Lost Woods (22 page)

25

[1960, 1964]

To Understand Biology/ Preface to
Animal Machines

CARSON AGREED TO CONTRIBUTE
an introduction for the Animal Welfare Institute’s educational booklet,
Humane Biology Projects,
which addressed the need for reform of biology instruction in the nation’s high schools. The Institute opposed animal experimentation and worked to change the callous attitude toward systematic cruelty that often accompanied classroom biology projects.

A.W.I.
head Christine Stevens was also instrumental in introducing Carson to the work of British activist Ruth Harrison, whose book Animal Machines
exposed the inhumane methods of raising livestock and the deplorable conditions in which they were kept before slaughter. In 1963 Carson wrote the preface to Harrison’s book.

Carson’s ideas about the humane treatment of animals place her fully in the tradition of Albert Schweitzer and his philosophy of the reverence for life. Her contributions to these publications emphasize the unity of all life, and the need to cultivate an emotional response to the living world.

Through the next several years Carson quietly aided the work of Stevens and the Animal Welfare Institute, writing to members of Congress in support of legislation banning the use of certain leg traps and against the inhumane treatment of laboratory animals. But she had to be careful not to draw too much attention to her support for causes that might link her in the public mind with fringe groups and extremists, lest she jeopardize her all-important work concerning the misuse of pesticides. Had this not been a real political consideration, Carson undoubtedly would have been an outspoken advocate of the humane treatment of animals.

To Understand Biology

I LIKE TO DEFINE BIOLOGY
as the history of the earth and all its life – past, present, and future. To understand biology is to understand that all life is linked to the earth from which it came; it is to understand that the stream of life, flowing out of the dim past into the uncertain future, is in reality a unified force, though composed of an infinite number and variety of separate lives. The essence of life is lived in freedom. Any concept of biology is not only sterile and profitless, it is distorted and untrue, if it puts its primary focus on unnatural conditions rather than on those vast forces not of man’s making that shape and channel the nature and direction of life.

To the extent that it is ever necessary to put certain questions to nature by placing unnatural restraints upon living creatures or by subjecting them to unnatural conditions or to changes in their bodily structure, this is a task for the mature scientist. It is essential that the beginning student should first become acquainted with the true meaning of his subject through observing the lives of creatures in their true relation to each other and to their environment. To begin by asking him to observe artificial conditions is to create in his mind distorted conceptions and to thwart the development of his natural emotional response to the mysteries of the life stream of which he is a part. Only as a child’s awareness and reverence for the wholeness of life are developed can his humanity to his own kind reach its full development.

Preface to
Animal Machines

THE MODERN WORLD
worships the gods of speed and quantity, and of the quick and easy profit, and out of this idolatry monstrous evils have arisen. Yet the evils go long unrecognized. Even those who create them manage by some devious rationalizing to blind themselves to the harm they have done society. As for the general public, the vast majority rest secure in a childlike faith that “someone” is looking after things – a faith unbroken until some public-spirited person, with patient scholarship and steadfast courage, presents facts that can no longer be ignored.

This is what Ruth Harrison has done. Her theme affects practically every citizen, for it deals with the new methods of rearing animals destined to become human food. It is a story that ought to shock the complacency out of any reader.

Modern animal husbandry has been swept by a passion for “intensivism”; on this tide everything that resembles the methods of an earlier day has been carried away. Gone are the pastoral scenes in which animals wandered through green fields or flocks of chickens scratching contentedly for their food. In their place are factorylike buildings in which animals live out their wretched existences without ever feeling the earth beneath their feet, without knowing sunlight, or experiencing the simple pleasures of grazing for natural food – indeed, so confined or so intolerably crowded that movement of any kind is scarcely possible. [ … ]

As a biologist whose special interests lie in the field of ecology, or the relation between living things and their environment, I find it inconceivable that healthy animals can be produced under the artificial and damaging conditions that prevail in these modern and factorylike installations, where animals are grown and turned out like so many inanimate objects. The intolerable crowding of broiler chickens, the revoltingly unsanitary conditions in the piggeries, the lifelong confinement of laying hens in tiny cages are samples of the conditions Mrs. Harrison describes. As she makes abundantly clear, this artificial environment is not a healthy one. Diseases sweep through these establishments, which indeed are kept going only by the continuous administration of antibiotics. Disease organisms then become resistant to the antibiotics. Veal calves, purposely kept in a state of induced aenemia so their white flesh will satisfy the supposed desires of the gourmet, sometimes drop dead when taken out of their imprisoning crates.

The question then arises: how can animals produced under such conditions be safe or acceptable human food? Mrs. Harrison quotes expert opinion and cites impressive evidence that they are not. Although the quantity of production is up, quality is down, a fact recognized in a most significant way by some of the producers themselves, who, for example, are more likely to keep a few chickens in the back yard for their own tables than to eat the products of the broiler establishments. The menace to human consumers from the drugs, hormones, and pesticides used to keep this whole fantastic operation somehow going is a matter never properly explored.

The final argument against the intensivism now practiced in this branch of agriculture is a humanitarian one. I am glad to see Mrs. Harrison raise the question of how far man has a moral right to go in his domination of other life. Has he the right, as in these examples, to reduce life to a bare existence that is scarcely life at all? Has he the further right to terminate these wretched lives by means that are wantonly cruel? My own answer is an unqualified no. It is my belief that man will never be at peace with his own kind until he has recognized the Schweitzerian ethic that embraces decent consideration for all living creatures – a true reverence for life.

Although Mrs. Harrison’s book describes in detail only the conditions prevailing in Great Britain, it deserves to be widely read also in those European countries where these methods are practiced, and in the United States where some of them arose. Wherever it is read it will certainly provoke feelings of dismay, revulsion, and outrage. I hope it will spark a consumers’ revolt of such proportions that this vast new agricultural industry will be forced to mend its ways.

26

[1962]

A Fable for Tomorrow

THE BRIEF FABLE
with which Carson opens
Silent Spring
is one of the most memorable in contemporary nonfiction and elicited more controversy than almost any other part of the book. Many scientists were appalled that Carson dared begin a book about the science of chemical pesticides with an allegory about the environmental pollution of an imaginary town. Some simply ignored the fact that it was a fable and attacked Carson because the town was not accurately described, while others accused her of writing science fiction throughout. By contrast, most literary critics praised her use of the fable as a brilliant rhetorical device and a creative way of introducing the disturbing subject of the deliberate poisoning of the earth.

Carson realized her first chapter, originally titled “The Rain of Death,” might be too formidable and used the fable as a device to engage the nonscientific reader. In early drafts, Carson gave her town a name, Green Meadows, and centered the action on a young man who returns home after many years only to find his town devastated by ecological havoc. At the urging of her publisher, she rewrote the fable making it clear that the town was a composite of many communities and became the voice of the fable’s narrator. The opening paragraphs recall the once bucolic town of Springdale, Pennsylvania, where Carson grew up, which was subjected to an earlier kind of industrial pollution.

THERE WAS ONCE A TOWN
in the heart of America where all life seemed to live in harmony with its surroundings. The town lay in the midst of a checkerboard of prosperous farms, with fields of grain and hillsides of orchards where, in spring, white clouds of bloom drifted above the green fields. In autumn, oak and maple and birch set up a blaze of color that flamed and flickered across a backdrop of pines. Then foxes barked in the hills and deer silently crossed the fields, half hidden in the mists of the fall mornings.

Along the roads, laurel, viburnum and alder, great ferns and wildflowers delighted the traveler’s eye through much of the year. Even in winter the roadsides were places of beauty, where countless birds came to feed on the berries and on the seed heads of the dried weeds rising above the snow. The countryside was, in fact, famous for the abundance and variety of its bird life, and when the flood of migrants was pouring through in spring and fall people traveled from great distances to observe them. Others came to fish the streams, which flowed clear and cold out of the hills and contained shady pools where trout lay. So it had been from the days many years ago when the first settlers raised their houses, sank their wells, and built their barns.

Then a strange blight crept over the area and everything began to change. Some evil spell had settled on the community: mysterious maladies swept the flocks of chickens; the cattle and sheep sickened and died. Everywhere was a shadow of death. The farmers spoke of much illness among their families. In the town the doctors had become more and more puzzled by new kinds of sickness appearing among their patients. There had been several sudden and unexplained deaths, not only among adults but even among children, who would be stricken suddenly while at play and die within a few hours.

There was a strange stillness. The birds, for example – where had they gone? Many people spoke of them, puzzled and disturbed. The feeding stations in the backyards were deserted. The few birds seen anywhere were moribund; they trembled violently and could not fly. It was a spring without voices. 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.

On the farms the hens brooded, but no chicks hatched. The farmers complained that they were unable to raise any pigs – the litters were small and the young survived only a few days. The apple trees were coming into bloom but no bees droned among the blossoms, so there was no pollination and there would be no fruit.

The roadsides, once so attractive, were now lined with browned and withered vegetation as though swept by fire. These, too, were silent, deserted by all living things. Even the streams were now lifeless. Anglers no longer visited them, for all the fish had died.

In the gutters under the eaves and between the shingles of the roofs, a white granular powder still showed a few patches; some weeks before it had fallen like snow upon the roofs and the lawns, the fields and streams.

No witchcraft, no enemy action had silenced the rebirth of new life in this stricken world. The people had done it themselves.

This town does not actually exist, but it might easily have a thousand counterparts in America or elsewhere in the world. I know of no community that has experienced all the misfortunes I describe. Yet every one of these disasters has actually happened somewhere, and many real communities have already suffered a substantial number of them. A grim specter has crept upon us almost unnoticed, and this imagined tragedy may easily become a stark reality we all shall know.

What has already silenced the voices of spring in countless towns in America? This book is an attempt to explain.