Rachel Carson's Ecological Critique

Rachel Carson was born just over 100 years ago in 1907. Her most famous book Silent Spring, published in 1962, is often seen as marking the birth of the modern environmental movement. Although an immense amount has been written about Carson and her work, the fact that she was objectively a “woman of the left” has often been downplayed. Today the rapidly accelerating planetary ecological crisis, which she more than anyone else alerted us to, calls for an exploration of the full critical nature of her thought and its relation to the larger revolt within science with which she was associated.

Carson was first and foremost a naturalist and scientist. But she was propelled by her understanding of the destructive ecological forces at work in modern society into the role of radical critic. A recent biography attempts to capture this in its title: The Gentle Subversive. The principal causes of ecological degradation, Carson insisted, were “the gods of profit and production.” The chief obstacle to a sustainable relation to the environment lay in the fact that we live “in an era dominated by industry, in which the right to make a dollar at any cost is seldom challenged.”1

Silent Spring was directed against the chemical industry and its production of deadly pesticides. Carson combined the best scientific information then available with the skills of a great writer, and had an extraordinary effect in raising public concern over this issue. Yet, despite a number of victories, Carson and those who followed in her footsteps lost the war against synthetic pesticides, which she preferred to call “biocides.” Although she conceded that there were some situations where the application of such chemicals might be appropriate, she strongly believed “the elimination of the use of persistent toxic pesticides should be the goal”—as stated in the 1963 report on pesticides of the President’s Science Advisory Committee, which she regarded as a “vindication” of her views. Chemical control needed to be replaced wherever practicable by biological control (organic methods relying on natural enemies of the pests). She called this, in the concluding chapter of her book, “The Other Road.” Nevertheless, except for the banning of a few of the most deadly toxins such as DDT, the chemical industry triumphed, seeing an expansion of the production of this class of chemicals.2

This growing use of synthetic pesticides had nothing to do with the rational application of science.

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She accurately predicted that dependence on synthetic pesticides would result in a pesticide treadmill as organisms evolved rapidly into more resistant forms requiring either higher doses or new biocides. “The chemical war,” she wrote, “is never won, and all life is caught in its violent crossfire.” By the late 1980s the production of pesticide active ingredients, much of it destined for U.S. farms, had increased to more than twice that of the early 1960s when Carson wrote Silent Spring. In 1999 over 100 million U.S. households applied some type of pesticide to their homes, lawns, and gardens. Many such chemicals on the market today have not been adequately tested. Meanwhile U.S. agribusiness has continued to produce and export banned pesticides to other countries. Some of the food imported to the United States from abroad is grown using these substances.

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