One day at lunch-time in San Francisco’s financial district, my co-worker pulled a book from one of the stalls along the Embarcadero and handed it to me. He said, “You should read this.” It was an earlier publication by Rachel Carson, A Sense of Wonder. But it was only until recently that I’ve read her seminal work, Silent Spring. The book was published in 1962 much to the displeasure of the chemical industry.
DDT (dichloro-diphenyl-trichloroerthane) was synthesized and discovered in 1874 by Austrian chemist Othmar Zeidler. Years afterward, Swiss chemist Paul Hermann Muller realized that the compound could be used to kill insects and later received the Nobel Prize for his work.
DDT was used used extensively throughout World War II and years afterward to kill insects attacking crops and carrying disease. But the chemical was found to be highly toxic accumulating in the body, harming fetuses and endangering our planet’s entire ecosystem by poisoning water and all life forms which depended upon it— birds, fish, animals, and plants.
In calling for the elimination of DDT and similar chemicals, Carson ends her book by saying that the control of nature “is a phrase conceived in arrogance born of the Neanderthal age of biology and philosophy, when it was supposed the nature exists for the convenience of man.”
Her work led to the banning of DDT in agriculture throughout the United States (1972) . The use of DDT was banned internationally by the Stockholm Convention on Persistent Organic Pollutants (2001). Carson’s action also led to the creation of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) initiated by President Richard Nixon (1970).
Such was the courage of one woman to defy the chemical industry. In educating and alerting the public, she set in motion the foundations of the environmental movement.
The fight for environmental justice continues. Many other organizations and standard bearers include Robin Wall Kimmerer, a scientist and enrolled member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation. Her most recent books are Braiding Sweetgrass and The Serviceberry: Abundance and Reciprocity in the Natural World. They bring an awareness of the practices of native peoples to work with and not against the environment. Kimmerer says that her best teachers are the Three Sisters–corn, squash, and beans. Together there is an interplay between them which helps them to grow and thrive. Together, she says, they form a nutritional triad that can sustain people.
There is a general realization that we are living in a new geological epoch where human beings (largely based in developed nations) are changing the environment at an exponential rate. There is also an understanding that the time to halt climate change has passed. Like all organisms, in order to survive, we must learn to adapt to our environment. In her book The Nature of the Future, author Elizabeth Kolbert examines how scientists are using new technologies, including knowledge about DNA structures, to adapt to these changes. Regarding climate warming she notes that just as there are three ways to add CO2 to the environment, there are at least as many ways to remove it.
As weather patterns change, ice bergs melt, and all life seek higher ground, we are all living in an epoch that demands a new awareness. Rachel Carson’s successors are pointing a direction to allow us to do so, and to make the world safer for this and future generations.