2. The Lady Who Started All This

Wallace Kaufman

“I knew a very wise man . . . [who] believed if a man were permitted to make all the ballads, he need not care who should make the laws of a nation. And we find that most of the ancient legislators thought they could not well reform the manners of any city without the help of a lyric, and sometimes of a dramatic poet.”

Andrew Fletcher, Scottish 17th century politician¹

On May 15, 1963, the diminutive and semi-reclusive science writer Rachel Carson sat alone behind a dozen microphones at a long table facing the famous Senator Abraham Ribicoff flanked by his full committee. The subject of the special hearing was the dangers of chemical pesticides to humans and wildlife. Carson read from the pages of her prepared testimony word for word, in a near monotone, slowly, without a single gesture. The senators listened attentively from their raised platform. Neither her carefully read text nor her cautiously worded answers moved the standing-room-only crowd to shows of approval or disapproval. The woman the senators heard and the bestselling writer who had brought them and all the major news outlets to that room were the same person but two distinct personas. No one watching that testimony in person or later on Fox Movie Tone News² could imagine her leading millions of activists in a political crusade. Yet, in less than 10 years, she would become for all time, “the mother of the environmental movement.”

Carson was that most uncommon writer who could make science interesting to common people without losing the approval of the scientists who provided her material. In the early 1950s, common people included my blue collar family, whose only bookshelf was inside the upper part of a cheap writing desk. Except for a Bible and three or four Reader’s Digest books, the shelf was empty. One of the Digest books abridged was Rachel Carson’s first best seller published in 1951—The Sea around Us. Maybe it got onto our shelf because my mother had been an avid swimmer since childhood. And maybe I opened it because I spent every possible minute by, in, or on the water swimming, fishing, and clamming. But non-swimmers and residents of inland America also bought Reader’s Digest books by the millions, including The Sea around Us.

How Rachel Carson became the mother of environmentalism and how I became an environmental activist reveals something important about the environmental movement. On that premise, I ask the reader to indulge me if I use myself as part of the evidence in this chapter. I do it not because I put myself on the same level with Rachel Carson, just the opposite. My movement from a blue-collar family’s preoccupation with buying a refrigerator, a stove, and a washing machine— one by one and each on installments—to becoming the leader of three statewide environmental groups is typical of how Carson’s influence worked on enough individuals to prepare a political movement.

Come on In, the Water’s Wonderful

Maybe my parents bought The Sea around Us because, like many Americans, they found the new writing about oceans and ocean voyages filled a need in their lives. It is not a mere fluke that Carson satisfied such needs and won public confidence and applause by writing about the oceans and sea life. Consider the place of the sea in the human psyche. A public fascination with the literature of oceans and ocean travel is as old as literature itself. Over 2000 years ago, the Greeks (or a bard named Homer) embedded in Western popular literature and the vocabularies and cultural touchstones of European languages one of the world’s all-time favorite stories, the voyages of Ulysses in The Odyssey. In the late 16th and early 17th centuries, ocean travel stories by Daniel Defoe and Richard Hakluyt found large audiences across Europe. Combining the mystical pull of the oceans with art had also made underwater adventure the proven stuff of commercial best sellers. Europeans eagerly devoured the 1697 narrative, A New Voyage Round the World, by the English buccaneer and naturalist William Dampier. In 1869, Jules Verne’s science fiction novel, Twenty Thousand Leagues under the Sea, took millions of readers below the surface into strange new worlds.

Herman Melville captures the root of our fascination with the sea in the first paragraphs of Moby Dick: “Let the most absent-minded of men be plunged in his deepest reveries—stand that man on his legs, set his feet a-going, and he will infallibly lead you to water, if water there be in all that region. . . . Surely all this is not without meaning. And still deeper the meaning of that story of Narcissus, who because he could not grasp the tormenting, mild image he saw in the fountain, plunged into it and was drowned. But that same image, we ourselves see in all rivers and oceans. It is the image of the ungraspable phantom of life; and this is the key to it all.”³

Rachel Carson’s first chapter of The Sea around Us contains a similar speculation. After bringing a rapid and lyrical summary of earth’s history to the evolution of humans, she writes, “Eventually man, too, found his way back to the sea. Standing on its shores, he must have looked but upon it with wonder and curiosity, compounded with an unconscious recognition of his lineage.”⁴ In many ways, and in a much more easily read form, Carson elaborates Walt Whitman’s vision in his well-known poem, “Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking.” Whitman says that in a transcendental boyhood experience of the sea, “My own songs, awaked from that hour.”⁵ In that mystical moment, he understood the sea or its voice as being both a cradle and a grave.

In a recent meditation on the prestigious Man Booker Prize for fiction, the novelist Chris Cleave noted how often the prize had been given to narratives in which the ocean is the main setting and often a character in its own right. “This strange power of the sea to give insight is why the Booker, like the great novelists of an earlier epoch, returns time and again to the ocean.” Writers like Melville and Conrad, he says, “put to sea in order to prove something about dry land: to survey its limits, to discover more of it, to claim more of life. . . . In these days when the world is all discovered and few of us believe that we will imminently be colonizing outer space, the sea fulfills a new office. It has become the symbol, rather than the enabling medium, of our yearning for the undiscovered. For the strange, for the beautiful, for the outlandish, we now cast our eyes towards the waves.”⁶

Rachel Carson had begun to write about the ocean before she ever saw it. In her freshman year at the Pennsylvania College for Women in Pittsburgh, she wrote a term paper in the form of a short story called, “The Master of the Ship’s Light.” The content of the story, which takes place on the New England coast and on the ocean, was nourished by her avid reading about the sea. Her English instructor commented, “Your style is so good because you have made what might be a relatively technical subject very intelligible to the reader.”⁷ This talent would be the key to Carson’s success and influence for the rest of her life.

Rachel Carson herself had a kind of Whitmanesque revelation and beginning as a writer in the summer of 1929. She graduated from college in June, and in July she left home to begin work as a “beginning investigator” at the prestigious Marine Biological Laboratory in Woods Hole, Massachusetts. Her designated research was a continuation of work she had begun in college—investigating the cranial nerves of turtles. That work, however, interested her much less than the international scientific magazines in the library there, the dissections of marine animals, the long talks with other students and senior scientists, walking along the shore inspecting sea life, and walking the beaches at night listening to the ocean and breathing the sea air. A roommate and friend from college understood that Carson was undergoing a mystical as well as professional transformation.⁸ At Woods Hole, she found both the science and the artistic vision that prepared her to become the author of The Sea around Us, but first she needed practice and then the right moment in history. Her practice began after her father’s death when she had to drop out of the PhD program at Johns Hopkins University to support her mother and sister. She still thought of herself as a scientist, however. When she set up her personnel file at the Johns Hopkins Bureau of Appointments, she listed her profession as “scientific research.”⁹

The late 1950s and first years of the 1960s saw a revival of popular ocean documentary. In 1947, Ferdinand Lane published Mysterious Sea. Although he wrote clearly, he made up for somewhat plodding prose by reinforcing the mystery with quotations from well-known poets. His first chapter on the origin of oceans begins, “The origin of the oceans is obscure.” Carson also began with a chapter on the origin of the oceans and the first sentence, “Beginnings are apt to be shadowy.” Carson went on to write a much more popular book than Lane’s. She dedicated her book to William Beebe, who had become famous when he and the inventor of the bathysphere, Otis Barton, made record deep descents. Beebe wrote about it for National Geographic in a 1931 article, “A Round Trip to Davy Jones’s Locker.”¹⁰ In 1934, the two men reported from more than 3,000 feet down. Ten years later, when Beebe edited The Book of Naturalists, its final chapter was an essay by a government science writer named Rachel Carson. They became friends, and he nominated her for the Eugene Saxton Memorial Fellowship that financed the last year of her writing for The Sea around Us.

Beebe’s book, Half Mile Down, came out in 1951, the same year as Carson’s. Beebe’s book sold well for its suspense and adventure. Carson’s book sold much better even though she dove beneath the surface of the sea only once, a 1950 event in Florida where she kept her hold on a boat’s ladder while wearing an 84-pound helmet. The other best seller that created the new hunger for ocean books was Thor Heyerdahl’s 1951 account of floating across the Pacific on a balsa raft, Kon Tiki. He and comrades made the journey to demonstrate the possibility that natives of South America might have been the first humans in Polynesia. I remember how that great adventure awed me not with the migration theory but with the vastness of the ocean and the endless drama of life and death played out on its surface and beneath. Carson admired Heyerdahl and sent him chapters of The Sea around Us to read. He returned them with great praise.

Like Defoe, Dampier, Melville, and Verne of earlier centuries, writers who “went to sea” in books during the late 1940s and early 1950s benefitted from readers who sought an alternative or an escape from the worlds they lived in. In the early 1950s, Americans, having survived the misery of the Great Depression and then the uncertainty and horrors of World War II, were ready for art and entertainment that made them feel that the world was wondrous and wide with opportunity for both the mind and the spirit. The American psyche still felt its greatest achievements were physical and its destiny was best fulfilled by discovery. This was both the product of the frontier experience and the reason we still needed a frontier. Space was not yet a possible frontier, a fact I regretted deeply because I was already building little rockets. To my dismay, serious scientists said the physics of energy in fuel and the mass of a rocket made reaching beyond our atmosphere and gravity impossible. So, like the rest of America, I felt the last frontier for physical exploration lay in the depths of the oceans. Rachel Carson understood that the ocean was her chance to become America’s frontier guide, but not as a scientist.

Science, in fact, had been the briefest of detours in her life, though a passionate and useful detour. From her first published story at age 10 in St. Nicholas Magazine for children, she had thought of herself as a writer. Her detour into hands-on science had begun when she changed majors in college from English to biology. But when she took a position as a biologist with the U.S. Bureau of Fish and Wildlife Services in the Commerce Department, her job there was as a writer, summarizing, then popularizing the work of scientists in the lab and in the field.

In 1945, when she tried to leave government service and applied for a job at Reader’s Digest, she described herself to its owner DeWitt Wallace as a scientist first. “Probably the most important single point to bring to the attention of the Digest is the fact that I am that comparatively rare phenomenon, a scientist who is also a writer.”¹¹ When she told Quincy Howe, a senior editor at Simon and Schuster, why she wanted the Digest job, she confirmed that she now saw herself as a public guide to nature and science. “I feel very strongly that the reporting of the progress of science is going to assume even greater importance in the months and years to come. We are all aware that startling developments have come, or are on the way, that cannot be talked about at the present time. When the necessary restrictions are lifted some very important stories will be told to the American public, and undoubtedly the Digest will take the lead in presenting them.”¹² She also seemed to sense Americans’ readiness to welcome wonders and the miraculous after years of economic depression and war. The miraculous could be natural or technological. From her wartime writing, she knew that technology had given humankind new powers to explore and understand nature.

Science writer would continue to be her profession despite holding jobs whose title included “biologist.” Her first government assignment came in 1935 when Elmer Higgins, a division chief at the U.S. Bureau of Fisheries, asked her to take over the production of a public radio series, “Romance under the Waters.” Several other government workers had had a go at it with poor results. Carson took on the short-term assignment and made the series a success. A relieved Higgins asked her to write an introduction to a government brochure on marine life. In April 1936, she handed Higgins the 11-page essay “World of Waters.” Carson remembered that he said, “I don’t think it will do. Better try again. But send this one to The Atlantic.”¹³ A year later, she did send the essay to The Atlantic with this opening paragraph: “The charting of the white wastes of Antarctica is accomplished; the conquest of Mount Everest has passed into history. But although the flags of explorers have waved on the highest peaks of the world and floated on the frozen rims of the continents, a vast unknown remains, the world of waters. Even from those who have spent their lives in patient questioning, the sea knows how to guard its secrets well. To most it is, in very truth, a ‘mare incognita’.”¹⁴ She did not have to say the obvious— that herewith she would be the reader’s guide to the sea, the last frontier. Nor did she realize at the time that successful American frontier guides become national heroes.

The Atlantic bought the article, and Carson, for the first time, used her full name. She had previously agreed with her colleagues at Fisheries that readers would be more comfortable with R. L. Carson because they could and probably would assume the writer was a man. After all, guides to a frontier, not to mention almost all famous and trusted scientists, were men. The venerable Atlantic had always been a trend-setter that endowed the new writers it published with standing in the literary community. Rachel Carson soon found new friends and supporters. Although she would labor in the relative obscurity of government bureaucracy for another 14 years before she became a household name, the future was hers to lose. Both financially and professionally, she was determined not to lose it. The path from her four-page article, retitled “Undersea,” to The Sea around Us was straight and without detours or lapses. Like her much loved mother, once she had decided on a course, she would not be deterred. She went back to Johns Hopkins to update her employment dossier. Now she listed herself as a part-time “feature writer of scientific subjects” working in the U.S. Bureau of Fisheries “educational division.”¹⁵

One of her first new friends after “Undersea” appeared in The Atlantic was the prolific historian and best-selling author Dr. Hendrik Willem van Loon. He wrote her an enthusiastic letter saying, “Maybe Jules Verne and his 20,000 Leagues under the Sea started me 60 years ago, but I have always wanted to read something about that mysterious world and suddenly . . . In the Atlantic, most appropriately . . . I found your article which shows that you are the woman . . . [who can help me.]”¹⁶ No one can say if these were his own words or a paraphrase of what Atlantic editor Ed Weeks wrote in the Contributors’ Column about Carson: “Ever since Jules Verne’s imagination went twenty thousand leagues deep, people have wondered what it would be like to walk on the ocean’s floor. Rachel Carson has a clear and accurate idea.”¹⁷ Both men implicitly recognized and accepted the role that Carson would play later on the public stage—a trusted guide to science and nature.

Van Loon pushed her in that direction by suggesting she go on to do a book about the sea. So did van Loon’s friend Quincy Howe at Simon and Schuster. A book contract offered her badly needed funds. More important, she had already become sure that she needed to be free from her assigned government writing.

In her first commercial articles, Carson learned how to take her readers vicariously into the ocean frontier—a frontier she knew from one brief and shallow dive clinging to a boat’s ladder. Nevertheless, like writers in earlier centuries who wrote without personal experience, from Pliny the Elder to the fictitious Sir John Mandeville (The Travels of Sir John Mandeville), she became the most famous guide of her time. Unlike Mandeville and Pliny, however, she could and did apply rigorous standards to the evidence she used, and unlike them, she did not claim to have been where she had not been. However, she used the same technique they used—guiding the reader in narrative form, observing as if with her own eyes—or the readers.’ Beginning with “Undersea” in The Atlantic, she continued steadily to build public faith in her as America’s trusted guide to nature and science.

Her first book, Under the Sea-Wind, published in November 1941, did report her own observations, and her recognition of the big ideas she could draw from her subject by becoming the reader’s guide to life and death. “To stand at the edge of the sea, to sense the ebb and the flow of the tides, to feel the breath of a mist moving over a great salt marsh, to watch the flight of shorebirds that have swept up and down the surf lines of the continents for untold thousands of years, to see the running of the old eels and the young shed to the sea, is to have knowledge of things that are as nearly eternal as any earthly life can be.”¹⁸

The month after the book’s publication, the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor, and America’s attention turned to war. Despite good reviews, including one by William Beebe in the very important Saturday Review, the first year sales amounted to 1,348 copies, and her total royalties until the book went out of print in 1946 came to $689.17.¹⁹ She had hoped for much more. “The world received the event with superb indifference,” she told an audience of journalists years later. “The reviewers were kind, but the rush to the book store that is the author’s dream never materialized.”²⁰ She would have to wait 10 years until The Sea around Us brought the fame and money she hoped for.

Contrary to popular images of the generation before mine and the label “Silent Generation” applied to my generation, in the late-1940s and 1950s (and I’m speaking in broad generalities), ferment and creativity were far more characteristic than preoccupation with survival or silent apathy. World War II had restored both American confidence and the economy. Victory and peace liberated scientists and engineers and writers to apply their talents wherever they could find support. The profits from wartime employment and production, followed by a “peace dividend” boost to the economy, also provided the economic cornerstones for a new creativity, not to mention growth in consumption that included a new book-buying public fueled in part by the hundreds of thousands of veterans going to college on the G.I. Bill. The accompanying Cold War, with communism and the threat of nuclear annihilation, only added to the appeal of books and technology that took us into nature’s wonders, especially the oceans. Carson’s time had come, and her timing was perfect.

On June 2, 1951, the New Yorker began its serialized version of Carson’s second book, The Sea around Us. On July 1, the New York Times ran a front page review written by Time Magazine’s science editor Jonathan Norton Leonard, “—And His Wonders in the Deep; A Scientist Draws an Intimate Portrait of the Winding Sea and Its Churning Life.” Although Carson was a scientist by training but not by practice, Leonard began his review validating Carson as both scientist and poet. “When poets write about the sea their errors annoy scientists. When scientists write about the sea their bleak and technical jargon paralyzes poets. Yet neither scientists nor poets should object to ‘The Sea around Us.’” Oxford University Press (an infrequent source of best sellers but a prestige imprint) published the book on July 2.

The clichés about publishing success began to sound— phenomenal, meteoric, explosive. Three weeks later, The Sea around Us was all around America, becoming number five on the New York Times “Best Seller List.” Oxford had issued a fifth printing by the end of August, bringing sales to 60,000. By the end of the year, the Book-of-the-Month Club had sold 167,181 copies. Sales increased to 200,000 the next year as Reader’s Digest Books brought it to homes like mine.²¹ the New York Times, which carried it on the best seller list for a year and a half and as number one for 32 weeks, called it the outstanding book of 1951.

Carson sold the film rights, and the documentary began playing in theaters in 1953. Carson didn’t like it, but the public did. So did the critics who gave it an Oscar for best documentary. Her legacy had begun to take on its own life. Among other things, her writing, her background, and the way the media presented her work set the pattern and the methods for winning public approval and translating science into the emotions that are the necessary precursors and fuel for a social movement. Had she lived, she might have found the way the environmental movement deployed her reputation, her methods, and even the substance of her books as unacceptable as the sentimentalized film.

She did not know then or in the remaining 11 years of her life that soon many people would call her “the mother of the environmental movement.” Nor did I know that I would become an environmental activist and president of three statewide environmental groups. I was 13 and Carson was 45. Like most serious writers, she wrote with the intent of changing people’s lives. Looking back, I see that my own path illustrates how Carson came to have such a deep impact on American thinking and political action. Maybe most 13-year-olds want to change their own lives, as I certainly did, but I had also begun to think I could change the world. More important, I thought the world needed changing. So did many adults who had lived through the Great Depression and World War II. Among them were millions of families like mine that by the 1950s had moved out of cities into suburbs and small towns and had begun to take vacations. In their new homes and with their new leisure and turning their backs on the squalor of the Depression and the destruction of war, they began to appreciate nature.

Carson had always appreciated the natural world, but with the end of the war she experienced some of the same release as other Americans. She continued to work for government until her fame and fortune were fully established in 1952. But as soon as the war ended she rapidly increased the number of popular articles she wrote for newspapers and magazines. She became active in the Wilderness Society and in 1948 joined the national board of the Audubon Society. She found her network of friends outside government rapidly expanding. Writers she had once respected, now respected her. Time Magazine’s Leonard was right when he predicted, “neither scientists nor poets should object to ‘The Sea around Us.’” She made many new friends among scientists who became valuable sources of information. She was part of the new creativity. America was ready for her, and she was ready to feed its new interests and needs.

Infection as Inspiration

When I took from my family’s single bookshelf the Reader’s Digest version of The Sea around Us and began reading, I was immediately infected with Carson’s curiosity and her reverence for natural wonders—both things and processes. I began to understand our local beach and the long finger-like Hempstead Harbor not as a playground and a tub full of fish and clams, but as part of the far greater sea. Occasionally, a reminder of that larger life arrived in our harbor—a pod of porpoises would come in on a high tide or a storm would wash up the two-foot-wide monk fish with its head spanning mouth, its needle teeth, and the “antennae” rising from the back of its head. I felt privileged to see the proof of what people in Ohio and Montana could only read about. Nevertheless, the sales of Carson’s book and its reviews prove that those inlanders too enjoyed Carson’s guided tour of the seas. They were like ball fans hearing a radio announcer; I was in the front row seats. For all of us, Carson made the sea into our sea.

The soaring acclaim and honors bestowed on The Sea around Us led to the re-publication of Under the Sea-Wind in 1952. It became a Book-of-the-Month Club alternate selection. All of part I was published by Life magazine, which millions of Americans read and which lingered in barber shops and beauty parlors across America. In April, Under the Sea-Wind reached number 10 on the New York Times best seller list while The Sea around Us had just the week before relinquished number one to a political exposé and held at number two. In 1955, the New Yorker serialized Carson’s third book, The Edge of the Sea. It soon appeared as number eight on the New York Times best seller list. It rose to number three in December, then held that position for five months. At the top of the list was Anne Morrow Lindbergh’s Gift from the Sea, and, as if to underscore why these two books were selling so well, the number two slot for some weeks listed the Rev. Dr. Norman Vincent Peale’s The Power of Positive Thinking.

The Edge of the Sea did not enjoy the intense praise and popularity of her earlier books, but it received enough to make any author proud. Again, reviewers cited her scientific expertise and her lyrical writing. The New York Times daily reviewer, Charles Poore, noted the quality that gave Carson an entrée into ordinary homes across America. He described the writing as “profoundly learned yet unencumbered with the numbing jargon of the squid and seaweed set.”²²

Carson had acquired those assets of literary success—fame, money, respect, and thus power—which she could have used to found a movement. Those assets came not from her scientific achievement but from her artistic achievement. Instead, as soon as her fame spread in 1951, she chose to stay in the role where she would be most effective. She turned down innumerable speaking offers so she could continue writing. She understood that her real power, not to mention her pleasure, came from writing. She was not a good speaker. She was comfortable with colleagues, not crowds. She chose to talk to the world through the largely safe and one-way form of writing. The world was listening.

She knew she had power, even if she did not think about what forms it might take. She was thinking, however, about the dream of all writers—changing people’s lives and behavior. For her that meant fighting the destruction of the natural world she loved. Environmental protection, no less political activism, was not a central theme in her ocean books, but the destructive powers of humankind were always on her mind. In The Sea around Us, she writes of the destruction of resources on the continents but presents the sea as unconquerable. This is in keeping with the subtle way in which the book changes its readers’ thinking. Throughout the book, she presents the seas and oceans as immense, powerful, ancient, enduring, and mysterious realms, while humankind is short-lived, frail, and ignorant by comparison. The Sea around Us opens by putting humankind in its place, so to speak.

And yet he has returned to his mother sea only on her own terms. He cannot control or change the ocean as, in his brief tenancy of earth, he has subdued and plundered the continents. In the artificial world of his cities and towns, he often forgets the true nature of his planet and the long vistas of its history, in which the existence of the race of men has occupied a mere moment of time. The sense of all these things comes to him most clearly in the course of a long ocean voyage, when he watches day after day the receding rim of the horizon, ridged and furrowed by waves; when at night he becomes aware of the earth’s rotation as the stars pass overhead; or when, alone in this world of water and sky, he feels the loneliness of his earth in space. And then, as never on land, he knows the truth that his world is a water world, a planet dominated by its covering mantle of ocean, in which the continents are but transient intrusions of land above the surface of the all encircling sea.²³

Maybe this was her way of putting in perspective the immense powers unleashed in World War II, but from there it was only a short step to the position that would soon be held by many environmentalists—that humanity is a mistake and a plague on nature.

Carson spoke much more explicitly to a select audience than to her anonymous audience of readers. In 1952, she accepted the John Burroughs Medal and told her audience:

Mankind has gone very far into an artificial world of his own creation. He has sought to insulate himself, in his cities of steel and concrete, from the realities of earth and water and the growing seed. Intoxicated with a sense of his own power, he seems to be going farther and farther into more experiments for the destruction of himself and his world.²⁴

This is still not the gloom and doom that would characterize the beginning of the environmental movement with its wholesale contempt for human achievement and its predictions that nature would respond with plagues and disasters of Biblical proportions. Carson the careful science writer says, “he seems to be going farther and farther” toward destruction. She followed that warning immediately with hope. Writers like her had a critical role to play in changing the civilized world’s behavior.

There is certainly no single remedy for this condition and I am offering no panacea. But it seems reasonable to believe— and I do believe—that the more clearly we can focus our attention on the wonders and realities of the universe about us, the less taste we shall have for the destruction of our race. Wonder and humility are wholesome emotions, and they do not exist side by side with a lust for destruction.²⁵

Her exceptional ability to “focus our attention on the wonders and realities of the universe” also infected us with her perspective and to various degrees with her commitment to preserving the natural environment. That achievement demonstrates the folly of considering art as little more than entertainment and diversion. In fact, entertainment should not be considered a pejorative. Literature of any quality aims to entertain, and the essence of entertain is the same today as in its Latin roots—to hold (tenere) among (inter). Art in all its forms, but particularly writing and film, has been a vital bridge between new thinking and a change in public attitudes. Every effective movement has recognized the practical necessity of using art to win converts, to motivate members, and to prevent, diminish, or demonize opposition or other new ideas. This fact has been widely recognized by all governments that seek to censor art, and also by those who use art as propaganda.

Carson’s scientific training and her ability to absorb and transform highly technical data into scenes and stories that appeal to the senses fulfills Leo Tolstoy’s requirement that, “The highest limit of the artist’s relation to his subject will be such as evokes in the soul of all men an impression of reality—the reality not so much of what exists, as of what goes on in the soul of the artist.” Tolstoy also says, “This impression of reality is produced by truth only, and therefore the highest relation of an author to his subject is sincerity.”²⁶ Carson affirmed this view when she accepted the National Book Award for Nonfiction in 1952. “If there is poetry in my book about the sea, it is not because I deliberately put it there, but because no one could write truthfully about the sea and leave out the poetry.”²⁷

Rachel Carson’s deep imprint on American thinking validates Tolstoy’s ultimate test of art—can a story be understood and admired by common people and infect them with the artist’s own feelings?²⁸ “Artistic (and also scientific) creation is such mental activity as bring dimly perceived feelings (or thoughts) to such a degree of clearness that these feelings (or thoughts) are transmitted to other people.”²⁹

And isn’t Tolstoy describing the way art prepares its audience to accept and join a movement when he writes that the effect of true art on its audience is

that the recipient of a truly artistic impression is so united to the artist that he feels as if the work were his own and not someone else’s—as if what it expresses were just what he had long been wishing to express. A real work of art destroys in the consciousness of the recipient the separation between himself and the artist, and not that alone, but also between himself and all whose minds received this work of art. In this freeing of our personality from its separation and isolation, in this uniting of it with others, lies the chief characteristic and the great attractive force of art.³⁰ [Emphasis added.]

Even if Carson’s academic degrees had been in literature and she had spent all her time writing, she practiced her art so well that the public would have believed her word as good as any scientist’s. Carson, however, had the added benefit of two degrees in science and a job in a branch of government where good scientists did work in both field and lab. Carson’s job description usually included “biologist,” and the media often called her a scientist. For most of the audience, that word meant someone actively engaged in methodical laboratory or field research. This understanding, along with the public trust and affection she had already won, made her the ideal guide to the subject of her last and most influential book, Silent Spring, published in 1962.³¹ This is her passionate, desperate, and angry attack on the pesticide industry. She believed she now had ironclad proof that their chemicals validated the warning she had given in 1952 at the Burroughs Medal award ceremony—“Intoxicated with a sense of his own power, [man] seems to be going farther and farther into more experiments for the destruction of himself and his world.” In Silent Spring, however, she includes no “seems,” no doubt.

The writing of Silent Spring had been a race against sure death— environmental death and Rachel Louise Carson’s own death. In 1946, doctors had removed a small cyst from one breast, and in 1950 a surgeon removed a walnut-sized tumor that he said was nonmalignant. To most friends, Carson minimized any worries, but in a letter to nature writer Edwin Way Teale, she wrote, “This time I’m not going to sit back for seven years before starting another [book]! I seem now to have, as writers should, a sense of urgency and passing time—and so much to say!”³² Many observers have tried to explain the pessimism and aggressiveness of Silent Spring by the fact that Carson was dying from cancer. In fact, Carson had started work on the book in 1958, and only in the spring of 1960 did doctors remove several tumors and perform a radical mastectomy. Even then, the surgeon told her that he could not confirm malignancy, only “a condition bordering on malignancy.”³³ Almost to the very end, she continued to hope for a return to good health.

She had every chance to blame her own cancer on chemicals, but she did not do it even when she wrote her chapters tying chemical exposure to cancer. Good nature writers know that nature kills, and they accept this fact even if their followers do not. A great irony of the environmental movement and its narrow focus on the evils of human technology and economy is that its two most inspiring writers were killed in their prime by forces of nature—Henry David Thoreau by tuberculosis and Rachel Carson by cancer. And both writers sought to cure themselves with the powers of modern technology. Thoreau was glad to take the railroad to what he hoped would be the restorative airs of the wide open plains of Minnesota. Carson, often described as a scientist and whose writing inspired the “precautionary principle,” embraced treatment with the hoax drug Krebiozen. She also submitted hopefully to the most toxic of all human technologies—radiation. (Later in this book, Larry Katzenstein makes the case that Carson established the precautionary principle as a mainstay of modern environmentalism.)

Carson’s health continued to deteriorate as she wrote, but her confidence in humankind and its handling of chemicals had begun to deteriorate long before Silent Spring, and even before the publication of The Sea around Us in 1952. In 1945, while she was still working for the government and just beginning to publish in newspapers and magazines, she had begun editing reports on DDT in the marine environment. Experts in Carson’s own department engaged in vigorous discussion, and Carson thought the public should know about the dark side of DDT. She proposed an article to Reader’s Digest, writing,

[P]ractically at my back door here in Maryland, an experiment of more than ordinary interest and importance is going on. We have all heard a lot about what DDT will soon do for us by wiping out insect pests. The experiments at Patuxent have been planned to show what other effects DDT may have when it is applied to wide areas: what will happen to insects that are beneficial or even . . . central; how it may affect waterfowl, or birds that depend on insect food; whether it may upset the whole delicate balance of nature if unwisely used.³⁴

Reader’s Digest turned down her proposal, but her interest in the subject continued. Suspicion turned to dismay, and dismay became despair, and despair erupted into the anger of Silent Spring.

I leave the judgment of her evidence and conclusions to other writers in this volume; but this writer believes Carson was too professional to let her own health troubles bias her writing, and her interest in the subject had been too sustained for that charge to stick. That is not to deny she had a passionate personal interest in how and when she chose to write about a subject. Outside of her government-assigned work, all of her writing choices were intensely personal. Although she paid careful attention to financial opportunity, even after The Sea around Us assured her fortune, she was never a writer for hire or a hired gun. In her three ocean books, she had written about what she loved. Science explained why the subjects were worthy of her love and attention, while her artistic writing infected readers with her emotions, or at least a degree of them. When the topic of pesticide toxicity was first proposed to her, she thought she was not qualified to write about it—or at least that others were more qualified to do so. Then she accepted a proposal to collaborate on the subject with a science writer from Newsweek. Soon she decided that no one else could do it, and collaboration might require compromise. She chose to write Silent Spring not because she loved the subject but because she felt she had to defend the natural world she loved.

When her mother died as she began writing in 1958, Carson described her in a letter to a friend. The description of the woman who had been with her all her life could easily have been a self-description: “Her love of life and of all living things was her outstanding quality, of which everyone speaks. More than anyone else I know, she embodied Albert Schweitzer’s ‘reverence for life.’ And while gentle and compassionate, she could fight fiercely against anything she believed wrong, as in our present crusade! Knowing how she felt about that will help me return to it soon, and carry it through to completion.”³⁵

She took on the task of writing Silent Spring even against the earnest pleas of her friend Dorothy Freeman, who felt the book would be an unfortunate and dark departure from the ocean books and their own idyllic forays into the natural world.³⁶ Freeman was the human friend Carson loved most dearly and intimately. (How dearly and how intimately is unknown, irrelevant, and out of bounds.) Her first and longest love was nature. “The beauty of the world I was trying to save has always been uppermost in my mind—that, and anger at the senseless, brutish things that were being done. I have felt bound by a solemn obligation to do what I could—if I didn’t at least try I could never again be happy in nature.”³⁷

Her decision to write Silent Spring, her intensity, and the selection of facts to create a lawyer-like adversarial argument was a very personal choice. It was William Shawn, the famous editor of the New Yorker, who encouraged her to take an adversarial rather than scientific approach, who encouraged her not to worry about maintaining the appearance of a disinterested scientist. He was offering her both a fat fee and a very large audience for a book-length series condemning the use of pesticides. His words demonstrate a serious flaw in logic and why Silent Spring is so different from Carson’s earlier books: “After all there are some things one doesn’t have to be objective and unbiased about—one doesn’t condone murder!” This is classic polarization—if you’re not for us, you’re against us. Clearly, objectivity and the open mind of scientific inquiry do not condone or condemn. This liberation from scientific objectivity delighted Carson. In the same letter reporting Shawn’s offer, she says, “Best of all, I can (indeed he wants me to) present it strictly from my own point of view, pulling no punches.”³⁸

With this beginning on Silent Spring, Carson had ceased to be either a scientist or a science writer and had become an environmentalist. She was able to use all her powers as a writer to infect an audience and guarantee the book’s emotional impact: she set herself up as the advocate of the earth against humankind.

The original title was actually stated like a court case, Man against the Earth. (Since she was of that era when all writers used man to mean all of humankind, let’s not read into the title an attack on the exclusively male hierarchy of business and government that produced and promoted the heavy use of pesticides.) At her agent’s urging, she later dropped the adversarial title and used the title of a chapter on birds; that title might have been suggested by lines from the poet Keats which appear as one of two quotations on the page after the dedication.

The sedge is wither’d from the lake,
And no birds sing.

The other two quotations displayed prominently before Chapter 1 convey other versions of the modern environmentalist perspective. She dedicated the book to Albert Schweitzer with his own words: “Man has lost the capacity to foresee and to forestall. He will end by destroying the earth.”

On the next page, below Keats, she quoted the well-known New Yorker editor E. B. White. “I am pessimistic about the human race because it is too ingenious for its own good. Our approach to nature is to beat it into submission. We would stand a better chance of survival if we accommodated ourselves to this planet and viewed it appreciatively instead of skeptically and dictatorially.”

If Carson had begun her writer’s crusade against pesticides in 1945, she might never have developed the credibility and public power she achieved before Silent Spring. She would have immediately drawn fire from the chemical industry, from agricultural interests, and even from government agencies that were promoting the heavy use of DDT and other chemicals. Personally, she would have weathered such attacks, as she did after Silent Spring even when her health was fragile. If the controversy had come at the beginning of her career, it would have polarized opinion about her credibility and objectivity. The credibility she built during her career by using scientific discoveries to offer readers beauty and inspire wonder contributed enormously to the impact of Silent Spring. In fact, another major publisher, Alfred Knopf, brought out Murray Bookchin’s condemnation of chemical toxicity in food and the natural world six months before Silent Spring, but Our Synthetic Environment went almost unnoticed. Knopf even tried to avoid associating its book’s argument with Bookchin’s radical reputation by publishing it under the pseudonym Lewis Herber. (Later chapters in this volume by Desrochers and Shimizu and by Meiners and Morriss show in considerable detail how earlier writers had already attacked the chemical and pesticide industries.)

Silent Spring’s success was immediate and on a scale even Carson, the author of two previous best sellers, had not expected. In July of 1962, the New Yorker began running the book in several installments, but what made Carson happier was word that the Book-of-the-Month Club had made Silent Spring its choice for October. “The BOM will carry it to farms and hamlets all over the country that don’t know what a bookstore looks like—much less the New Yorker.” It’s worth noting that the New Yorker launched a pre-emptive editorial against expected criticism. The editors assured readers that although Carson would be “accused of alarmism” or “lack of objectivity,” she was not an extremist who wanted to ban all chemical pesticides. In the second chapter of her book, really one of two short introductions, she concludes, “It is not my contention that chemical insecticides must never be used.”³⁹ That was the truth, and when Carson testified before Ribicoff’s Senate committee, she stated very carefully that she understood the value of pesticides and that the problem was misuse and over-use.⁴⁰ However, she did not use her great gift of communication to relate even a single story of what values pesticides had, nor did she mention a single benefit.

The Mother and the Movement

Although another eight years would pass before the environmental movement would become a decisive political power on Earth Day 1970, the reactions to the New Yorker segments helped formulate the nascent movement’s message—that large, selfish, and greedy corporations had bought the virtue of government officials and Congress so they could profit from poisoning helpless people and the natural world they depended on. And this disaster was the inevitable result of human arrogance and its lost awe and appreciation of the natural world. Carson even suggests we should apprehend the culprits and punish them.

Who has made the decision that sets in motion these chains of poisonings, this ever-widening wave of death that spreads out, like ripples when a pebble is dropped into a still pond? Who has placed in one pan of the scales the leaves that might have been eaten by the beetles and in the other the pitiful heaps of many-hued feathers, the lifeless remains of the birds that fell before the unselective bludgeon of insecticidal poisons? Who has decided—who has the right to decide—for the countless legions of people who were not consulted that the supreme value is a world without insects, even though it be also a sterile world ungraced by the curving wing of a bird in flight? The decision is that of the authoritarian temporarily entrusted with power; he has made it during a moment of inattention by millions to whom beauty and the ordered world of nature still have a meaning that is deep and imperative.⁴¹

This passage is nothing short of a call to arms and a demand to mete out justice. It has the shape of a legal argument about rights and guilt. Carson was a lifelong bird watcher, and this passage comes at the end of Chapter 8, “And No Birds Sing.” Carson uses the demise of bird populations as a warning of what will happen to other species, including humans. She concludes with this argument that would have moved any jury to quick and severe judgment. The environmental movement, of course, would make legal action one of its most constant and effective weapons. Consider other ways in which Silent Spring models the methods of the new environmentalism.

The condemnation of authority and large corporations and, by extension, the free market system and capitalism appealed to many young people from the radical student movements, to anarchist groups, and to socialists. Their movements were losing steam, and the environmental movement had much broader appeal to average Americans who now cared more about nature than about economic and political theory.

Carson’s occasional comments affirming that the world could not sustain its standard of living without synthetic chemicals are meek, mild, and rare compared to page after page of text and chapter titles laden with emotional words and metaphors. They provide a catalog of language and ideas that become staple fare in the environmental movement. Chapters include “Elixirs of Death,” “Needless Havoc,” “Rivers of Death,” and “Indiscriminately from the Skies.” She relates how enough parathion is sprayed in California alone to “provide a lethal dose for five to ten times the whole world’s population,” and that we are saved from “extinction by this means” only because the chemical decomposes rapidly.⁴² Our rivers and lakes, she writes “have become almost universally contaminated with insecticides.”⁴³

Carson also engages in demonization. “Under the philosophy that now seems to guide our destinies, nothing must get in the way of the man with the spray gun. The incidental victims of his crusade against insects count as nothing. . . .”⁴⁴ She portrays Americans as helpless victims of ruthless poisoners: “As matters stand now, we are in little better position than the guests of the Borgias.”⁴⁵ She sets up black and white alternatives and warns that readers are in danger of dire personal consequences: “Confusion, delusions, loss of memory, mania—a heavy price to pay for the temporary destruction of the few insects, but a price that will continue to be exacted as long as we insist upon using chemicals that strike directly at the nervous system.”⁴⁶

She portrays humankind at a life-and-death fork in the path of history: “We stand now where two roads diverge.” But unlike the roads in Robert Frost’s familiar poem, they are not equally fair. The road we have long been traveling is deceptively easy, a smooth superhighway on which we progress with great speed, but at its end lies disaster. The other fork of the road—the one less traveled— offers our last, our only chance to reach a destination that assures the preservation of the earth.⁴⁷

Carson, who once expressed great disapproval of the way filmmakers had turned The Sea around Us into kitsch, approved every bit of Silent Spring. That includes the sentimentalized line drawings of animals where even the bugs are cute. In fact, she wrote to Dorothy Freeman, “I consider my contributions to scientific fact far less important than my attempts to awaken an emotional response to the world of nature.”⁴⁸ This too would become a staple of environmental art, especially in fund raising appeals.

She concludes Silent Spring with ridicule: “The ‘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. The concepts and practices of applied entomology for the most part date from that stone age of science.”⁴⁹

Carson should not be judged by what others have done with her work any more than boxers should be blamed for gang violence. In Silent Spring, Carson exercises her usual skillful technique of melding concrete detail and dramatic stories and the appeal to the senses. The science she selects, she reports carefully and clearly. The ensuing controversy, which others in this volume will explore at length, concerns her omissions, analysis, and conclusions.

I write as one of the many ordinary Americans who came to admire and respect Rachel Carson’s science writing, and who sat as a member of the national jury listening to her argument in Silent Spring. We understood that her argument was telling us what we should do. Consciously or not, we also learned from her how we should do it. In her despair and anger and urgency, she took her familiar approach to the wonders of nature and added to it all the rhetorical devices and misanthropic perspectives that would be repeated and elaborated on endlessly by the gloom-and-doom core of the new environmental movement.

The Disruptive Vision

In technology and economics, we often hear about “disruptors” that change the way we live or do business—fire, agriculture, steam power, the internal combustion engine, the transistor, the computer, the Internet. Writing subtly in her ocean books and with anger and polemic in Silent Spring, Rachel Carson popularized a disruptive vision of how nature works and of human responsibility and morality.

When I returned to America from graduate work at Oxford two years after the publication of Silent Spring, I took a temporary position in a Long Island middle school teaching English to classes of seventh graders from affluent middle-class families. Almost immediately, the school psychologist invited me to help conduct a special seminar for “gifted but opinionated” freshmen. They were students, he and the principal believed, who needed some thought-provoking reading and discussion. In other words, we intended to be disruptive. Our text would be the most disruptive book of the time—Silent Spring.

I was glad to have a reason to read and talk about a new book by Rachel Carson. Like many university students of my generation, I thought the world needed disruption and that possibly our entire free-market system was doomed because it was free. Besides, I had just returned from living in a country where a still powerful class system discriminated against people from my walk of life. I now had degrees from Duke University and Oxford, and I was ready to rumble. At still-segregated Duke, I had participated in civil rights demonstrations and experimented with peyote (then legal) to unlock what Aldous Huxley called “the doors of perception” because I was ready and felt I should be “shaken out of the ruts of ordinary perception.”⁵⁰ At Oxford, the British class system had hit me like a smack in the face, and if I had been given to sloganeering, I would have joined the meetings and demonstrations shouting “down with the establishment.” And here was Carson attacking the establishment.

I also wanted to get away from Long Island and the city influence, so the next year I accepted an offer to teach at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. I immediately found a country rental and soon bought an ancient house and five acres far enough into the countryside that professionals from the universities and the growing Research Triangle Park had not yet penetrated. I was allowed to teach one special freshman seminar and chose the theme “man and nature” to guide the reading and writing. I also became a charter member of the newly formed Conservation Council of North Carolina. I would go on to become the president of the council and also president of the Conservation Foundation of North Carolina and the North Carolina Land Trustees of America. Like many young college-educated Americans in the years between Silent Spring and the first Earth Day, I was looking for ways to do what Rachel Carson had demanded and what the new movement demanded—change the way America treated its environment.

The years between the publication of Silent Spring and the environmental movement’s official birth on the first Earth Day had all the richness and rapid development of pregnancy. Was Silent Spring really such a powerful force? It was for me, and I have had much more famous company. When Al Gore was vice president, he posted on the White House website a special tribute to Rachel Carson. “For me personally, Silent Spring had a profound impact. It was one of the books we read at home at my mother’s insistence and then discussed around the dinner table. My sister and I didn’t like every book that made it to that table, but our conversations about Silent Spring are a happy and vivid memory. Indeed, Rachel Carson was one of the reasons I became so conscious of the environment and involved with environmental issues.”⁵¹

The leaders of movements know what the best fiction writers know—there are only three great stories: betrayal, love, and death. To engage a reader’s attention or the attention of possible recruits to a movement, leaders must engage the audience in outrage against betrayal and in saving the thing they love from imminent death. In her ocean books, Carson taught them how to convince their recruits and followers to love nature. In Silent Spring, she gave a virtuoso demonstration of how to identify its betrayers, convict them, and offer the rest of civilization the hope of salvation.

We should not forget that Carson offered many alternatives to the practices she condemned, and she ended Silent Spring with a chapter of alternatives to pesticides. The environmental movement, of course, has expanded the supposed alternatives manifold times, usually accompanied by the claim that what is good for the environment is good for the economy. Often environmentalists turn this into a self-evident truth by pointing out the common linguistic roots of economy and ecology in the Greek oikos—house or household. Thus, by way of definition, what is good for nature is good for the economy. If a claimed economic benefit harms the environment, then some accounting is missing, external costs ignored, and the claim is false. In the same vein, as creationists arguing against evolution, belief dictates facts.

Would Carson approve? Give the dead the benefit of the doubt. She might have favored the hypothesis, but she would have recognized that embracing such dogma draws a distinct line between environmentalism and science. She does come very close to endorsing the idea even if she might not have approved of it as dogma. “If we have been slow to develop the general concepts of ecology and conservation, we have been even more tardy in recognizing the facts of the ecology and conservation of man himself. We may hope that this will be the next major phase in the development of biology. Here and there awareness is growing that man, far from being the overlord of all creation, is himself part of nature, subject to the same cosmic forces that control all other life. Man’s future welfare and probably even his survival depend upon his learning to live in harmony, rather than in combat, with these forces.”⁵² [Emphasis added.]

The way her followers took her insistence on alternatives and made it into dogma demonstrates that her contribution to the environmental movement was not a respect for science but nourishment of a faith. We see something like this in the way creationists use gaps in the geological record of evolution to support the divine creation of species. (Robert Nelson explores the religious nature of environmentalism later in this volume.)

I was among those who liked the idea that what was good for nature was also good for the economy and vice versa. First, I tried an organic vegetable farm pledged to selling produce at or below the price in the local supermarket. I always sold out, but since I was earning less than $1 an hour for my labor, what was good for the environment was not good for my economy. I next organized investors to buy rural land on which I wrote covenants to protect trees, endangered species, wild animals, and important habitat. One success led to another, and now more than 2,000 acres of land in North Carolina’s Research Triangle area are protected while yielding a profit. What I learned from these two experiments, of course, was what I hope Carson might have concluded from a study of her alternatives to pesticides—that economic benefits are the best way to ensure environmental benefits. The fact is, my two lessons were bound to separate me from both Carson and the environmental movement. I suspect that by failing to distinguish between greed and profits, and equating profit with environmental destruction, she established a bias she could not have overcome. It is certainly a bias that came to dominate the environmental movement.

In the movement’s frequent disregard for testing alternatives in reality, perhaps it demonstrates a subconscious faith that, given any challenge, human ingenuity will triumph. But this is unacknowledged at best, and at worst it postulates an environmentalist heaven reached only after modern society has died. The dominant vision of the movement mirrors Carson’s anger and despair and transforms it into doom and gloom. Between Silent Spring and the first Earth Day in 1970, the future leaders and thinkers of the movement issued a number of influential doom-and-gloom predictions, articles, and books.

Ballantine Books, credited with inventing the paperback, began publishing cheap books sponsored by David Brower and his revitalized Sierra Club. Several were large-format books with high-quality color photos. The title of the first book was Thoreau’s famous statement that would become a shibboleth of environmentalist philosophy; it fits neatly with the dogma that what is good for nature is good for the economy: In Wildness Is the Preservation of the World. Its text was a series of quotations from Thoreau, and the pictures were pleasant nature photographs, not a human face, form, or object among them. Brower’s clever strategy mirrored Carson’s success in her ocean books—win with wonder. The books were popular with many people who had not yet thought about environmental problems, much less joined the Sierra Club. One of Ballantine’s new authors was Dr. Paul Ehrlich, a Stanford University specialist in butterfly species who, in April 1967, had given a lecture on what he considered the disaster of population growth. Brower and Ballantine convinced Ehrlich and his wife Anne to write The Population Bomb. (For unknown reasons, the publisher and Paul Ehrlich decided his wife Anne should not be listed as an author.) The book began, “The battle to feed all of humanity is over. In the 1970s hundreds of millions of people will starve to death in spite of any crash programs embarked upon now. At this late date nothing can prevent a substantial increase in the world death rate.”⁵³

One of Ehrlich’s heroes, biologist Raymond Dasmann, sounded the call for more government power in planning in his prophetic 1965 book, The Destruction of California. Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas wrote Wilderness Bill of Rights, in which he proposed that animals, plants, and natural objects should have legal rights just as humans do. Landscape architect Ian McHarg proposed a new kind of planning in Design with Nature. McHarg’s book had many innovative ideas, but it also contributed to dogmatic, oppressive, and expensive regulations administered by an elite bureaucracy of converts with degrees from new schools of urban planning.

Every movement has three human components. The followers are the muscle, the leaders are the strategists and tacticians, and the writers and thinkers are the inspiration for both. Carson was the principle writer and visionary for those who would become activists. Her intellectual DNA continues in most variations of the movement from The Nature Conservancy to Greenpeace.

Social and political movements are not created by reason, logic, philosophy, or science any more than a human being is created by meat and vegetables. Movements grow from the experience of a people as crystals emerge from a super-saturated solution. Unlike the writers and thinkers, the founders of most social and political movements that change a country or the world are usually highly visible figures in the movement’s first days. (They may write as well as speak, but they seldom write at Thoreau’s or Carson’s level.)

For the environmental movement that would dominate the environmental conscience of America from 1970 until now, the prime movers enjoyed being on the public stage and leading organizations. Dennis Hayes and Sen. Gaylord Nelson organized the first Earth Day in 1970 and drew almost 20 million Americans to a single day’s events across the country. They were modeled on the highly political “teach-ins” of the student movement and the anti-Vietnam protests. David Brower brought the old and quiet Sierra Club into the political arena, multiplying its membership manifold times and sacrificing its tax-exempt status. Stewart Brand toured the country promoting his Whole Earth Catalog full of environmentally friendly ideas and products. Ron Cobb, a cartoonist whose work often appeared in the Whole Earth Catalog, drew the Ecology Flag, and poet Gary Snyder published his popular Declaration of Interdependence. The 95-cent, 367-page paperback The Environmental Handbook, edited by Garrett de Bell and published for Friends of the Earth by Ballantine Books, went to three printings in 1970 alone.

Last, and close to least, on Earth Day 1970, there I was in Princeton, New Jersey, delivering a talk as part of the local celebration. I had written only one article on the intellectual roots of environmental thinking. But I had been an organic farmer, and I had already begun to organize investors to buy rural land for experimental homesteads and protect them with covenants that limited tree cutting and prohibited the use of chlorinated hydrocarbons like chlordane that Carson had tied to cancer. Because I was also an assistant professor of English, the Woodrow Wilson Foundation of Princeton had selected me to tour nonacademic small towns of America presenting a multimedia show about man and the environment. None of us might have been movers of that first Earth Day except for Rachel Carson.

Ecologist Dr. Carl Safina, president of The Blue Ocean Institute, wrote a foreword to the 2003 commemorative edition of The Sea around Us. Instead of dwelling on Carson’s scientific credentials, he recognizes her much more important influence as the mother and muse of the environmental movement. “Her very name evokes the beatific luminosity of the canonized.” Safina also notes, “The Rachel Carson we think of is the author of Silent Spring, birth mother of modern environmentalism, messenger of a story that rocked the world. The real Rachel Carson never met her. . . . She didn’t live long enough to become acquainted with the Carson we know, that towering figure whose light illuminated our sense of the world forever.”⁵⁴

The reverse is also true—the Rachel Carson beatified by the environmental movement is not the real Rachel Carson. Sainthood is an inspirational story, not careful biography.

A new way of thinking about a scientist’s (or science writer’s) influence has recently appeared on the Internet. In collaboration with Google, a team led by French psychologist Jean-Baptiste Michel and Harvard mathematician Erez Lieberman Aiden has created a method of analyzing data from 15 million books with trillions of words digitalized by Google. Entering a person’s name for a given period of years produces a graph showing how often that name (or a phrase) appears in each of the included years. The plots you’ll see are the frequency of those names and phrases in the pages of all books published each year between the dates you choose.⁵⁵ In Figure 2.1, Rachel Carson’s name ranks below only Henry David Thoreau and above scientists who were environmental writers—Aldo Leopold, Barry Commoner, Murray Bookchin, and Paul Ehrlich.⁵⁶

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Figure 2.1
FREQUENCY OF PUBLISHED NAMES OF ENVIRONMENTALISTS
(1940–2008)

SOURCE: Google Labs, Books Ngram Viewer.

Carson is clearly still a powerful force. It’s also interesting that the only writer mentioned more often in the years of her own career is the very quotable curmudgeon of the mid-19th century, Henry David Thoreau.

Carson was neither a profound nor an original thinker, as Pierre Desrochers and Hiroko Shimizu will show in Chapter 3. Rachel Carson, however, would have been a good writer in any century, and she happened to be the right kind of writer at a time when America was ripening for change and ready for her material and talent. The environmental movement would certainly have crystallized without her. She was not its founder or its lifeblood, but first an inspiration and then, with Silent Spring, a catalyst that set off reactions waiting to happen—and she imparted to them a special character.

The channel of Carson’s influence—arousing the emotions and awareness of the general public through a work of art—is almost a reincarnation of another powerful American writer’s success. Exactly 100 years before publication of The Sea around Us, in 1851, another woman writer who had lived in Ohio published the first installment of the book that drew more than a million readers and energized the Abolitionist Movement. The writer was Harriet Beecher Stowe and her book, Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Uncle Tom’s Cabin became a theater drama, and Carson’s book became a film.

On December 2, 1862, when Harriet Beecher Stowe visited Abraham Lincoln in the White House, he is supposed to have greeted her with the words, “So you are the little woman who started all this?”⁵⁷ When Abraham Ribicoff welcomed Rachel Carson to his Senate hearing on pesticides in the environment, he began, “Miss Carson, you are the lady who started all this.”

Ribicoff was unaware that by placing Carson at the center of the legislative deliberation he was proving a claim made by the English poet Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792–1822). Shelley, using the words poetry and poets to mean most literary work, said that such writers become our interpreters of mysteries and prophets, “the mirrors of the gigantic shadows which futurity casts upon the present; the words which express what they understand not; the trumpets which sing to battle, and feel not what they inspire; the influence which is moved not, but moves. Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world.”⁵⁸