The Sound of the Silent Spring

I first read marine biologist Rachel Carson ten years after she had published the book Silent Spring (1962). I had heard about the book because the first Earth Day and environmental concerns and protests were all around me in high school and college. Someone told me that I had to read the book — first serialized in The New Yorker in the summer of 1962 — that made her a name that was widely known.

She was born in Springdale, Pennsylvania in 1907. I was surprised to learn that she was an English major at the Pennsylvania College for Women. In her junior year, she took a biology course and it so fascinated her that she changed her major to zoology.

Silent Spring was not her first book. She was working for the U.S. Bureau of Fisheries and wrote something for a department publication. her boss thought it read it read as more “literary” and suggested that she send it to Atlantic Monthly instead of using it in a government publication. She did and it was published in the magazine in 1937. It also became the starting place for her first book, Under the Sea-Wind (1941).

Carson continued to work in government jobs until 1952. Eventually, she became editor-in-chief for all the publications of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. She resigned in 1952 after publishing two books in order to devote herself fully to her own writing.

She won the National Book Award in nonfiction for her second book, the best-seller The Sea Around Us (1951). In her acceptance speech, she said:

“The aim of science is to discover and illuminate truth. And that, I take it, is the aim of literature, whether biography or history or fiction. It seems to me, then, that there can be no separate literature of science. […] The winds, the sea, and the moving tides are what they are. If there is wonder and beauty and majesty in them, science will discover these qualities. If they are not there, science cannot create them. If there is poetry in my book about the sea, it is not because I deliberately put it there, but because no one could write truthfully about the sea and leave out the poetry.”

Silent Spring (1962) was the book that really gave her fame and allowed her messages about the environment to gain wider exposure. She opened the book with a little fable. The fable is about a time and place where a spring morning begins silently. No birds singing. No chirping insects. It is an ecosystem destroyed by the widespread misuse of harmful pesticides like DDT.

That opening may have hurt the book in its initial publication because some saw the book as “fiction” based on that fable. But the book was the result of six years of rigorous scientific research. She was also attacked by the chemical industry which had allies within and outside the government. Though today we know her message was accurate and one that needed to be heard and heeded, you can find many critics who attacked her at the time of its publication.  There were industry people who claimed that banning pesticides like DDT resulted in “millions of malaria deaths” while not considering the lives and damage that were saved by eliminating these pesticides from the ecosystem and slowly eliminating them from our water, soil, air, wildlife and humans via all those vectors and from our food sources.  She wrote. “I do contend that we have put poisonous and biologically potent chemicals indiscriminately into the hands of persons largely or wholly ignorant of their potentials for harm.”

When President Kennedy read Silent Spring during the summer of 1962, it influenced him. He formed a presidential commission to re-examine the government’s pesticide policy and the commission endorsed Carson’s findings. Rachel’s writing and advocacy boosted public awareness of environmental matters. It helped start a new conservation movement and some say it eventually was part of the reason that the Environmental Protection Agency was created in 1970. Sadly, Rachel Carson never saw that happen. She died of cancer in 1964, just two years after Silent Spring was published.

The sound of the silent spring is still echoing in our world.

“….All the life of the planet is interrelated ….each species has its own ties to others, and….all are related to the Earth. This is the theme of ‘The Sea Around Us,’ and the other sea books, and it is also the message of ‘Silent Spring’.” Rachel Carson National Wildlife Refuge in Maine

World Cleanup Day

Tomorrow, September 15, is World Cleanup Day, a global social action program aimed at combating the global solid waste problem on land and in our oceans.

It is annually held over the course of a 24-hour period in September. There are numerous organizations that facilitate and host World Cleanup Day globally.

Participants in World Cleanup Days are typically volunteers, with coordination from non-governmental organizations (NGO) who assist in awareness-raising, logistics, and fundraising.

Volunteers at a stream cleanup event

Being that I believe in the “Think globally, but act locally” philosophy, I try to participate in community cleanup efforts. You can probably find a fall cleanup event, such as a park, trail, beach, river or school cleanup event in your community or area.

It might occur tomorrow, but World Cleanup Day doesn’t have the exposure or reputation of an event like Earth Day. Still, it has a similar approach to Earth Day in that it is non-partisan, apolitical, and is not affiliated with any national or global political party or discrete ideology.

When global cleanup efforts do make it into news, it is probably after catastrophes such as earthquakes, floods, hurricanes and tsunamis. In modern history, these efforts are typically undertaken by the affected communities, with support from various international organizations and NGOs, such as Red Cross, Oxfam, and other relief organizations.

I was taught as a Boy Scout to leave the woods or campsite cleaner than when I entered. I still will pick up trash and try to recycle it even when I am just taking laps on the local track around the soccer field.

You can certainly do your own cleanup event by yourself or with friends or family tomorrow in your community, but the goal of World Cleanup Day is to organize large-scale efforts. Perhaps you can start with your own small circle and build that next year into a bigger event.

On the September 15, 2018 World Cleanup Day, people in 150 countries will stand up against the global trash problem and clean up waste, making it the biggest positive civic action the world has seen. Imagine a powerful “green wave” starting in New Zealand and ending in Hawaii with hundred of millions of people taking positive action together on the very same day.

World Cleanup Day 2018 on Facebook

 

 

Desperate Hope

“I think there’s a kind of desperate hope built into poetry now that one really wants, hopelessly, to save the world. One is trying to say everything that can be said for the things that one loves while there’s still time.

We try to save what is passing, if only by describing it, telling it, knowing all the time that we can’t do any of these things. The urge to tell it, and the knowledge of the impossibility. Isn’t that one reason we write?”

I’m just reading some Merwin poetry tonight with my after-dinner cup of tea on the deck on an unusually warm November evening in Paradelle.

American poet, translator, and environmental activist W.S. (William Stanley) Merwin was born in New York City and lived for a time in Union City, New Jersey, then to Scranton, Pennsylvania, when he was a small boy. His father was a Presbyterian minister.

In Pennsylvania, William connected with nature. I’ve read that as a boy he talked to the backyard trees, liked creating stories for them and also wrote hymns for his father’s church.  All good writer and poet training. Once, when some men came to trim the trees in his backyard, he was so angered that he attacked the men.

In 1948, after graduating from Princeton University, Merwin did a lot of traveling while he studied: across Europe, in Portugal (tutoring the children of the Portuguese royal family) to Spain, where he met poet and translator Robert Graves (he tutored Graves’ kids too), and to London, where he befriended poets T.S. Eliot, Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath.

His first collection of poetry was A Mask for Janus and it won the 1952 Yale Younger Prize, judged by W.H. Auden. They became friends but had a falling out in 1971, when Merwin refused the Pulitzer Prize for his collection The Carrier of Ladders.

Merwin was an anti-war activist and with the Vietnam War peaking (a time I recall, as I was headed to college and in the last class that could be drafted), Merwin declined the prize money. Auden saw this as an “ill-judged… publicity-stunt.” I remember that and saw it as admirable.

Merwin wrote in a public letter: “After years of the news from Southeast Asia, and the commentary from Washington, I am too conscious of being an American to accept public congratulation with good grace, or to welcome it except as an occasion for expressing openly a shame which many Americans feel, day after day, helplessly and in silence.”

The committee must have been okay with his decision too. Merwin won a second Pulitzer Prize in 2009 for The Shadow of Sirius.

Merwin moved to Hawaii where he decided to take a former pineapple plantation on Maui and restore it to its original rainforest state. His poetry has always connected to nature and ecology.

I think I agree with and try to follow his writing precept of regular practice.

“I’ve found that the best thing for me is to insist that some part of the day — and for me, it’s the morning until about two in the afternoon — be dedicated to writing. I go into my room and shut the door, and that’s that. You have to make exceptions, of course, but you just stick to it, and then it becomes a habit, and I think it’s a valuable one. If you’re waiting for lightning to strike a stump, you’re going to sit there for the rest of your life.”

I have that quote from his poem “Place” that is at the top of this post pinned near my writing desk as a line of hope in a desperate time.