I HAVE READ MANY DEFINITIONS OF WHAT IS A CONSERVATIONIST, AND WRITTEN NOT A FEW MYSELF, BUT I SUSPECT THAT THE BEST ONE IS WRITTEN NOT WITH A PEN, BUT WITH AN AXE. IT IS A MATTER OF WHAT A MAN THINKS ABOUT WHILE CHOPPING, OR WHILE DECIDING WHAT TO CHOP. A CONSERVATIONIST IS ONE WHO IS HUMBLY AWARE THAT WITH EACH STROKE HE IS WRITING HIS SIGNATURE ON THE FACE OF HIS LAND. — ALDO LEOPOLD
Environmental law and policy of the 20th Century grew out of the environmental literature that preceded it. Henry David Thoreau, Walt Whitman, and John Muir prepared the soil with works that transcended common nature writing to study mankind within the environment. They provoked serious consideration of the environment per se, and John Muir's efforts resulted in policy visible on the ground: Yosemite National Park is but one example. Environmental law and policy in the 20th Century came to reflect ideas found in the best of environmental literature, which took on mythic importance to our culture.
Myths are stories we tell ourselves over and over to explain origins, destinies, and our present situation; therefore, myths are critical to the development of a civilization. As James P. Carse notes, "A culture can be no stronger than its strongest myths." Modern myths must satisfy an increasingly well educated society, and we now demand that myths be based on accurate scientific and historical evidence. The 20th Century environmental movement is based on just such myths — fundamental, if relative, truths, really — and its most prominent mythmakers are Edward Abbey, Rachel Carson, and Aldo Leopold.
These three authors generated a paradigm shift in environmental awareness. A paradigm is more than just a shared set of theories or model; a paradigm is the shared commitment to a model. To sway the belief system of scholars from one model to another requires profoundly convincing arguments made at the fundamental level of discussion. Abbey, Carson, and Leopold waged such arguments. They altered our understanding of the environment from one that was anthropocentric, detached, and irresponsible to one biocentric, inclusive, and increasingly reactive to our own actions.
Though they were most active on the environmental stage during the middle half of the 20th Century, roughly 1925 to 1975, these three authors did not work in concert with one another. Abbey, the youngest of the three, was highly influenced by Leopold's land ethic and was undoubtedly aware of Carson's Silent Spring. Carson was not favorably disposed to Leopold's conservationist perspective, and died several years before Abbey published Desert Solitaire. Leopold, a professor at the University of Wisconsin, may have been aware of Carson's "Undersea" works, but could not possibly have known when he died that Abbey was then attending a land grant university many miles to the south.
Their differences are numerous, though their similarities may be more telling. Of their differences, most obviously, two were men and one was a woman. Abbey and Leopold both married and fathered five children each, though Abbey had five wives to Leopold's one. Carson never married but did raise two nieces after the death of her sister.
Of their similarities, several are remarkable: All three were born in that region of America now known as the Old West, those northern states between the Appalachian Mountains and the Mississippi River Valley. All three died at a relatively young age. All three completed Master's degrees at a time when graduate work was rare for anybody, but especially rare for a woman. All three worked for federal government agencies for a good portion of their lives, and all three taught at the university level at some point. Most importantly, all three were disturbed by the environmental trends they perceived and felt compelled to compose their thoughts and seek publication. All three wrote prodigiously.
The tremendous volume of published works that Abbey, Carson, and Leopold left behind makes it at once difficult and enjoyable to study their thoughts. This blog will guide you through some of their most important contributions to environmental literature, while providing enough contextual material to place them within modern American culture. The stage is set with a chapter on "Manifest Destiny"; then each author is introduced with a biographical sketch. Each of the books from which readings were synopsized is critiqued, and the legacy of each author established. Lastly, the total impact of Abbey, Carson, and Leopold on the environment, the environmental movement, and environmental philosophy and literature is presented, including a matrix of events that occurred during their lifetimes.
Readings from two books by each author are summarized: a book of early writings and a later book that represents the summit of that author's philosophy. This was done to demonstrate the evolution and maturation of each author's writing. Several of the books are collections of essays, from which it is relatively easy to select representative samples. Others are longer works that were more difficult to cull: one is a novel, the other an exceptionally tight book-length argument. The purpose of these synopses is to inspire the reader to pursue further the works of these authors. If these summaries feel less than satisfactory to you, by all means read the books, which are available through the Required Reading slideshow in the right-hand frame. Other sources used in compiling this guide are also available for purchase by clicking on their respective titles at the end of each section in which they were used.
From Edward Abbey's extensive bibliography were selected essays from Desert Solitaire, the 1968 book that slowly gained a tremendous following, and his 1975 novel, The Monkey Wrench Gang, which propelled Abbey into the literary mainstream. Included also are two essays first published in Abbey's 1988 collection, One Life at a Time, Please. "Eco-Defense" and "A Writer's Credo" are essential to a collection that emphasizes the importance of writing to changes in environmental law and policy.
Rachel Carson may have been somewhat less prolific than Abbey, but that does not make the editor's job any easier. Synopses of chapters from Under the Sea Wind show clearly the unique workings of her incredibly literary scientific mind, even if the book was not her best selling. Obviously, no collection of Carson's work would be complete without selections from Silent Spring, but here the task was even more daunting: how to pick a few selections without losing the thread of her argument. Again, the purpose is only to inspire a more thorough reading.
Finally, Aldo Leopold's essays were difficult only in deciding what to chop. He actually only published one book during his lifetime (Game Management, a college textbook), but had published numerous magazine and journal articles on wildlife conservation and ecology. Many of these articles were published again posthumously, largely due to the efforts of his son, Luna Leopold. Essays from Round River, published in 1953 but made up of early articles and entries from Leopold's hunting journal were selected as well as essays from A Sand County Almanac, Leopold's most famous work, published the year after his death in 1948.
You may have noticed by now that the authors are not presented in chronological order. There are several reasons for this: First, as it happens, their alphabetical order is reverse chronological order. By arranging the authors in reverse chronological order the reader can proceed from destinies to origins, immediately grasping the results of earlier thinking. Within each author, however, the selections are arranged in chronological order to show that author's growth over his or her lifetime. This structuring is not without precedent: Aldo Leopold relies on a similar construct in "Good Oak," one of his most important pieces. If these three authors represent the trunk of the tree of environmental philosophy then Abbey is the bark, the visible skin of the tree, where matter meets mind and meaning. Carson is the sapwood, where information flows between science and philosophy. Leopold is the heartwood, the older, colorful core of 20th Century environmental philosophy and literature.
Second, Edward Abbey's self-awareness as a writer makes for an excellent starting point in a book about environmental writing. Think of the writer as one who realizes the impact of writing about the environment on the environment itself. Abbey is a writer's writer who happens to occasionally write about the environment in which he lives.
Finally, Leopold's greatest statement, contained in "The Land Ethic," was saved for last. All of the other works philosophically lead up to this statement, even if most of them were written subsequently.
Edward Abbey, Rachel Carson, and Aldo Leopold are the most influential environmental writers of the 20th Century. Their books have been read by millions but more importantly those millions were stirred to action by what they read. Actions became policies that changed the environment — literally. These authors did not work in a vacuum, however. They were greatly influenced by earlier writers such as Thoreau, Whitman, and Muir, but they were also products of their own time and place — 20th Century America.
Aldo Leopold was born in 1887, atop the Flint Hills of Burlington, Iowa, overlooking the Mississippi River. Rachel Carson was born twenty years later in Springdale, near Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Edward Abbey was born yet another twenty years later in Home, Pennsylvania. Though their births covered forty years, each grew up with frontier stories of the Old West, so recently settled. They were profoundly impressed with the closing of the frontier in America, and would seek out their own frontiers where they could: Abbey and Leopold in the wilderness of the southwestern desert; Carson in the sea. Each was markedly influenced by the times in which they lived. They read the land, they sensed the timbre of their times, and each foresaw the potential for environmental disaster. Abbey, Carson, and Leopold collectively rose to inform contemporary environmental philosophy, while they left their personal signatures indelibly etched upon this land.
ONE OF THE PENALTIES OF AN ECOLOGICAL EDUCATION IS THAT ONE LIVES ALONE IN A WORLD OF WOUNDS.
— ALDO LEOPOLD
The landscape of 19th Century America, the landscape that produced Abbey, Carson, and Leopold, was markedly different from the environment in which readers of this blog find themselves. Just think for a moment how different your own life would have been at the turn of the 20th Century... No cars, airliners, or computers — you might have seen or read about a demonstration of electric lighting somewhere. You would most likely live in an urban setting, regardless of future misconceptions about a mostly rural America, and you are surrounded by filth and disease. Yet, you know there is more to America than meets your eye. Your ancestors and predecessors of the 19th Century found an entire continent just waiting for their plows and their ideals. Vast tracts of unspoiled wilderness still lay just to the west, and that knowledge buoyed their optimism. Even if they never saw those lands, their children would, and they would thrive because America had land enough for their descendants "to the thousandth and thousandth generation." Thomas Jefferson told them so.
The sheer size of the continental nation staggered the 19th Century imagination. Travelers and explorers reported mile after mile of hardwood forests to the west of the Appalachian Mountains. Beyond the forests lay unbroken miles of tallgrass plains just waiting for the touch of your plow. Further west lay mountains and deserts, terrible yet enchanting with possibilities: gold, silver, cattle, land — freedom. Finally, a veritable paradise lay at the shores of the Pacific Ocean: the temperate rainforests of the Oregon Territory; the Gold Hills of California. Many reports were written specifically to lure people to the frontier and contained a great deal of misinformation. Some were just plain lies. The growing economy rested on a foundation of continual frontier settlement. Land speculators, railroads, and even the government needed inhabitants in order to validate their existence in the wilderness.
Not that settlers needed much information before deciding to pick up and move west. They tended to migrate in waves. First came the hunter/trapper types — itinerant men, some with families, who might pause long enough to graze a cow and raise some corn and squash. They lived primarily by their rifles and traps, leaving the land largely undiminished when they heard the first report of neighbors. Next came the hunter/farmer — the first true settler — an industrious sort who cleared the land of timber to build a glassed-in farmhouse with stone chimney and raise cows and hogs and grains and vegetables to feed his family. He stayed long enough to see the value of his land — gotten by fiat of a paternal government — rise tremendously, at which point he moved west again. Finally there came the settled farmers and townspeople — doctors, lawyers, merchants, preachers, et al. This third wave came to stay, improved the lands with intensive agricultural methods, built their towns, and brought civilization to country so recently wilderness.
It took a special kind of person to brave this wilderness: independent of mind and spirit, self-reliant, and above all, optimistic. They tended to sort themselves out into three classes: a better sort, the middling sort, and a meaner sort. They were descendants of various northern European stocks — German, Scotch, Irish, Dutch, Scandinavian, and even a few French, in addition to the English majority — achieving unity in the knowledge that this land was not the Europe from which they had escaped, but America. Without hesitation they set about the task of civilizing the wilderness. They worked hard at it. Some may have been manic-depressive, a disorder possibly quite useful to the farmer, rancher, or logger who must work like hell while the sun shines, then sit and wait for a break in the weather, brutally hot or brutally cold, before he can venture out to work like hell again. As Frederick Jackson Turner wrote in his history-making book, The Frontier in American History, "these men were emotional. [...] They had faith in themselves and their destiny."
They worked hard and they built a nation. They built it on a foundation of free lands and democratic principles. Turner wrote that "free lands promoted individualism, economic equality, freedom to rise, democracy. [...] In a word, then, free lands meant free opportunities."
Oh, yes. There were others living on this land — whole peoples who did not share in the nation building effort. Native Americans were pushed along, resettled in reservations to the Southwest, or exterminated. Recently freed slaves tended to huddle in cities east of the Mississippi, though a few found good work on the immense ranches of the West. Chinese laborers were imported to lay railroad tracks and work the mines but were not allowed to own land. Even women, the wives of frontiersmen, had no voice. Each of these groups would have to wait for democracy to reach down to them.
Manifest Destiny was a white man's notion, encouraged and enforced by a white man's government. From the times of the Revolutionary War, the United States (at that time a plural noun) had promoted policies designed to gain new territories. George Washington, the son of a settler himself, settled the lands he surveyed. Thomas Jefferson was the son of a pioneer, born in the frontier region of Virginia. Abraham Lincoln, of course, was the very embodiment of pioneer democracy.
In their quest for additional lands, the United States commissioned expeditions such as Lewis and Clark's, which conducted scientific inquiry as it opened new lands to American fur traders of the early 19th Century. The United States fought wars with England, France, Mexico, and the Indians. More importantly, they won. They made deals, and every time they made a deal or won a war, new territory brought them that much closer to the reality of a continental nation. Jefferson bought the Louisiana Territory for a song at a time when Napoleonic France needed the money for its own dreams of empire. Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, and California were easily won from a weak Mexican government once the United States set their collective mind to the goal. In all, 29 states were admitted to the Union during the 19th Century. The United States doubled and redoubled themselves until they formed a singular concept, spanning the continent from sea to shining sea.
All of this land needed people, and fast. The newly aggrandized federal government met this need with ordinances and acts that encouraged migration and settlement to the west. The Land Ordinance of 1785 contributed a lasting legacy of land divided into townships consisting of 36 sections of 640 acres (one square mile) each. They were to be auctioned off for as little as one dollar per acre. The Homestead Act of 1862 granted 160 acres of Western land, mostly desert, free to any qualified applicant.
Migrants needed transportation to reach their homesteads, so the states and federal government responded with waterways such as the Erie Canal, connecting the Great Lakes to the Hudson River, and roads such as the Cumberland Road, supporting traffic to and from the Old West of Ohio, Kentucky, and Indiana. The Santa Fe Trail to the Southwest and the Oregon Trail to the Northwest were soon carrying goods and settlers to the loneliest points on the map. Then along came the steam-powered Iron Horse — the railroad. In the same year that Congress passed the Homestead Act it also passed the Pacific Railroad Act, thus financing a transcontinental railroad. In May of 1869, a westbound Union Pacific train met an eastbound Central Pacific train near Ogden, Utah. Pounding of the Golden Spike was telegraphed back east, announcing that travelers could now cross the nation in days rather than weeks or months.
This was important because gold, silver and other precious ores had recently been discovered out west. California had its Gold Rush of 1849, with peak production of four million ounces of gold in 1852. Nevada's Comstock Lode of silver ore was discovered in 1859, and Colorado attracted miners and their retinue to numerous gold and silver rushes throughout the latter half of the century. Again, the government stepped in to assist. After a great deal of discussion beginning in 1850, delayed mostly by demands that Chinese miners be prevented from harvesting precious metals, Congress passed the Mining Act of 1866, declaring that "mineral lands are free and open to exploration and occupation." The Mining Act, with some revisions, is the law of the land to this day.
Mining for precious metals was not the only subterranean activity, however. Coal production increased 3000 per cent to 14 million tons between 1820 and 1860, then grew to 270 million tons by the turn of the century. Even with this incredible increase in coal production, Turner could write in 1910 that "[m]ore coal was mined in the United States in the ten years after 1897 than in all the life of the nation before that time." Mining companies came to be hated giants of industrial greed, subjecting employees to the harshest, most dangerous working conditions while raping the land as they followed veins of bituminous and anthracite ore.
The landscape was also changing on the grazing lands of the West. Where buffalo had so recently roamed, cattle now grazed. Even land that could not support buffalo was turned to pasture. Ranching was pursued wherever the land would not yield crops or gold. Of course, these deserts and semi-desert shrublands could not support many head per acre, so ranches tended to become large as homesteaders quickly discovered they could not survive on 160 acres, selling their land for just enough to move further west.
In spite of this headlong rush for free lands granted to homesteaders, miners, and railroads, the American population was actually becoming more and more urbanized. Historian Dayton Duncan notes that while the American population grew 16-fold during the 19th Century, its urban population increased 139-fold. In fact for every homestead granted, 20 farmers moved into the city. American cities grew first on the Atlantic coast, followed canals, rivers, and turnpikes to the Mississippi Valley, then took root along the railroad tracks that soon ran capillary-like to nearly anywhere on the continent.
This new urbanization of America, the third wave of settlers, believed in Manifest Destiny to an extent unconsidered by the first wave of simple hunters or the second wave of migrant farmers. The civilized settlers of towns and cities across America read with fervor the words of Herman Melville in 1850:
God has predestinated, mankind expects, great things from our race; and great things we feel in our souls. The rest of the nations must soon be in our rear. We are the pioneers of the world; the advance guard, sent on through the wilderness of untried things, to break a new path in the New World that is ours. In our youth is our strength; in our inexperience, our wisdom.
America had, in less than 100 years, risen to fulfill its Manifest Destiny. Lands that were once merely overrun with Indians were now inhabited by democratic pursuers of an increasingly industrial economy. These zealots had created a fiercely democratic society based on the availability of free lands that could be exploited for agriculture, minerals, or transport, the essential ingredients of commerce. But even before Destiny was achieved, there were those who could see potential problems on the American landscape.
A literary genre evolved in which prescient writers could warn of the dangers to America's rush to exploit her lands. Henry David Thoreau wrote of his experience on Walden Pond, an experiment in resistance to the industrial revolution with its debtor society and indifference to Nature. "Let us spend one day as deliberately as Nature," he wrote in Walden; or, Life in the Woods. Thoreau railed against that noisy new technology that each day broke into his Solitude, saying of the railroad, "few are riding, but the rest are run over." He recommended living thriftily within one's means such that "to maintain one's self on this earth is not a hardship but a pastime." In a statement completely contradictory to Manifest Destiny he concluded, "Give me the poverty that enjoys true wealth."
Thoreau was just two years the senior of Walt Whitman, an American poet who greatly influenced the environmental movement of the 20th Century. Whitman decried the tyranny latent in Manifest Destiny, exhorting us to "resist much, obey little," as in "To the States:"
To the States or any one of them, or any city of the States,
Resist much, obey little,
Once unquestioning obedience, once fully enslaved,
Once fully enslaved, no nation, state, city of this earth,
ever afterward resumes its liberty.
Whitman also sensed trouble ahead for disciples of the Industrial Age, as in this excerpt from "To a Locomotive in Winter:"
Thy train of cars behind, obedient, merrily following,
Through gale or calm, now swift, now slack, yet steadily careering;
Type of the modern — emblem of motion and power — and pulse of the
continent,
For once come serve the Muse and merge in verse, even as here
I see thee,
With storm and buffeting gusts of wind and falling snow,
By day thy warning ringing bell to sound its notes,
By night thy silent signal lamps to swing.
Clearly, not all of America's authors were as optimistically assured of the rightness of Manifest Destiny as was Melville. This was the time of America's literary fruition. Literary notables to emerge from 19th Century America included Ralph Waldo Emerson, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Mark Twain, and Henry James. While they wrote of pioneer days, they did so with nostalgia for days gone by before we even had a chance to enjoy them.
Much of their subject matter deals with the loss of frontier in America, and its replacement by the commercial class of third wave settlers. This closing of the frontier was academically established by a young historian named Frederick Jackson Turner in 1893. Turner had noticed a statement by the Superintendent of the Census for 1890 that "Up to and including 1880 the country had a frontier of settlement, but at present the unsettled area has been so broken into by isolated bodies of settlement that there can hardly be said to be a frontier line." Over the course of a spectacular career (for a historian), Turner turned that statement into a thesis of American history through first an essay, then popular speeches, then a book, The Frontier in American History. While today's historians debate the validity of Turner's thesis, at the turn of the century it was taken as gospel. The American frontier was forever gone, lost in the achievement of Manifest Destiny. While vast areas of desolate frontier lands (those with fewer than seven inhabitants per square mile) remained, what was lost was the promise of free lands to "the thousandth and thousandth generation" of Americans. The frontier was a social process or, as Turner termed it, "the meeting point between savagery and civilization" that could never again be used as a generator of American democracy.
Turner noted four revolutionary changes in the last decade of the 19th Century: 1) The supply of free land was no longer a factor in American development. 2) Capital had so concentrated in the hands of a few fundamental industries, e.g., coal, cattle, and railroads, that a significantly new and different economy had arisen. 3) The United States had recently embarked upon unprecedented imperial missions overseas. And 4) economic disparity between the rich and the poor had resulted in unparalleled political divisiveness on the question of Socialism. This schism would result in the rise of the Populist party at the turn of the century, and a long period of Democratic Party White Houses in the 20th Century.
Turner's thesis was greeted enthusiastically both within academe and without. Theodore Roosevelt converted to Turner's view of America — so did Woodrow Wilson. All of America, in fact, came to believe that Manifest Destiny had been achieved and America would now benefit from industrialism without the distraction of having to tame the wilderness. When Turner retired from his teaching duties at Harvard in the summer of 1924, he settled down in Madison, Wisconsin, to write. As it happened, his neighbor two doors down was none other than Aldo Leopold, recently returned from the frontier lands of New Mexico, who corroborated many of Turner's theories with what he had himself seen of disappearing wilderness.
While Turner's thesis was at heart an optimistic one, it also revealed the downside of "progress." Environmental problems became more pronounced and more widely known at the turn of the century, such that Turner was forced to admit in 1910 that "[t]hree years ago the President of the United States summoned the governors of forty-six states to deliberate upon the danger of the exhaustion of the natural resources of the nation." Wisconsin would soon, in fact, be nearly completely deforested — the state's pine forests were gone by the turn of the century; the hardwoods would follow within the next 25 years. America's bird life was suffering mightily at the hands of civilization: The heath hen was hunted to extinction by 1932. Migratory waterfowl populations had dipped to precariously low numbers while Aldo Leopold was still a young boy growing up along the Mississippi flyway. The passenger pigeon had already succumbed to America's taste for squab. Leopold would later reflect on a monument to the pigeon in A Sand County Almanac, saying:
Our grandfathers were less well-housed, well-fed, well-clothed than we are. The strivings by which they bettered their lot are also those which deprived us of pigeons. Perhaps we now grieve because we are not sure, in our hearts, that we have gained by the exchange. The gadgets of industry bring us more comforts than the pigeons did, but do they add as much to the glory of the spring?
And again, the federal government responded to the needs of America. Gifford Pinchot, a forester subscribing to new theories of scientific forest management, had recently become chief of the Department of Agriculture's Division of Forestry. He was a close friend and advisor to Theodore Roosevelt when the original Rough Rider became President in 1900. Together they began the U.S. conservation movement. In 1905, Roosevelt signed the Transfer Act that handed responsibility for the nation's forest lands to the new U.S. Forest Service, with Gifford Pinchot as its chief. The lands held as Forest Reserves more than doubled to 150 million acres between 1903 and 1907, at which time they were officially designated National Forests. The utilitarian conservation of America's National Forests would ensure "a perpetual supply of timber for home industries, preventing destruction of the forest cover which regulates the flow of streams, and protecting local industries from unfair competition in the use of forest and range," as proclaimed in the Forest Service's first mission statement.
Working the same ground but from a vitally different perspective was the preservationist movement led by John Muir. In 1867, the 29-year-old Scottish-American naturalist walked 1000 miles from his Wisconsin home to the Gulf of Mexico. He then turned toward the Pacific, visited Yosemite Valley, and embarked upon a life-long mission to preserve and protect what little remained of America's pristine natural wonders. His efforts resulted in formation of the Sierra Club, and eventually succeeded in gaining Yosemite's designation as America's second National Park (after Yellowstone) in 1890.
The philosophies of John Muir and Gifford Pinchot would soon meet head-on in the Hetch Hetchy Valley of Yosemite National Park. The City of San Francisco wanted to dam the Hetch Hetchy for a municipal water supply. John Muir, the preservationist, said we may as well "dam for water-tanks the people's cathedrals and churches, for no holier temple has ever been consecrated by the heart of man." To which Pinchot, the conservationist, replied that whatever injury may accompany the substitution of a lake for the swampy floor of the Hetch Hetchy Valley "is altogether unimportant compared with the benefits to be derived from its use as a reservoir." San Francisco got its dammed water in 1913. The "greatest good for the greatest number" has held sway in nearly every court battle since.
In response to the emerging crisis in wildlife resources, Theodore Roosevelt asked Congress to designate certain lands as federal game refuges. One Congressman denounced the President's proposal as "the fad of game preservation run stark raving mad." The bill died, prompting the President to ask, "Is there any law that will prevent me from declaring Pelican Island a Federal Bird Reservation?" He was informed the island was already federal property, so he said, "Very well, I so declare it." In this way, Pelican Island, off the Florida coast, became the nation's first wildlife refuge in 1903.
Meanwhile, technological advances were occurring regularly as the 20th Century dawned on America. The closing of the frontier had been achieved in large part due to the immediate implementation of recent technological advances. The windmill, barbed wire, railroads, Morse Code and the telegraph, the McCormick Reaper, the Colt revolver, and a network of irrigation systems to water the arid lands west of the Mississippi River had all played vital roles in the winning of the West. Now the inventions of Thomas Edison and Alexander Graham Bell were introduced: electric lighting and the telephone. In 1903, the Wright Brothers made their first flight in a powered aircraft. That same year, Henry Ford founded the Ford Motor Company, using assembly-line manufacturing techniques to build tens of thousands of new Model T automobiles each year.
The U.S. population, which had not topped 10 million by 1820, would swell to well over 100 million before 1920. Where the population had been less than 10 per cent foreign born at the beginning of the 19th Century, by the end of that century some metropolitan areas in the east were only 30 per cent native stock. Such rapid changes in technology, manufacturing, and demographics forced lurking social issues to the fore. Workers' revolts were common, and were ruthlessly quelled by captains of industry with the aid of their allies in government. The Woman Suffrage movement was gaining momentum under the leadership of such women as Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton. It is difficult for us to imagine a nation in which women had no vote. Their cause was delayed by other issues such as the temperance movement, which harbored many of the same advocates, and Negro emancipation after the Civil War. Nonetheless, women's suffrage would not be granted across the nation until well into the 20th Century. Rachel Carson was 13 years old when the 19th Amendment, extending voting rights to women, was ratified in 1920.
American society became increasingly stratified through the winnowing effects of commerce and industry at the turn of the century. Increasingly, special interest groups — conservationists, feminists, and socialists alike —turned to the federal government to right the wrongs of the nation where previously they would have turned to the states or to themselves.
This sense of belonging to a greater entity — the United States was now definitely a singular noun — combined with the news of horrors coming out of Europe, led the U.S. to reluctantly shed its isolationist ideology and become involved in World War I. As part of the effort, the Forest Service supplied the lumber for barracks, trenches, and aircraft, requiring a pronounced increase in timbering activity and a scaling-back of recreational development on national forest lands.
After Armistice Day, Americans breathed a collective sigh of relief and returned to the task of improving their lives at any cost. While the economy boomed, ethics went bust. Warren G. Harding's Presidency was among the most corrupt, and several members of his Cabinet were forced to resign amid scandal. Americans were largely inattentive because times were good. The typical citizen could now afford to buy an automobile. The atypical citizen was beginning to travel by air. Charles Lindbergh successfully flew the first solo crossing of the Atlantic Ocean in an airplane, the Spirit of St. Louis, in 1927. The times were heady, if dry, as emerging technologies reached down to the masses. Unfortunately, these seemingly good times were brought to a screeching halt with the Stock Market Crash of October 29, 1929, precipitating the Great Depression.
The Depression did not immediately affect everyone in America. It rolled out from Wall Street over the next several years, hitting different sectors of the economy at different times. In general, however, the nation went from an unemployment rate of less than two per cent in the middle of the '20s to nine per cent in 1930 and nearly 24 per cent in 1932. That year also saw industrial production slowed to 40 per cent of its capacity, and the stock market at ten per cent of its pre-Crash level. To make matters worse, intensive agricultural practices in the West reaped a grim harvest as dry, windy conditions settled into the southern Plains from 1933 to 1935, resulting in the Dust Bowl that drove myriad farmers and settlers off the plains and further west.
The nation turned once again to the federal government for help. Franklin D. Roosevelt was elected President in 1932, the beginning of 16 years of New Deal policies generally credited with bringing about the nation's slow economic recovery.
In Europe the Great War never really ended, merely took recess in order to regroup. Hitler rose to power. By 1939, Europe was again fighting and Japan was waging war in Asia and the Pacific, but America tried desperately to remain neutral. This ended on December 7, 1941, when the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor, the first time American territory had been attacked in the 20th Century. Germany declared war on the U.S. shortly thereafter and America was soon committed to military theaters around the globe.
The War Years greatly affected American life. More than 16 million Americans served in the armed forces — 292,000 died in battle. Beyond this a tremendous effort was undertaken to produce the machinery of war, which had lain dormant since 1919. Gasoline and other materials were rationed. Women were recruited in unheard of numbers to work in factories that had never before seen a female employee. The nation's efforts resulted in unconditional surrender from Hitler's Germany after unrelenting aerial bombing reduced German manufacturing capabilities to zero. The Japanese were largely defeated after the firebombing of Tokyo had reduced that wooden city to ashes, but the U.S. sent a clear and unequivocal message to the rest of the world (most especially the Soviet Union) with atomic bomb blasts over Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August of 1945.
America again turned inward after the war, turning assembly lines that had so recently produced tanks and bombers to the task of producing cars and airliners. Communism became the great external threat, so the nation endured communist witch hunts led by Senator Joseph McCarthy and the Federal Bureau of Investigation, and embarked upon a series of military conflicts involving the Soviet Union in Southeast Asia. The federal government, which had grown tremendously in the first half of the 20th Century, continued to expand its influence, its budget and its workforce. Where federal government expenditures at the turn of the century amounted to no more than $400 million annually, by 1960 that number would reach $90 billion, with federal employees numbering nearly nine million.
This was also a time in which people were beginning to realize the environmental wrongs of the first half of the century. Manifest Destiny was not achieved without great cost to the environment. The population had doubled again, reaching 200 million before 1970, as metropolitan areas sprawled across the continent, connected by the new Interstate system of high-speed highways. Wilderness became dear. The bald eagle, our national symbol of pride, was on the verge of extinction due to hunting and degradation of habitat. Lake Erie was pronounced dead, and the Cuyahoga River in Ohio caught fire due to pollutants pouring into the stream from industrial plants. Finally, an Apollo spacecraft took a photograph of the Earth as it returned from the Moon. Never before had we seen ourselves from space. Never before had we felt so small, so fragile.
All of which led to the ecology movement of the late '60s and early '70s. President Richard M. Nixon declared the Environmental Decade, and the first Earth Day was celebrated in 1970. Millions of Americans came to believe something was wrong with the environment, and it was up to them to fix it.
This change in attitude was the result of several factors that defined the first half of the 20th Century: the closing of the frontier, the rise of technology in everyday life, and the works of several great writers. They were not without their detractors. As Alexis de Tocqueville had noted 100 years earlier, "Nothing is more annoying in the ordinary intercourse of life than this irritable patriotism of the Americans. A foreigner will gladly agree to praise much in their country, but he would like to be allowed to criticize something, and that he is absolutely refused." The environmental wrongs decried by Abbey, Carson, and Leopold cast them as foreigners in their own land, a land where material conveniences came to outweigh environmental rights, even democratic principles.
Rather than be defeated by the problems they saw, Abbey, Carson, and Leopold rose to expand the horizons of science and philosophy, creating new fields of environmental study where none had previously existed. Frederick Jackson Turner predicted these advancements in 1914 when he wrote:
But if there is disillusion and shock and apprehension as we come to realize these changes, to strong men and women there is challenge and inspiration in them too. In place of old frontiers of wilderness, there are new frontiers of unwon fields of science, fruitful for the needs of the race; there are frontiers of better social domains yet unexplored.
Abbey, Carson, and Leopold were the children of pioneers, raised in the Old West of turn-of-the-century America. They listened to the stories of their parents' pioneering struggles. They read the works of Henry David Thoreau, Walt Whitman, and John Muir. They believed in the spirit of America, and wanted only to set their country back on the right track of environmental awareness and stewardship. As Turner wrote, "In spite of his rude, gross nature, this early Western man was an idealist withal. He dreamed dreams and beheld visions. He had faith in man, hope for democracy, belief in America's destiny, unbounded confidence in his ability to make his dreams come true." It may well be that no American writer fits this description better than does Edward Abbey, to whom we now turn.
MOST OF US WALK UNSEEING THROUGH THE WORLD, UNAWARE ALIKE OF ITS BEAUTIES, ITS WONDERS, AND THE STRANGE AND SOMETIMES TERRIBLE INTENSITY OF THE LIVES THAT ARE BEING LIVED ABOUT US.
A sense of wonder held the young child entranced as she explored the woods near her family's Pennsylvania home. She never tired of spending time in the out of doors, studying backyard biology, learning the words that described the relationships between herself and the plants and the animals around her. Rachel Carson never outgrew that sense of wonder. Rather, she cultivated it, learned to reveal it through the written word, and shared it with the world.
She was born on May 27, 1907 to Robert Warden and Maria (McLean) Carson in the rural community of Springdale, Pennsylvania, near Pittsburgh. Though young Rachel had two siblings, Marian and Robert, she was comfortable in solitude, quietly learning her mother's love for nature, books, music, and a reverence for life.
When she was ten years old, Rachel published a story in St. Nicholas magazine, a popular periodical for children. This first entry in her bibliography placed her in a literary circle that includes E. E. Cummings, William Faulkner, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Edna St. Vincent Millay, and E. B. White, who also had articles published in St. Nicholas when they were young.
She went on to enroll in the Pennsylvania College for Women, now known as Chatham College, where she majored in English, intent on a writing career. She took a biology class that fascinated her and immediately switched majors saying, "Biology has given me something to write about." She graduated magna cum laude in 1929 and received a scholarship to Johns Hopkins University, where she took a Master of Science degree in zoology, completing her graduate work in 1932.
Life became very tough for Carson at that point. She was a young woman who had chosen to work in a field dominated by men, and the nation was deep in the throes of the Great Depression. To make matters worse, she had to support her parents on what she could earn teaching and working as a lab assistant at Johns Hopkins and the University of Maryland. Her father died in 1935. Her sister died a year later, leaving Carson's two young nieces to the care of Carson and her mother.
Her situation improved when she was hired by the Bureau of Fisheries, now known as the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. The Bureau hired her on a temporary basis in 1935 to write a series of radio spots on sea life, called "Romance Under the Waters." She soon won a post as junior aquatic biologist, becoming one of the Bureau's first women ever hired for a non-clerical position. Over her 16 years with the government, Carson was promoted to biologist, then editor-in-chief of Fish and Wildlife Service publications.
In 1937 she wrote a piece called "Undersea," intending it as an introduction to the Bureau's published version of the radio series for which she had been originally hired. Her boss, Elmer Higgins, felt the piece was too literary for his purposes and suggested she submit it to a literary magazine. She did, and the Atlantic Monthly published her submarine voyage into the deep waters of the sea in September 1937. It caught the attention of naturalists and writers alike, who encouraged her to develop the article into a book-length piece. Carson would later say that from "Undersea" "everything else followed."
What followed next was Under the Sea Wind, first published in 1941. Where "Undersea" took the reader on a poetic journey through the portals of a submarine, Under the Sea Wind inserts the reader into the environment — becoming one with the marine birds, fishes, and other animal life followed over the course of a year on the Atlantic Ocean. Unfortunately Under the Sea Wind was published just one month before Pearl Harbor. It did not sell well as America entered World War II, and had to wait another ten years before it would gain popularity on the heels of its author's runaway bestseller, The Sea Around Us.
Carson continued honing her skills, writing and editing government publications on biological topics. She decided to write her magnum opus, again taking the reader on a journey into the sea, but this time from the perspective of the scientist. The result was The Sea Around Us, published in 1950. Where previously the author had kept her own personality out of her writing, she now unabashedly proclaimed her enthusiasm for science and the sea as a tour guide through the then-current state of knowledge on all things oceanic. Her reverence for science and scientists is readily apparent and inspires the reader to learn more about both. The book sold very well, and enabled her to leave her position with Fish and Wildlife Service to pursue writing full-time.
Carson's logical sequel to The Sea Around Us was The Edge of the Sea, published in 1955. This book, too, earned her critical acclaim, and was on the New York Times best-sellers list for 23 weeks. The woman for whom, "biology gave me something to write about" had settled her reputation.
She intended to continue writing in this vein, but became increasingly aware of damage to the environment through the indiscriminate and unregulated use of chemical pesticides. In her status as one of America's prominent writers of scientific literature, Carson was kept in the loop on all things biological. Additionally, readers and fans would write to her telling of biological die-offs in their communities that seemed to be related to the spraying of insecticides. Carson became convinced that the war on bugs was killing birds as well. She began to research the literature and concluded that not only wildlife was endangered by pesticides but also the health and well-being of mankind. She learned of the carcinogenic effects of powerful organic chemicals, and felt someone needed to say something to draw attention to the dangers in which innocent and unknowing lives had been placed. She published Silent Spring in 1962, guaranteeing her a place among the most influential environmental writers of the 20th Century.
Silent Spring created such an uproar that Carson was now much in demand as a public speaker and an expert witness before Congress, testifying to the detrimental effects of indiscriminate use of pesticides. Her own health was failing — she had been diagnosed with cancer several years earlier — yet she continued to bear the torch, marching against the tide of opposition lobbied against her by the well financed chemical industry who saw her book as a direct threat to their economic well-being. She would not live to see the full fruits of her labors.
She published an article in the July 1956 issue of Woman's Home Companion called "Help Your Child to Wonder." She had hoped to expand the article into a book that parents could use to help them instill scientific curiosity in their children. She was unable to complete the project, but others completed it for her, publishing picture-book treatments of the article in 1965 and again in 1998. The most recent version of The Sense of Wonder is a beautifully photographed interpretation of Carson's essay, shot along the north Atlantic coast of which she writes. In addition, numerous books have been written about Rachel Carson, including Paul Brooks', The House of Life: Rachel Carson at Work, published in 1972, and Carol Gartner's biography, Rachel Carson, published in 1983.
Rachel Carson died of breast cancer and heart failure on April 14, 1964. She was 56 years old. Her funeral, held at National Cathedral in Washington, D.C., was attended by such environmental notables as Stewart Udall, then Secretary of the Interior. But her work did not end with her life. As we shall see in her legacy, she continued the fight against pesticides long after her death. Over the next two decades the newly created Environmental Protection Agency would fund the Rachel Carson Award for scientific merit, and President Jimmy Carter would posthumously bestow upon her the Presidential Medal of Freedom.
Her avowed mission was to "shock the complacency" out of the public. She did. But she did something more: Rachel Carson taught us to explore our own place within the environment. She encouraged every one of us to understand the science that affects our daily lives. She instilled a sense of wonder in an entire generation. Rachel Carson asked, "Who has known the ocean?"
As we explore Under the Sea Wind, we know it was she.
Fly, swim, and stroll through the food web along the shores of the eastern seaboard as Carson takes us on a guided tour of the wildlife resident there—including Homo sapiens.
Carson takes us to the top of the food chain as we participate in the efforts of a fishing crew intent on netting a school of feeding mackerel. We go below to swim with the prey, only to discover a greater threat lurking in the depths.
We travel full circle — a year, a generation of eels — to feel the rhythms of life syncopated by the rhythms of other species, then step back to observe the larger rhythms of the Earth itself.
Rachel Carson introduced herself as an ecologist and a writer through publication of "Undersea." The article met with considerable success and she was encouraged to develop her ideas into a book-length work. The result was Under the Sea Wind, a series of interconnected "short stories" told from the perspective of marine wildlife. Her status as both an ecologist and a writer was firmly established. Unfortunately a decade would pass before more than a few readers knew it.
Under the Sea Wind goes further than establishing Carson's credentials, however. She used the book as a vehicle for pointing out errors committed by humans in their interactions with marine life, in addition to simply describing life from the vantage point of inhabitants of the sea. Humans are the only species in Carson's work that fight among themselves for economic gain, and their methods of capturing prey are cruel and inhumane. One easily detects a note of misanthropy whenever humans are on the water. Or is there something darker at work here?
All of the humans encountered are male. Of course — they are fishermen, ruthless exterminators of marine wildlife upsetting the natural order of things and all the while bickering over the best fishing spots. But when we look at all of the species' habits a pattern emerges: males prey; females spawn. If Abbey can be accused of misogyny, I think it is only fair to raise the question in Carson's work. The only problem is, the English language does not have a male equivalent for misogyny, the mistrust or hatred of women. Misanthropy does not work because it refers to all of mankind — Homo sapiens — including the female of the species. No, I believe we need a new word, one that describes the mistrust or hatred of men. I would like to submit misandry. I admit it does not roll off the tongue as easily as the four-syllable words applied to men who mistrust or hate women, or people who mistrust or hate all mankind. But now that women are speaking their mind, it is clear we need a word to describe the feelings of mistrust or hatred women may feel toward men.
Labeling Carson as a misandrist does not in the least, however, detract from her ability to describe the world of ecology. On the contrary, a writer unwilling to overlook the undesirable characteristics of the male of the species will be more effective in speaking out against the atrocities committed by mankind. Human atrocities are usually committed by men. More importantly, Carson uses a voice at once confident and inoffensive. In Under the Sea Wind, male cruelties are simply a part of life.
The book begins by setting the reader in a monochrome world dominated by the presence of ocean water. The tone of "Flood Tide" is detached, descriptive. There is no nostalgia for this world, only water, a bit of land surrounded by water, and a solitary flyer called Rynchops, the scientific name for the black skimmer. We watch without affection as Rynchops plies his trade as a flying fisher of shallow waters. Gray turns nearly black as the cloudy twilight becomes night, the moon mostly obscured. We observe others. Diamondback terrapins finish laying their eggs and head back to the relative safety of the sea. A male rat, "crafty with the cunning of years and filled with the lust for blood," detects the scent of terrapin eggs, finds their nest, and feasts on them, including a young hatchling from another nest. Justice is immediately served by a male blue heron who surprises the rat, spears him and eats him.
We enter the water to follow roe shad returning to spawn, become caught up in a fight between gill-netting fishermen and those who utilize pound nets as we watch innumerable fish die unseemly deaths by suffocation in the inhumane devices of the gill-netters. Justice is served this time by the eels of the estuary, all male, who attack the netted shad, gorge themselves on shad caviar, and leave the fishermen with nets full of bones and fish heads. Males prey — females spawn.
Still there is no denying the truth in Carson's arguments. Gill nets are cruel. Fishermen are infamous for bickering among themselves. I have no doubt eels will take advantage of fish caught in gill nets, given half a chance. Carson could have written the predaceous rat as a female character, or the blue heron that spears the rat — in real life, females eat too — but she chose not to. In one simple, seemingly innocuous opening chapter, Carson reveals herself as a knowledgeable ecologist, a confident writer, and a woman on a mission. We immediately accept her version of marine ecology, including its misandrist implications.
In "Seine Haul" we board a fishing vessel as its crew works the offshore waters for mackerel. The vessel and crew coalesce into one predatory organism: "a giant fish swimming at the surface." The reader is tempted to accuse Carson of anthropomorphism, but she is well ahead of us and not about to fall into that trap. Instead she employs the perspective of the prey mackerel, in particular an individual named Scomber — the scientific name for mackerel — to describe the activities of the fishermen. This reverse anthropomorphism might be better called piscimorphism, as the protaganist ascribes fishlike qualities to the preying humans and their machinery. This clever device enables Carson to portray the world of the mackerel, including the mackerel's most dangerous predator, in a way that strikes the reader as completely trustworthy. Our confidence in Carson's ecology deepens.
She completes the cycle of food web death and rebirth with the final chapter, called "Return," in which we follow migrating eels from birth in the twilight zone depths above the abyssal floor of the Atlantic, up to the feeding grounds of the surface sargassum, and along the coast of North America as they drift with warmwater currents toward their instinctual destinations, the estuaries (males) and streams (females) of the eastern seaboard.
Carson makes this impossible journey believable by freely admitting unknown facts where they are unknowable. "No one knows how the eels traveled to their common destination," she says, then offers plausible explanations using current knowledge along with intelligent use of evolutionary theory to move the eels from their North American habitats to their mid-Atlantic spawning grounds. In her "Preface to the 1961 Edition" of her bestseller, The Sea Around Us, Carson corrects her previous descriptions of the abyss. She undoubtedly would have done the same for Under the Sea Wind if she had lived to see a second edition.
She guides us along the route of heroic elvers following the trail of their mothers, against the currents of rushing streams swollen with newly melted snows, forcing rapid physiological changes to tolerate and thrive in fresh waters where they had previously known only salt. The males do not take this plunge, so remain in the brackish waters of coastal estuaries, yet the females swim onward — "No hardship and no obstacle would deter them." If Carson were not a preeminent ecologist, she would surely have been a prominent feminist. She ends the book on an evolutionary note, rapidly taking the reader through geological epochs of sea waters rising and falling, mountains eroding and forming, the cities of men long since forgotten while the eels swim on, ever navigating old waters anew.
Under the Sea Wind is significant for the radiant scientific confidence that it establishes for the author in the mind of her reader. We are convinced Carson understands the food web, the foundation of that branch of biology known as ecology. It firmly establishes the voice of a writer with a message, a qualified critic of the society in which she lives. The book failed to immediately gain the audience it deserved due to the economic facts of World War II (an atrocity foisted upon the world largely by the male of the species). Regardless, it sets the stage for Carson's later writings, including Silent Spring, to which we now turn.
Set your time machine for the early 1960s and get ready to take notes for what is likely the most easily understood chemistry lecture ever delivered. Professor Carson is at the podium — the world is her classroom.
Read "Elixirs of Death" in Silent Spring by Rachel Carson
Carson presents one of the earliest broad treatments of environmental causes of cancer. She was, herself, suffering from breast cancer while writing this text, though she does not reveal the fact.
Read "One in Every Four" in Silent Spring by Rachel Carson
We learn of our failure to eradicate insect pests through the use of broad-spectrum chemicals; how, in fact, these same chemicals have often worsened the problem or created new ones. We are introduced to non-violent biological controls, now known as integrated pest management, and we learn of economic entomologists who continue to develop and market weapons of chemical warfare against our greatest enemy: bugs.
Read "Nature Fights Back" in Silent Spring by Rachel Carson
Carson is nearly swept away in her veneration of poisons coming out of the biologist's laboratory rather than the chemist's — especially the andricides — but she recovers to emphasize natural, non-violent methods of insect control, finally leaving us with one of the most important statements of environmental philosophy ever written.
Read "The Other Road" in Silent Spring by Rachel Carson
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.
A THING IS RIGHT WHEN IT TENDS TO PRESERVE THE INTEGRITY, STABILITY, AND BEAUTY OF THE BIOTIC COMMUNITY. IT IS WRONG WHEN IT TENDS OTHERWISE.
— ALDO LEOPOLD
See the timeline of events in the lives of Abbey, Carson, and Leopold.
I trust you have enjoyed this tour through the writings of Abbey, Carson, and Leopold as much as I have enjoyed acting as your guide. In this last chapter I hope to convince you of the merit in my argument that Abbey, Carson, and Leopold are without doubt the most influential environmental writers of the 20th Century. Together they constitute the environmental movement's arborvitae, the bark, the sapwood, and the heartwood of that philosophical tree of life that informs us as we enter the 21st century. Their words influenced environmental policy to an extent unmatched by any others, though they sprouted numerous fruit-bearing branches.
Take a good look at the matrix of events that surrounded the lives of Abbey, Carson, and Leopold. You will see that they were influenced by their time and place at least as much as they influenced the future. They were each self-aware actors intent upon modifying the environment while simultaneously living fully within it. They perceived the instant karma of Manifest Destiny, and worked to correct its course. Indeed, each was fully conscious of making history, that is to say, re-writing the future as they depicted the present.
Like any movement, the 20th Century environmental movement is based on the myths — stories, histories, and legends — that compel its followers to enact its ideals. Abbey, Carson, and Leopold are the triune godhead of that movement. Edward Abbey's fictionalized reporting on the environmental deeds taking place in his beloved desert inspired environmental actions across the nation and around the globe. He echoed Walt Whitman's famous exhortation to "Resist much, obey little," as in this address recorded by Dave Foreman, founder of Earth First!:
Speaking toward the future, Abbey offered this advice: "Oppose. Oppose the destruction of our homeland by these alien forces from Houston, Tokyo, Manhattan, Washington, D.C., and the Pentagon. And if opposition is not enough, we must resist. And if resistance is not enough, then subvert."
Abbey supplied the environmental movement with the deeds it needed to take back the wilderness and keep it like it was!
Rachel Carson's words became the law of the land, the literal gospel of environmentalism in America. In the wake of her writing came pesticide regulations that forever changed the way chemicals would be perceived and used. A large and powerful agency of the federal government, the Environmental Protection Agency, would be created for the purpose of enforcing these new laws.
And at the core of it all, Aldo Leopold's thoughts formed the basis of the ecology movement of the latter half of the century. That Homo sapiens should consider and adopt an ethic, a code of right relationships, toward the soil, water, plants, and animals that make up the planet Earth was heretofore unheard of. That we should honor metavalues such as integrity, aesthetic quality, and stability, the very truth, beauty, and goodness of a planetary community was nothing less than environmental revelation. Leopold's Escudilla becomes our Mount Sinai, his thoughts at once simple and profound, concrete on the surface yet abstract to the extent we are able to follow.
"A culture can be no stronger than its strongest myths," as we recall the words of James P. Carse. Abbey, Carson, and Leopold gave us myths strong enough to compel and sustain a culture of ecological awareness that changed the direction of the world. In doing so, our mythmakers became mythic heroes themselves. Indeed, it has become difficult to distinguish the apostle from the apocrypha, the writer from the writings.
We identify so strongly with these authors because they wrote directly to each of us in words we could understand at our own level of comprehension. Where we lacked the vocabulary necessary to understand them, they patiently taught us the words we would need to know. Abbey, Carson, and Leopold knew full well that influencing the next step in evolution would require more than a reasonable argument —they would have to reach us through the vividness of a universal statement at once penetrating and simple in application. We are entranced by the unfailing charm of their prose.
All of which has led to a veritable, and verifiable, paradigm shift in environmental awareness. This can be quantified by innumerable references to their work in the current literature. It seems nearly every book that has anything to do with the environment references Aldo Leopold, while many, many books will also refer to Rachel Carson or Edward Abbey, depending upon the focus of the book, scientific or philosophical. This paradigm shift is best qualified by the blossoming of intellectual movements that have founded themselves on the work of Abbey, Carson, and Leopold.
Possibly the most erudite of these movements is the relational, total-field perspective of environmental philosopher Arne Naess' deep ecology. Bill Devall and George Sessions, teachers of sociology and philosophy, elaborated on Naess' thesis, stating that "Deep ecology goes beyond a limited piecemeal shallow approach to environmental problems and attempts to articulate a comprehensive religious and philosophical worldview." They speak of self-realization and biocentric equality within this paradigm. They list eight basic principles of deep ecology, sound statements in which we may adhere as members of the church of metaphysical ecology. Unfortunately their principles strike our jaded ears as commandments that limit our freedom of action, quite unlike the liberating maxims of Edward Abbey, Rachel Carson, and Aldo Leopold.
Academe responded enthusiastically to the seats left vacant by Abbey, Carson, and Leopold, creating an entirely new field of study in environmental philosophy per se. Academicians quickly realized they had an extant literature, resurrecting Thoreau and Whitman from the anthologies of 19th Century American literary works, while rescuing John Muir from the confines of the Sierra Club. Annie L. Booth describes environmental philosophy and its offspring, environmental ethics, as "an exploration of the cosmos and humanity's relationship to it." Of course, that is what all of philosophy aspires to, but environmental philosophy informs us from an ecological foundation built on Thoreau, Whitman, and Muir, encouraged by Abbey, Carson, and Leopold. One professor of environmental philosophy, Joseph R. des Jardins, has beautifully stated the philosophical choice we make every day:
Humans cannot help but be shaped and created by their social history. But this can occur in two ways. Humans can go through life being created by and in turn creating their social world without fully recognizing this reality, or they can be fully conscious of and responsible for this history.
Abbey, Carson, and Leopold were thus fully conscious, and demand of us a careful reading of their work. As Thoreau admonished, "Books must be read as deliberately and reservedly as they were written."
Who, then, will be the most influential environmental writers of the next century, the 21st Century? Chances are they are not yet living among us, but they will most assuredly be informed by Abbey, Carson, and Leopold. The unimaginable paradigm shift they will provoke will lead their readers, their critics, and their followers into realms of thought into which we can barely glimpse — we do not even possess the vocabulary at this time to speak of their visions. They will succeed because of their careful attention to defining that vocabulary for us. They will succeed because of their tremendous ability to write, to paint pictures of their visions in words.
Even so, we must begin preparing for the writings of the next generation even as they prepare to write them. The key to implementing a land ethic is ecological literacy, the ability to think and communicate in ecological terms. When we have attained the requisite level of ecological awareness, a land ethic will follow.
I hope This Land has played a worthy role in that process for you.
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Whenever I look at that cross above the altar I see his plane moving back
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by Rachel Carson
by Rachel Carson
