by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2017 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
I watched the American
Experience special on biologist and
nature writer Rachel Carson, who trained as a marine biologist, worked for years
at the U.S. Department of Fish and Wildlife and stumbled into national
consciousness in 1951 with the publication of her book The Sea Around Us. Carson was born May 27, 1907 in Springdale,
Pennsylvania, the third of three daughters of the formidable Marie Carson, who
taught her to appreciate nature and study it scientifically. Carson eventually
fastened on marine biology as her specialty — though according to the show she
only dived once, and that was for just eight minutes — and her rise in the scientific
profession (she got a masters’ degree but for financial reasons had to drop her
pursuit of a Ph.D.) was hampered not only by being a woman but by having to
care for much of her family, including her mom (who depended on Rachel for
financial support after Rachel’s dad died in 1935), her sisters and their kids. So Rachel Carson had the responsibility of
caring for a family without having acquired one through a normal relationship —
indeed it seems likely that Carson never had a sexual relationship of any kind. Carson’s skill at popularizing
biological concepts and explaining them in prose of often breathtaking beauty
became apparent when she worked on Fish and Wildlife brochures and — a part of
her career unmentioned in the PBS documentary — the scripts for a weekly radio
show called Romance Under the Waters. She wrote her first book, Under the Sea-Winds, in 1941, but had the misfortune to release it just
before the 1941 attack on Pearl Harbor plunged the U.S. into World War II.
Meanwhile — and the PBS Carson documentary does an excellent job dramatizing
this with quite a lot of footage from industry and government promotional films
of the period — the insect-killing properties of a chemical called DDT (Dichlorodiphenyltrichloroethane), which was used
extensively in both the European and Pacific theatres. There are shots of
people in Naples enthusiastically lining up to be sprayed with DDT to avoid
getting lice, and also notes on how the stuff was used in the Pacific to stop
the spread of the Anopheles
mosquito that spreads malaria. After the war DDT was released for civilian use
and heavily promoted as a chemical that would be lethal to insects but harmless
to people, and at the same time the development of atomic weapons and
particularly the hydrogen bomb made people aware for the first time that
chemicals in the atmosphere that were barely visible could nonetheless kill.
(The Carson documentary tells the story of the Japanese fishing boat Lucky
Dragon V, whose crew was doused with
fallout from America’s first H-bomb test, leading to the death of everyone on
board from radiation sickness — though the show did not mention that it was this incident that inspired
the original 1954 Japanese version of Godzilla.) Carson had become concerned with DDT’s potential
long-term implications — particularly its effect on birds and its gradual
accumulation in higher and higher concentrations as it moved up the food chain
— as early as 1945, when based on Fish and Wildlife researches she wrote an
article about it and submitted it to Reader’s Digest, which turned it down. Carson’s 1951 book The
Sea Around Us became a surprise bestseller;
instead of relying on her own research as she had with Under the Sea-Winds, she synthesized the work of other scientists
and added a piquant, quasi-poetic prose style that delighted readers.
The
Sea Around Us was such a hit that it
inspired the reissue of Under the Sea-Winds, Carson sold the movie rights (though she hated the
Lewis Allen documentary film that got released — her contract had given her the
right to “review” the film’s script but not to insist on changes — and, like J.
D. Salinger, she hated the experience of having her work filmed so much she
never again sold movie rights to any of her books), and she got a contract for
a third book on the sea, The Edge of the Sea, based on other scientists’ research and also on
her own explorations of the coastline. Carson used the money to buy a summer
house in Maine and befriended a couple named Stanley and Dorothy Freeman — and,
though they only spent about two months in each other’s physical presence over
a 10-year friendship, Carson and Dorothy Freeman wrote powerful, emotionally
intense letters to each other that were basically a throwback to a 19th
century model of friendship in which people addressed each other in ways that
in the late 20th century would be considered appropriate only for
people who were, or wanted to be, sexually involved with each other. In the
1950’s she briefly considered writing a book about evolution and also one about
the environment called Remembrance of the Earth, as the preliminary studies being done on DDT and
other long-lasting pesticides convinced her that the continued indiscriminate
use of such substances threatened life on earth. She began what became the book
Silent Spring in 1958 but
was slowed up by the cancer that eventually killed her. When Silent Spring was first released in 1962 — her friend William
Shawn published three extended excerpts in The New Yorker months before the book as a whole was available
— it caused a sensation and pretty much set the terms for environmental debate
(on both sides!) that have obtained since. Though the PBS documentary (narrated
movingly by actress Mary-Louise Parker, who plays Carson in readings from her
works and her letters, mostly to Dorothy Freeman) doesn’t stress the point, one
gets the distinct impression that opposition to Carson’s work was motivated as
much by sexism as by corporate and individual self-interest. Male scientists
and corporate leaders were used to being acclaimed as heroes who were changing
the face of the earth to make it better and more habitable for humans, and here
was this woman who’d
previously been known for nice, harmless books about the sea challenging all
that and portraying the captains of industry and what former President Dwight
Eisenhower in his farewell address (right after he warned about the
“military-industrial complex”) called “the scentific-technological elite” and
which he regarded as similarly dangerous, as the potential destroyers of life
on earth. Silent Spring
also was one of the first books to advance the concept later known as
“ecology,” the idea that all life forms on earth are interconnected and
therefore wiping out one seemingly inconvenient form of life could have dire
consequences for other species that humans considered desirable.
The book so
closely set the tone for debate on environmental issues in general and
pesticides in particular that when I did an article on the history of
pesticides for the Holistic Living News in the early 1980’s among the books I consulted,
along with Silent Spring
itself, were tomes called Before Silent Spring and Since Silent Spring — as well as That They May Live, a 1964 response book financed by the pesticide
industry and written under contract to them by Congressmember Jamie L. Whitten
(D-Mississippi), who was also a strong racist whose Congressional seat was
protected when Mississippi lost a seat following the 1960 census by simply
jamming his district together with racial moderate Frank E. Smith’s, thereby
ensuring Smith’s defeat in the next election. (Smith tells this story in his
book Congressman from Mississippi, and in 1964 the U.S. Supreme Court put an end to these sorts of
shenanigans in their “one person, one vote” decision.) It was ironic, to say
the least, that PBS aired this show the day President Donald Trump signed
executive orders green-lighting the Keystone XL and Dakota Access pipelines,
using the same sorts of arguments made by Rachel Carson’s opponents 55 years
ago — that potential long-term damage to the environment is utterly
unimportant; what matters is the U.S. economy and jobs here and now —
confirming the anti-environmentalist message of his campaign and also, I
suspect, reinforcing his whole macho concept of leadership. It’s long struck me that
there’s a sexist component in the anti-environmentalist movement, a sense that real
men get their energy by drilling
for oil or digging for coal, and it’s only women and feminized “men” who
advocate for solar, wind, geothermal and other renewable energy sources.
Likewise real men
use pestcides and herbicides when they farm, and it’s only women and feminized
“men” who concern themselves with long-term environmental consequences —
though, ironically, at least part of the anti-environmentalism that’s so much a
part of the American Right (less so the Right in other countries) comes from
the arrogant dismissal of it in female author Ayn Rand’s novels and her belief
that any environmental problems created by untrammeled capitalism could be solved
by it as well (like Atlas Shrugged protagonist John Galt’s physics-defying motor that runs on air).
