Silent Spring and the Cold War by Moderator William Souder

 Discussion topic:  Silent Spring by Rachel Carson

William Souder, author of On a Farther Shore: The Life and Legacy of Rachel Carson  (2012)

In the pre-dawn hours of the morning of March 1, 1954, a Japanese tuna-fishing boat named The Lucky Dragon drifted placidly on the Pacific swell just east of the Marshall Islands. Its longline was out and most of the crew was asleep in their bunks below deck when all at once the sky to the west lit up as if the atmosphere itself had suddenly caught fire. As the men rushed on deck the frightening light turned deep red and continued to rise high above the horizon. Minutes passed. Then the ship lurched as a deep, concussive shock wave passed over it. Nobody knew what was happening. A few hours later, as the crew hauled in the longline under leaden skies, a gray, gritty, ash-like substance began falling from the sky, coating everything and everyone aboard The Lucky Dragon.

On their way home, the crew became sick. They were nauseated and their skin burned and then erupted in sores. By the time they returned to port the men appeared almost black, as if badly burned, and their eyes oozed and their hair had started falling out. The men would eventually spend an entire year in a Tokyo hospital that specialized in treating radiation sickness. What The Lucky Dragon had unintentionally gotten too close to was an operation called “Castle Bravo,” a hydrogen bomb test carried out by the United States on a tiny sand archipelago called Bikini Atoll. Several things went wrong that day—the wind shifted and the explosion was far more powerful than expected. The result was that some of the many thousands of tons of irradiated sand and coral blown into the atmosphere in Castle Bravo had fallen on The Lucky Dragon. After an international outcry—not to mention public dismay at the vast power of the new hydrogen bomb—the U.S. paid damages to the crew members and their families, and to the Japanese fishing industry.

Eventually all but one of the crew recovered. The one who didn’t, a radio operator named Kuboyama, seemed to be on the mend before his liver suddenly failed and he died. Eight years later, Kuboyama would reappear—in the pages of Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring. Carson likened Kuboyama’s demise to that of a comparably healthy and vigorous Swedish farmer, who while doing his work had accidentally exposed himself to a pesticide cloud composed of DDT and benzene hexachloride. The farmer became sick that same night, and died three months later.
    
For Carson, radioactive fallout—then prevalent everywhere in the world due to frenzied weapons testing by the U.S. and the Soviet Union—offered an exact parallel to the problem of widespread contamination of what she called “the total environment” by pesticides. Here’s how she put it in Silent Spring:
         
In this now universal contamination of the environment, chemicals are the sinister and little-recognized partners of radiation in changing the very nature of the world—the very nature of its life.

The year 1962 was the peak year for above-ground testing of nuclear weapons. In the month of June alone, as readers of the New Yorker were learning of the dark promise of pesticides in three long installments from the forthcoming Silent Spring, the U.S. detonated ten nuclear devices in the South Pacific. Soviet testing in Siberia, meanwhile, produced a steady rain of radioactive fallout in parts of the northern hemisphere downwind—notably central North America, where cows gave milk tainted with radioactivity after being pastured on fields exposed to fallout. For Carson, the threats from radiation and chemical contaminants were existential questions. To continue so heedlessly with nuclear testing and the use of pesticides would eventually, Carson said, make this world “unfit for all life.”

But the connection between radiation and pesticides was also an important to Carson in another way. In 1962 the idea that chemicals could be dangerous environmental contaminants—persisting for long periods and entering into food chains and causing collateral damage to all manner of non-targeted species—was a novel concept. Few people gave thought to such considerations. But in the midst of the Cold War, people did understand the threat from radioactive fallout, which, like pesticides, was everywhere all at once, invisible and toxic. In drawing the parallel between the two technologies, which had both been perfected in wartime and had become part of a beleaguered peacetime, Carson made plain for the first time the dangers of chemical contaminants. It’s no accident that Baby Boomers, the generation steeped in Cold War fears, would become the vanguard of the environmental movement that emerged in the wake of Silent Spring. They got it.

See William Souder's new book  On a Farther Shore: The Life and Legacy of Rachel Carson (2012)

 

Reflections on Silent Spring by Moderator William Souder

William Souder

 Discussion topic:  Silent Spring by Rachel Carson

William Souder, author of On a Farther Shore: The Life and Legacy of Rachel Carson  (2012)

Here’s a question I often get: Can there ever be another book like Silent Spring?

What the questioner wants to know, of course, is whether any book will ever produce an upheaval comparable to the change in public attitudes and government policies that followed the publication of Rachel Carson’s biting polemic on the indiscriminate use of synthetic pesticides. This usually comes up at readings or other appearances when I have just finished talking about the importance of Silent Spring, and when it does I sense a mood of hope in the audience.

My answer always disappoints.

Times have changed, and so have we. The odds are against another book ever having the impact and lasting influence of Silent Spring.

For starters, we don’t have a Rachel Carson among us. Before she turned her attention to pesticides Carson was one of America’s most celebrated and beloved writers—the author of three lovely, lyrical books about the sea that had captivated readers for a decade. The Sea Around Us, published in 1951, stood atop the bestseller list for thirty-nine weeks, won the National Book Award, and made Carson’s reputation as a writer to be reckoned with. When she published Silent Spring eleven years later—first in installments in the New Yorker in June of 1962 and then in September as a book already engulfed in controversy—it, too, became a bestseller.

But what a shock it was. Leaving behind the celebratory mood of her earlier works—so joyful and besotted with life—Carson’s mood in Silent Spring was dark and foreboding. Though in places every bit as elegantly written as her sea books, Silent Spring was a bleak and often dismal read. And I think this contributed immeasurably to its impact. If a writer so enraptured with the natural world could suddenly take such a hard stance against what we were doing to it the message surely had to be an important one.

I don’t think any writer or body of work today quite fits that model.
    
Then there is the profound shift in the media landscape that has occurred over the past half century. Rachel Carson lived and worked in the age of print, when every city had several newspapers, and the great national magazines—Life, Look, Colliers, Coronet, Reader’s Digest, The Saturday Evening Post—exerted a powerful influence over public discourse. The world of print reflected back on itself, and Silent Spring reverberated among writers and journalists who shaped the national agenda.

Today, most of those publications are gone; many that remain are on life support. The media landscape is fragmented—an atomized and diffuse galaxy of mostly broadcast or digital platforms that include cable news outlets, blogs, Twitter, and talk radio. It is a noisy, fractious scene in which it’s hard to imagine any single idea—or book—taking hold in the way Silent Spring did. There were really only two ways people thought about Silent Spring in 1962: they loved it or hated it. Since then we’ve done a good job of discrediting the media, arguing so thoroughly that they are biased in one direction or another that we don’t trust any of them. Nowadays, everybody is a consensus of one—we think what we think for our own reasons, and rarely because of what we see or hear or read. And here is what we think: Nothing is clear.

I recently moderated a panel discussion at a conference of environmental journalists, where two of the women who joined me—Florence Williams and Cynthia Barnett—made the case for a new approach to writing about environmental issues. Williams and Barnett argue that the angry tone taken in Silent Spring and its mountains of dismaying data are things that no longer work with readers. People shut down, they argue, when confronted with too much negative information—and feel helpless when faced with problems that are not accompanied by solutions.

Rachel Carson did offer ideas about alternatives to synthetic pesticides. But the problems we confront today—notably climate change—are more complex and harder to address. Williams and Barnett both feel that we need to shift arguments about environmental matters out of the “now” and extend them forward into the next and succeeding generations. If people can dismiss climate change as a problem that directly confronts them, they may be less willing to turn away if they can be persuaded it will affect their children and grandchildren.

Rachel Carson worried about future generations, too. But she went straight at her readers in real time. And they responded, both for and against her. As any environmental writer can tell you today, it’s hard now to get a reaction—period. The legacy of Silent Spring is with us still—but the age of the polemic would seem to be over.

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