Comments by Moderator Linda Lear

Rachel Carson's last speech before the Kaiser Permanente Medical Group in San Francisco, titled "The Pollution of Our Environment" (Lost Woods, pp. 227-245) summarizes much of what she wanted most to talk about in her last months, and what she thought was most important for our future.
In this speech she expanded her criticism of a society that seldom evaluated the risks of new technology before it was entrenched into social systems. Carson's understanding of social dynamics was such that she understood absolutely that once a product was put out into the social system it could not be taken back.
This Sunday, The Washington Post, had a front page article ("FDA Rules Override Warnings About Drug") that struck me as something that would not surprise Rachel Carson in the least. The culprit in this case, was not DDT, but the implementation in the food-chain of a new class of antibiotics, known commonly as cefquinome, against a bovine pneumonia-like disease, carrying with it a risk of the emergence of resistant microbes in humans who eat the meat of cattle injected with the antibiotic. In spite of protests from health groups and the AMA, it appears that the FDA will approve the use of cefquinome this spring.
The advocates of putting this "new technology" out there are not the old chemical industry or food industry as Carson knew it, but the pharmaceutical industry and the cattle/beef lobby. These are more or less the same old personnae, with slightly different nuances, but the same agenda of profit now and "we'll worry about the result to humans and nature tomorrow, or sometime later... much later.
Why has the political and economic, and yes, the scientific culture seemingly changed so little since 1963? And what conclusions for the future of our environment do you draw from this seemingly endless cycle of repeating the same old mistakes? As Carson put it in 1963" man does not live apart from the world; he lives in the midst of a complex, dynamic interplay of physical, chemical, and biological forces, and between himself and this environment there are continuing, never-ending interactions."

Reading:
Introduction by Linda Lear in Silent Spring. 40th Anniversary Edition. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2002. Reprinted by permission of the author.

Introduction by Linda Lear in Lost Woods: The Discovered Writings of Rachel Carson. Boston: Beacon Press, 1998. Reprinted by permission of the publisher.

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