5 Speculative Ecology

As the last chapter demonstrated, works in the documentary aesthetic can complicate an individualized understanding of life, morality, crime, and even death in our neoliberal culture. In this chapter, I focus on how documentary works can reorient our understanding of time, in ways that can make different relations to the environment possible. For example, the conceptual artist Hans Haacke’s 1975 work On Social Grease is a series of photoengraved magnesium plates. Each plate reproduces a statement about supporting the arts from a corporate executive or U.S. politician who sits on the board of a major museum or cultural institution. The plaques document the way in which art is a social asset for petroleum corporations, a way to embed oil into everyday life not through the pump but through the more rarefied air of the art museum. The work’s title is a play on how art is used by corporate interests as a way to ease the opening up of new markets, especially in urban centers. One plaque, in particular, uses the overt metaphor of “lubrication” to connect fossil fuels with markets (fig. 15):

EXXON’s support of the arts serves the arts as a social lubricant.

And if business is to continue in big cities, it needs a more lubricated environment.1

This vision of smooth circulation, perhaps with undertones of sexual intercourse between Exxon and “the arts,” implies that oil is both the medium through which we view works of art and the environment in which economic relations take place. That is, our fossil fuel economy is imagined here as constituting the horizon of aesthetic and economic activity. The metal plaque’s appearance as a kind of permanent marker also gestures toward a possible future where this sentiment has become historical. The plaque functions as a future memorial to days past, even as it documents the present.

Taking this plaque as a starting point, this chapter will explore how documentary works like Haacke’s have seized upon the intertwinement of nature and culture as a site of contestation in finance capitalism and the expansive time of environmental crisis that has accompanied it. If the coming struggles, as Joshua Clover has argued, are going to be about circulation within finance capitalism, then the ways of life and visions of futurity premised on a future of plentiful oil, of smooth circulation, provide a place to raise questions, to form resistance, to make more viscous the “lubricated environment” that allows for the uneven distribution of food, housing, and clothes.2 As climate change produces a more erratic environment, the modes of circulation that have defined wealthy and even middle-class existence under neoliberalism must be transformed, and our global reliance on extractive resources must transition to other modes. Documentary art can both make visible the exploitative nature of our relation to the environment and posit speculative paths forward, beyond neoliberal “fixes” to climate change that would not change the exploitative structure of fossil-fueled life but merely afford an increasingly privatized zone of energy-dependent comfort for those who can afford it. In focusing on documentary forms about the environment, this chapter aims to account for how works in the documentary aesthetic approach, on one hand, the economic and ecological reality of climate change and, on the other hand, the possibility of imagining a future beyond our current economic regime’s reliance on fossil fuels.3

Like most of the previous chapters, this one begins with a documentary text published during the period of neoliberal culture’s emergence, in this case Rachel Carson’s 1962 Silent Spring. Carson provided a speculative approach to environmentalism that became a template for future environmentalist documentaries, just as her work was also distilled into a set of positions that allowed neoliberal policies to adopt the rhetoric of environmentalism without advocating for the necessary changes to exploitative structures that have led to our current environmental crises. Carson’s work of literary nonfiction straddles the New Deal era of programmatic documentary and the 1960s era of the documentary aesthetic. The book is often celebrated for its legislative effect. As is frequently noted, Carson’s book documenting the harmful effects of DDT and other pesticides was central to the creation of the Environmental Protection Agency by executive order of Richard Nixon in 1970 and the nationwide ban on the use of DDT in 1972. The immediate reception of Silent Spring as a pressing work of activist documentary has just as much to do with the work’s speculative imaginings as it does with its more traditional journalistic content. Though primarily lauded as the origin point of modern environmental legislation, Silent Spring is part of a larger trajectory in Carson’s documentary writings about nature, one that is concerned not just with regulating chemicals like DDT but also with a broader reorientation of our relation to the environment in a way that can make visible, and therefore allow us to begin to think of alternatives to, the structural conditions of environmental harm that have led to the crisis of climate change. Carson’s prose blends nature writing, science writing, investigative reporting, and lyrical imagining into a mode that I will describe as speculative documentary. This mode blends traditional documentary modes with visions of economic and environmental futures, both to emphasize the “slow violence” of pollution and climate change and to ground that violence and its long-term effects in our everyday lives.4

Silent Spring consolidates New Deal–era documentary forms aimed at a broad public with a more speculative imaginary emergent in Carson’s earlier writings. Carson’s lyrical prose represents both the vast network of marine ecology, from the shorelines to the deepest reaches of the sea floor, and the effects of seemingly mundane chemicals like DDT. In her writings about the ocean, ecological networks, and human-made toxins, Carson articulated and popularized a mode of speculative documentary suited to grappling with environmental problems, and especially with climate change, by making available a conception of the world in which ecological systems are estranged from and even unrecognizable to the humans who inhabit them. By undoing the familiarity of nature as a stable other to culture, Carson produces a documentary account capable of projecting the future from present-day actions and thus advocating for changes to behaviors that otherwise slowly, and perhaps invisibly, lead to catastrophe. This method has become central to environmentalist documentary. For example, Al Gore’s award-winning account of climate change An Inconvenient Truth (2006) opens with a speculative invitation to readers: “Imagine with me now that . . . we have the chance to use our moral imaginations and to project ourselves across the expanse of time, 17 years into the future, and share a brief conversation with our children and grandchildren as they are living their lives in the year 2023.”5 This kind of speculative imagining is necessary to make climate change and other environmental problems visible. Carson’s synthesis of nature writing, science writing, investigative journalism, and imaginations of the future initiated a mode within the documentary aesthetic capable of representing climate change, environmental harm, and the necessity of environmental activism in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. Only through speculation about the future can environmentalist documentaries present climate change and other forms of environmental crisis as immediate problems.

Speculative Documentary

Silent Spring is about the proliferation of pesticide spraying programs after World War II. Documenting DDT and other pesticides’ effects on water, soil, plants, fish, birds, and mammals (including humans), Silent Spring is written in a lyrical yet journalistic style, intertwining scientific data, industry history, and information about spraying programs with reflections about nature’s importance, anecdotes about victims of pesticide toxicity, and apocalyptic imaginings of a world forever poisoned. As Gary Kroll has noted, Silent Spring is not a singular text but a “polysemous” one, appearing in multiple forms, from its initial magazine publication to its publication as a book and distribution through the Book of the Month Club.6 Moreover, Carson’s reportage on pesticides followed and relied upon earlier reports doubting DDT’s safety. Employed by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, Carson herself had written press releases warning fish-processing plants about DDT’s toxicity in 1945 and 1946.7 Silent Spring’s publication as a book, then, was part of a longer progression of reportage and dissemination, less a singular text than a process that could then be consolidated around a concrete object and through a cohering documentary style. Following the book’s publication, Carson’s account of pesticides would be disseminated even further through television and government documents, including, in 1963, an episode of the news program CBS Reports and a report on pesticides from President Kennedy’s Science Advisory Committee.

Even before Silent Spring was published by Houghton Mifflin, Carson’s writing was defining and propelling the environmentalist movement forward in the 1960s. As Rob Nixon, Rachel Carson Professor at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, noted in an editorial, Silent Spring and its reception had a sobering effect, a double-sided sense of both the possibilities for environmental change and its limits: “We can seldom expect outright environmental victories, just indispensable, heroic holding actions, in which writers of conscience—as interpreters and witnesses—have a vital role to play. Sure, Carson didn’t live to see the Clean Water Act of 1972 and the Safe Drinking Water Act of 1974 that her writings helped inspire. But she also didn’t live to see U.S. Vice President Dick Cheney, a former Halliburton chief executive, chair the energy task force that resulted in the 2005 bill exempting high-risk hydraulic fracturing (fracking) from the requirements of those same two acts.”8 As Nixon points out, celebrations of Silent Spring’s legislative impact can occlude the persistent and worsening problems of environmental pollution and escalating climate change, let alone legislative mandates that have undone or bypassed the regulations Silent Spring helped to put in place. Thinking of Silent Spring as speculative documentary, though, allows one to find in the book both an activist argument about government legislation and also a vision of the environment that foregrounds exploitation and its long-term effects, a recognition of the slow accumulation of damage and toxicity that cannot be fully repaired by regulatory triumphs. In this way, Silent Spring makes available both an activist orientation toward the state and corporations and a broader perspective that can reckon with a past and future that does not contain those entities. Silent Spring’s documentary aesthetic is both practical in its demands for legislative reform and speculative in its positing of a time before and after late capitalism.

Involvement in governmental reports was not new for Carson, who had worked for almost ten years for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, where she “wrote pamphlets and press releases, and edited scientific papers generated by other Fish and Wildlife staff.”9 Owing to Carson’s experience and the role her writings played in legislation, her work clearly partakes in and is an important late part of the tradition of government-sponsored documentary forms associated largely with the New Deal. These documentaries, like Pare Lorenz’s film The River (1938), tend to celebrate technology, government, and humanity’s ability to reshape the environment for the better. What makes Carson’s work distinct from those government-sponsored, often sentimentally humanist forms, though, is her twinned focus on legislative action and the vast temporal sweep of ecology that displaces human society as central to the world. This ecological framework is evident in Silent Spring, but it was crafted and refined in Carson’s earlier books about ocean ecology. These earlier ocean books—Under the Sea-Wind (1941), The Sea Around Us (1951), and The Edge of the Sea (1955)—engage in a hybrid documentary form much like Silent Spring, though they are descriptive rather than activist in their ultimate intent.10 While rooted in federal patronage of oceanography and her own experiences working for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, Carson’s ocean writings importantly speculate as much as they report and disseminate scientific information.11 As Philip Cafaro claims about Carson’s first book, Under the Sea-Wind, she combines “an imaginative, phenomenological exploration of other consciousnesses with the latest researches in scientific natural history.”12 It is this imagining of other consciousnesses, such as Under the Sea-Wind’s character Scomber the Mackerel, coupled with her lyrical passages about deep time that produce a speculative documentary form, one that remains key to environmentalist documentary writing and film today.

Through her blend of science and nature writing with speculative imagining about the futures of an increasingly over-fished and toxic ocean, Carson’s books often produce a sense of a doomed future. Indeed, in the 1952 documentary film adaptation of Carson’s The Sea Around Us, written and directed by Irwin Allen, who would later make the successful disaster films The Poseidon Adventure (1972) and The Towering Inferno (1974), a series of Technicolor scenes of glaciers shedding ice into the ocean concludes the film on an ominous note about temperatures rising across the globe and the concomitant rise of ocean levels. The film concludes with the phrase “The End?,” presaging both Allen’s future career in disaster films and Carson’s sublime approach to nature. Kroll notes that Carson was disappointed with Allen’s adaptation of her book, and he cites a letter in which Carson wishes that the film version of The Sea Around Us had been made with the “beauty, the dignity, and the impressiveness of the Pare Lorenz script for The River.”13 Pare Lorenz’s New Deal documentary The River concludes with an account of how the Tennessee Valley Authority and the Farm Security Administration are improving farmland and restoring rivers, optimistically stating, “We had the power to take the valley apart—we have the power to put it together again.” Though Carson was unhappy with it as a film adaptation, Allen’s The Sea Around Us nonetheless captures, in its ominous conclusion’s warning of environmental catastrophe, the way in which Carson presents a longer view than Lorenz’s documentary, one that emphasizes not the rehabilitation of society but its ultimate and inevitable collapse. Rather than engaging in a sentimental humanist account of social flourishing and the renewed control of nature, as we see in The River, Carson offers, through speculation, a longer view of the environment over time that does not depend on human institutions.

Gesturing not to a hopeful future occasioned by liberalism but instead to a disastrous future facilitated by human interference with ecological systems, Carson’s approach to the environment speculates about our apocalyptic future and in so doing challenges the public to imagine alternatives to their seemingly mundane activities. Indeed, Allen’s 1961 science fiction film Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea would hinge on a giant fire in the sky that threatens to extinguish all life on Earth by raising the planet’s temperature. Featuring crumbling glaciers and nuclear warheads, Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea dramatizes, in the guise of an adventure story, the kinds of apocalyptic visions lyrically and presciently documented in Carson’s writings about warming oceans and toxic environments.14 Carson’s prose trades in a kind of sensational imagining similar to Allen’s, and it is only through that speculation that she is able to begin to describe the larger consequences of climate change.

As Michael Schudson states in his influential Discovering the News, literary journalism of the 1960s often took on a subjective, challenging tone in order to make visible what might otherwise be obscured by the “standard of objectivity” in print journalism.15 Carson’s contribution to this subversive, critical tradition in literary nonfiction is the synthesis of nature writing, lyrical reflection, and speculative representations of the future. Moving from ecosystems to pesticide production, Carson documents nature as a function of economic, oceanic, and biological processes rather than a static end in itself to be conserved and celebrated. Silent Spring takes part in both the traditions Schudson ascribes to critical journalism of the 1960s—“a literary tradition and a muckraking tradition.”16 At once investigative and speculative, Carson’s prose blends a distinctively imaginative style with investigative strategies, including endnotes to support Silent Spring’s claims. This synthesis of the investigative and the speculative can be traced through Carson’s own career, and it has led to a wide swath of speculative documentaries that seek to make visible environmental damage, the climate change crisis, and the need for largescale environmentalist reform.

In an influential essay that helped to define the shift from ecocriticism to what is commonly referred to now as the environmental humanities, Lawrence Buell claims that “contemporary toxic discourse effectively starts with Silent Spring.”17 Moving beyond romantic notions of nature as separate from human activity, toxic discourse, in Buell’s argument, “insists on the interdependence of ecocentric and anthropocentric values. It underscores the point that environmentalism must make concerns for human and social health more central and salient than it traditionally has if it is to thrive, perhaps even to survive.”18 However, in her Sense of Place and Sense of Planet, Ursula K. Heise notes that the discourse of toxicity often replicates what it purportedly disavows, “the fundamentally pastoral vision of ecology . . . a vision that understands ecological systems as harmonious and balanced networks and that sees nature as self-regenerating if left on its own.”19 Moving beyond this pastoral vision has proven difficult, and Heise argues in a later essay that science fiction is one site where ecology has been thought of as thoroughly enmeshed with human culture, as part of a global network that cannot be nostalgically bracketed off from late capitalism. As Heise asserts, modern environmentalism must imagine “a human society that will live its future life in Martian ecologies, no matter the planet.”20

What Carson offers, even in her early writings on the ocean, is a blend of what Buell describes as toxic discourse and what Heise describes as imaginative representations of ecology as part of a global network. Carson is not nostalgic for pristine nature but instead imagines ecology as in a constant, yet slow, state of change and flow. In The Sea Around Us, Carson describes the sea as both one entity and not an entity at all but movement: “There is, then, no water that is wholly of the Pacific, or wholly of the Atlantic, or of the Indian or the Antarctic. The surf that we find exhilarating at Virginia Beach or at La Jolla today may have lapped at the base of antarctic icebergs or sparkled in the Mediterranean sun, years ago, before it moved through dark and unseen waterways to the place we find it now. It is by the deep, hidden currents that the oceans are made one.”21 Carson’s network thinking—her emphasis on the fluidity of the ocean over our geographical boundaries—casts the ocean as fluid and porous, as something that undoes the names that describe it once one looks at water itself. That is, the ocean, and ecology more broadly, presents the nonfiction writer with a representational dilemma. Traditional nomenclature fails to capture the reality of the ocean, and Carson’s speculative documentary prose aims to represent the “deep, hidden currents” otherwise obscured.

In Under the Sea-Wind, Carson describes writing about the ocean precisely as such:

In planning this book I was confronted at the very outset with the problem of a central character. It soon became evident that there was no single animal—bird, fish, mammal, or any of the sea’s lesser creatures—that could live in all the various parts of the sea I proposed to describe. That problem was instantly solved, however, when I realized that the sea itself must be the central character whether I wished it or not; for the sense of the sea, holding the power of life and death over every one of its creatures from the smallest to the largest, would inevitably pervade every page.22

Carson’s central character, then, is a vast ecological network, one that makes human society seem temporary, yet also one that requires representation through a human framework, characterization. What Carson’s prose stages and what allows her to engage in the various tropes and imaginings of Silent Spring is a dialectic representation of nature, as both other to human society and as the network on which human society is based. Toxicity and equilibrium, ultimately, are synthesized in Carson’s view, as ecological systems were never stable entities in the first place but only in balance in a very short temporal view. This understanding of ecology engages in the documentary aesthetic by attempting to represent what cannot be directly observed or documented.

The Nature of Silent Spring

Like many of her earlier works about marine life and ocean ecology, Carson’s Silent Spring was initially published in the New Yorker, a venue best known for its “smart” commentary on urban life. On the surface, Carson’s writings seem at odds with the New Yorker’s editorial focus, yet as Jamin Creed Rowan has argued, Carson’s ecological writings mirrored the magazine’s understanding of the city as a network. Comparing Carson’s prose to Jane Jacobs’s writing about the city, Rowan demonstrates how “like the community of sea creatures Carson describes at sea’s edge, the pedestrians on Hudson Street compose a deeply interconnected yet anonymous social web.”23 While her earlier works might, on first glance, fit within the tradition of nature writing continuous from nineteenth-century nonfiction such as Henry David Thoreau’s Walden (1854), works which find in the natural world an escape and difference from culture, Carson’s writing also makes clear how nature writing is, and always was, just as much about nature’s intertwinement with culture as it is about drawing a stark dichotomy between the cultural and the natural. Carson’s ecological networks mirror the urban flows of the postwar city, entailing, in the worst-case scenario, the naturalization of exploitative structures and, in the best-case scenario, the decentering of normalized hierarchies. In Silent Spring, especially, this enlarged vision of nature as culture is necessary, for only through that lens can one begin to understand the permanent, long-term, largescale effects of pesticide toxicity.

From Silent Spring’s title and its opening chapter, “A Fable for Tomorrow,” Carson begins her record of increased organic pesticide use in the United States and its harmful effects on plants, animals, water supplies, and soil with a vision of future apocalypse. Like many works of environmentalist documentary to follow it, Silent Spring begins not with facts or experience but with speculation, a narrative about a before—“There was once a town in the heart of America where all life seemed to live in harmony with its surroundings”—and an after—“Then a strange blight crept over the area and everything began to change. . . . On the mornings that had once throbbed with the dawn chorus of robins, catbirds, doves, jays, wrens, and scores of other bird voices there was now no sound; only silence lay over the fields and woods and marsh.”24 Borrowing a familiar trope from The Communist Manifesto, Carson then concludes the first chapter of Silent Spring with a claim about what her documentary prose will make available as knowledge: “A grim specter has crept upon us almost unnoticed, and this imagined tragedy may easily become a stark reality we all shall know.”25

Carson figures this possible “stark reality” in two temporal registers—the slow time of pollution, which results in small changes to the ecosystem that, compounded, become disastrous, and the immediate, catastrophic event. As she writes, “The full maturing of whatever seeds of malignancy have been sown by these chemicals is yet to come.”26 In this view toxicity is hidden until catastrophic—“an irreversible malignancy will slumber long and undetected until finally—its cause long forgotten and even unsuspected—it flares into the open as recognizable cancer”27; but Carson also documents more immediate, noticeable effects of toxicity. The central reference point for this is the death of songbirds, which is invoked in the book’s fictionalized first chapter only to be returned to, as fact and not as fiction, in chapter eight: “Over increasingly large areas of the United States, spring now comes unheralded by the return of the birds, and the early mornings are strangely silent where once they were filled with the beauty of bird song. This sudden silencing of the song of birds, this obliteration of the color and beauty and interest they lend to our world have come about swiftly, insidiously, and unnoticed by those whose communities are as yet unaffected.”28 This alliterative “sudden silencing of the song of birds” echoes Silent Spring’s title, shushing through prose the silencing occasioned by DDT.

While Carson figures natural cycles and equilibrium as persistent and as inevitably returning after a disruption such as the use of DDT, Silent Spring also chronicles the irreversibility of some pollution and toxicity, the ways in which “the living world was shattered.”29 In the book’s concluding chapter, “The Other Road,” Carson argues that in forests, “with a minimum of help and a maximum of noninterference from man, Nature can have her way, setting up all that wonderful and intricate system of checks and balances that protects the forest from undue damage by insects.”30 In this contradiction—between nature as irreversibly damaged and nature as always striving to an equilibrium—lies Carson’s conception of nature. At once beyond human interference and completely determined by human activity, nature in Silent Spring is a marker of an other to human culture and a figure for human culture’s growing reliance on the manipulation and production of the natural world as a source of revenue. Carson’s images of apocalypse and deep time, of the inevitable washing away of human society, coupled with her representation of the irreversible changes human society has contributed to the environment, stages this dialectical approach to ecology, one in which humans are both temporary and permanent agents among other organic and inorganic entities in the environment, never certain about their place in a fluid system.

The permanent harm done by humans is rendered clear when Carson casts an everyday object as saturated with foreign toxins: “The common salad bowl may easily present a combination of organic phosphate insecticides. Residues well within the legally permissible limits may interact.”31 Carson then projects, through the toxic salad bowl, an apocalyptic vision of the environment:

The world of systemic insecticides is a weird world, surpassing the imaginings of the brothers Grimm—perhaps most closely akin to the cartoon world of Charles Addams. It is a world where the enchanted forest of the fairy tales has become the poisonous forest in which an insect that chews a leaf or sucks the sap of a plant is doomed. It is a world where a flea bites a dog, and dies because the dog’s blood has been made poisonous, where an insect may die from vapors emanating from a plant it has never touched, where a bee may carry poisonous nectar back to its hive and presently produce poisonous honey.32

Carson’s representation of the “slow violence” of environmental degradation and displacement is punctuated by these moments of everyday toxicity, of sudden death and contamination.33

In his reading of the 1963 episode of CBS Reports titled “The Silent Spring of Rachel Carson,” which gave Carson’s warnings about pesticides an even broader audience, Finis Dunaway argues that the media spectacle produced around Silent Spring, similar to other media coverage of environmental problems such as nuclear testing, pollution, and climate change, “narrowed the scope of Silent Spring to single out DDT as the nation’s sole pesticide danger. The repeated emphasis on DDT, while lending legitimacy to the ban, also worked to marginalize systemic critiques of industrial agriculture and the increasing reliance on pesticides.”34 The reduction of Carson’s critique to DDT bypasses her larger ecological framework, in which DDT is merely one example of human society’s slow violence, and in which human society is temporary, destined to be washed away. This perspective lends itself less to environmental policy than to science fiction, and this is perhaps why Silent Spring’s speculative vision of apocalypse is followed up with chapters and endnotes about the present, not the future. Carson’s careful documentation and citation practices in Silent Spring are evidence of a pragmatic concern—that her documentary project will be received as merely speculative rather than founded on scientific evidence and principles. As Mark McGurl has noted, deep time lends itself to genre fiction, and especially science fiction and horror, for unlike literary realism, genre fiction is “willing to risk artistic ludicrousness in their representation of the inhumanly large and long.”35 This is, in part, evident in Silent Spring, and countered in the text by endnotes and citations. What makes Silent Spring unique, in this instance, is its dialectical staging of what McGurl refers to as a the “posthuman comedy” of deep time, in which human society is rendered absurd by the cosmos’ grand history and the stasis and silence of postwar America. Carson’s speculative documentary imagines an important shift from everyday life in the present to the future that our economic and social systems are making, thus grounding the time travel of speculative documentary in empirical data about everyday life in the present.

Silent Spring argues for a more mindful use of science in pest control, while also emphasizing how ecology is a vast system that exceeds human society. In Silent Spring, Carson traces how her ecosystem thinking, emergent alongside urban planning ideologies that would be appropriated into fantasies of organic synthesis between work and life, can produce not a sense of organic equilibrium but a recognition of dynamism, change, and political responsibility.36 Prefiguring the ecological theories of thinkers such as Timothy Morton, Silent Spring denies nature’s status as ontologically distinct from culture and politics.37 Even more than this, though, Carson’s mode of speculative documentary positions the speculative documentation of the future as central to environmental activism.

This imperative to document the future is taken up by later environmentalist documentaries, from the counterhistory in the film Who Killed the Electric Car? (2006) to the environmental damage described in Bill McKibben’s Eaarth: Making Life on a Tough New Planet (2010). To focus briefly on another example: Werner Herzog’s 1992 film Lesson of Darkness engages in the kind of estrangement from place and time that allows one to view our world as transient, as polluted and unsustainable, bound to give way. The film is composed of documentary footage shot in Kuwait after the first Gulf War. Centering on scenes of the Kuwaiti oil fires and the oil workers trying to contain them, the film is narrated by Herzog as an alien observer, introducing the footage in the film as being from “a planet in our solar system,” and going on to say about an oil worker standing in front of a wall of flames, gesturing and stomping on the ground, “the first creature we encountered tried to communicate something to us.” The communication is, of course, unintelligible. Perhaps the worker is showing us that the wall of flame is coming from below the ground, that the fire is crude oil aflame, but Herzog neither interviews the figure nor speculates about the meaning of his gestures. Instead, the viewer is left not with a sense of aestheticized violence (something that the film was initially accused of upon its first festival screenings) but with a sense of how environmental catastrophe estranges one from the environment, displaces the familiar and the everyday so completely as to render human communication and human agency moot. This rendering moot is also part of the documentary’s temporal and spatial reach—one of the film’s chapters is titled “A Dinosaur’s Feast,” featuring shots of large machinery moving around Kuwaiti oil fields. The chapter title’s reference to the organic beings, the dinosaurs, who decomposed into petroleum, is ironic—it is not dinosaurs who feast on their crude remains but these large machines. The dinosaurs here are not reptiles but fossil-fuel burning engines, facing extinction on a burning planet. This kind of imaginary can capture the temporal span necessary for thinking of our everyday actions and structures of environmental exploitation as slowly leading to catastrophe.

Representing Capitalism and Climate Change

Central to Silent Spring, but not named as such, is the engine driving the exploitative use of pesticides: late capitalism. Indeed, Silent Spring spurred not only the environmentalism of the late twentieth century but also contemporary environmentalist politics that focus on capitalism and economics. As Nixon notes in his editorial on Carson, the ways in which legislation has been manipulated under neoliberalism to conform to corporate interests have actively impeded the legislative triumphs occasioned by Silent Spring: “Even the prescient Carson could not have imagined this: an America where corporations are now legally people, replete with human rights, thereby endangering the rights of us noncorporate humans—ordinary, mortal citizens whose right to an unpoisoned future Carson rose up to defend.”38 The problems facing us today require something more than the advocacy of legislation and regulation, and this was anticipated even in Carson’s earlier books about the ocean. For Carson, ecological time necessitates a shift in perspective, a recognition of and sense of obligation toward the dark patches of unknown life that precede and will follow the human species.

In a chapter about eels in Under the Sea-Wind, for example, Carson imagines a distant future: “As the waiting of the eels off the mouth of the bay was only an interlude in a long life filled with constant change, so the relation of sea and coast and mountains ranges was that of a moment in geologic time. For once more the mountains would be worn away by the endless erosion of water and carried in silt to the sea, and once more all the coast would be water again, and the places of its cities and towns would belong to the sea.”39 This moment of speculative documentary poses a subtle counterpoint to the logic of conservation, as the environment is valuable not as a resource for human life but because it will exist after humans have vanished. With its focus on entrepreneurial individualism and free markets, the neoliberal imaginary is incapable of conceiving interests outside of the purview of human agents, and indeed it even figures nonhuman entities like corporations as human agents. Carson offers an early meditation on the necessity of radical alterity, as a foil to emergent neoliberalism’s totalized field of human agents.

Silent Spring and the environmentalist documentary tradition that follows from it—in books such as Edward Abbey’s Desert Solitaire (1968) and John McPhee’s Control of Nature (1989), and more recently Elizabeth Kolbert’s The Sixth Extinction (2014) and Naomi Klein’s This Changes Everything (2014)—strive to represent the mutual imbrication of nature and culture through imaginings of the future available in the documentary aesthetic. Carson’s sublime imagery often offsets capitalism as temporary, as in this passage from The Sea Around Us about humankind:

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.40

Our place in this world is transient, Carson reminds us, even if our effects on this world will be permanent.

Contrary to Carson’s faith in the decentering force of the sea, and as Allan Sekula documented in his work of photography and prose Fish Story (1995), late capitalism nonetheless transformed our relation to the sea at the time Silent Spring was being written, published, and read through the “containerization of cargo movement: an innovation pioneered initially by United States shipping companies in the latter half of the 1950s, evolving into the world standard for general cargo by the end of the 1960s. . . . Factories become mobile, ship-like, as ships become increasingly indistinguishable from trucks and trains, and seaways lose their difference with highways. . . . This historical change reverses the ‘classical’ relationship between the fixity of the land and the fluidity of the sea” (fig. 16).41 Carson’s ocean loses its difference from the land, yet this entails not the sea’s taming by late capitalism but late capitalism’s own instability, its own entrance into the speculative imaginaries that Carson associated with the sea. Sekula’s Fish Story details how documentary representations of labor must always be provisional, and this provisionality is, in the work of Carson and other environmentalist documentarians, where speculation can chart possible pasts and futures.42

Like Fish Story, Richard Misrach and Kate Orff’s Petrochemical America (2014) also documents in photographs and text the ways in which fossil fuels undergird our world, flush with goods that appear through petroculture’s modes of circulation. In Misrach’s photograph Norco Cumulus Cloud, for example, one can mistake the fluffy cloud for an idyllic landscape, until one reads the photo’s caption: “Throughout the day, natural-looking clouds, nicknamed ‘Norco cumulus,’ hover over the site, created by the comingling of moisture and volatile hydrocarbons that originate in the process of refining gasoline” (fig. 17).43 The natural is the petrochemical. The emissions cloud and its innocuous toxicity, though, is only part of the documentary effort in Petrochemical America. When read alongside the work’s second half, a series of maps, charts, and glossaries, a longer vision than that of the momentary, uncanny Norco cloud becomes available. In Orff’s map From the Earth to the Sky, carbon dioxide is mapped alongside the fossil record in Louisiana, bleeding off of the map to represent offshore pipelines and deepwater drilling sites, tracing the seep of petroculture into the future, toxicity above and below the surface. It is a vision of a system and timeline that makes the Norco cloud less a coincidence than a point on a continuum whose effects will outlast us all.44

Petrochemical America’s collaborative mapping project differs substantially from another of Misrach’s well-known works, The Mysterious Opacity of Other Beings (2015). These photographs of individual humans floating in borderless water capture some of the sublimity of the ocean that so interested Rachel Carson (fig. 18). The water, in these photographs, offsets and renders ghostly the human body, making the body’s materiality, and the materiality of the swimsuits each subject wears, a stark contrast against water without apparent end. Taken from an elevated vantage point so as to create the appearance of an infinite body of water, these photographs posit an unreal nature, an impossible relation between human and water, and a vision, perhaps, of the rising waters to come with rising global temperatures. In contrast, Misrach’s photographs of Louisiana remain situated, rooted in context, history, extraction, and emission. Similar to the human/inhuman dialectic used by Carson to advocate for legislative reform and to posit a deep future where resources can no longer be thought of as resources, Misrach’s photographic projects reveal both the resilience of the human and the economic forces that dwarf individual humans and render them immobile. The human is at once central and left behind, as in the photograph Night Fishing, Near Bonnet Carré Spillway (fig. 19). In this photograph, a blurry barge moves through the spillway and a refinery lights up the background. In contrast to this movement and light, a solitary figure stands immobile on the shore. His back to the camera, at the end of a grass-and-dirt patch leading up to the water, the fisherman is static, rendered as landscape against the barge in motion, even though he is in the foreground.

In A. Laurie Palmer’s photobook In the Aura of a Hole: Exploring Sites of Material Extraction (2014), the stakes are less the interplay of humanity, mobility, and timeframes than the normalization of largescale extraction. In the work’s chapter on sulfur, Palmer travels to and photographs a BP-owned Sulfur mine in California (fig. 20). While there, she learns of “extremophiles,” bacteria found in hot springs and carbon deposits that seem to ingest sulfur and emit hydrogen. These organisms, Palmer notes, became part of a “science . . . [that] has been used to shore up a heretical and politically charged theory about oil and fossil fuel formation,” namely, that fossil fuels are in fact renewable via these microorganisms.45 Undercutting the technofuturist utopianism of this science, though, Palmer concludes her sulfur chapter with this postscript: “In 2012 BP sold its Carson refinery . . . to help pay for the cost of the explosion and spill at the Deepwater Horizon rig.”46 In Palmer’s photograph Sulfur Pile, Port of Long Beach, California, a bright yellow pyramid amid trees and chain link fence positions extraction as the chief interest of energy corporations. Speculation about renewability is a mere smokescreen, a prop to alleviate anxiety about the limits of our economic system and a future possibility quickly monetized in the face of present-day crisis.

Since Silent Spring, environmentalist documentary has come to engage in both activism, often aimed at specific legislative action or consumer awareness, and speculation about what comes after our current economic and energy regime. Climate change has made this twofold mode of representation even more necessary, as it demands recognition of the role petroculture has played in reshaping the environment. This poses a representational problem, as Dipesh Chakrabarty has noted, because “one never experiences being a concept.”47 It is here that Carson’s writings continue to be useful, for they do allow one to experience exactly this—the conceptual nature of deep time and the twin pulls of hopelessness and individual activism that can accompany a recognition of one’s place within a system. Carson’s engagement with the documentary aesthetic has informed even works of science fiction. James VanderMeer’s Southern Reach trilogy is a series of novels about an othered environment not understood by the humans who live alongside it. VanderMeer once tweeted that his trilogy was “all based on the video game of Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring.” It is this kind of speculative imagining—a never-created video game of a work of documentary prose, leading to a science fiction trilogy about an environment unrecognizable by humans who formerly inhabited it—that Silent Spring has made possible. This kind of speculative yet also documentary thought may allow us to grapple with the reality of climate change, especially because addressing climate change requires collective action, a kind of action difficult to fathom within neoliberal culture.