Chapter Ten

Nature is powerful, Man is weak

10.1 Marsh was a prophetic writer with a vision of humans changing relationship with Nature far ahead of his time. Meanwhile American industry forged ahead and didn’t pay too much attention to his views as EO Wilson explains

10.2 This growing environmental awareness was slow to develop during the first half of the 20th century, not least because of the undeniable success of American industry in raising the status of the country to a world power of which all Americans could be proud, and the might of its destructive power was turned into heroic proportions in the 1940s as American industry and American workers manufactured the largest volume of destructive weaponry ever seen and used it to devastating effect to win the most recent global war.

10.3 “The environment was also excluded from the mainstream political agenda. America in the late 1950s and early 1960s was an exuberant and prospering nation. Buoyed by record peacetime economic growth, an ethic of limitless progress prevailed, yet the country, locked in a cold war that threated our way of life, was vulnerable to the formidable enemies that encircled us. The Soviet Union had matched the United States in nuclear weaponry and beaten us into space, and on the Asian mainland China held us at a military standstill. For the sake of our prosperity and security, we rewarded science and technology with high esteem and placed great trust in the seeming infallibility of material ingenuity. As a consequence, environmental warnings were treated with irritable impatience. To a populace whose forebears had within living memory colonized the interior of a vast continent and whose country had never lost a war, arguments for limit and constraint seemed almost unpatriotic.”

10.4 But soon after the war this was to change, in no small way thanks to the writings of one courageous marine biologist, Rachel Carson. Whereas Marsh had tried to draw attention to the macroscopic scale of human impact on the environment, no doubt driven by the sight of such large scale infrastructural development throughout American. Rachel Carson drew public attention to an entirely different level of human impact on nature – the microscopic scale of chemical pesticides.

10.5 This explosion of environmental awareness is often traced back to the impact of one book. Rachel Carson published Silent Spring in 1962 – describing in with scientific detail how the large scale use of chemical pesticides was threatening to wreak havoc with the natural environment, killing not just the insects originally targeted but the birds that feed on them too, and the remainder of animal life in due course, resulting in future silent springs.

10.6 Perhaps the reason this book caught popular consciousness was that she showed the invasiveness of these chemicals into the bodies of each and every citizen in the world – specifically into the livers of every man, woman, child and unborn baby in America. She brought the environment movement up close and personal. This one book, helped by the fact that it was serialized in one of America’s most respected journals – the New Yorker, provoked such a widespread public reaction that the US government was forced to intervene, and amongst other things the use of the pesticide DDT was banned in the US. Environmental legislation followed swiftly not just in the US but around the world, as well as environmental organization such as Greenpeace, the “Greens” emerged as political movement in many countries, and many large-scale environmental events were organized, such as Earth Day. The momentum for all this environmental concern continued to be impelled by a succession of stories of environmental disaster, Thalidomide for Pharma, whether vast leaks tankers such as the Torrey Canyon for the oil industry, Bopal from chemical industry, the pollution of the river Rhine by manufacturing industry, accidents such as Chernobyl with nuclear industry, or more insidious but potentially more damaging threats such as global warming from the entirety of human activity on the planet.

10.7 Rachel Carson sets out her thesis in her Chapter 2. “The history of life on earth has been a history of interaction between living things and their surroundings. To a large extent the physical form and the habits of the earth’s vegetation and its animal life have been molded by the environment.” P5. But now one species, man, has “ acquired significant power to alter the nature of this world. During the past quarter century this power has not only increased to one of disturbing magnitude but it has changed in character. The most alarming of all man’s assaults upon the environment is the contamination of air, earth, rivers and sea with dangerous and even lethal materials.”

10.8 “It took hundreds of millions of years to produce the life that now inhabits the earth – eons of time in which that developing and evolving and diversifying life reached a state of adjustment and balance with its surroundings.” But now “new chemicals come from our laboratories in an endless stream: almost five hundred annually find their way into actual use in the United States alone. The figure is staggering and its implications are not easily grasped – 500 new chemicals to which the bodies of man and animals are required somehow to adapt each year, chemicals totally outside the limits of biological experience. Among them are many that are use in man’s war against nature. Since the mid-1940s over 200 basic chemicals have been created for us in killing insects, weeds, rodents and other organisms described in the modern vernacular as “pests”; and they are sold under several thousand brand names. These sprays, dusts, and aerosols are now applied almost universally to farms, gardens, forests, and homes – nonselective chemicals that have the power to kill every insect, the “good” and the “bad”, to still the song of birds and the leaping of fish in the streams, to coat the leaves with a deadly film, and to linger on in the soil – all this though the intended target may be only a few weeds or insects. “

10.9 “Along with the possibility of the extinction of mankind by nuclear war, the central problem of our age has therefore become the contamination of man’s total environment with such substances of incredible potential for harm – substances that accumulate in the tissues of plants and animals and even penetrate the germ cells to shatter or alter the very material of heredity upon which the shape of the future depends.”

10.10 As Linda Lear says in her introduction to the book “Headlines in the New York Times in July 1962 captured the national sentiment: “Silent Spring is now noisy summer”. In the few months between the New Yorker’s serialization of Silent Spring in June and its publication in book form that September, Rachel Carson’s alarm touched off a national debate on the use of chemical pesticides, the responsibility of science, and the limits of technological progress. When Carson died barely eighteen months later in the spring of 1964, at the age of fifty-six, she had set in motion a course of events that would results in a ban on the domestic production of DDT and the creation of a grass-roots movement demanding protection of the environment through state and federal legislation. Carson’s writing initiated a transformation in the relationship between humans and the natural world and stirred an awakening of public environmental consciousness.”

10.11 Double Pulitzer Prize winner and the world’s foremost myrmycologist, Edward O Wilson, wrote in the afterword to Carson’s book “When it appeared in 1962, Silent Spring delivered a galvanic jolt to public consciousness and, as a result, infused the environmental movement with new substance and meaning. The effects of pesticides and other toxic chemical pollutants on the environment and public health had been well documented before Silent Spring, but in bits and pieces scattered through the technical literature. Environmental scientists were aware of the problem, but by and large they focused only on the narrow sector of their personal expertise. It was Rachel Carson’s achievement to synthesize this knowledge into a single image that everyone, scientists and the general public alike, could easily understand.”

10.12 As well as criticizing the destructiveness indiscriminate widespread spraying of these chemical weapons, she also drew attention to their surprising ineffectiveness against the intended target

10.13 “The first malaria mosquito to develop resistance to DDT was Anopheles sacharovi in Greece. Extensive spraying was begun in 1946 with early success; by 1949, however, observers noticed that adult mosquitoes were resting in large number under road bridges, although they were absent from houses and stables that had been treated. Soon this habit of outside resting was extended to caves, outbuildings, and culverts and to the foliage and trunks of orange trees. Apparently the adult mosquitoes had become sufficiently tolerant of DDT to escape from sprayed buildings and rest and recover in the open. A few months later they were able to remain in houses where they were found resting on treated walls.”

10.20 So the history of the environmental movement turns out not to be a history but a running battle being waged in the public domain even as we speak. With quasi science being used not to illuminate but to confuse. But this is as it ever was throughout the history of the environmental movement as new ideas which upset previously entrenched views and interests were firstly loudly and vigorously condemned before eventual acceptance in the face of overwhelming evidence – Copernicus, Galileo, Hutton, Cuvier, Darwin, Marsh, Carson. It would appear that one of the responsibilities of the modern environmental movement, as a consequence of its widespread popularity and influence, is to contribute to the scientific education of the public. This is exactly the approach Dr Servettaz took all those years ago, before the modern environmental movement to show him the way. He was one man with no organization to promote his ideas and no money to pay his way. But he used science and patient, diligent discussion to explain, and convince and he was successful because earned the trust of his colleagues because his ideas were based on well-grounded science.

10.21 The same could be said of Rachel Carson, as EO Wilson concludes “We are still poisoning the air and water and eroding the biosphere, albeit less so than if Rachel Carson had not written. Today we understand better than ever why we must press the effort to save the environment all the way home, true to the mind and spirit of the valiant author of Silent Spring.”

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