butterfly for Rachel Carson

Some 50 years have passed since Rachel Carson published Silent Spring – a book heralded by her contemporary society as the Uncle Tom’s Cabin of its era. I have just finished reading Linda Lear’s very thorough biography of Rachel Carson’s life and wonder if anyone could contemplate the story of this remarkable woman without feelings of strong admiration. While fighting the final two years of her battle with cancer, Carson released her landmark book on the ecological devastation being wrought by the pesticide DDT and began speaking publicly on the subject; and the more ill she became, the stronger grew her voice in opposition to man’s mistaken efforts to control nature rather than learning to live gracefully within it.

Like the words of any legitimate prophet, Carson’s continue to ring true in our own day, but during my entire perusal of Lear’s biography, I found myself inwardly railing at the things that haven’t changed, despite the life and work of a human being of Carson’s merit. 10 years after the publication of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, slavery came to its end in the United States. 50 years after the publication of Silent Spring, we continue to befog our nation with billions of pounds of pesticides annually. It would seem that our society is even more dependent upon toxic chemicals than we once were upon slavery. Though DDT was eventually banned in the United States, the ‘peculiar institution’ of self-poisoning with carcinogens, mutagens and endocrine disruptors has only grown since Carson’s lifetime.

What Hasn’t Changed

Essential mindsets
Man as the controller of nature, blind trust in industry and government, and lack of personal accountability for the health of the environment continue to make up the thoughts and mental stances of so many Americans, despite decades of warnings, scandals, failures and disasters. All you have to do is look at the comments section on any news article about any environmental tragedy or disaster to see overwhelming evidence of this. I know I will never forget reading the comments of people during the aerial pesticide spraying of California’s Central Coast in 2007. Someone would write about dead sea birds, children in the hospital or some other tragic outcome of this spraying and there would always be comments insisting that pesticides were safe and the government – the same government that lauded the safety of DDT – would never harm us. These fear-based abdications of reason in the face of abundant evidence to the contrary are as rife as in Rachel’s day when industry and citizenry attacked her as being a communist and hysterical woman.

The Tactics
Having had first-hand experience of industry/government standard operations during the LBAM spray disaster of the past decade, it was almost re-affirming to watch Rachel Carson and her contemporaries face the identical lies, evasions, fact juggling and disregard for human rights that my peers continue to encounter around the issue of pesticides. Proponents of human rights and environmental health continue to be attacked and dismissed as alarmist, anti-government and delusional. In addition to being called a communist, Carson was accused of being – of all things – a ‘peace-nut’. Such a term may sound laughably quaint to us today, but anyone who has worked for peace or justice will easily relate to the ill spirit and underlying threat of slurs like these.

Carson was, in fact, sneered at for what appeared to some people as a ridiculous insistence that there was a careful balance in nature. If you watch this short video documentary about Carson’s work you will see a white-coated scientist explaining that man’s task is to control all nature. This was the very ideology Carson wanted to see abolished and exchanged for a more evolved conception of man’s small place in the grand scheme of the Universe.

Today, when we battle for human rights and environmental protection, we face the same stone-faced government agents who turn deaf ears to our sufferings and pleas to be governed as we wish by the people who are suppose to serve us. We face the same accusations by industry or fellow citizens of being unpatriotic or insane. We sense the same current of danger and threat when we tell the truth. And, we face an industrial-governmental complex even more deeply linked than that of Carson’s day. Industry controls nearly all important areas of our so-called Republic, and when we work for change, we are sharing the experience that Rachel Carson, her editors, publisher, friends and colleagues went through and refused to be discouraged by.

The Players
I groaned inwardly in reading Lear’s biography when the names of Velsicol, DuPont and Monsanto began appearing in the text on the pages of this lengthy book. I was struck with a sudden sense of injustice that Carson is long at rest, but the very corporations who foisted their leftover wartime chemicals on the American people are still very much in business. Monsanto’s absurd parody of Silent Spring – in which bugs are portrayed as the true danger to the earth, rather than DDT – shows up their ethics for what they truly are. Nearly everyone in the chemical industry championed DDT, just as they champion today’s carcinogenic scourges, and though the heads of most of those corporations in Carson’s times are likely in the grave now, company policy remains the same. In a letter to Carson, a colleague wrote:

“There are such powerful adversaries: the U.S Department of Agriculture and the business empires and the ever-increasing practice of monoculture.”

If that sounds familiar, it’s because we continue to whistle the exact same sad tune today.

This summer, Monsanto has elected itself Trojan Horse by attempting to ‘donate’ hundreds of tons of GMO corn seed to the disaster area of Haiti. This corn, which has been cited as a health hazard by numerous independent scientists, will not only contaminate Haiti’s regional heritage corn but would make serfs of Haitian farmers forever, as the non-reproducing corn could not be saved from year to year, but would force the people to re-purchase their seed corn annually from Monsanto. Visions of vultures are dancing in the heads of Americans and Haitians alike over this latest effort of the very same Monstano Corporation that mocked Rachel Carson when she cited DDT as a hazard. It can be painfully disheartening to contemplate the continuing story of corporations like this and the ever-growing, never-ending list of human and environmental tragedies that continues to be written.

What Has Changed
None of what I’ve written above is intended to diminish the very real accomplishments of Rachel Carson’s inspiring life. On a personal level, as a woman with an environmentally-caused chronic illness, I can’t be anything but moved and incredibly grateful to this one special woman who used her days on Earth, despite sickness and pain, to wake up a sector of the public to the dangers of pesticide use. I feel a strong kinship for Carson in that her motivation to protect the environment stemmed from her deep love of the beautiful Earth – a mindset identical to my own.

On a public level, Carson has done something of inestimable value for every human being who fights for environmental health. Today, at least where I live, I am able to find plenty of company when working on ecological issues. The people of my generation grew up in a world in which parents were at least concerned about pesticides, pollution, recycling, water quality and similar inter-related issues. This is because the parents grew up hearing about Rachel Carson and her contemporaries. These matters became part of the furniture of the human mind, thanks to the work of pioneering naturalists and environmentalists who started the struggle to bring American society back towards the Native ideals once dominant in this land: ideals of stewardship and appreciation of the Earth. We remain so far from the living practices of this country’s true Native forefathers, but at least, in 2010, not everyone I meet will think I am totally crazy if I suggest that there is a balance in nature. There are signs everywhere that we, as a whole people, are becoming less enchanted with our former obsession with ‘progress’.

Again, on a public level, we have Carson to thank as one of the instigators of modern thought regarding farming. Carson is certainly not responsible for the existence of organic farming practices, but she took inspiration from the testimony being given by an organic gardener whose food supply had been contaminated with DDT in the 1950s. All farms and gardens had been organic until the introduction of chemical pesticides and herbicides, but we had gotten so far away from this tradition in the post-WWII era that to be intentionally running an organic farm was something out of the ordinary in the 1950s. In 2010, where I live, it is not longer queer to farm organically. It is, in fact, seen as positive and modern. Certainly, much of the rest of the country has a lot of catching up to do when it comes to this, but when I look at California, I see evidence everywhere that Rachel Carson’s message ‘took’, at least on a small scale. On a large scale, commercial conventional agriculture still dominates, burdening our people and our land with a never-before-seen mixture of utterly toxic chemicals; but, at least I have the option to go to a local farmer, a farm market, a local grocery store and purchase safe, organic food. Rachel Carson’s work is inherent in this blessing, for certain.

Most importantly, perhaps, Rachel Carson’s gift to us is that of independent thought. Nearly all mid-20th-century Americans were shocked to learn that U.S. drug companies had been allowed to market Thalidomide (a sedative which caused horrendous birth defects) in the United States after the drug companies were fully aware of the effects the drug had caused abroad. People were outraged and stunned. Today, I think that less of us are stunned when our so-called regulating agencies, out of greed, fear or stupidity, fail to protect us from danger.

I think that, thanks to Carson and her peers, more 21st century American have learned to think for themselves, rather than placing unthinking trust in government and industry. We investigate. We weigh evidence. We work to make healthy choices despite the breaking of human rights laws by our politicians and the marketing ploys of big business. We may look one another in the eye for a moment and shake our heads about the rampant abuse we suffer at the hands of a government that has chosen profit over humaneness again and again, we may even try a dry chuckle over the fact that our politicians are supposed to be our servants, but while we make these somewhat jaded and socially acceptable gestures, many of us work to develop a private world in which we think for ourselves, build our own organic gardens, and strive to pass on to the next generation the values of environmental respect.

In geological time, 50 years is the blink of an eye, despite the vast human experience it represents. Who can say, over time, whether Rachel Carson’s clarion call, the voice crying in the wilderness, will eventually result in the environmentalists outnumbering the greedy? We’ve added genetic modification and global warming to our plate since Carson’s time. The odds are likely against us. But this is why I would encourage anyone to read Silent Spring and to look for a biography of this admirable woman’s life.

Time and again, the smallest, gentlest, humblest of people have had the most lasting effect on human society as a whole. If Rachel Carson, hampered with sickness and surrounded by a sleeping public, could put her skills to such good purpose, what can I do, what can you do? Simple folk have always and will always greatly outnumber the mighty and powerful. Take courage in the thought that we are now several generations deep in a society that has heard of the dangers of pesticide – a society that is learning to recognize the disease we have created in our loved ones and ecology – and we can do the work that is ahead of us. I am thinking about this today, looking out the window at my family’s organic farm, wondering what else I can do to carry on the work and move it forward, for love of the Earth.