“I think we’re challenged, as mankind has never been challenged before, to prove our maturity, and our mastery. Not of nature—but of ourselves.” Rachel Carson issued this warning in a television interview a few months after the publication of her final book, Silent Spring, in September 1962. A book of truly alarming implications, it exposed the widespread environmental and potential human damage caused by the 20th century’s embrace of pesticides and other “miraculous” new chemicals. As it passed its 60th anniversary this autumn, Carson’s last testament is now older than she herself lived to be—she died from breast cancer less than two years after its release, aged just 56.
Amid today’s chronic pessimism about humanity’s catastrophic impact on the planet, it is not so easy to understand what Silent Spring’s revelations meant for the public imagination at the time. It focused mainly on two significant chemical groups used in agriculture—organophosphates and chlorinated hydrocarbons—and demonstrated how they accumulated in ecosystems and biological organisms alike, leading to instances of sudden death as well as higher rates of infertility and cancer. In doing so, Carson effectively pulled back the veil on the extent to which human societies were beginning to permanently reshape the “natural” world.
The book was an unlikely bestseller, catching the attention of the Kennedy administration and leading to bans on many of the chemicals Carson warned about, most famously the insecticide DDT. In 1962, when Kennedy himself was asked at a press conference whether the Department of Agriculture was taking a “closer look” at the use of pesticides, he responded: “Yes, and I know that they already are. I think particularly, of course, since Miss Carson’s book.” Her influence was felt for years to come across other major developments in US environmental policy, particularly in the creation of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) in 1970 as well as in the passing of the first Clean Air and Water Acts soon after that.
What makes Carson’s book so powerful is how she crafted her message out of two distinct parts. The first was through her compelling scientific evidence, which showed the drive for constant economic growth came with a high environmental price. Chemicals were big business by the mid-20th century: between 1947 and 1960, Carson reported that production rose from 124m to 637m pounds (562m kg to 2,889m kg) every year, an “endless stream” which yearly introduced about “500 new chemicals to which the bodies of animals and men are somehow expected to adapt.” This was only the first hints of a far more ingrained problem; Carson would be stunned by today’s figures. By the time Barack Obama signed the Chemical Safety for the 21st Century Act into law in 2016—the first major upgrade in the EPA’s ability to regulate and test chemicals since the Toxic Substances Control Act of 1976—the number of chemicals used in agriculture had risen to an average of 1,500 a year in the US alone. Developing countries are subject to even less oversight as they face imperatives to grow: Brazil, one of the world’s top pesticide users alongside China and the USA, today produces more than 2.2bn kg a year.
The second facet of her argument was the emotive significance of the message that she brought to all of her writing: namely that we are inseparably a part of the natural world, and that in destroying it we destroy ourselves. “In nature”, she wrote, “nothing exists alone.” Where Darwin posited that humans had arisen from the natural order, Carson evoked our inseparable dependence on it: “[t]he history of life on earth,” she wrote, “has been a history of interaction between living things and their surroundings.” She was perhaps the first to reveal what an inhospitable world we were beginning to create for ourselves, without hiding her rage; it’s this emotional undercurrent that carries the reader through the hard science. “Who”, she asks, “would want to live in a world which is just not quite fatal?”
In an earlier trilogy of books about the oceans, Carson had already begun to hone a voice that could reveal modern science’s wonders with vivid, exquisite clarity. “What happens to a diatom in the upper, sunlit strata of the sea, may well determine what happens to a cod lying on a ledge of some rocky canyon a hundred fathoms below”, she writes, “or to a prawn creeping over the soft oozes of the sea floor in the blackness of mile-deep water.” She looks for the brilliant singularity of each particular creature’s voyage through the sea, enfolding it simultaneously into a vast yet intimately connected frame.
In Silent Spring, she turned her voice and cultural authority toward producing a wholly different kind of literary-scientific work that drew on both her lifelong love of poetry and scientific training. This poetic-scientific fascination with the natural world infuses every chapter of Silent Spring: the book’s apocalyptic prelude, titled “A Fable for Tomorrow”, imagines a dead town of withered hedgerows, empty woods and silent skies. It was a risky and bold way to weave a narrative of the evidence she had amassed, and the world to which it was pointing. The influence of this style on writers today is plain to see: echoes of Silent Spring can be heard in many other scientific polemics charged by personal passion, from David Wallace-Wells’ The Uninhabitable Earth to Naomi Klein’s This Changes Everything to Dave Goulson’s Silent Earth: Averting the Insect Apocalypse.
But, as Goulson himself writes in Silent Earth, Carson “would weep to see how much worse it has become.” Insects numbers are plummeting worldwide, with at least 40 per cent of species declining. Or consider the still poorly understood impact of accumulating microplastics across the globe and in our bodies: traces were recently detected in the blood of 80 per cent of those tested by scientists. Or the similarly uncertain but clearly declining rates of male fertility—more than a 50 per cent drop over the past half century.
Some of these alarming facts were foreseen by Carson; some she couldn’t have imagined. The gaps in our knowledge today certainly seem to cry out for a new Silent Spring for the 21st century. But would any book published today have anything like its influence? Each new revelatory book on climate or biodiversity loss seems still to elicit little more than a gloomy, collective shrug. Arguably, Carson possessed a certain cultural authority which today’s public sphere no longer accommodates. Or perhaps it is just that the facts alone can no longer hit the public gut as they did 60 years ago. By now, we are perhaps too resigned to a sense of impending doom.
It doesn’t have to be that way. In The Sense of Wonder, a short book written for her adopted nephew Roger and published posthumously in 1965, Carson wrote: “One way to open your eyes is to ask yourself, ‘What if I had never seen this before? What if I knew I would never see it again?’” Through her writing, Carson sought to combine a penetrating sense of nature’s fragility into a much grander vision, finding hope and courage in its inexhaustible mysteries. She instinctively knew that we won’t save what we don’t love. Amid the catastrophes engulfing us, that’s easy to forget. But it’s not too late to begin again.
