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NORTH COAST TIMES E A G L E, JAN&FEB 2001
WOODBLOCK PRINTS BY NANCY KEM
THE POLITICS OF RACHEL CARSON
BY ELLEN LEOPOLD
Lost Woods The Undiscovered Writing of Rachel
Carson, edited with an introduction by Linda Lear (Beacon
Press, 1999) brings Rachel Carson back into the public
realm.This collection of her writings, selected by her biographer
Lear, reminds yet again of the extraordinary range of her talents
and the equally extraordinary use to which she put them. The
book offers, in one modest volume, a taste of all the pleasures
to be found in Carson's longer works Through a careful choice
of speeches, articles, field notes, and letters, presented in
chronological order, Lear allows us to witness in Carson's own
words, her transformation from a natural scientist to a political
advocate for the environment.
Much of the first half is devoted to brief pieces of
Carson's nature writing that illustrate her reverence for the
mysteries and great antiquity of life. Writing of the role of winds
and air currents in populating island ecosystems, Carson tells
us that "airmen have passed through great numbers of the
white, silken filaments of spiders' 'parachutes' at heights of two
to three miles." The migrations of the Chesapeake eels are
equally miraculous After 10 or 20 years of contented life among
the mud banks and marshes, they take it upon themselves to
return to their breeding grounds, a thousand miles away in the
Sargasso Sea. What guides them in their air travels is still
unknown. In the air, the annual migrations of birds mirror the
same curious journeys undertaken by eels and other fish in the
sea. Carson describes the evolution of richly varied island life
over millions of years as the "stocking of an island." The stories
she tells of living creatures guided by unfathomable impulses
serve in a parallel way to "stock" our imaginations. There is,
apparently, an infinite number of solutions to the challenge of
life.
As Linda Lear aptly describes her in the subtitle of her
biography, Carson was a "witness for nature." In describing the
patterns of the winds or sea currents or the habits of larvae, she
writes as a transparent narrator, conveying her own fascination
with the subject without drawing attention to herself. She puts
nature center stage, emphasizing the complex processes of life
evolving eons before the arrival of humans These enduring life
forms negotiate their environment in ways wholly foreign to
human beings — and they have been doing so for much longer
By trying to get to their perspective on life. Carson continually
adjusts the angle on our own. Her distress at the consequences
of human warfare, for instance, is focused not on the decimation
of human lives but on the damage or destruction of wildlife for
which both sides in any of conflict are responsible (In the war
in the Pacific in the 1940s, for example, planes killed thousands
of birds, especially those flying at night: other large birds like
albatrosses and petrels fell into foxholes where they starved to
death.)
Carson's obligations were to the natural world as a
wrfiole rather than to any one tribe within it She was no more
likely to discriminate among Linnaean classes of invertebrates
than among Marxist classes of vertebrates Her politics were
ecological, not ideological. She perceived the relationship of
organisms to their environment as a continuous chain of events,
in which every link played a critical role, rather than as a series
of decisive struggles between the weak and the strong The dis
ruption of this continuity, through "man's habitual tampenng with
Nature's balance," had not one but many victims, to be found at
every point along the food chain. Leaves sprayed with pesticides
fell to the ground and became food for earthworms The follow
ing spring, robins consumed a lethal dose of those earth worms
and died
Granting no special privileges to human beings freed
Carson from a narrowly instrumental view of nature that saw the
earth as a vast repository of wealth to be exploited and approp
riated by humans For Carson, proper stewardship came first;
ownership became an issue only w4ien it conflicted with nature's
capacity to renew itself unharmed Carson did not object to land
being held in pnvate hands, minerals being mined, wilderness
being claimed for agriculture or even to pesticides being used
— occasionally and sparingly She did object to irresponsible
interference wth natural resources for short-term gam (political
or economic) that turned its back, wth impunity, on the long
term consequences for the environment Gradually, as her con
cerns brought her ever closer to the driving forces behind the
widespread destruction of natural life, she understood that much
more was at stake and that she would have to take her private
passions into public — and political — arenas.
The transition between Carson as observer and Carson
as activist is marked in Lost Worlds by a letter she wrote to the
Washington Post in 1953.lt protested the sacking of professional
conservationists from high-level government posts in the Fish &
Wildlife Service and the Bureau of Land management by newly
elected Republicans Their replacement with political appointees
boded ill for "the real wealth of the Nation the resources of the
earth — soil, water, forests, minerals and wildlife " The heavy-
handed intervention suggested to Carson that the way "was
being cleared for a raid upon our national resources . The pro
posed giveaway of our offshore oil reserves and the threatened
invasion of national parks, forests and other public lands."
Writing at the height of McCarthyism, Carson concluded. "It is
one of the ironies of our time that, while concentrating on the
defense of our country against enemies from without, we should
be so heedless of those who would destroy it from within."
Carson fired off another letter to the Post in 1959, in
response to an editorial discussing the effects of an extremely
harsh winter on migrating birds. This was the first public salvo
in her war against the indiscriminate use of pesticides (Silent
Spring was published three years later.) In a preface to the
second edition of The Sea Around Us, Carson highlighted the
dangers of "a problem that is far more complex and far more
hazardous than has been admitted. The truth is that (radio
active waste) disposal has proceeded far more rapidly than our
knowledge justifies To dispose first and investigate later is an
invitation to disaster. ..”
Carson could just as easily have been warning of the
premature applications of pesticides as the dangers of waste
disposal at sea. In both cases, scientific prudence had been
sacrificed, as she put it in a speech to the Women’s National
Press Club, "to serve the gods of profit and production " Strate
gies had been adopted, synthetic chemicals had been released
into the land, the air, and the sea before science had determined
that they were safe The demands of industry and commerce
were simply too urgent and too powerful to be tethered to the
overcautious concerns of the public health officer It was much
easier simply to assume that chemicals were innocent until
proven guilty than to await the scientific all-clear
Rachel Carson was one of the first scientists to recog
nize the difficulties that this would present to those seeking to
curb the use of toxic chemicals. Conventional science tradition
ally tests substances one at a time The prospect of ever being
able to disentangle the effects of multiple exposure to thousands
of different chemicals in order to identify the risks associated
with each one individually is close to nil.But the lack of evidence
demonstrating toxicity does not guarantee that a substance is
not toxic, simply that the conventional approach to science
makes such an assessment impracticable Not surprisingly,
there is no "data" at all on the most suspected carcinogens
Sound science, therefore, has become the refuge and
rallying cry of the chemical industnes. For the great majority
of potentially harmful chemicals, it is tantamount to no science
For the small majority of cases where it can be put to use. the
tool of choice is risk assessment applied to cost/benefit analysis
Developed as an environmental tool in the 1970s nsk assess-
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ment vastly overestimates the ability of science to predict harm
in what are extremely complex ecological and human systems.
It is used to quantify and manage risk, not to eliminate it; and
asks what levels of exposure are safe rather than howto move
toward cleaner alternatives Most of the assumptions it makes
— about exposures, dose-response, extrapolations from animals
to humans — are based on subjective and sometimes arbitrary
decisions Yet it provides a respectable cover for all kinds of
environmental posturing The same Al Gore who wrote a gloving
introduction to an anniversary edition of Silent Spring cited
'sound science' to justify the creation of an advisory panel that
effectively delayed the phasing-out of several pesticides — all
used heavily in states (such as California, Florida. Texas and
Iowa) that are key to Gore's election campaign Environmental
and public interest groups quit the panel in 1999, citing the
ERA'S unwillingness "to make hard choices "
To the idealistic Carson, the solution to this dilemma
was to forestall the possibility of harm by withdrawing or wth-
holding from use any substance not proven to be safe. 'The
burden of proof," Carson argued in her last public appearance,
"is on those who would use these chemicals to prove the
procedures are safe " This strategy has now been elaborated
in the Precautionary Principle, a decision-making tool honed
at a conference of activists, scientists and scholars in Wisconsin
in 1998 It argues that legislation does not need to wait upon
science and that, even in the context of scientific uncertainty,
polluters should be made to demonstrate both a clear necessity
to undertake any hazardous activity and the absence of any
safer alternative
Older environmental strategies that played the "science"
game and relied upon risk assessments to make their case have
clearly met with limited success The production of pesticides
has increased by 400% since the publication of Silent Spring.
Their widespread use leads to roughly 110.000 poisonings and
25 recorded deaths annually. Routine agncultural spraying kills
67 million birds a year — a fact which wDuld be particularly dis
tressing to Rachel Carson
Agnbusiness is now much better organized than it was
in Carson's day The lobbying of chemical corporations (whose
tax-deductible status Carson vehemently objected to in the early
1960s) now wields influence on a scale she w>uld find unimagin
able As a contender, the Precautionary Principle seems a thin
reed, unlikely to stand up to gale-force lobbying by the chemical
industry Yet its proponents argue that it is already embodied in
many current policies The United States, they argue, did sign
and ratify the Rio Declaration, binding on the Environmental
protection Agency (EPA), at the United Nations Conference
on Environment & Development in 1992. This stated: "Where
there are threats of serious or irreversible damage, lack of full
scientific certainty shall not be sued as a reason for postponing
cost-effective measures to prevent environmental degradation."
But that "cost-effective" — there's the rub Inserted at
the insistence of the U S delegation, it makes clear that where
the demand for "scientific certainty" fails to protect corporate
interests, the underlying economic imperatives that it serves
will move to the fore Of course, the use of cost/benefit analysis
guarantees that the ball will remain in the profit-maximizers'
court
Still, in the absence of any more hard-hitting campaigns
to control the spread of toxic chemicals, the Precautionary
Pnnciple today may be no more quixotic than the gauntlet
thrown down by an independent voman scientist in a book
written almost 40 years ago Lost Woods reminds us again
of the scale of the opposition Carson faced and of the very
improbability of her success This is a message we need to
hear
Ellen Leopold is the author of A Darker Ribbon: Breast
Cancer. Women & Their Doctors in the 20th Century (Boston:
Beacon Press, 1999) The book includes the correspondence
of Rachel Carson who died of breast cancer in 1964, and her
consultant, George Crile Jr M D This article has been reprinted
from the Anderson Valley Advertiser
Nancy Ann Kern was an artist and art teacher at Astoria
High School She was bom in 1931 and died in 1997 "She was
an artist v/io taught." her fnend Nancy Spaan said "She was a
teacher's teacher In her wwld there was no room for violence,
bigotry or prejudice There was also no room for indifference ”