The Appearance of Silent Spring
The Reception of Silent Spring
Readers interested in the social and cultural presence of Silent Spring will find a beautiful resource by historian Mark Stoll, Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring: A Book that Changed the World.” This virtual exhibition at the Environment & Society Portal presents the global reception and impact of Carson’s book. The site offers insight into the reception of the book in popular culture, music, literature, and the arts. The exhibit begins with an overview and ends with a list for further reading.
The reception of Silent Spring is complex, both in the United States and around the world. One of the interesting questions for readers of Carson is how a particular book like Silent Spring uses language to generate a response in readers. In particular, Carson explicitly urges her readers to consider the intersection of scientific and moral questions–an intersection where it is difficult to avoid thinking about knowledge, power, privilege, gender, social justice, and democracy in the social movement of environmentalism.
Selected Contemporary Responses
“The crux, the fulcrum over which the argument [of Silent Spring] chiefly rests, is that Miss Carson maintains that the balance of nature is a major force in the survival of man, whereas the modern chemist, the modern biologist and scientist, believes that man is steadily controlling nature.”
—Robert H. White Stevens (chemist)
“On the whole, her book will come to be regarded in time as a gross distortion of the actual facts, essentially unsupported by either scientific experimental evidence or practical experience in the field”
—Prediction by White-Stevens at the Synthetic Organic Chemical Manufacturer’s Association in 1962. Qtd. in Van Fleet, 1963)
If man were to follow the teachings of Miss Carson, we would return to the Dark Ages, and the insects and diseases and vermin would once again inherit the earth.
—White-Stevens, interview, CBS Reports (3 April 1963)
“…what I interpret as bias and oversimplification may be just what it takes to write a best seller” (From and editorial, qtd. In Diamond, 1963).
Carson is dismissed in print “hysterical,” “emotional,” “bird lover,” “cat lover,” “fish lover,” “nun of nature,” and “priestess of nature”
Carson “is unmarried but not a feminist (‘I’m not interested in things done by women or by men but in things done by people.’)”
—Life magazine (105).
Miss Rachel Carson’s reference to the selfishness of insecticide manufacturers probably reflects her Communist sympathies, like a lot of our writers these days. We can live without birds and animals, but, as the current market slump shows, we cannot live without business. As for insects, isn’t it just like a woman to be scared to death of a few little bugs! As long as we have the H-bomb everything will be O.K.
—Letter to the editor of the New Yorker [cited in Smith 2001, 741]
Reception and Legacy
“Forty years ago, Silent Spring delivered a galvanic jolt to public consciousness and, as a result, infused the environmental movement with new substance and meaning. The effects of pesticides and other toxic chemical pollutants on the environment and public health had been well documented before Silent Spring, but in bits and pieces scattered through the technical literature. Environmental scientists were aware of the problem, but by and large they focused only on the narrow sector of their personal expertise. It was Rachel Carson’s achievement to synthesize this knowledge into a single image that everyone, scientists and the general public alike, could easily understand.
The need for such a book was great even within the sciences. As the mild-mannered aquatic biologist was researching Silent Spring, ecology was near the bottom of the scientific disciplines in prestige and support; few Americans even knew what the world meant. Conservation biology, later to become one of the most rapidly growing disciplines, did not exist. At the time, the scientific culture was fixated on the spectacular success of the molecular revolution, which had placed physics and chemistry at the foundation of biology. Researchers were learning to reduce living processes to their molecular elements. I, for example, as a young naturalist trained in field biology, was busy collaborating with organic chemists to break the code of pheromones used by ants to organize their colonies.
The environment was also excluded from the mainstream political agenda. America in the late 1950s and early 1960s was an exuberant and prospering nation. Buoyed by record peacetime economic growth, an ethic of limitless progress prevailed, yet the country, locked in a cold war that threatened our way of life, was vulnerable to the formidable enemies that encircled us. The Soviet Union had matched the United States in nuclear weaponry and beaten us into space, and on the Asian mainland China held us at a military standstill. For the sake of our prosperity and security, we rewarded science and technology with high esteem and placed great trust in the seeming infallibility of material ingenuity. As a consequence, environmental warnings were treated with irritable impatience. To a populace whose forebears had within living memory colonized the interior of a vast continent and whose country had never lost a war, arguments for limit and constraint seemed almost unpatriotic.”
— Edward O. Wilson, “Afterword” to 2002 edition of Silent Spring
“In 1962, when Silent Spring was first published, “environment” was not even an entry in the vocabulary of public policy. Conservation — the precursor of environmentalism — had been mentioned during the 1960 Democratic and Republican conventions, but only in passing and almost entirely in the context of national parks and natural resources. And except for a few scattered entries in largely inaccessible scientific journals, there was virtually no public dialogue about the growing, invisible dangers of DDT and other pesticides and chemicals. Silent Spring came as a cry in the wilderness, a deeply felt, thoroughly researched, and brilliantly written argument that changed the course of history. Without this book, the environmental movement might have been long delayed or never have developed at all.”
—Al Gore, Introduction to 1994 Edition to Silent Spring
. . . I want to remember Rachel Carson’s spirit. I want it to be both fierce and compassionate at once. I want to carry a sense of indignation inside to shatter the complacency that has seeped into our society. Call it a sacred rage, a rage that is grounded in the knowledge that all life is intertwined. I want to know the grace of wild things that sustains hope.
—Terry Tempest Williams, “The Moral Courage of Rachel Carson”
Witness and Wonder
In 1957, the world watched in wonder as the Soviet Union launched Sputnik 1, the first artificial satellite, into outer space. Despite Cold War anxieties, The New York Times admitted that space exploration ‘represented a step toward escape from man’s imprisonment to Earth and its thin envelope of atmosphere’. Technology, it seemed, possessed the astonishing potential to liberate humanity from terrestrial life.
But not all assessments of Sputnik were so celebratory. In The Human Condition (1958), the political theorist Hannah Arendt reflected on the Times’s strange statement, writing that ‘nobody in the history of mankind has ever conceived of the Earth as a prison for men’s bodies’. Such rhetoric betrayed an acute sense of alienation. Misplaced wonder at our own scientific and technological prowess, she worried, would isolate humanity from the realities of the world we share, not just with one another, but with all living creatures.
Arendt’s disquiet stemmed from the postwar context in which she lived: the United States economy was booming, and, for many Americans, the much-celebrated cycle of expansion and construction, of extraction and consumption, appeared infinite. Millions of Americans had bought into the glittering promise of limitless prosperity. While technologies such as plastic wrap and Velcro, microwave ovens and nonstick cookware might seem mundane today, they were unimaginably novel at the time, and pushed people further into a manmade world. While Arendt was concerned that humans would become self-absorbed and isolated, stupefied by the synthetic, and prone to totalitarian tricksters, others fretted that nature (for a large portion of the population, at least) was no longer a place to discover transcendence but had instead become merely a resource to be exploited. At mid-century, we were in the process of trading Walden Pond for Walmart.
If enchantment with ourselves and our artificial creations can alienate us, there is another conception of wonder that can help us transcend our self-centred, even solipsistic impulses. In the 1940s, Rachel Carson began developing an ethic of wonder that stood at the centre of her ecological philosophy.
A trailblazing marine biologist who sparked the modern environmental movement with Silent Spring (1962), Carson’s lesser-known writings – Under the Sea-Wind (1941), The Sea Around Us (1951), The Edge of the Sea (1955) and the posthumously published The Sense of Wonder (1965) – encouraged her readers to consciously cultivate habits of awe, to pay careful attention to the often-overlooked ‘beauties and mysterious rhythms of the natural world’. ‘We look too hastily,’ she lamented. ‘[P]eople everywhere are desperately eager for whatever will lift them out of themselves and allow them to believe in the future.’
Disturbed by the devastation wrought by the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945, and distressed by the spectre of the nuclear arms race, Carson understood that human beings could now annihilate the world along with all of its splendours and secrets:
Mankind has gone very far into an artificial world of his own creation. He has sought to insulate himself, in his cities of steel and concrete, from the realities of earth and water and the growing seed. Intoxicated with a sense of his own power, he seems to be going farther and farther into more experiments for the destruction of himself and his world.
This understanding fundamentally shaped her ethic of wonder. And while she admitted that there was no single solution to humanity’s hubris, or to the dangers and uncertainties intrinsic to the atomic age, she argued that
the more clearly we can focus our attention on the wonders and realities of the Universe about us, the less taste we shall have for the destruction of our race. Wonder and humility are wholesome emotions, and they do not exist side by side with a lust for destruction.
For Carson, bearing witness to nature, and responding with joy, excitement and delight at the sight of a ‘sand-coloured, fleet-legged’ ghost crab scurrying across the starlit dunes of a night beach, or to the miniature, multitudinous worlds hidden within tide pools, those slant-rock shallow basins where sponges, sea slugs, and starfish so often reside; or even to the daily affirmation of the sunrise, which anyone – no matter her location or resources – could see, fostered a sense of humility in the face of something larger than oneself. At a time when US culture was becoming increasingly therapeutic, shifting from a focus on society to a focus on the self, Carson’s ethic of wonder moved her readers’ awareness from private vexations to the other-directed realities of the world, and she invited them to become ‘receptive to what lies all around you’, to revel in the exhilarating voyage of discovery. It also taught that human lives were linked to a vast ecological community inherently worth preserving and protecting from depletion.
Carson’s poetic prose about the wonders of the natural world allowed her to transcend science as mere fact, to find, as she put it, ‘renewed excitement in living’. She viewed her ethic of wonder as an ‘unfailing antidote’ to the boredom of modern life, to our ‘sterile preoccupation’ with our own artificial creations. It allowed her to ‘witness a spectacle that echoes vast and elemental things’, to live deeper, richer, fuller, ‘never alone or weary of life’ but always conscious of something more meaningful, more eternal than herself. By modelling wonder as a state of mind, as a habit to be taught and practised, she harkened back to a Thoreauvian call to experience amazement at all the daily beauties and mysteries that humans had no hand in creating.
Whatever piece of nature’s puzzle she contemplated – whether it was the nebulous stream of the Milky Way on a cloudless spring evening, or a migrant sandpiper skittering along the salt-rimmed coasts of Maine – Carson unearthed more than personal joy in nature. She also proffered a philosophy of how to live a good life as an engaged member of one’s larger community. She wanted to reunite our material and moral worlds, and she showed readers how they might make meaning out of science, against an age of materialism and reductionism. She intuited an ‘immense and unsatisfied thirst for understanding’ in a disenchanted world, and her readers responded in spades, revealing in fan letters sent after the publication of The Sea Around Us that they had been apprehensive and ‘troubled about the world, and had almost lost faith’ in it. But her writings helped readers ‘relate so many of our manmade problems to their proper proportions’ – small in the grand scheme of things, ‘when we think’, as an admirer observed, ‘in terms of millions of years’ of natural history.
When we read Carson as a philosopher, and not simply as an environmentalist, we might realise that we could use a little more wonder in our own lives. We remain captivated with ourselves, with our own individuality: from self-cultivation to self-care, from self-presentation to self-promotion, we too often emphasise the personal at the expense of the wider world. These days, we rarely stand in awe of the virescent landscape, too busy marvelling at the miraculous devices that allow us to trade our physical realities for virtual ones – devices that, as much as they have empowered us, keep us indoors and tethered to technology, gazing with reverence at our own greatest inventions.
But Carson reminds us to look up, go outside, and really see what lies beyond ourselves. If we redirect our sense of wonder outward, and not toward our own ingenuity, we might resist the worst of our narcissistic impulses; we might fall in love with the beauty that is all around, and come to the revolutionary realisation that power and profit from scientific and technological progress are worth neither the sacrifice of humanity nor the Earth. We might recover a little bit of enchantment, opening ourselves to experiencing radical amazement at the fact that any of this exists at all, and that something will continue to exist long after our lives cease. In learning, as Carson did, how to be a moral member of the ecological community, we might inhabit and love our shared world more fully, forging new connections to everyone and everything that exists around us, despite our differences. How wonderful that would be.
Essay by Jennifer Stitt, a PhD candidate in US intellectual history at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, originally published at the nonprofit digital magazine Aeon and republished under Creative Commons.
Rachel Carson and the Modern
There are many good reasons to be suspicious of beginnings. Consider the narrative (we are tracing) of the environmental movement in the United States that begins with the transformative cultural presence of Rachel Carson and her most widely-read book Silent Spring. Here is former Vice President Albert Gore, in his “Introduction” to a 1994 edition of the book, rehearsing the story. “Silent Spring came as a cry in the wilderness, a deeply felt, thoroughly researched, and brilliantly written argument that changed the course of history. Without this book, the environmental movement might have been long delayed or never have developed at all” (xv).
A narrative of the environmental movement in north American during the 1960s makes sense with Carson at its origins: as the alarming evidence her book offered—and, its philosophical approach to nature—caught the attention of a wide range of readers, and in turn shaped public opinion, science, political discourse, as well as local, state, and federal policy. (The book sparked one of the most dynamic periods of federal environmental legislation in the history of the United States.) It was translated into over a dozen languages, and in turn shaped environmental concern, discourse, and policy in countries around the world. Silent Spring also offers a convenient starting point for thinking about the development of literary and artistic work during the 1960s and ‘70s.
Yet while reading Silent Spring as a catalytic event in our collective environmental conscience makes a semester of study possible, at the same time, there is another reading of Silent Spring that situates Carson’s work in a way of thinking about the world that shows a nineteenth-century awakening to environmental concern with the unfolding history of human life and experience in the modern world. If you are interested in the history of environmental concern before the twentieth century, I recommend starting with Pamela Regis’ Describing Early America: Bartram, Jefferson, Crèvecoeur, and the Influence of Natural History (1993) and Dan Philippon’s Conserving Words: How American Nature Writers Shaped the Environmental Movement (2004)
At the same time, Carson’s contributions are one chapter in a series of expressions of environmental concern that have emerged around the world in response to industrialization—from the literary and artistic responses to questions of preserving park lands, engaging in resource and wildlife conservation; reflecting on the existential and spiritual presence of plants and animals in human life; and engaging with inescapable environmental questions of social justice and equity—what Ramanchandra Guha calls the first wave of environmentalism. The first wave of the social movement we call environmentalism is a response, in part, to what Guha calls the “onset of industrialization.”
Environmentalism is also a social and cultural discourse and activity that aligns with other responses to experiences of what the social critic Marshall Berman, among others, has called the modern, or the process we call modernization. To be modern, Berman writes in his book All that is Solid Melts into Air (1982),
is to find ourselves in an environment that promises us adventure, power, joy, growth, transformation of ourselves and the world—and, at the same time, that threatens to destroy everything we have, everything we know, everything we are. . . . The maelstrom of modern life has been fed from many sources: great discoveries in the physical sciences, changing our images of the universe and our place in it; the industrialization of production, which transforms scientific knowledge into technology, creates new human environments and destroys old ones, speeds up the whole tempo of life, generates new forms of corporate power and class struggle; immense demographic upheavals, severing millions of people from their ancestral habitats, hurtling them half way across the world into new lives; rapid and often cataclysmic urban growth; systems of mass communication, dynamic in their development, enveloping and binding together the most diverse people and societies; increasingly powerful national states, bureaucratically structured and operated, constantly striving to expand their powers; mass social movements of people, and peoples, challenging their political and economic rulers, striving to gain some control over their lives; finally, bearing and driving all these people and institutions along, an ever-expanding, drastically fluctuating capitalist world market. In the twentieth century, the social processes that bring this maelstrom into being, and keep it in a state of perpetual becoming, have come to be called ‘modernization.’ These world-historical processes have nourished an amazing variety of visions and ideas that aim to make men and women the subjects as well as the objects of modernization, the give them the power to change the world that is changing them, to make their way through the maelstrom and make it their own. Over the past century, those visions and values have come to be loosely grouped together under the name of ‘modernism.’
One gift of Rachel Carson’s writing is that it helps us to think about these visions and values: of modernism and modernization, regimes of discourse and power, and the questions that arise as one takes seriously the transformations of the human and natural orders, as well as the environmental consequences of modern life.