Agricultural History Review, Volume 57 Part 1 (2009), p. 152

Rachel Carson’s final book, Silent Spring, deserves its reputation as a key text – if not the key text – of the environmental movement of the late twentieth century, at least as it developed in the western/developed world. Published in 1962 and serialized in The New Yorker, public reaction to Carson’s warning about indiscriminate use of bio-accumulative and environmentally persistent pesticides forced governments in North America and Europe to acknowledge scientific concerns about ecological and human health risks. Lest we forget, to this day wild bird populations remain lower and cancer rates in humans higher (to mention just two of many impacts) thanks, in part, to persistence in the global environment and contamination of all food chains by the organochlorinated compounds against which Carson railed so eloquently.

The underlying premise of Rachel Carson: legacy and challenge is a sound one; essentially, that Rachel Carson matters. As Sideris and Dean Moore state in their introduction, ‘It is difficult to overestimate the importance of Silent Spring in shaping our environmental consciousness’. However, the approach taken by Sideris and Dean Moore to demonstrate the significance of Carson and her writing is, at times, too woolly to be of much use to historians. Several of the essays in this book are light on analysis and/or new information and, instead, act more as tributes to Carson as exemplary ‘green heroine’. For instance, Terry Tempest Williams’ essay, ‘One Patriot’, links the terrorism of 11 September 2001 with the ‘terrorism’ of on-going environmental degradation. It doesn’t work.

This book is one in a series focusing on ‘environmental philosophy and ethics’ and, thus, several essays examine Carson’s writing, including her earlier books about the marine environment, in order to argue that she deserves a place within the pantheon of environmental ethicists, alongside the likes of Aldo Leopold and Albert Schweitzer. Collectively, these essays assert that Carson should not simply be classed as a scientist who used her already-established public profile as a popular science writer to rouse the world to the dangers of DDT and other organochlorinated pesticides. Instead, Carson should be seen as a writer with a sophisticated ecological vision of lasting relevance. These arguments are persuasive.

Rachel Carson’s most important legacy is the change that occurred in public and official attitudes to pesticide use following the publication of Silent Spring. Indeed, it could be argued that Carson will one day come to be viewed by agricultural historians as one of the ‘biggest’ names in the history of industrial farming, although it is too early to be certain of this. Given the regulatory steps that were taken to restrict use of certain pesticides in North America and Europe after Silent Spring proved a bestseller, it is disappointing that this new book fails to discuss post-Silent Spring changes in the way farmers used chemical pest control products, or the way agrochemical companies marketed pesticides, or the extent to which the environmental and human health impacts that pesticides bring have lessened or expanded. A four-page essay by David Pimentel on the ‘ecological effects of pesticides on public health and on birds and other organisms’ is frankly inadequate.

There remain many unanswered questions about the impact of widespread use of agro-chemicals during the second half of the twentieth century; surely, one or two essays focusing on what happened in the years prior to and after Silent Spring is not asking for too much. How quickly did routine aerial spraying of DDT over residential areas in America come to an end, for example? Is there any information about how farmers reacted to public fears about pesticide-laced food? If Joni Mitchell was singing about it in her hit song Big Yellow Taxi, we know this was an issue discussed by people up and down the land.

Anyone interested in learning more about Rachel Carson as an environmental ethicist should take a look at this book. However, those seeking a better understanding of Carson’s life and body of work would do better to read Linda Lear’s painfully comprehensive biography, Rachel Carson: witness for nature.