Silent Spring is a very tight argument against the indiscriminate and unregulated use of pesticides, especially insecticides, particularly DDT. Carson's argument, in fact, is so tight, so well constructed, that the book is extremely difficult to excerpt without losing a great deal of the argument itself. The works by Edward Abbey and Aldo Leopold selected for this reader were much easier to excerpt: they are mostly essays that stand on their own. Not so with the chapters in Silent Spring. Each builds on the preceding chapter and is intimately intertwined with the argument as a whole. A sense of continuity is retained, however, with the selected excerpts, and Carson's argument will be completed through this critique.
Carson established her reputation for thorough research and exquisite writing long before she embarked upon Silent Spring, the book that would propel her into the company of the century's most influential environmental writers. Though, as a marine biologist, her primary scientific focus was not on chemical pesticides or their effect on land-based wildlife, her position as eminent science writer kept her in the loop on matters of biological interest in general. She became aware of a growing problem with the use of DDT. Her conclusion, as stated in "The Obligation to Endure," a chapter from Silent Spring omitted from this guide, was this:
It is not my contention that chemical insecticides must never be used. I do contend that we have put poisonous and biologically potent chemicals indiscriminately into the hands of persons largely or wholly ignorant of their potentials for harm. We have subjected enormous numbers of people to contact with these poisons, without their consent and often without their knowledge. If the Bill of Rights contains no guarantee that a citizen shall be secure against lethal poisons distributed either by private individuals or by public officials, it is surely only because our forefathers, despite their considerable wisdom and foresight, could conceive of no such problem.
I contend, furthermore, that we have allowed these chemicals to be used with little or no advance investigation of their effect on soil, water, wildlife, and man himself. Future generations are unlikely to condone our lack of prudent concern for the integrity of the natural world that supports all life.
Carson's argument, then, is stated succinctly and without malice toward any one group or industry. Let us see how she uses the rest of Silent Spring to support her argument.
She begins the book with "A Fable for Tomorrow," the Grimm tale of Anytown, USA, which wakes up one day to find that its wildlife has largely disappeared, rendering the capacity for life in general greatly depleted. As in all good fables, the town's fate has been self-inflicted by the residents themselves in their quest for an easier, seemingly better, life. By creating a collage from the reports of dire consequences of chemical pesticide use then available, Carson brings the point home that America is heading down a slippery slope, at the bottom of which lies an undesirable future.
She then states her case in "The Obligation to Endure." She knows she must educate her readers in the complex chemistry and biological effects of chemical pesticides, and does so in "Elixirs of Death." In this wonderful introduction to organic chemistry, Carson teaches all of the chemistry required to understand her argument. This serves to further reinforce her credibility, as students are usually inclined to accept the theories of their teachers. She describes the composition of chemicals, inorganic as well as organic, and the proclivity of each to bind with other chemicals essential to life. She goes on to describe the effect of these chemicals on the environment, including their migration throughout the environment and all of its inhabitants, then includes the reader in "The Human Price:"
We spray our elms and the following springs are silent of robin song, not because we sprayed the robins directly but because the poison traveled, step by step, through the now familiar elm leaf-earthworm-robin cycle. These are matters of record, observable, part of the visible world around us. They reflect the web of life — or death — that scientists know as ecology.
But there is also an ecology of the world within our bodies. In this unseen world minute causes produce mighty effects; the effect, moreover, is often seemingly unrelated to the cause, appearing in a part of the body remote from the area where the original injury was sustained. "A change at one point, in one molecule even, may reverberate throughout the entire system to initiate changes in seemingly unrelated organs and tissues," says a recent summary of the present status of medical research. When one is concerned with the mysterious and wonderful functioning of the human body, cause and effect are seldom simple and easily demonstrated relationships. They may be widely separated both in space and time. To discover the agent of disease and death depends on a patient piecing together of many seemingly distinct and unrelated facts developed through a vast amount of research in widely separated fields.
This cause and effect in the human body refers to exposure to carcinogenic chemicals and later development of cancer. As cancer was and still is a growing concern for civilized societies, "The Human Price" makes the problem of pesticides a personal problem for every reader. It is this aspect of Carson's compelling argument that gave her book the impact required to stir society into action.
In "One in Every Four" she completes our education of poisonous and potentially carcinogenic pesticides through a number of cases and then-current theories as to how these chemicals work. She describes the problems encountered by regulatory agencies, specifically the Food and Drug Administration, in requiring companies to prove the safety of their products before they release them upon the public's environment. Unfortunately, chemicals are presumed innocent until proven guilty, and the burden of proof lies upon the government, not the producer. She cites cases of acute leukemia directly attributable to chemical pesticides, and leans on the latest theories to explain how organic chemicals work within the environment of the human body to cause leukemia and other blood disorders. This is important because leukemia is a rapidly developing disease that may give clues to the cause and effect of other, more slowly developing, cancers. She uses the Warburg theory to demonstrate that exposure to levels of chemicals that do not result in acute poisoning may actually be more certain of carcinogenic capacity later in life. She also mentions the effect organic chemicals have on the chromosomes, and the possibility that chemically altered chromosomes may later become mutagenic.
Curiously, she refers to the two-fold attack on infectious diseases — prevention as well as cure — but does not apply the analogy completely to her argument against the indiscriminate use of pesticides. Chemical drugs are analogous to chemical pesticides — both rid the environment of unwanted organisms. Both attempt to control the environment, whether it be the internal environment of the human body in the case of medicinal drugs or the external environment of the landscape in the case of chemical pesticides. The pests in our internal environment are infectious bacteria. The pests in our external environment are weeds and insects. Carson notes the analogy of prevention — personal hygiene, disposal of bacteria-ridden waste, treatment of drinking water — to the human environment in which the agents of prevention in the external environment become the agents of cancerous disease in the internal environment. However, she does not strongly disclose that even in the internal environment, prevention is more effective than cure. She does not immediately and strongly argue that we should be emphasizing prevention in the external environment, just as we do for the internal environment. The environmental analogy of cure has a dark side, i.e., the chemical "cures" of our external pests have become the pests themselves in our internal environment. She points out that chemical production and use has become so firmly entrenched in our notion of a better life, including the economy that supports a better lifestyle, we are unwilling to look upon those chemical cures as the very agents of disease themselves. Her final conclusion, that we must eliminate carcinogens for the danger to ourselves, seems too narrow, however effective it may be in winning the support of her readership.
She then demonstrates the inability of those chemical cures to win the battle against pests in the external environment in "Nature Fights Back." She shows that effective control of insects is applied by nature, not by man — that the environment itself is an effective control to the overwhelming of pests. She points to cases that demonstrate the consequences of upsetting the delicate balance maintained in nature, especially the case of overgrazing by deer on the Kaibab National Forest in Arizona, with its implicit reference to Aldo Leopold's "Thinking Like a Mountain." Unfortunately tales of biology do not pack the punch of philosophy, as I think you will see when you read Leopold's famous essay.
Carson then lets us in on the dirty little secret of the chemical pesticide industry: research follows money. Economic entomologists create chemical pesticides even in the face of (poorly funded) research showing that pesticides are ineffective and dangerous because chemicals make money. Money is energy. Chemical patents require labor, resulting in Lockean property rights to the proceeds from the sale of those chemicals. For, as John Locke said, "Whatsoever then he removes out of the state that nature hath provided and left it in, he hath mixed his labour with, and joined to it something that is his own, and thereby makes it his property." Furthermore, this labor entitles the economic entomologist to property rights on the environment itself, including its pests, to which pesticides are applied, even ownership of the economy that places such great emphasis on the manufacture and sale of those chemicals. This is the modern Goliath that Carson sought to overcome. She quotes F. H. Jacob in arguing against the economic entomologists, that "only the biologist will provide the answers to the basic problems of pest control." She does not seem to see the problem of specialists, with their single-dimensional solutions to any given problem, but she does go on to tell of what we now refer to as Integrated Pest Management, the control of pests through biological understanding of the life-cycles of specific pests, including the careful and timely use of chemical pesticides. She ends the chapter with a quote from a Canadian entomologist who clearly does not understand that money is energy, that labor transfers property rights to the laborer: "We must change our philosophy, abandon our attitude of human superiority and admit that in many cases in natural environments we find ways and means of limiting populations of organisms in a more economical way than we can do it ourselves." Let me state categorically that letting Nature control insects is no way to make money. If we are to change our philosophy, and we must, it must be more far-reaching than merely abandoning the notion of human superiority over the environment.
It is with the final excerpt, "The Other Road," that I think Carson gained her reputation for having a shrill voice in her fight against the chemical industry. The undertone of this chapter reminds one of the misandry noted in Under the Sea Wind. She begins with a stated preference for biological alternatives to the chemical control of insects. She then goes on to describe those alternatives. She enthusiastically endorses programs of male sterilization, and seems to completely miss the irony of chemical sterilants unleashed upon the environment. She admits that chemosterilants are potentially hazardous, possibly even more so than chemical insecticides, but her admission seems too little, too late. With her enthusiasm for such programs, Carson falls into the very same trap as her opponents in her attempt to control the environment. This lessens the impact of her quote by Dr. Peter Alexander, that the control of insects through chemosterilants would be "open to the most severe objections."
If Carson is enthusiastic about male sterilization efforts, she is positively gleeful in her description of insect control through the deception of males using sex attractants. She seems mesmerized by andricides. Again I must create a word to describe a previously non-existent idea. Her favorite methods seem to be those that attract the male insect through pheromones, then poison him, leaving the female unharmed. That Carson can endorse these programs, ignoring her previously stated arguments against man's attempt to control insect populations in general, is completely bewildering. There must have been some deeply rooted issues at work in the author that would cause her to write with such complete abandonment of self-aware irony.
She concludes the chapter with cases of microbial and mammalian methods of controlling insect populations, but again she seems to forget that the environment itself is the best control of insects. There remains the same problem of proof as with chemical insecticides, that is, the burden of proving the ecological safety of such methods should be borne by the promoter. Are there not plenty of cases in which the introduction of exotic mammals has led to degradation of the environment? Do we really know what long-term effect the introduction of shrews to control sawflies in temperate forests will have on the forest ecosystem? Shrewd skepticism would recommend against such action, with even less enthusiasm for microbial solutions.
In the end, Carson is still trying to control the environment. Whether our methods employ chemical insecticides, chemosterilants, andricides, or seemingly benign uses of exotic predators, we are still trying to tip the balance of nature in our favor. Because we are one with the environment we are trying to control, we cannot help but be affected by the consequences of our attempts. Disadvantageous consequences of attempts to control the environment will always outweigh the sought-after advantages. Carson's final statement admits that "[t]he 'control of nature' is a phrase conceived in arrogance, born of the Neanderthal age of biology and philosophy, when it was supposed that nature exists for the convenience of man." Not so much arrogance as ignorance. The real problem is one of one-dimensional solutions of control applied to multidimensional problems about which we have little or no real understanding.
Still, Silent Spring is a tremendously influential piece of work. It resulted in the regulation of chemical pesticides, especially DDT. It worked through heightened public awareness, which in turn created legislative pressure against the indiscriminate use of pesticides. Carson achieved this impossible victory over the chemical industry by relying on her credibility as a scientist and a writer to create a work with the power to persuade a nation.
Her legacy is far more substantial, however, than merely the regulation of chemical pesticides. Rachel Carson changed American society. Let us now see just how she did that.
Critics and historians usually refer to Rachel Carson as a nature writer first, and a scientist second. Indeed she gave us vivid descriptions of the sea and the life that indwells the oceans, but I believe her influence reaches far beyond the simple boundaries of nature writer, even scientist. Rachel Carson left unparalleled legacies in the fields of science — particularly ecology — environmental policy, and feminism. Furthermore, she achieved them through writing, surely her most important legacy.
If there is any one character that best exemplifies Carson's life, it must be that of the female Anguilla eel, here described in Under the Sea Wind:
But the females would press on, swimming up against the currents of the rivers. They would move swiftly and by night as their mothers had come down the rivers. Their columns, miles in length, would wind up along the shallows of river and stream, each elver pressing close to the tail of the next before it, the whole like a serpent of monstrous length. No hardship and no obstacle would deter them.
This was the task set before Rachel Carson as she set out to fight the currents of a male-dominated techno-industrial world bent on destroying the environment, not to mention a woman's determination to succeed in that environment. That Carson attempted the journey is remarkable in itself. That she succeeded to the degree that she did is the stuff of legends.
She left behind a trail of environmental legacies without match. In her wake we find sweeping legislative acts that inalterably changed the direction of environmental policy, including formation of a Federal government agency dedicated to administering several environmental laws, the Environmental Protection Agency or EPA.
As a scientist she was one of the very first to survey the then-current research on chemical pesticides. She announced the carcinogenic nature of pesticides to a public that was completely unaware (and happily uncaring) about their long-term effects. She developed a convincing argument along five lines of evidence. First, the chemical industry had created countless new artificial substances in less than half a century. Second, the world's entire population had experienced unprecedented exposure to many of these chemicals through their indiscriminate application in the name of health, welfare, wealth, and convenience. Third, there was considerable evidence of increases in the incidence of cancers in humans simultaneous with these exposures. For example, white males born in the 1940s exhibit twice the incidence of non-tobacco-related cancer than their grandfathers. Biologist/poet Sandra Steingraber explains the relevance of this line of evidence thusly:
The rise in cancer incidence over calendar time is one line of evidence that implicates environmental factors. The increase in cancer incidence among successive generations is another. A third line of evidence comes from a close consideration of the cancers that exhibit particularly rapid rates of increase.
Carson realized the importance of this last point and emphasized the increased rate of incidence for leukemia, in the general population as well as among those involved in the manufacture and application of chemical pesticides. This also recognizes the relevance of spatial qualities to rising cancer rates in addition to the temporal qualities. Industrialized countries have disproportionately higher rates of cancer, and people who work with these chemicals have yet disproportionately higher rates than their less-exposed neighbors. Subsequent to Carson's research, the World Health Organization has concluded that over 80 percent of all cancer is attributable to environmental factors.
Fourth, Carson used then-recent results from experiments on laboratory animals to show strong correlations between low doses of pesticides and higher rates of cancer in mammals. Fifth, she explained how the inner workings of the cell could lead to cancerous tumors through chromosomal damage, hormonal disruption, and metabolic alteration.
Carson's legacy as a scientist continues through the work of contemporary female scientists researching and writing about damage to the environment via chemical pesticides. In Living Downstream, Sandra Steingraber ignores Carson's precedent of not admitting her own battle with cancer. Steingraber tells the story of environmental links to cancer through the eyes of a scientist recovering from cancer herself. She points out that Carson kept secret her own illness in order to "retain the appearance of scientific objectivity," but, strangely, Steingraber felt that her own work did not require this level of objectivity.
Steingraber gives the reader a course in organic chemistry, much like her mentor. She straightens out several definitions used interchangeably by laymen: To a chemist, the term organic simply refers to a carbon compound while synthetic refers to any artificially formulated compound. Thus, to a chemist, a compound can easily be both organic and synthetic. This differs from the biologist's definition for organic, which would include only those compounds derived from organisms. For the biologist, and for the population at large, organic and synthetic are mutually exclusive. Steingraber goes on to explain how organic (using the chemist's terminology) synthetic compounds came to be so entwined in the fabric of modern life, including the rise of the petrochemical industry as a result of the scarcity of whale oil in the 19th Century. She falls short of carrying the history lesson through to the Western world's transformation from a carbohydrate-based economy to that of a hydrocarbon-based economy, preferring, instead, to call it a petrochemical-based economy.
Carbohydrates are organic compounds made up of carbon, hydrogen, and oxygen, including sugars, starches, and celluloses. Hydrocarbons, on the other hand, are not necessarily oxygenated, that is, they can be made up of only carbon and hydrogen molecules, including fossil fuels such as coal, natural gas, and gasoline. That much of our hydrocarbon consumption is satisfied through the refinement of petroleum does not thoroughly explain our economic transformation. Ultimately, the transformation is one of utilizing resources long-dead rather than resources that were recently alive. In applying financial terms to natural resources, the carbohydrate-based economy lives off of the planet's interest. The hydrocarbon-based economy consumes capital. This radical change in the basis for supporting life goes unmentioned by Steingraber.
While an omission of this scope is forgivable, Steingraber's work remains largely unreadable due to several errors committed as a writer, not as a scientist. First, she meanders through her argument in a way that Carson would have deemed unacceptable. Nonlinear expression is better left to the arts than to science. Second, the reader is left with the impression that Steingraber is using environmental science to complain about her fate as a victim of cancer. This simply destroys any "appearance of scientific objectivity." Subjective accounts should be stated elsewhere, leaving the field of environmental science untainted. Steingraber really should have stuck to Carson's examples in clearly stating her argument in a linear fashion that is completely objective.
Carson also hinted at genetic effects caused by the indiscriminate use of chemical pesticides. As it happened, Silent Spring was published at the same time the thalidomide story was breaking, and the two were not unrelated. Thalidomide was prescribed to prevent morning sickness and enhance sleep in pregnant women. Unfortunately it resulted in birth defects, such as unformed limbs, previously unseen on such a large scale. It was followed closely by another medical scandal, that of DES, which had been prescribed for the prevention of miscarriage for over thirty years and was now blamed for sterility and even premature death due to genital cancers in women who came to be known as "DES daughters." Both of these medical disasters proved the fallaciousness of the so-called placental barrier that was supposed by medicine to protect the fetus from injury by the mother. Carson foresaw similar problems due to the mother's exposure to environmental insults of a pesticidal nature.
In Our Stolen Future, Theo Colborn, Dianne Dumanoski, and John Peterson Myers explore this area of Carson's research. Colborn is the primary researcher on this project, a woman who did not begin her graduate studies until the age of fifty-one but persevered through a master's in ecology and a Ph.D. in zoology. She found work with the Conservation Foundation, studying air pollution and water purification efforts on the Great Lakes, but kept getting sidetracked by data showing something seriously wrong in the region's wildlife. While the problem of thinning eggshells in eagles had been reversed with the ban of DDT in 1972, other birds and wildlife were still showing abnormalities: vanishing mink populations, unhatched eggs in herring gull colonies, and physical deformities in cormorants. There seemed to be a pattern of genetic disorders due to hormonal disruptions that Colborn could not dismiss, even if she could not pin down the source. Finally, she concluded that the hormone mimicking characteristics of many organic chemicals had become magnified through the food chain, as explained in Silent Spring, to the point that they were wreaking havoc among Great Lakes inhabitants decades after the chemicals themselves, now outlawed, had been discharged into the environment, often from points thousands of miles away. Where Steingraber writes about Carson's forecast for the current generation, Colborn explains Carson's predictions for the next generation. And it doesn't look good.
Colborn refers to the DES experience to describe the state of medicine, past and present. Before DES, a chemical was considered safe "unless it caused immediate and obvious malformations." After DES, scientists realized that the effects of a chemical may not show themselves in the current generation, and may not even reveal themselves until the next generation attempts to conceive. The delayed reaction of DES demonstrated that chemicals could cross the placenta, disrupt the development of the baby, and have serious effects that might not be evident until decades later.
The route taken by such chemicals was also new. Not toxic, and not necessarily carcinogenic, these synthetic hormone disruptors work their black magic by imitating estrogen, the female hormone required for conception and the successful development of the fetus in the womb. Estrogen mimics are found throughout nature, often used by plants to protect themselves from predatory herbivores. Clover produces formonenetin, an estrogenic compound, to reduce predation by causing sterility in sheep, a very clever, farsighted defense mechanism. Fortunately the sheep population can regain its viability by eating something else — not so when the estrogen mimic is applied indiscriminately to the environment at large.
DDT was discovered to have estrogenic qualities in 1950. That discovery led to research on other organic compounds, including PCBs (polychlorinated biphenyls) and dioxin, both of which are excellent estrogen mimics and are both widely distributed throughout the environment. Carson did not think to include PCBs because the insulating compound was not thought to be poisonous at the time. With hormonal disruptors what matters even more than the toxicity or carcinogenicity of a compound is its ability to persist in the environment. PCBs simply do not break down in human time frames and will remain in the food chain for as long as life exists on earth. Their fat solubility ensures their presence in the current generation will be magnified at each higher link in the food chain, and will be passed to the next generation through the placenta and breast milk in mammals. Dioxin, long known to be toxic as well as carcinogenic, may prove to be most dangerous to life on earth in its capacity as a persistent hormone disruptor.
Evidence of hormone disruption is not limited to females. Declining sperm counts have been found in men living in industrialized countries, along with rising rates of testicular cancer, prostate cancer, and other reproductive abnormalities. Cases of hermaphrodites, once considered a biological rarity, are now regularly recorded in areas polluted by estrogen mimics.
The key to persistence in the environment is fat solubility. Organic compounds are attracted to fatty tissues, which, as carbohydrates, are themselves rich in carbon. Pesticides and other organic compounds are stored in these fatty tissues until the fat is drawn down. In mammals this occurs during gestation through placental conveyance of nutrients and in the production of breast milk, thus ensuring that organic compounds ingested by the mother will be passed to the newborn. Every child conceived since the mid-20th Century received his or her first dose of DDT, PCBs, and dioxin before he or she was even born, and got the second dose while nursing.
Clinical studies have shown definite links between estrogen and cancer. Prostate cancer in rats is induced by long-term exposure to estrogen. Breast cancer cells have been found to proliferate wildly in petri dishes when exposed to estrogen. Synthetic estrogenic compounds are often even more potent in this regard than natural estrogen.
Other effects of hormone disruptors have been found as well. Lower birth weights have been found in babies delivered by women who eat large quantities of fish caught in Lake Michigan, known to be polluted with heavy concentrations of PCBs. Hyperactivity and attention deficit have been linked to PCBs and other organic compounds, in addition to other behavioral and neurological problems.
Colborn concludes that the chemical messages required to sustain life in the current generation and successfully procreate succeeding generations may be disrupted by persistent organic compounds first decried by Rachel Carson. She exhorts the scientific community to move beyond the cancer paradigm — tragic on the personal level, not the species level — to look harder at hormone disruption, which acts on the species level. They offer methods for defending ourselves: Know the quality of water you drink. Choose foods low in persistent organic compounds. Reduce the contamination of food through plastic packaging (never microwave food in plastic — always use glass). Avoid unnecessary exposure by washing your hands and always assume pesticides are unsafe. But ultimately we must eliminate the hubris that has allowed the production of persistent organic compounds. At the heart of the solution lies a change in philosophy in which we must question our right to alter the environment.
Colborn's follow-up to Silent Spring is thoroughly researched and highly compelling. The editing is uneven and sometimes sloppy, but overall the book is highly readable for its genre. The authors are careful to state their arguments clearly in a linear format, and if any of them knowingly suffers from the effects of persistent organic compounds in the environment they do not let on.
Rachel Carson gave the public one of its first scientific treatments of ecology. Colborn refers to this new knowledge as a "watershed in the relationship between humans and the Earth." Our whole perspective has changed, and Carson was highly influential in bringing about this change. Without Silent Spring we would not likely have entertained the Gaia hypothesis, put forward by James Lovelock, whose original claim to fame was the discovery of CFCs (chlorofluorocarbons) throughout the Earth's atmosphere. While his theory of biogeochemical homeostasis is not universally accepted, Lovelock would not even have a platform from which to present his theory without Carson's precedent-setting work.
On the ground, however, Carson's greatest influence came as a result of the legislative actions taken in the wake of Silent Spring. She did not live to see the fruits of her labors, but they did indeed bear fruit. Her research on DDT was combined with corroborating evidence in the years immediately following Silent Spring, with the effect that registration for use of DDT in the United States was revoked in 1972. DDT is still manufactured for export and the established modes of transmission that Carson portrayed ensure that we are still affected by its use. Our exposure, however, is not nearly what it was before Silent Spring.
Other pesticides decried by Carson have also been banned. Aldrin and dieldrin were banned in 1975 except that aldrin, which converts to dieldrin in soil and fatty tissues, continued to be used as a termite poison until its complete ban in 1987. Lindane was banned in 1983 except for use in lice shampoos for humans and flea dips for dogs. Agricultural use of chlordane was stopped in 1980, while that of heptachlor ended in 1983.
This does not mean that all use of pesticides has been halted. Quite to the contrary, 99 percent of U.S. cornfields were sprayed with pesticides in 1993, as compared to less than 10 percent forty years earlier. In fact, current annual pesticide use in the U.S. amounts to about 8.8 pounds for every man, woman, and child. This may seem disheartening just when things were starting to improve, thanks to Rachel Carson, but as Colborn points out, "trends are not destiny." Just as Carson's work may have prevented the "silent spring" that she predicted, today's scientific research may enable us to avoid the remaining dangers of indiscriminate use of chemical pesticides.
In addition to bans on specific pesticides, several other landmark laws were passed in the wake of Silent Spring, their sponsors often crediting Carson with the impetus to bring about sweeping changes in environmental law and policy. The 1965 Water Quality Act attempted to specify acceptable levels of pollution in interstate waterways. The 1967 Air Quality Act took a regional approach to the regulation of air pollution such that emissions limitations were controlled by the states. The National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) was passed in 1969, requiring all federal agencies to assess the environmental impact of their actions, which led directly to the formation of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) in 1970. That same year the Federal Insecticide, Fungicide, and Rodenticide Act (FIFRA) was passed, requiring all pesticide manufacturers to register their products with the EPA. Products that could not be applied or used with adequate levels of safety would not be registered. Also in 1970, Congress gave responsibility for enforceable standards to the federal government as part of the Clean Air Act. With the 1972 Clean Water Act, the federal government prohibited the emission of any pollutant into navigable water without a permit. If Silent Spring were the catalyst for these changes alone, Carson's legacy would be sealed — but such is not the case.
I believe Rachel Carson's most important impact was in neither science nor environmental law and policy. Her most lasting work was done in the minds of young women who read and admired her writing. She demonstrated that women could work in science and produce important results. Her work opened doors for later female science writers inspired to take up her torch. Her words struck a chord with her readers, especially young women. If she had not been so enamored with biology, Carson may well have been the 20th Century's most important feminist voice. Instead, she spoke for the entire planet.
Rachel Carson never committed the sin of anthropomorphism in her work, instead immersing herself and her reader in the mind of nature as seen through the eye of science. She took nature writing to a new level, culminating in the creation of a new genre, the ecological apocalypse, which has yet to fall out of favor among the book-buying public. She generated a paradigm shift in our attitude toward the planet and the chemicals we pour into our environment. She felt an obligation to help others see and understand, an obligation she met with tireless enthusiasm and incredible creativity. She helped us to see the world, more aware of all its beauties and wonders and the "strange and sometimes terrible intensity of the lives that are being lived about us."
The sum of Rachel Carson's achievements is a legacy without equal. And she did it entirely through her use of the written word. Writing was simply Rachel Carson's life-history strategy. She wrote to express her sense of wonder. Rachel Carson could no more avoid writing than Anguilla could avoid swimming upstream.
THERE ARE TWO SPIRITUAL DANGERS IN NOT OWNING A FARM. ONE IS THE DANGER OF SUPPOSING THAT BREAKFAST COMES FROM THE GROCERY, AND THE OTHER THAT HEAT COMES FROM THE FURNACE.
Flames licked lightly the body of America's foremost expert on conservation, wildlife management, ecology, and wilderness.
Aldo Leopold died of a heart attack on April 21, 1948, near the renovated chicken coop and reclaimed Wisconsin farmland known to his family and friends as "the shack." He had been fighting a neighbor's trash fire gone out of control. It threatened the tens of thousands of pines and hardwoods he and his family had planted. He set down the water pump he had carried to fight the fire, and lay down to rest his head on a clump of grass.
The morning of his death, Leopold counted a flight of 871 geese flying into the nearby Wisconsin River of Sauk County. The geese were attracted by the cover and food provided by the Wisconsin woods Leopold had worked so hard to restore. Just the day before, he, with his wife Estella and his youngest daughter, Estella Jr., added 100 more pines to the stand of some thirty thousand trees and shrubs planted over 11 years at the shack.
At 61 years old, Aldo Leopold was the elder statesman of the American conservation movement. Two months earlier, he'd been appointed to the United Nations Economic and Social Council's International Scientific Conference on the Conservation and Utilization of Resources.
In February of 1948, he had begun teaching Wildlife Ecology 118 at the University of Wisconsin in Madison for the fifteenth year. The class had a record 97 students. "The Professor" began the course by saying, "To formulate hypotheses about wildlife, and to test them for conformity to observed facts, is wildlife ecology. A person is an ecologist if he is skillful in seeing facts, ingenious in formulating hypotheses, and ruthless in discarding them when they don't fit." Aldo Leopold was an ecologist.
One month earlier he had attended, as Commissioner, a meeting of the Wisconsin Conservation Commission and voted to defeat a move to approve hydroelectric dams on the Menominee, Chippewa, and Wisconsin Rivers. He stated for the record, "The building of a power dam is an act of violence on nature and it is up to somebody to prove a dam will make the river more valuable than it is without it."
The previous year, he was elected honorary vice president of the American Forestry Association, and president of the Ecological Society of America.
He offered a new graduate-level course in Fall of 1946, called Advanced Game Management 179 "to develop the student's ability to think critically." This, after he had worked unsuccessfully all summer to convince the Conservation Commission to allow another any-deer hunting season to reduce the herd, saying "I want my exact words in the record. The same public which now insists that we postpone our [deer] reduction program will ask us, after the starvation is over, why we did not foresee it."
In April of 1945, the Leopold family planted 935 pines and tamaracks at the shack. They were heartened to find that natural reproduction had increased the plantings of aspens, birches, cherries, red osier dogwoods, willows, and other shrubs planted over the previous ten years. Leopold remarked, "The trees are getting awkward to measure."
Earlier in the year, he stood up as Conservation Commissioner to the public outcry for reenacting the predator bounty saying "I shall fight for again discontinuing the bounty whenever extermination again threatens. We have no right to exterminate any species of wildlife. I stand on this as a fundamental principle."
November 25, 1944 was opening day of the deer season in Wisconsin but, though he and his family were at the shack, Leopold did not hunt that year for the first time in many years. The previous spring and summer had been spent calling for a second any-deer hunt in order to further reduce the herd to Wisconsin's estimated carrying capacity of 200,000 deer. The Wisconsin Conservation Congress, a representative body of hunters from around the state, voted for a buck-only season and the State Conservation Department concurred. The Conservation Commission, on which Leopold served, would not vote against the wishes of both the hunters and the State's game professionals, no matter how pursuasive the arguments of Professor Leopold.
Spring planting that year included 475 tamarack, 500 red pines, and 1000 white pines. Leopold heard a loon at the shack for the first time.
The previous deer season had come to be known as the "crime of '43." An antlerless season had resulted in 128,000 deer taken — three times more than any previous year. The kill was unevenly distributed, however, so some areas were hardly touched, especially the northern counties deep in snow, while other counties reduced the herd by as much as 90 percent, when a reduction of 50 percent would have sufficed to improve the herd. Leopold, himself, suffered a tremendous loss when one of his favorite hunting dogs was injured by a wounded deer. Gus had to be put down by the hunter, who would never hunt deer again.
He had been appointed to the Wisconsin Conservation Commission on June 17, 1943, just in time to promulgate a new policy designed to alleviate the intense overbrowsing of woodlands that Wisconsin suffered due to its vastly excessive deer herd. As a member of the Citizen's Deer Committee, he had made several recommendations to the Conservation Commission the previous May. He suggested the Commission authorize an antlerless season in the fall, with a complete closure on buck hunting in order to improve the sex ratio of the herd, and concentrate hunting on overbrowsed refuges. Further, he recommended, the Commission should lift the bounty on wolves, and curtail the artificial feeding of deer.
In April, the Leopold family planted 2000 more pines at the shack. They also saw the first natural pine reproduction on the property, probably the result of a fire the previous year.
Earlier that spring the Citizen's Deer Committee inspected deer ranges in northern Wisconsin, where they found record numbers of starving deer, including one hundred fawns. There were apparently no predators of any kind to cull the herd, and there was obvious evidence of severe overbrowsing in the deer range. Leopold had been appointed chairman of the Committee in September of 1942 to conduct an independent evaluation of the deer situation in Wisconsin, especially in the north where deer were threatening to overpopulate their range.
April of 1942 saw four members of the Leopold family, Aldo and Estella, their youngest son Carl, and Estella Jr., plant 1700 pines, junipers, and cedars at the shack.
As chairman of the American Wildlife Institute's Technical Committee, Leopold toured Colorado, Utah, Arizona, Nevada, California, and Oregon in July of 1941. There he saw firsthand the deterioration of deer range throughout the West caused by policies intended to build up the deer herd, including elimination of predators such as mountain lions and coyotes.
Spring planting at the shack that year included 1700 white, jack, and red pines, along with numerous pasque flowers, Dutchman's breeches, and blue phlox.
In March of 1941, Leopold, his mind heavy with news of Hitler's campaign of domination in Europe, diverted with a lecture on War Ecology to his Wildlife Ecology 118 class. He explained the give and take of man's place in the environment, saying, "Nations fight over who shall take charge of increasing the take and to whom the better life shall accrue. Even in peace-time the energies of mankind are directed not toward creating the better life, but toward dividing the materials supposedly necessary for it."
Leopold began to record the number of geese sighted at the shack in April of 1940, and recorded as well the planting of 1500 more pines.
Half of the previous spring's planting of 2300 pines were lost to drought, in spite of Leopold's new desodding procedure around each tree. A handful of bur oak acorns were planted the previous fall to mark a visit to the shack by Charles Elton, an early ecologist whom Leopold admired greatly, and his wife.
That summer, Leopold had been employed by the Huron Mountain Club as a wildlife consultant. He recommended a management plan that included holding the interior of the Club's 15,000-acre tract of virgin hardwood forest near Lake Superior free from logging, so to be preserved as a natural area. He recommended the interior be surrounded by selective logging that would ease deer pressure from without, disperse the deer population within the tract, and encourage songbirds and wildflowers. He also recommended that the Club cease the killing of predators, especially wolves, and allow scientific studies on the land.
As Chairman of the Technical Committee of the American Wildlife Institute, Leopold helped to establish a waterfowl research station, known as the Delta Duck Station, on Lake Manitoba, near Winnipeg, in June of 1938. He installed one of his students, Albert Hochbaum, to work on it. Here, Hochbaum would conduct the research that led to his own stature as preeminent scientist and ecologist. His findings, compiled in the classic Canvasback on a Prairie Marsh, would win him the Brewster Medal of the American Ornithologists' Union and the 1944 Literary Award of the Wildlife Society.
The previous April saw the planting of 100 aspens, hazels, dogwoods, and sumacs, 100 white pines, 500 red pines, 500 jack pines, 500 red oaks, 50 tamaracks, 50 red cedars, 12 wahoo bushes, 40 red osier dogwoods, 30 more hazels, 24 paper birch, and 12 hard maples. This time the family added extra mulch and potash fertilizer to encourage the young plants.
Leopold admitted Albert Hochbaum to the Department of Wildlife Management graduate program in the fall of 1937. Hochbaum had been working with the National Park Service, but intended to pursue his interest in hole-nesting birds. He came to the program equipped with the talent to pursue his goal, a keen mind, and skill in nature drawing.
The previous year's planting of over three thousand cedars, junipers, crabapples, witch-hazel, raspberries, mountain ash, red pine, white pine, and jack pine, suffered great losses to drought and dust storms, leading the family to plant another three thousand pines in the fall.
In the spring of 1936, the Leopold family, that is, Aldo and sons Starker and Luna, had determined to create "a little forest for ourselves" at the shack. The whole family, including Estella, Nina, Carl, and Estella Jr., undertook to plant 2000 pine trees and dozens of mountain ash, juneberry, nannyberry, cranberry, raspberry, and plum. Only a few of the trees survived the nation's raging Dust Bowl that year.
In January of 1935, the Leopold family bought an abandoned farm on the Wisconsin River in Sauk County, along with eighty acres of surrounding land that would be augmented by another 40 acres in later years. The farm included a chicken coop, which the family transformed into a vacation cabin. Leopold started a new journal that day, a journal in which he would record field observations on the property.
He accepted an invitation in October of 1934 to help organize a new "Wilderness Society" through which he was able to promote on-the-ground efforts to preserve American wilderness. The organization was radical, small, and tight-knit.
On June 17, 1934, Leopold and a group of Madison civic leaders and University officials broke ground on the University of Wisconsin Arboretum and Wild Life Refuge. "Our idea," he said, "is to reconstruct [...] a sample of original Wisconsin."
The University of Wisconsin offered a course called Game Management 118 for the first time in March of 1934. The instructor was Aldo Leopold.
Leopold served on the President's Committee on Wild Life Restoration for the Roosevelt Administration beginning in January 1934. The Committee was authorized to develop a national wildlife conservation plan for purchasing submarginal agricultural lands. It included popular cartoonist Jay "Ding" Darling, soon to be head of the Biological Survey.
In October of 1933, Leopold created a wildlife management plan for 500 acres at the University of Wisconsin. This, just after the Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation had appointed him to a new chair of conservation with the title Professor of Game Management. The position required teaching a course on game management and overseeing the University's proposed Arboretum. His new five-year contract paid $8000 a year, and brought to an end the hardest times of the Depression for the Leopold family.
For two years, Leopold had been using letterhead that proclaimed him a "Consulting Forester," but there was not much consulting work to be had during the financial depths of 1932-1933. The Leopold family had just been through several months in which they received no income whatsoever.
Leopold attended the Matamek Conference in Quebec in July 1931, an international conference of biologists to discuss cyclic phenomena in nature. He first met Charles Elton there, a Professor of Zoology at Oxford University and author of Animal Ecology, a book that led the way in the modern approach to ecology.
That same summer, Leopold organized and consulted with a group of farmers, calling themselves the Riley Game Cooperative, near Riley, Wisconsin, to implement provisions of the American Game Policy on private lands, including restocking and winter feeding of game. The Cooperative soon became one of Leopold's preferred hunting grounds.
Formulation of the American Game Policy had culminated in December of 1930. Leopold chaired the committee that drafted the final policy, in which the American Game Protective Association called for a national commitment to game management. This was meant to include provisions for regulating take, providing cover and food, and controlling predators. It fundamentally placed responsibility for carrying out these provisions in the hands of landholders, especially the nation's farmers.
Leopold left the United States Forest Service on June 26, 1928, at age 41, to conduct a game survey of north-central states for the Sporting Arms and Ammunition Manufacturers' Institute (SAAMI). In the course of his research, he identified two trends: an increase in human population, including hunters, and a decrease in the ability of land to produce game.
Estella Jr., fifth child and second daughter of Aldo and Estella Leopold, was born in 1927.
The family took up archery and bowhunting in 1926, making their own bows out of stocks of osage orange, yew, Port Orford cedar, and Sitka spruce — access to specialty woods being a perquisite enjoyed by the Assistant Director of the USFS Forest Products Laboratory. He had been appointed to the position on July 1, 1924, which required moving the family to Madison from their home in Albuquerque, New Mexico.
In the month prior, the Gila Wilderness Area on the Apache National Forest of New Mexico was established. It was the first designated wilderness area in the National Forest System. Wilderness was now rare in the Southwest, and Aldo Leopold had been instrumental in planting the seed of desire for designated wilderness areas.
Aldo "Carl" Leopold, fourth child and third son, was born December 18, 1919.
The senior Leopold met with Arthur Carhart that same month to discuss the radical notion of designating forest lands as "wilderness." This was just months after he had rejoined the USFS as Assistant District Forester in Charge of Operations to conduct inspections of National Forests in District 3, report findings, and recommend changes. He had left the Forest Service to work briefly as Secretary for the Albuquerque Chamber of Commerce, where he developed and honed his public relations and organizational skills.
Adelina "Nina" Leopold was born in August of 1917.
Leopold visited the Grand Canyon for the first time in May of 1917, and was disappointed by the "improvements" installed on the rim in order to attract tourists. He had been sent there by the Forest Service to work on a recreational development plan with Frank A. Waugh. Waugh was a leading landscape specialist, dead set against turning the Canyon over to the National Park Service, with its impossibly paradoxical mission to "conserve the scenery [...] and to provide for the enjoyment of the same." Waugh failed.
Leopold spent the fall of 1916 working on the Grand Canyon Working Plan to correct discord between the natural beauty that draws tourists to the Canyon and the impact those same tourists have on the Canyon once they get there.
He was also working with the New Mexico Game Protective Association to enforce newly promulgated hunting laws, establish game refuges on the national forests of New Mexico, and wage war on predatory animals. Leopold had been instrumental in organizing sportsmen (hunters) into Game Protection Associations of Arizona and New Mexico with the goal of increasing game in the southwest.
Luna Bergere Leopold, second son, was born on September 8, 1915.
Leopold was detailed to the USFS Office of Grazing for nine months, where he learned to appreciate "carrying capacity" as applied to stock on forest lands. The Leopold family had moved to Albuquerque, New Mexico in October of 1914 for the new detail.
Aldo Starker Leopold, Aldo and Estella's first child, was born October 22, 1913. The couple had been married on October 9, 1912, at the Cathedral of Saint Francis in Santa Fe, New Mexico.
During the spring of 1912, Leopold planned and built the supervisor's quarters on the Carson National Forest at Tres Piedras, New Mexico. He built the small but elegant house around a great fireplace, facing the Sangre de Cristos mountains to the east, for $650. The new home was necessary because Leopold had fallen in love with Estella Bergere, the daughter of a prominent Santa Fe family that could trace its roots back to captains of Cortez and Coronado. The State of New Mexico was admitted to the Union in January of that year, largely due to the efforts of Estella's uncle, Solomon Luna.
Leopold was promoted to Supervisor of the Carson National Forest in northern New Mexico in May of 1911. He had previously been assigned as Crew Chief of a reconnaissance party to survey the Blue Range on Apache National Forest in Arizona and New Mexico. This assignment was a disaster for the young forester: He made crucial mathematical errors to the baseline survey, which threw the rest of the survey off, and made enemies of everyone on his crew. In spite of this, his superiors in the Forest Service felt he showed a good deal of promise.
He climbed Escudilla Mountain upon arrival in Springerville, Arizona, in July of 1909, having reported to work for the US Forest Service on the 3rd of that month. He had just completed 10 weeks of Forest Service training in New Orleans, after graduating from Yale University with a Master of Forestry degree. The Class of '09 included 35 foresters dedicated to the ideas and ideals of Gifford Pinchot, benefactor to the Yale Forest School, father of utilitarian forest management, and first Chief of the United States Forest Service.
Before Yale, Leopold attended the Lawrenceville School for two years of college preparation, having attended public schools in Burlington, Iowa until that time. He was known among his schoolmates and the community as a local expert in matters of ornithology, having developed his interest in birds and natural history while growing up in a mansion overlooking the Mississippi River, atop Prospect Hill in Burlington.
He was born Rand Aldo Leopold on January 11, 1887 to Carl Leopold and Clara Starker Leopold, first cousins and descendants of displaced aristocracy cum frontier nobility. From his father, young Aldo learned the ways of Nature, including a deep respect for life that was exhibited in Carl's self-imposed bag limits and hunting rules to encourage the local populations of waterfowl at a time when the migrating flocks were obviously declining. He also took from his father the drive to do things right: Carl ran the family business — the Leopold Desk Company — with the motto, Built on Honor to Endure. From his mother, he learned to love literature, philosophy, and poetry, especially that of Henry David Thoreau and Jack London.
At age eleven, Leopold wrote in his composition book that he liked to study birds in general, and wrens the best of all, "because they do more good than almost any other bird." He began keeping an ornithological journal in 1902, a habit he would retain for life.
When Aldo left for Lawrenceville, his mother's first letter, sent while his train was still steaming eastbound, pleaded with her son to give "his last thought at night to his mother." His father implored him to "write us fully, my boy, as often as you can every detail of your life in school as it will be of interest to us." And he did.
At the Lawrenceville School, he wrote home every day, often describing his tramps through nearby woods and his latest nature sightings. As an adolescent his phrase was often flowery but prophetic, once writing: "We can put on paper that such-and-such flowers are added to the list, that these birds have arrived and those are nesting, but who can write the great things, the deep changes, the wonderful nameless things, which are the real object of study of any kind."
As a young Assistant Director on the Carson National Forest, in June of 1911, Leopold started a newsletter called The Pine Cone "to scatter seeds of knowledge, encouragement, and enthusiasm among the members and create interest in the work. May these seeds fall on fertile soil and each and every one of them germinate, grow, and flourish...." Leopold served as chief editor, reporter, and illustrator.
While working to organize sportsmen in Arizona and New Mexico, he published another paper called The Pine Cone for that audience. This second newsletter was meant "to promote the protection and enjoyment of wild things. As the cone scatters the seeds of the pine and fir tree, so may it scatter the seeds of wisdom and understanding among men, to the end that every citizen may learn to hold the lives of harmless wild creatures as a public trust for human good." Early issues called for "the reduction of predatory animals ... the wolves, lions, coyotes, bob-cats, foxes, skunks, and other varmints," and hailed the killing of an infamous grizzly bear, saying, "the king of Mt. Taylor was a cow-killer from away back. He was a bad egg. He ate a thousand dollars' worth of beef a year. The destructiveness of cow-killers is intolerable, and it is highly desirable that they be destroyed on sight."
During this time he began keeping a hunting journal. His first entry recorded the day's take of three doves on the Rio Grande flats, along with some self-criticism. "Shot poorly," he wrote.
He began publishing articles in journals and periodicals in 1918, including an article in Outers Book — Recreation called "The Popular Wilderness Fallacy." In another article called "Forestry and Game Conservation," Leopold first compared game management to forest management, saying, "Forestry may prescribe for a certain area either a mixed stand or a pure one. But game management should always prescribe a mixed stand — that is, the perpetuation of every indigenous species. Variety in game is quite as valuable as quantity." Though aware of the need for biodiversity, his awareness at this point did not yet include a need for predators, even in wilderness.
He addressed a group of University of Mexico students in October of 1920. In speaking to them on "A Man's Leisure Time," Leopold declared that he spent his own leisure "entirely in search of adventure, without regard to prudence, profit, self-improvement, learning, or any other serious thing." He applauded others who spent their leisure time working to educate themselves in natural history and recommended such pursuits to his audience.
Another article in a 1921 edition of the Journal of Forestry titled "The Wilderness and Its Place in Forest Recreation Policy" was the profession's first treatment of wilderness. The seasoned forester wanted "to give definite form to the issue of wilderness conservation, and to suggest certain policies for meeting it, especially as applied to the Southwest." Furthermore the article asked "whether the principle of highest use does not itself demand that representative portions of some forests be preserved as wilderness." It recommended setting aside the headwaters of the Gila River in the Mogollon Mountains of New Mexico as a prototype wilderness area.
From 1924 to 1928, Leopold worked on a book he wanted to write called Southwestern Game Fields, but never completed for several reasons. He was experiencing difficulty communicating with his primary contributors in the field, when at the same time they began reporting of a disaster on the Kaibab National Forest. The forest had been swept clean of predators and the deer were now overbrowsing the range to the point of their own starvation. This new data required Leopold to completely rethink his stance on predator control. During this period, he also wrote numerous articles on game management, technical forestry, and wilderness.
He spent the better part of 1930 writing Report on a Game Survey of the North Central States, based on the SAAMI Game Survey, and immediately formulated plans to write an accompanying book. This now-classic textbook on game management would be more encompassing than Southwestern Game Fields, using the latest in field research, and based on a series of lectures Leopold had presented at the University of Wisconsin.
He devoted the first six months of 1931 to writing Game Management, while the nation and the Leopold family languished in the grasp of the Great Depression. Charles Scribner's Sons agreed to publish Game Management if Leopold would agree to certain reductions in production costs and contribute $500 of his own money. Leopold agreed, and signed a contract with Scribner's on January 11, 1932 — Leopold's 45th birthday. He worked diligently on Game Management throughout 1932, and sent the final manuscript to Scribner's on July 16, 1933.
In October of 1933, Leopold wrote "The Conservation Ethic" for the American Association for the Advancement of Science. Here Leopold showed the direction in which he was heading after writing Game Management, saying the goal of conservation "is a universal symbiosis with land, economic and esthetic, public and private."
Critical acclaim and material reward soon began to accrue from the publication of Game Management, By November of 1933, 1900 copies had been sold and the book soon became a required text for students of wildlife conservation in America. That same month, Leopold received his first royalty check of $675 — not a bad sum for Depression times.
In 1935, Leopold first used the phrase "land ethic" in an address called "Land Pathology" given at the University of Wisconsin. While the country choked on the product of its own abuse of the land during the Dust Bowl, Leopold said, "Philosophers have long since claimed that society is an organism, but with few exceptions they have failed to understand that the organism includes the land which is its medium[.]" Further, forces required to stabilize the land could "eventually yield a land ethic more potent than the [forces themselves], but the breeding of ethics is as yet beyond our powers."
Leopold published "Marshland Elegy" in the October issue of American Forests to celebrate the sandhill crane and lament its loss in Wisconsin's marshlands. He later delivered "Natural History, the Forgotten Science" at the University of Missouri, in which he criticized the natural history curriculum. He also wrote more than thirty popular articles for the Wisconsin Agriculturalist and Farmer in order to provide the farmer with basic information needed to practice wildlife conservation on the farm. It was at this time that Leopold first used the word "ecology," and delivered an address on "A Biotic View of Land" to a joint meeting of the Society of American Foresters and the Ecological Society of America, in which he discussed the relationship between ecology and conservation.
By the end of 1941, Leopold was seriously considering writing an illustrated series of ecological essays. He discussed the idea with Harold Strauss, an editor at Knopf, but his busy schedule kept getting in the way. He began writing in earnest in late 1943, beginning with one of his personal favorites, "Great Possessions" in September, followed by "Illinois Bus Ride" on New Year's Day, 1944, and "The Delta Colorado" several days later. He wrote "Thinking Like a Mountain" on April 1, 1944 in response to Albert Hochbaum's proddings to admit his own guilty role in the extermination of predators in the Southwest. Leopold and Hochbaum had discussed the idea of Hochbaum illustrating Leopold's essays, but constraints on Hochbaum's time prevented collaborating with the former student while he researched and wrote Canvasback on a Prairie Marsh.
Leopold delivered an address to the Conservation Committee of the Garden Club of America in June 1947 on "The Ecological Conscience," "an affair of the mind as well as the heart. It implies a capacity to study and learn, as well as to emote about the problems of conservation."
He wrote "The Land Ethic" in the summer of 1947 to summarize his ecological essays. His capstone piece was created largely by combining and rewriting "The Conservation Ethic," "A Biotic View of Land," and "The Ecological Conscience" from earlier publications and addresses.
Leopold met with Charles Schwartz to discuss illustration of the book in the summer of 1947. Schwartz was an illustrator then working with the Missouri Conservation Commission who had been introduced to Leopold by his son, Luna.
He sent a manuscript to Knopf in September 1947, but editor Clinton Simpson promptly rejected the book, saying "What we like best is the nature observations, and the more objective narratives and essays. We like less the subjective parts — that is, the philosophical reflections[.] In short, the book seems unlikely to win approval from readers or to be a successful publication as it now stands."
Disappointed but undaunted, Leopold wrote "Axe-in-Hand" in November of 1947, and a new, more concise, foreword in December. Meanwhile, his, son, Luna, felt Leopold was not given fair treatment by Knopf and began negotiations with Oxford University Press and William Sloane Associates of New York.
Leopold wrote "Good Oak" in early 1948, and on the same day that he voted against hydroelectric dams in Wisconsin, he wrote to Carl Russell, superintendent of Yosemite National Park, to oppose construction of a highway through Tioga Pass, saying, "I think the Park Service has already acquiesced in far too much motorization, and that the time to call a halt on that process is now, while there are still some wilderness values left to conserve."
He continued to edit the manuscript and, on Wednesday, April 14, 1948, Phillip Vaudrin, editor at Oxford, called Leopold to say Oxford would like to publish the book. Leopold wired Charlie Schwartz with the good news on Thursday, April 15, then wrote to Luna to thank him for his efforts in getting the book published.
On Wednesday, April 21, Leopold recorded sighting 871 geese at the shack, the most geese he had ever recorded in all of his journals.
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