Happy 50th Birthday "Silent Spring" by FWS Historian Mark Madison

Welcome to the WILD READ book discussion on Silent Spring perhaps the most important book written in the history of the environmental movement.  I sincerely thank you for taking the time to read this.

I am excited to be the first moderator for this book as those of us in the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (FWS) consider Rachel Carson one of our own.  Carson worked for the agency for 16 years (from 1936-1952), longer than she did anything else in her life.  Much of her work for the agency helped inform Silent Spring.  The new miracle pesticide DDT had first been used in World War II and was heralded as scientific panacea—both crops and picnics could now be pest free.  Yet almost immediately after its introduction, scientists at the FWS began to notice the troubling effects of DDT on birds and fish.  Carson wrote her first press release on the dangers of DDT in 1945 and for the next 17 years she collected damning evidence as to its detrimental effects.  The result of her research and passion is Silent Spring (1962). 

When I was in Middle School (back when dinosaurs roamed the earth) we were assigned Silent Spring and I remember my classmates being horrified and energized by Carson’s prose.  I am afraid the book is not much read today, which is a pity as Carson offers advice on many environmental maladies of today. 

As we read (or re-read) this book together I would like to hear your answers to a few questions:

Do you think this book still has relevance today?

Who is the best audience for this book?

Is this primarily a science book or a philosophical book?

I look forward to reading your observations and hearing your opinion of this groundbreaking environmental book!

For more information about Rachel Carson and Silent Spring:  Linda Lear and  her biography: Rachel Carson: Witness to Nature (1998) and William Souder's On a Farther Shore: The Life and Legacy of Rachel Carson (2012).

Truth or Fiction? By Mark Madison

It is interesting that after 21 non-fiction books, Professor Wilson decided to communicate his passion for the environment in a novel. It raises the interesting question: Does non-fiction or fiction provide the most powerful environmental literature? And the related question: What is the best book you have ever read on the environment?

Personally, if I had to pick, my favorite environmental book of all time is Aldo Leopold's A Sand County Almanac. I don't know if it is homesickness for my state of Wisconsin or Leopold's thoughtful prose, but this is a book I re-read every year. If I had to pick a powerful environmental work of fiction, I just recently read Margaret Atwood's Year of the Flood--an all too real extrapolation of present environmental trends. Atwood will be moderating this blog beginning July 3 and I look forward to her thoughts on the role of fiction in environmental thought.

That is all for me, it has been a pleasure co-moderating with Kris Hoellen and all of you who have taken the time to comment!

Ants, Novelists, and Lawyers by Mark Madison

A very warm welcome from your co-moderator this week—reluctantly following Kris Hoellen’s great discussion of this section. My name is Mark Madison and I am the historian for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. It is a real honor to be moderating this book blog. I have great respect for those of you who have taken the time to make insightful comments and my own career has been significantly influenced by Wilson’s work.

The first book I read as an undergraduate in 1986 was E.O. Wilson’s On Human Nature—a look at the genetic and evolutionary origins of human behavior. Two weeks after completing that book (the first book I read all the way through in college), I changed my major from Political Science to Biology. That is the type of impact someone like E.O. Wilson can have on impressionable minds. Later while a graduate student at Harvard University, I encountered countless students like myself who had come to the University or been attracted to the field by Wilson’s exciting ideas. As for the natural environment, speaking now as a professional conservationist, I can say without hesitation Wilson is perhaps the most respected member of our field having done more to explain and protect the nature he loves than any other living scientist. So it is very exciting for me to discuss Wilson’s first attempt to explain the natural world through a novel.

Which raises the first question: what fiction writers do you think influenced Wilson’s novelistic style? Personally I sense a lot of Harper Lee (To Kill a Mockingbird) and John Grisham in Wilson's Anthill.

The second question comes from the name of this section--“The Armentarium.” This was definitely a new term to me (and my computer spell check). It is extremely obscure but seems to refer to medical training/tool kit. Presumably Raff is adding a legal degree to his personal tool kit. This begs another question: is a law degree an essential tool for environmental protection? Or to spin it out more broadly: are environmental laws the best means to protect nature?

I look forward to reading your thoughts on one or both of these quite disparate questions. . .