The Age of Global Warming: A History (8 page)

The threat of cancer lurked everywhere. People were living in a sea of carcinogens.
[33]
Worse still was the prevalence of cancer among children. Twenty-five years previously, cancer in children had been rare. ‘Today more American school children die of cancer than from any other disease.’
[34]
Attempts to cure cancer were doomed, Carson wrote, ‘because it leaves untouched the great reservoirs of carcinogenic agents which continue to claim new victims faster than the as yet elusive “cure” could allay the disease’.
[35]

After her death in 1964 (the same year as Callendar), Carson acquired an iconic status as a lonely female scientist speaking up for nature against an entrenched male scientific establishment financed by vested interests. While working on
Silent Spring
, Carson was being treated for breast cancer, sanctifying
Silent Spring
as the product of a green martyrdom. Questioning its scientific basis is considered bad form or worse, especially from the wilder shores of eco-feminism.
*
  

Although framed as an indictment of pesticides, Carson’s general theory was that flora and fauna were threatened by any substance which they had not previously encountered.

With the dawn of the industrial era the world became a place of continuous, even accelerating change. Instead of the natural environment there was rapidly substituted an artificial one composed of new chemical and physical agents, many of them possessing powerful capabilities for inducing biologic change.
[36]

Each year, five hundred new chemicals were being introduced to which ‘the bodies of men and animals are required somehow to adapt’.
[37]
Man’s speed was nature’s enemy. ‘The rapidity of change and the speed with which new situations are created follow the impetuous pace of man rather than the deliberate pace of nature.’
[38]

This scientific hypothesis at the core of
Silent Spring
is not one that was subsequently developed with any success. Even her admirers do not ascribe pre-eminence to the science of
Silent Spring
. For them, its significance lies elsewhere. Linda Lear’s 1997 biography describes
Silent Spring
as a ‘fundamental social critique of a gospel of technological progress.’
[39]
A leading textbook of environmental issues in American history argues that
Silent Spring
was more important for what it said about modern society and its relationship to nature than about chemistry and biology.

For all the debate about the specific merits of pesticide regulation that Carson’s work ultimately produced, at bottom her profoundly radical and most enduring argument was that corporate and governmental institutions of power – whether out of arrogance or ignorance, or for base profit motives – had disrupted the balance of the natural world and now threatened human health.
[40]

As social theory, the arguments in
Silent Spring
are decidedly patchy. Who was to blame? ‘The authoritarian temporarily entrusted with power.’
[41]
But elsewhere, Carson castigated ‘the mores of suburbia’ which led to the use of herbicides to remove unwanted crabgrass. Power mowers, Carson complained, had been fitted with devices to disseminate pesticides, ‘so to the potentially dangerous fumes from petrol added the finely divided particles of whatever insecticide the probably unsuspected suburbanite has chosen’.
[42]
Then there were farmers exceeding the prescribed dosages and using chemicals too close to harvest time or more insecticides than were necessary and in other ways displaying ‘the common human failure to read the fine print.’
[43]
If Carson’s reputation had rested on the power and originality of her analysis of social causation, she would have been a marginal figure.

During her life, Carson was accused by some of her critics of being unmarried, which was true but irrelevant – although not everyone thought so (‘I thought she was a spinster. What’s she so worried about genetics for?’ exclaimed a member of the Federal Pest Control Review Board) – and a communist.
[44]
Classical Marxism was about reorganising industrial societies along socialist lines. Carson was against industrial societies altogether. Carson was not a communist; she was an ecologist. ‘What is important is the relation of man to all life, when through our technology we are waging war against the natural world,’ she said in 1963.
[45]
Writing to a friend, she put it more baldly: ‘In truth, man is against the earth.’
[46]
  

Carson summarised her credo in a 1964 CBS interview:

I truly believe that we in this generation must come to terms with nature, and I think we’re challenged as mankind has never been challenged before to prove our maturity and our mastery, not of nature, but of ourselves.
[47]

In a statement written not long after
The Sea Around Us
was published, Carson gave voice to an aesthetic, her belief system. ‘I believe that whenever we destroy beauty, or whenever we substitute something man-made and artificial for a natural feature of the earth, we have retarded some part of man’s spiritual growth.’
[48]

The ecologism espoused by Carson conforms to what Nietzsche had anticipated at the end of the nineteenth century. Since the time of Copernicus, science had been pushing man from the centre of the universe and would push him to its periphery. ‘It destroys my importance,’ Kant observed. According to Nietzsche, science was destroying the self-respect humans once had. The faith in their dignity, their uniqueness, their irreplaceable position in the chain of being, their position as children of God, had gone. The human being was becoming a mere animal.
[49]

Biologists in the second half of the twentieth century point out that
homo sapiens
is one species among the countless that have existed since life began, and, in their eyes, not an especially significant one. Palaeontologist Stephen Jay Gould liked to counter the received picture of evolution working from simple forms of life toward complexity, with man at the summit. ‘The most outstanding feature of life’s history is that through 3.5 billion years this has remained, really, a bacterial planet. Most creatures are what they’ve always been: They’re bacteria and they rule the world,’ Gould told an interviewer. ‘We need to be nice to them.’
[50]

Carson told the viewers of CBS that man still talked in terms of conquest. ‘We still haven’t become mature enough to think of ourselves as only a tiny part of a vast and incredible universe.’
[51]
Carson’s ocean-centrism overwhelmed mankind’s significance. ‘He cannot control or change the ocean as, in his brief tenancy of earth, he has subdued and plundered the continent,’ she wrote in
The Sea Around Us
.
[52]

Ecologism differs from the transcendentalism of Emerson and Thoreau. With the latter, the individual’s openness to nature elevates him and shows him his uniqueness. By contrast, ecologism preaches man’s intrinsic insignificance. Not that its followers find their own lives devoid of importance. Towards the end of her life, Carson was drawn toward belief in the immortality of her soul. When consideration moves from a particular individual to the relationship of human society to the natural world, ecologism brings a radically altered perspective, one of a disruptive, out-of-control species, putting its survival and that of other species at risk by upsetting natural balances. 

Ecologism was a child of the 1960s given the breath of life by Rachel Carson. It would be the philosophy used to evaluate man’s impact on nature. The lasting effect was the presumption that human interventions in the natural world were potentially harmful. New ones should be avoided unless it could be demonstrated that they were harmless, giving rise to the precautionary principle. The logic of the precautionary principle runs counter to the development of human society, especially its acceleration with the Industrial Revolution. As environmentalism reached a peak in 1972, the Canadian economist Harry Johnson countered that ‘man’s whole history has been one of transforming his environment rather than accepting its limitations’.
[53]

In focusing exclusively on mankind’s impact on nature, ecologism – the ideological core of the environmental movement – opposed the claims of the poor to seek better lives for themselves. There were too many of them and meeting their demands would put further pressure on fragile ecological balances and accelerate resource depletion.

To succeed in its mission to save the planet, environmentalism depended on global participation. Its ability to persuade developing countries that doing so would be in their interests would be environmentalism’s greatest challenge. Its success would determine the fate of its most ambitious project – saving the world from the perils of global warming.

*  In
The Recurring Silent Spring
, Patricia Hynes, a former official of the EPA, wrote of her anger ‘at living in a world in which nature and women are presumed to exist for the use and convenience of men, so that the destruction of nature and violence against women are interconnected, increasingly technologised, and infect all corners of the earth.’ H. Patricia Hynes,
The Recurring Silent Spring
, Elmsford, (1989), p. 2.