EarthSky

May 27th, 2007 - Human World

sagar: Author=’Linda Lear’ program=” video=”Rachel Carson image courtesy FWS._Last week, Oklahoma senator “Tom Coburn”:http://coburn.senate.gov/public/ effectively “blocked a resolution”:http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/05/22/AR2007052201574.html to honor environmental author Rachel Carson on the 100th anniversary of her birth. Carson, who died in 1964, would have turned 100 on May 27, 2007. In blocking the resolution, the Oklahoma senator asserted that Carson’s warnings about environmental damage have put a stigma on potentially lifesaving pesticides, including DDT. Others in addition to Coburn have criticized Carson, arguing that restrictions placed on DDT after the publication of her book Silent Spring ultimately caused needless deaths around the world from malaria. Still others have called those criticisms, and Coburn’s actions, “political and misguided.”:http://scholarsandrogues.wordpress.com/2007/05/23/senators-attack-on-carsons-silent-spring-political-misguided/ Linda Lear is the author of Carson’s biography, called “Witness for Nature”:http://www.amazon.com/Rachel-Carson-Witness-Linda-Lear/dp/0805034285. Lear kindly granted to Earth & Sky’s readers this statement on the blocking of the resolution to honor Rachel Carson._

Rachel Carson would be one hundred years old on Sunday, May 27.

A nature writer and ecologist whose lyric writing made the science of oceanography understandable to the general public in her international best selling book, The Sea Around Us (1951), Carson never wavered in her desire to make us aware of our connectedness to the natural world. Writing in a time before ecology was recognized as a science, Rachel Carson wanted to instill in us a “sense of wonder” so compelling that we would lose our appetite for destruction and care for the perpetuation of the natural world that sustains us all. She died in 1964 just eighteen-months after her landmark book Silent Spring was published. It was a book about death, our own and potentially nature’s, by a woman who was committed to the continuation of all life.

Silent Spring has been called many things over the past forty-five years. For many, it was the book that began the environmental movement of the 20th century; the book which sounded the alarm over human kind’s ability to alter nature and thus our planet’s future irrevocably. To others it was polemic which overstated the case for the damage caused by the use of synthetic chemical pesticides.

The truth is that Rachel Carson never called for the banning of DDT and never suggested in Silent Spring that pesticides not be used. Her research suggested that chemical pesticides were being used inefficiently, ineffectively and indiscriminately. (If a little was good, a lot more was better.) She worried about the chemical mixture that was being laid on the land and its ultimate the effects on soil, water, animal and human life — in the long run.

The US did not ban the domestic application of DDT until January 1972. It never banned the domestic manufacture or export of DDT or of its latter day sister synthetic pesticides. DDT has continued to be exported, used and misused, in almost every country around the globe. It is found in every atoll island, in every ice cap, and in the liver of most species of birds and fish. Insects, especially those mosquitos carrying infectious diseases like malaria quickly became resistant to DDT, and the disease returned, and will continue to return. But to assign responsibility to Rachel Carson or her writings for the persistence of malaria is a tragic misrepresentation of her book and her ideals, as well as deeply misinformed science.

Carson hoped that technology, eg. pesticides, would be used responsibility. She believed that the “obligation to endure” gave us the right to question not just whether a thing could be done, but whether it should be done. This desire to perpetuate life is Carson’s deepest legacy, and it is one which we should celebrate today. – Linda Lear