to the war did not stand a chance, and were soon eclipsed...

...Scattered reports of problems with pesticides had appeared in the technical literature from the fifties onwards, but it was only in 1962 that a wide-ranging critique of pesticides was published for a popular audience...

...The disappearance of Bookchin's work and the furor over even the politically restrained Silent Spring suggest that Carson stood close to these limits...

...It too is structured as a middle ground, a way of navigating between the technological hubris of pesticides on the one hand, and a vulnerability to nature's wildness in the form of pests on the other...

...Pesticides are an evil blight disrupting this harmony, killing the town's birds and animals and bringing a strange stillness, a silent spring...

...Why, for instance, is the importation of an exotic pathogen (a bacteria) to kill the Japanese beetle a "natural" means of control...

...At the same time, however, Carson's avoidance of politics left unchallenged the structural underpinnings of pesticide use that are with us still...

...While these unions produced eggs, these were, without exception, sterile...

...The chapter continues to talk of people being "slow to recognize" problems with pesticides, and of chemical research drawing the best people because it seems "more exciting," and Carson concludes it with a quotation that exemplifies the book's dominant message...

...Bookchin was steeped in the writings of the Frankfurt School, in anarchist theory, and Marxism...

...There is, he argues, no preordained state that must be preserved forever, and the "quasi-mystical" and unreserved valorization of "nature" and the "natural" is misguided, "an impediment to a rational outlook...

...It would also have helped had she unreified "spray planes" to make more visible which people were paid...

...One could not hope for a more symbolically-appealing solution: Yankee ingenuity in service of a pastoral ideal...

...Written pseudonymously by the journalist and anarchist theorist Murray Bookchin, who later became well known as the founder of social ecology, Our Synthetic Environment briskly covered almost all of the substance of Carson's critique of pesticides in less than twenty pages...

...The book demonstrated how pesticides were not only harmful, but ultimately self-defeating, since pests soon developed resistance while beneficial insects and animals that helped keep them in check were killed...

...In less than two years, the species had vanished...

...For him human emotions in the presence of nature are not an indication of nature's special metaphysical status (as they were for the Transcendentalists with whom Carson sympathized), and reticence in using technology to remake nature in service of our needs should not be sentimentalized...

...The book's political consequences are complex, and still unfolding...

...4 FALL • 1995 • 545 Reconsiderations At the same time, however, other longer term and more subtle effects of the sea-change Carson helped initiate are only now beginning to surface...

...This is because Carson cast the entrenchment of pesticides and the call for their replacement as primarily an epistemic and moral problem, rather than a political-economic one...

...My goal, however, is not to judge the book politically ineffective or undesirable, only to highlight the limits of what could be said and widely heard in that particular moment...

...I want to explore the mixed results of this success...

...The rest of the book documented the many other ways in which human health was compromised by the industrialized, urbanized way of life that increasingly characterized postwar America...

...Take, for example, Carson's preference for biological rather than chemical methods of pest control as less disturbing of "nature's balance...

...3 "We are walkFALL • 1995 • 543 Reconsiderations ing in nature like an elephant in the china cabinet," she quotes a scientist whose "rare understanding" she respects, implying "our" problem to be one of clumsiness...

...Carson's book did not call for nor achieve a fundamental democratization of research, technology, and production...

...These are valuable orientations in themselves, but their mildness and abstraction bespeak the book's missing politics...

...But with political-economic ground rules remaining intact, agriculture and the chemical industry could respond to these developments relatively easily...

...And beyond these problems of the food system, Bookchin described how health was endangered by a polluted, stressful, and dehumanizing urban environment...

...Even at the level of single sentences Carson frequently masks agency and blame through passive or negative sentence constructions...

...One concrete way in which politics was avoided in her text was through the circumlocutions she substituted for the names of chemicals, their manufacturers, or other delinquent parties in order to avoid lawsuits...

...and from a review in the (London) Times Literary Supplement, February 15, 1963, p.103...

...Had Carson chosen to cast the X-ray sterilization of males as unnatural, the rhetorical resources she uses to disparage pesticides could easily have been redirected, as in the following imagined rendition of the same facts Carson gives in her celebratory account...

...Carson's initially embattled viewpoint on pesticide problems rapidly became absorbed into public sentiment...

...Further pesticide applications to counter a resurgence of the targeted species and infestations of new insects that weren't a problem before began an escalating cycle...

...Why did these two works have such a different fate...

...Silent Spring, however, made visible only a tiny part of this network of factors...

...Curiously, it may have required an "apolitical" challenge to pesticides to initiate this process...

...At the end of the book, in the last chapter, entitled "The Other Road," Carson offers her proposal for regaining this lost balance through various forms of biological pest control...

...How much more powerful would this sentence have been had its latter part been directly and positively phrased: "there was incentive to use as much as possible...

...Carson's reticence about the political and economic forces encouraging heedless pesticide use made it hard for her to talk about fundamental social interventions as part of a solution...

...This kind of hanging question is most comfortably accommodated at the end of sections...

...More generally, these reforms did nothing to stop the trend toward increasingly mechanized and large-scale agriculture that made pesticides unavoidable...

...It received short negative reviews in the literary supplements of the New York Times and the Times of London, and not much else, and soon disappeared...

...And a pest-control method that was chemical-based, fast-acting, broad-spectrum, and seemed to offer total eradication accorded well with certain American cultural values...

...Focusing on chlorinated hydrocarbons and DDT in particular, it described their physiological effects, their impact on human health and wildlife, and the inadequacy of existing pesticide regulation...

...But surely the difference between this celebrated method and the chemical practices Carson castigates lies not in their inherent degrees of "naturalness" but in (human) judgments about their respective impacts...

...But Carson's avoidance of politics, abetted by her conceptions of nature, helped lead them away again...

...His book was dismissed as "nice sentiments, only impossible," as "numbing" or "unmanageable" in its scope, and as offering only "incoherent," "intangible," or hopelessly utopian proposals.' Carson's Nature Whereas the focus of Bookchin's analysis was "the relationship between human and human," Silent Spring's center of gravity lay in Carson's reworking of deeply conventional conceptions of the balance of nature and the web of life...

...He discusses, for example, how the food industry undermined enlightened standards for food purity in place at the beginning of the century, and nibbled away at the Delany clause protecting consumers from carcinogens...

...Linda Lear in her forthcoming biography of Carson shows, for example, how Carson chose to include only a small amount of the extensive evidence she had for the environmental origins of cancer, and declined to mention organic gardening for fear of being associated with food faddists...

...and by the rise in heart disease and cancer associated with lifestyle and environmental causes...

...Silent Spring opens with such a middle ground in its rustic idyll of "a town in the heart of America where all life seemed to live in harmony with its surroundings...

...For Bookchin, these early achievements are not simply models for what could be achieved again in the future...

...I am grateful to Iain Boal, Leo Marx, Peter Taylor, Charles Weiner, Rosalind Williams, Anna Tsing, Debra Keates, Barbara Goldoftas, Linda Lear, Danny Faber, and participants in the 1994-1995 IAS Social Sciences Seminar for comments on versions of that essay, and to the Institute for Advanced Study, where it was completed...

...Her proposals, therefore, gravitate toward the only resource left to her: a respect for the balance of nature and ecological interconnectedness, to be achieved through attitudinal reform and the technologies of biological control...

...She wrote in a period that some have called the "McCarthy era of the environmental movement," in which those who questioned the use of pesticides were specifically branded as being against the spirit of free enterprise...

...The "balance of nature" provided Carson with a norm against which human interference could be assessed and challenged...

...Department ofAgriculture Biological Survey, Clarence Cottam, that Carson was keenly aware of the financial incentives that skewed the development, use, and evaluation of pesticides, she kept this out of the book...

...With the exception of the Army Chemical Corps, Carson did not name a single manufacturer of chemicals or pesticide brand name...

...At the same time, its avoidance of politics troubled the logic of Carson's argument...

...Even when protesting the fact that certain innocuously named weed killers sold for suburban lawns didn't list their ingredients, including chlordane and dieldrin, nor mention their dangers, she withheld the names of these products at this tantalizingly apt point, when mentioning them would have worked directly to end their facade of benignity...

...Readers are left to make their own inferences or, more likely, to ignore the troubling questions these narrative lapses signal...

...By casting the problem of pest control as primarily an issue of achieving a harmonious relationship to "nature," with little reference to the social criteria embedded in the term, nor the changes in social institutions necessary to achieve this harmony, Carson stripped her book of overtly political analysis or claims...

...Nor did Carson invoke the biocentric convictions about the inherent worth of other forms of life that she expressed in other writing...

...by the radioactive byproducts of nuclear testing and energy production...

...the distance between those who know and those who order...

...As part of nature, humans are justified, claims Bookchin, in making the world's fate up as they go—if they do so with an eye first and foremost toward "promoting human health and fitness...

...The book proposed replacing this hubristic attempt to master nature, which was destroying the earth's capacity to support human life, with a philosophy of wise management of ecosystems and the development of ecologically sound biological control of pests...

...Slipping into the militaristic imagery she objects to in the proponents of pesticide spraying, she talks approvingly of research that turns "insect sterilization into a weapon that would wipe out a major insect enemy...

...Part of the answer lies, no doubt, in luck and in the New Yorker forum...

...When the president of the chemical manufacturing company Monsanto characterized her as "a fanatic defender of the cult of the balance of nature," he was reacting to what is indeed the book's central metaphor...

...Thus the book is dense with images of dislocation: a living world "shattered," landscapes "bludgeoned," threads "broken," fabric "ripped apart," delicate processes "uncoupled...

...Restrictions placed several years later on organochlorines, the earliest generation of synthetic pesticides such as DDT, for example, didn't halt their continued manufacture for export, nor the development and profitable production of other pesticides, nor recent attempts to genetically engineer profitable and hazardous pest and pesticide resistant crops...

...And by including the delicate internal realms of human and animal physiology within nature's balanced and interconnected system, she seamlessly and chillingly joined inner and outer landscapes, ecology and human health, launching a new phase of environmental concern...

...To the extent that Carson does trace the origins of the destruction whose "irrationality" she has exposed, her account of agency is feeble and diffuse, her blame mild...

...Because the spray planes were paid by the gallon rather than by the acre," Carson says, "there was no effort to be conservative...