By Matt Pearce
Our perception of man and nature colliding is mostly iconographic and kind of hegemonistic. Something is always being dominated by a greater apocalyptic force. Houses are always getting flattened by mudslides, mountains of salmon are seen swung around in a giant net.
These things are sensational and make for great images. They inspire people to action.
So how, then, do you write about a disaster whose root causes are molecular? And in a time when prevailing scientific wisdom was seemingly sacrosanct?
Carson’s use of lyricism — metaphor, essentially — is the natural tool for jumping from place to place, from zoom to zoom; a wide-angle telescope with a perfectly-adjustible aperture capable of capturing her argument for nature’s — and man’s — interconnectivity.
I think it’s important to point out the successes of the written word when we encounter them. Nature is a beautiful thing, but as much as we’d love to luxuriate in its visual largesse, a physical camera can’t tell all its stories.
DDT: what is it, exactly? What does it do when it enters an organism? How does it affect an insect, a waterway, a township? These are the questions a crusading writer has to answer, and answer in ways that can engage the people who most need to be engaged.
On a related note, you have to be curious about who will be Carson’s heir for our generation, and what values they’ll challenge. We look back with pride on our successful muckraker journalists who, stripped of the context of history, seem to don great cloaks of justice.
But how were they treated in their day? As activists. Rabble-rousers, challenging the system.
This seems to conflict, slightly, with some of our inculcated values as journalists: impartiality, fairness, not becoming the story. I wonder how much the achievement of success affects questions of these journalists’ “impartiality,” and how much that empowers us as journalists to pursue causes we know are just.
Because what if we’re found in the wrong? We would have violated some of our most hallowed professional values.
I suppose muckraking journalism is kind in that its successes are much better remembered than its failures. It makes me also wonder whether our attempts at impartiality aren’t also hedges against the changing mores of history.
Nonetheless, Rachel Carson was right, and so we salute her. She had the facts on her side, and she delivered them with the grace of a litterateur. Given her success, and the success of the authors we’ve read before, it’s hard to argue against journalists taking a few more chances and making a few more stands.
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Silent Spring and its criticism set the stage for what would ultimately become a highly politicized and controversial issue in the United States. It was Carson’s intention to make pollution and wildlife conservation into a political issue, and her book highly influenced the creation of the EPA and subsequent environmental legislation.
ReplyDeleteHowever, Carson also meant to initiate an intelligent public discussion about environmental issues by giving the issue shape around a central pollutant, DDT, which would act as the symbolic “villain” of the movement. She was successful in starting the conversational “buzz,” but as the issue became more and more entangled in politics, the nuances of environmental issues were lost in translation. The black-and-white nature of the resulting environmental legislation was successful for the time being in consolidating a movement against air and water pollution, but the fact that many environmental effects are unseen, as opposed to Carson’s vivid descriptions in Silent Spring, led to dissolution of public support. While Carson kick-started the movement, she also set the stage for an ineffective method of representing environmental issues. There is not always a hero and a villain in these issues, but Silent Spring raised the expectation for these symbolic attention-grabbers. The science of the issues often falls by the wayside as the public searches for whom to blame and depends on the grand narrative of good versus evil.
Silent Spring did bring up important philosophical issues in terms of conservation rather than previous considerations of preservation. Her thesis, developed on the basis of Leopold’s “land ethic,” delves into the intrinsic value of ecological processes rather than their commodification. While conservation had been in the air before Silent Spring, it was the first time the word had entered the public conversation on a large scale.