Some of you reading this may remember a book called Silent Spring written by Rachel Carson. Now more than 60 years after its publication, her work as a biologist and naturist is I think still worthy of attention and to me at least, seems more relevant than ever.
MS. Carson was an early whistleblower in a time before YouTube and twitter and Facebook. It was a time when books were books and people read them.
She grew up in the small Allegheny County Pennsylvania town of Springdale; a town of about the size of Kelseyville. She dared to question conventional wisdom and defy big money and corporate funded science.
Little has changed since then in that there are still those among the ranks who speak out but even less has changed in the way they are dealt with.
They are either spurned or sued or shot as they always were but still they keep coming because if there”s one thing about the truth that doesn”t change, it”s that it always seems to find whatever crack it can in the tar that”s poured over it to make its way through.
At the time of Rachel Carson”s birth (1907) women in the United States had not yet been granted the right to vote. That did not happen until 1920 when with the passage of the Nineteenth Amendment when Rachel was but a little girl of 13 with big dreams.
She graduated from Pennsylvania College for Women in 1929 and received her Master”s degree in zoology from John Hopkins University in 1932.
Rachel began her career writing scripts for the U.S. Bureau of Fisheries during the Depression. In 1936 she became Editor-In-Chief for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and throughout her 15 year career in government service, wrote and edited numerous scientific articles on conservation and natural resources.
Rachel left her government position in 1952 to devote all of her time to her passion of writing to teach as her biography (Rachel Carson: Witness for Nature published in 1997) states “about the wonder and beauty of the living world.”
Noteworthy among those publications was “Help Your Child to Wonder” in 1956 and “Our Ever-Changing Shore” in 1957.
Concerned about the licentious use of synthetic chemical pesticides after World War II, Rachel felt the need to warn the public about the long term effects of misusing pesticides and locked horns with the agricultural practices of scientists and the government when she called for a change in the way in which we view the natural world.
Even before the publication of Silent Spring, Rachel Carson came under personal attack from both the chemical industry and the government as an alarmist.
Time Magazine wrote of the “vicious opposition to it” and reported that she had been violently assailed by threats of lawsuits and derision including suggestions that she was a “hysterical woman” unqualified to write such a book. The attack on her though waged by the whole chemical industry, was led by Monsanto, the now multinational agricultural biotechnology corporation and purveyor of products such as Roundup and who not so strangely makes news these days at the center of the worldwide GMO controversy.
Carson testified before Congress in 1963 calling for new policies to protect human health and the environment and while in office then U.S. President John F. Kennedy directed his Science Advisory Committee to investigate Carson”s claims, which vindicated her work and led to a strengthening of chemical pesticide regulations. President Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas later that year and the following year, 1964, Rachel Carson died of breast cancer.
I think it”s worth noting that when the chemical industry came out to attack Silent Spring, it did so according to all reports with the support of the United States Department of Agriculture whose website I visited when writing this piece in order to obtain its mission statement as demonstration of the covenant this agency proclaims to have with the American people and was met with: “Due to the lapse in federal government funding, this website is not available.”
MS. Carson received virtually no positive press at the time she was under attack by the chemical industry and the government in what is viewed by historians as a very cautious media. Not surprising.
Having come down the road where we as Americans witnessed the unholy matrimony commonly referred to as Corporate Personhood, and now living with the laws and regulations that are the offspring of this marriage of convenience, I think it”s fair to say that Rachel Carson took one on the jaw for all of us and was neither hysterical nor motivated by anything beyond social consciousness when she wrote her book.
I can”t help but wonder what horrors would have lay in store for Rachel Carson if she had written her book now.
Clearly she did not make this stuff up just to bring attention to herself or to sell books.
She had been following the use of pesticides like DDT since the 1940s and their use as part of the Pacific war effort but it was in 1958, prompted by a letter published in The Boston Herald following the odd and unexplained death of numerous birds after the aerial spraying of DDT, that she focused her research on the book whose title was meant to evoke a spring season in which no bird songs could be heard because they had all vanished as a result of pesticide abuse. Its title was inspired by a poem by John Keats, “La Belle Dame sans Merci,” which contained the lines “The sedge is wither”d from the lake, And no birds sing.”
Howard Glasser
Kelseyville
