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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 discusses the excesses of the Industrial Revolution and the explosion of the human population as the issues that showed us the devastating impact that human activities could have on the earth. It traces the environmental movement through the 20th century, noting that it gained an ethic and a mission with two important mid-century publications: Aldo Leopold's Sand County Almanac in 1949 and Rachel Carson's Silent Spring. It reviews the life and accomplishments of Lee Talbot, a key player in the development of US environmental policy and practice.

This introductory chapter begins by contextualising the study, discussing the representation of Nature in early Cold War American culture and the emergence of modern environmentalism from 1945. The chapter also outlines the book’s argument that whilst the publication of Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring (1962) is understandably viewed as a watershed moment in terms of raising environmental consciousness in America, Silent Spring should also be considered as part of a developing trend of ecological portrayals of Nature in American literature written after 1945. This opening chapter also situates the book’s argument within the field of Cold War literary studies and introduces the book’s ecocritical methodology, including its sustained engagement with Timothy Morton’s ideas of ‘the mesh’ and ‘the ecological thought’ as outlined in The Ecological Thought (2010).

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 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.

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 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.

The book’s concluding chapter begins with an ecocritical reading Gregory Corso’s 1958 poem ‘Bomb’. The conclusion then reflects on the book’s contributions to the fields of Cold War literary criticism and ecocriticism. As part of the book’s re-evaluation of the significance of the Cold War period to contemporary ecocritical debate, this chapter also develops the book’s argument that Rachel Carson’s seminal work Silent Spring (1962) should be viewed as one of a growing number of American texts written after 1945 that present an interdependent, ecological vision of the human’s relationship to its 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 examines the budding movement for pesticide reform during the period 1962–1972. It begins with a discussion of Rachel Carson’s 1962 book Silent Spring, which introduced the public to the adverse effects of pesticides by addressing the unexplainable sicknesses and death that plagued people and livestock living in a fictional town. It then considers how concerned scientists disseminated information about the ill effects of pesticides directly and indirectly to the United Farm Workers Organizing Committee and environmental organizations. It also discusses the growing concern of both environmentalists and farmworker groups about pesticides, particularly DDT, as well as their development of fairly different strategies in their attempts to make change. The chapter argues that the differences in strategies limited but did not preclude opportunities for collaboration between farmworkers and the environmental movement, especially in mounting legal challenges. Their efforts paid off when in June 1972, the Environmental Protection Agency issued an order to ban nearly all uses of DDT in the six months following.

The introductory chapter reinterprets Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring (1962) and its historiographical legacy. It begins with an exploration of lay and expert conceptualizations of the relationship between health and the environment in the United States in the pre-WWII period. It then situates health and environmentalism within both the broader political culture of liberal and progressive activism in the post-WWII period, and the legislative and regulatory trajectory of health and the environment.  From these broader histories, the chapter argues that the widespread lionization of Carson’s work and person, by embracing an influential yet bounded reformism for which health was a matter of personal choice and individual boundaries, has impeded a more wide-ranging scholarly engagement with the centrality of health to environmental politics.

This chapter discusses the use of different pesticides after the banning of DDT in 1972. Based on the message from Silent Spring, many Americans considered DDT as the most harmful insecticide due to its effects on wildlife, particularly birds. American legislators became concerned about environmental cancer. When DDT and other chlorinated hydrocarbons underwent scrutiny, farmers turned to alternatives such as toxaphene and organophosphates. By 1976, organophosphates dominated insecticides in agricultural use. The passage of the Food Quality Protection Act in 1996 and the review of organophosphates in 2006 ultimately led to the removal of organophosphates the market.

This chapter examines birding in the environmental age, with particular emphasis on the ways the gospel of environmental conservation changed the balance between conservation and recreation in the hobby and the ways ecological insights influenced field guides. It looks at three books that represent the early environmental years: Rachel Carson's Silent Spring, Chandler Robbins and Arthur Singer's Birds of North America, and Kenn Kaufman's Kingbird Highway. The chapter first traces birdwatching in the early environmental years, focusing on the tension between conservation and recreation as well as conservation's transformation from a genteel concern with birds as something good in our lives to a staunch advocacy of the ecosystems on which both birds and humans depend. It then considers Carson's ideas and in particular the battle over DDT, in which birders such as Lorrie Otto and Joseph Hickey figured prominently. It also analyzes recreational birding, along with the emergence of a new generation of field guides and the growing national competition for a record list.

This chapter presents two examples to demonstrate that natural history is the necessary basis of any reliable understanding of the world. More than a half century ago, Rachel Carson revolutionized the public’s view of pesticides. The foundation of her success was the careful use of natural history data, collated from across North America. The examples she assembled left little doubt that DDT and other pesticides were causing a widespread decline in birds. More recently, the case for the impact of atrazine on wildlife was based on laboratory experiments, without the advantage of natural history observations. For atrazine, natural history observations now suggest that other chemical agents are more likely to be responsible for feminization of wildlife populations. Developing expectations for scientists to collect natural history information can help to avoid over-extrapolating lab results to wild populations, a tendency often seen when those lab results conform to preconceptions about chemicals in the environment.

When active environmentalists were asked in a questionnaire, “Has there been an author who has most deeply affected your thinking about environmental issues?” respondents mentioned Rachel Carson about three times as often as any other writer. Carson’s book Silent Spring has been described as the primary catalyst in transforming the largely moribund conservation movement of the 1950s into the modern environmental movement of the 1960s and 1970s. Carson’s work precipitated the shift from first-generation environmental problems of land and resource protection to second-generation problems, especially pollution, which were more pervasive, less immediately apparent, and in many ways more insidiously threatening to members of the general population. The rise of pollution problems to the forefront of public policy concerns required a new vernacular, a new way of speaking about environmental threats and solutions. Rachel Carson, it is said, succeeded in one place where Leopold had failed; she injected ecological concepts and ideas into broader public policy discussions. Her graphic writing style, as well as her considerable status as a successful author, succeeded in transforming public discussions of environmental problems into a more ecological context by emphasizing the ways in which persistent chemicals move through natural systems and into human bodies. Immense economic stakes were involved in the pesticide issue; production of DDT, for example, quintupled between 1945 and 1962, as chemical manufacturers’ sales climbed from just over $10 billion to almost $33 billion. The publication of Silent Spring caused a huge public controversy; that controversy has set the parameters, as well as the tone, for much of the subsequent debate regarding environmental regulation and environmental policy. Carson began her attack on the indiscriminate use of pesticides with “A Fable for Tomorrow,” in which she described an imaginary town in the heart of America. She first described an idyllic scene of humans living in harmony with their surroundings, including woods and hedgerows inhabited by countless birds, and streams swimming with fish. But “then a strange blight crept over the area and everything began to change.” Domestic animals died. Humans became ill.

In which we make the transition from the nineteenth to the twentieth centuries as issues of conservation and preservation become entwined with natural history. John Muir’s travels both within the United States and globally echo some of the early natural historians, but the emphasis has shifted from one of discovery to one of concern. The founding of the Museum of Vertebrate Zoology at Berkeley and the founding of the School of Forestry at Yale mark two axes of future direction to what comes to be called ecology.

The New York Post, a New York City daily, ran a sensational headline on the front page of its April 12, 2000, issue: “Breast Cancer Hot Spots”. The news story reported that statistics and maps of breast cancer rates just released by New York State health authorities showed unusually high rates of breast cancer on the Upper East Side of Manhattan, as well as on Long Island and several other areas in New York City and upstate. These high rates were described by the state authorities as “not likely due to chance.” The residents of the Upper East Side, one of the most affluent areas of the city, were understandably alarmed. One woman interviewed was considering whether to move elsewhere, but had not yet decided. A second demanded that the two major party candidates for the U.S. Senate state their positions on the high rate. A third noted that there were no obvious sources of pollution in the neighborhood, no pesticide spraying or toxic waste dumps, that could explain why the breast cancer rate was high. Many people believe that breast cancer is caused by toxic agents in the environment. Victims of breast cancer we have met at sessions of support groups have described vividly the pains and discomfort of chemotherapy, radiation, and radical surgery; the nagging anxiety about a possible recurrence, the sense of disfigurement, of mutilation; the ignorance and insensitivity of many of the so-far healthy; the strengthening or weakening of bonds to those close to them: husbands, sons, daughters, parents, who either grow in understanding and compassion or fall short. But there is one common thread that runs through their stories: each of them feels there must be a reason why she, at this particular point in her life, should have gotten this terrible disease. Why me? Lucia D., in her late thirties, remembers that as a child of eight or nine growing up in Panama she and other children used to run after the truck that periodically sprayed DDT in their neighborhood and dance around in the spray. She is convinced that this childhood exposure is the reason she has breast cancer at such an early age.

“Get under your desks. The missiles are coming.” “The President has been shot!” “The National Guard has killed four students at Kent State.” “The river is burning!” These are my searing teenage and early adult memories. My formative years took place in the 1960s, when society was seemingly coming apart at the seams, with riots over the Vietnam War, riots over racial issues, and the assassinations of President John F. Kennedy, Robert Kennedy, and Martin Luther King, Jr. The Cold War was in full swing and there was great fear that the United States and the (former) Soviet Union would annihilate the world with a nuclear holocaust. In addition to these crises, the environment had become degraded to such an extent that the Cuyahoga River caught fire and the air in major cities was not safe to breathe. In response to this toxic mix of social and environmental ills, many citizens began questioning whether they could trust the government or technology. Fueled by this questioning, a new sense of activism led to (among other things) an environmental movement that helped establish the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to clean up our rivers and air. This was a time when books such as Silent Spring (1), The Population Bomb (2), and The Limits to Growth (3) were proclaiming dire consequences for our planet if we didn’t take our impacts on the planet more seriously. It was also a time when environmental activists became very concerned and vocal about the hazards of nuclear weapons and radiation in general. Fears of even a limited nuclear war leading to a “nuclear winter” were prevalent. As nuclear power plants were being proposed, fierce demonstrations took place to try to prevent them from being built and delaying the time line for actually building them to ten or more years. A large segment of society became convinced that virtually any exposure to radiation would cause cancer and that nuclear reactors were a major health hazard.

Plum Creek begins in drainage from farms on the west side of the city of Oberlin, Ohio, and flows eastward through a city golf course, a college arboretum, and the downtown area. East of the city, the stream receives the effluent from the city sewer facility before it joins with the Black River, which flows north through two rust-belt cities, Elyria and Lorain, before emptying into Lake Erie 25 miles west of Cleveland. Plum Creek shows all of the signs of 150 years of human use and abuse. As late as 1850 the stream ran clear even in times of flood, but now it is murky brown year-round. Because of pollution, sediments, and the lack of aquatic life, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency considers it to be a “nonattainment” stream. Yet it survives, more or less. To most residents of Oberlin, Plum Creek is little more than a drain and sewer useful for moving water off the land as rapidly as possible. Few regard it as an aesthetic asset or ecological resource. The character of Plum Creek changes quickly as it flows eastward into downtown Oberlin. Runoff from city streets enters the stream where the creek runs under the intersection of Morgan and Professor Streets. One block to the east, a larger volume of runoff polluted by oil and grease from city streets enters the creek as it flows under Main Street, past a Midas Muffler shop, a NAPA Auto Parts Store, and City Hall, located in the flood plain. Where Plum Creek flows under Main Street, an increased volume of storm water and consequently increased stream velocity have widened the banks and cut the channel from several feet to a depth of 10 feet or more. The city has attempted to stabilize the stream by lining the banks with concrete or by riprapping with large chunks of broken concrete. The aquatic life that exists upstream mostly disappears as Plum Creek flows through the downtown. Bending to the northeast, the creek passes through suburban backyards, past the municipal wastewater plant, a Browning Ferris Industries landfill, and on toward the west fork of the Black River and Lake Erie.