Search Results

This chapter focuses on nature writer and zoologist Rachel Carson. It offers a short biographical sketch and shows how she formulated and articulated her holistic ethos. Influenced by Presbyterianism, the nature movement, and scientific studies, Carson adopted a holistic understanding of life and popularized it in best‐selling books on the sea and pesticides. She wrote of a world of interconnecting parts that formed a whole. “In the ecological web of life,” she explained, “nothing exists alone.” Life was more than a mere collection of individuated atoms; earth's inhabitants survived in a community of interdependent relationships. The naturalist provided her readers with a compelling vision that emphasized harmony, balance, community, and mutuality, and she struck a chord in American society that resonated with particular appeal. Her books became a catalyst for the modern environmental movement and shaped the way many understood the relationships between humans and nature. This study supports the work of environmental historians who have situated Carson within a holistic paradigm in ecology, and it extends our understanding of Carson by positioning her in the culture more broadly. Alongside architects, psychologists, and social reformers, she invoked holistic frameworks to comprehend the world, question the status quo, express individual needs, and enact change.

This chapter shows how ecology, literally and metaphorically, affords a model for rethinking the established theories of knowledge, and relations between humanity and the other-than-human, that characterize the social imaginary of the post-Enlightenment western world. Ecology figures as a study of habitats where people can live well together; of the ethos and habitus enacted in the customs, social organizations, and creative-regulative principles by which they strive or fail to achieve this end. Focusing on a shift in Rachel Carson’s thinking from geographical to ecological, and drawing on Kristin Shrader-Frechette’s analysis of ecological science, the chapter draws a parallel between Carson’s tacit epistemology and that of biologist Karen Messing to develop the working conception of ecology that informs the argument of the book. A reclamation of testimony as a source of evidence is central to the argument.

This chapter focuses on the life of Rachel Carson. In late summer of 1929, 22-year-old Rachel Carson arrived at the Marine Biological Laboratory (MBL) in Woods Hole, Massachusetts. A recent graduate of the Pennsylvania College for Women, Carson came to the MBL as a “beginning investigator”, to study reptilian nerve systems. By the time Carson left Woods Hole, biology and its social implications were well known. When Carson established herself as natural scientist, her role as a scientist defined her social position. Her scientific credibility was (and often still is) debated, an issue greatly affected by the contemporary politics of gender, but her acceptance of the social responsibility of the scientist was not. Promoting a socially engaged understanding of natural science was something she had anticipated and prepared for much of her life.

This chapter continues the discussion of the life of Rachel Carson. Human interaction with the nonhuman world was at the foundation of Carson's environmental vision. Her childhood nature writing, for example, focused on her ordinary surroundings. During her collegiate training, her scientific knowledge of nature increased, but analysis predicated on personal experience, on the beach and in the tide pools, was still most rewarding. Carson expected natural scientists to reveal the social uses of American biology. Her critics, however, labeled her a “generalist” and a “popularizer” and relegated her vision of natural science to the domain of the amateur.

The emotion of wonder is among our genetically encoded programs for responding to unexpected features of the environment. Wonder is distinct from other emotions in its ability to foster receptivity, openness, metaphysical thinking, and moral sensitivity. Biological and psychological studies of wonder help us understand the moods and motivations that distinguish aesthetic spirituality or nature religion.

Beginning in the latter half of the nineteenth century, Darwinism had a varied impact on American sensibilities. John Muir, for example, studied science and accepted the transmutative premise of evolutionary theory--but retained a biblically colored piety that saw God’s presence inscribed “in magnificent capitals” at places like Yosemite. During this extended period, writings by Mary Austin and Black Elk reflect their encounters with versions of naturalistic piety lying outside Euro-American ethnic traditions. Still, the written form in which Black Elk expressed his ecological vision of holiness, as imaged in the great hoop of the Lakota nation, was decidedly influenced by his contact with non-Indian culture. Although Rachel Carson was a committed scientist whose work presupposed belief in organic evolution, her writing also reflects a robust spirituality founded upon reverence for life and for the mystery of things unseen.

This chapter explores the “rototypical characteristics” of the experience of wonder by looking at one individual whose life was shaped by recurring experiences of wonder: the environmental activist Rachel Carson. It examines how emotional experiences of wonder can lead to a lifelong sensibility for what Carson termed “the beauties and mysteries of the earth.” After presenting a brief background on Carson's life, the chapter focuses on her notion of an ethics of appreciation rather than an ethics of obedience to moral authority. It also describes her advocacy of trying not only to help others know about nature but also to teach them how to feel about nature, her argument that wonder is a profoundly functional emotion, and the importance of humility and wonder in her spiritual orientation to life. Finally, it considers Carson's view that it is the sense of wonder that best elicits and sustains a reverence for life.

This introductory chapter begins with a discussion of the purpose of the book, which is to examine the working world of natural scientists, exploring how they used science within American life and, most importantly, illuminating the impact of natural science on American culture. Beginning with the conclusion of the Civil War and the creation of a recognizably modern America, and continuing forward to the emergence of environmentalism as a political force nearly a century later, the book explores the evolving internal paradigms and external forces influencing the design and purpose of American natural science. The chapter also considers the work of Clarence King, Robert Marshall, and Rachel Carson, representatives of the community of natural scientists who blended their work, understanding of politics, and concern for social welfare into a vision of a liberal, cooperative, and scientifically informed America.

This chapter provides an analysis of Thomas Merton's letter to Rachel Carson and a brief clarification of how these two literary minds were prophets of both revelation and revolution. Rachel Carson was the author of the recently published Silent Spring. Merton's January 12, 1963, letter is a watershed moment, or “spot of time”, in his developing environmental consciousness. Merton's reading of Silent Spring was an epiphanic event akin to other well-known and powerful moments of spiritual insight in his life. Nearly fifty years later, it can verify that Silent Spring became the catalyst for the current environmental movement. In both writers, there is a sense of responsibility for environmental health that comes from attentiveness to their surroundings and commitment to a coherent vision of the cosmos. There is also what the ecocritic Jonathan Bate has called ecopoesis—a deep longing for belonging.

This chapter discusses Rachel Carson's Silent Spring, a bestseller which alerted Americans to the hazards of insecticides. Carson's prose revealed hazards found with the indiscriminate use of DDT and other chlorinated hydrocarbons. With the exception of malathion, organophosphates posed greater risks to humans and wildlife. However, organophosphates had one notable advantage over DDT and the chlorinated hydrocarbons: organophosphates broke down into relatively harmless components over the course of weeks or even days, whereas chlorinated hydrocarbons accumulated in ecosystems and the bodies of wildlife and humans. In general, Silent Spring painted a sharp picture of toxicological risk in layman's terms.

In his essay, “Speculative Ecology: Rachel Carson’s Environmentalist Documentaries,” Daniel Worden argues that Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring is not only a path-breaking work of investigative journalism, but also a daring work of imaginative projection. Rereading this seminal book in light of Carson’s earlier writing about the ocean, which she portrays as vast and indecipherable, Worden reinterprets Carson’s storied career and demonstrates her contribution to contemporary writing about climate change. Tasked with describing catastrophe that unfolds incrementally, Carson’s speculative documentary defamiliarizes nature itself, performing the work of estrangement that survival may require.

This chapter focuses on the work of Rachel Carson and its influence on ecological science and environmental activism. Even before the term “ecological” became mainstream in the English language and in the language of professional scientific circles, Carson’s work was undeniably ecological, even if peppered with social and political commitments. Carson’s legacy is her work’s potential to unsettle the settled assumptions of an epistemological orthodoxy that sustains a conviction in the value of individual, detached, and depersonalized mastery and control. This chapter, in developing an epistemological approach referred to as “ecological naturalism,”, draws heavily from Carson’s works, specifically Silent Spring. This chapter discusses knowledge as being “acquired” for manipulation of nature and human nature, and knowledge as a valuable commodity that legitimizes possession of power as these possessors recast “the natural world” as a resource for human gratification.

This chapter presents some concluding thoughts from the author. It argues that nature continues to serve as a foundation for American political values, with natural science acting as guide. Key to its modern appeal is an understanding of science as an objective form of knowledge located within the authoritative natural world. The challenge for scientists and citizens alike is to recognize how much of our search for answers in the physical environment is not based on the ability of science to reveal what nature intended but is, rather, a necessary product of human relations in a social environment.

Rachel Carson was an American marine biologist who began her career at the U.S. Bureau of Fisheries, and became a full-time nature writer in the 1950s, most known for Silent Spring, published in 1962. Alarmed by the damage done to the environment by synthetic pesticides, Carson wrote passionately, and effectively, about the need for developing a culture and ethic of conservation. Meeting fierce opposition by chemical companies, Carson became more even more emboldened. Ultimately, Carson’s vision proved highly influential, spurring a reversal in national policy on pesticides, and inspiring a grassroots environmental movement that led to the creation of the United States Environmental Protection Agency. Few books in the history of the twentieth century can be said to have exercised such an impact as Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring. What was it about this woman’s vision and conviction that allowed it to bring about such revolutionary results? What was it about her times? This contribution seeks to provide answers to these and other questions.

This chapter presents three sets of images as together constituting a prehistory of environmental icons: advertisements against nuclear testing produced by SANE (the National Committee for a Sane Nuclear Policy); the Daisy Girl and other TV commercials produced for the 1964 Lyndon Baines Johnson presidential campaign; and pesticide imagery that followed publication of Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring (1962) and culminated with the 1972 federal ban on DDT. These images depicted the temporality of the environmental crisis by portraying the long-term risks of radioactive fallout and pesticides to the environment and the human body. This chapter explains how popular images challenged the Cold War emotional style by picturing innocent children as the prime victims of environmental danger. From SANE ads to the DDT ban, images helped popularize notions of the ecological body by explaining the ways that Strontium-90 and pesticides could enter the food chain and thereby threaten fragile ecosystems and human health.

This chapter traces the steps of an emerging ecological consciousness—from Thomas Merton's letter to Rachel Carson in 1963 until his last published book review a few months before his death in 1968. The assortment of letters, journal entries, reading notebooks, and published book reviews written during these five years reveals Thomas Merton on the cutting edge of environmental thinking and developing what Aldo Leopold—and later Merton—called an ecological conscience. Embedded in Merton's letter to Carson are three strands of his deepening spirituality: awareness and a keen eye for the beauty and the holiness or “sacramentality” of nature, a deepening realization of kinship and harmony with nature, and a growing sense of compassion and responsibility for all creation. Although these strands have been looked at individually in a somewhat biographical way, it can also be discerned how they become part of the fabric of Merton's spirituality particularly in the last years of his life. In general, the letters and published book reviews during the last five years of his life document an evolving and more intensely felt commitment to environmental integrity—a new consciousness motivated by justice for all creatures.

This essay reviews the book Silent Spring (1962), by Rachel Carson. Silent Spring alerted readers to the environmental and human dangers of indiscriminate use of pesticides and other toxic pollutants, spurring revolutionary changes in U.S. laws affecting our air, land, and water. What Carson called the “chain of evil”—the buildup of chemicals in our environment—continues unbroken to this day. And even though the political firestorm Silent Spring stirred up forty-three years ago burns with just as much intensity today, most of Carson's science remains sound and her warnings prescient. If we take a mental snapshot of what we know now about the dangers of chemical exposure, the questions still outnumber the answers. Yet one thing remains as certain as it was in 1962: we are leaving a toxic trail that will outlive us. Carson described in great scientific detail the dangers of DDT and its sister chlorinated chemicals, and her writings transformed how people felt about pesticides.

John Wills begins this chapter by contrasting the place of the environment for Henry David Thoreau in the 1840s with its status in the early twenty-first century, in which the preservation of national parks sits alongside the heavy toll on the natural world caused by 150 years of industrialisation and commerce. Exploring the United States as a place of extremes and contradictions when it comes to environmental issues, the chapter focuses in particular on the devastation wrought by Hurricane Katrina in August 2005 and related issues of global warming and energy consumption. Wills moves on to consider the growing environmental consciousness of the new century, green-branded commerce, the new commitment to green technology amongst major manufacturers, and national environmental policies. The chapter ends with a consideration of Al Gore’s environmental film An Inconvenient Truth (2006) as a contemporary take on Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring (1962) for promoting the environmental message.