Opening Remarks by Moderator Tom Dunlap

Forty years has made Silent Spring into two books—a technical discussion of an old problem and a very timely plea for a new relationship between humans and the world, one that global warning, extinctions, and other environmental problems have made more relevant as the years pass.

In reading (and commenting) keep in mind Carson’s narrative structure. The first three chapters described our situation, the next eight gave the evidence about environmental problems, three more told what the chemicals do and might do to us and our children, and a final three laid out other, better ways to control insects and a better way to think about humans’ relation to nature.

In this week’s reading Carson argued that our massive, careless use of new chemicals involved not just public health but the health of the systems that supported all life on earth. The chapters drew on a range of knowledge and ideas, from science to American values. This post can only point to some of the more important ideas and themes.

By setting the frightening tale of a “silent spring” that made up the first chapter in a small town, she appealed to American dreams of the small town as the ideal place to raise children, but the setting also allowed her to show damages to humans, plants, animal, and farms not as separate things but elements of the “web of life” and society. It also made pesticides, “men’s issues” of science and public policy, part of home and community life and so “women’s issues” as well.

In the next chapter she moved from the familiar ground of home and family to ecology, evolution, and the development of earth’s life in deep time, “intellectual” subjects she explored with poetic prose. (Even her harshest critics acknowledged her literary skill) One major accomplishment here, done very quickly, was to show how our short-term perspective created problems we did not easily see because nature’s processes worked over very long times. She put the relation between humans and the land in moral terms and made the survival of ecosystems and the processes of evolutionary change important moral values. These have become familiar, and now environmentalists plant trees to offset their use of carbon on vacation and eat locally and use public transportation to reduce their impact on the earth, but in 1962 these views were strange—even revolutionary.

In “Elixirs of Death,” she described the chemical properties of the new insecticides and herbicides, showing their immediate dangers with incidents of death and injury but also raising a deeper concern, that long-term damage might not appear until it was too late. She would return to that theme of deferred consequences often through the book.

The Age of Environmentalism that followed Silent Spring made Carson’s views seem normal, but we ought to remember just how startling they were in 1962.

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