Free Radicals - Michael Brooks [105]
Despite these efforts to discredit and discourage Carson and her supporters (many industry scientists had covertly helped with her research, and those who were openly quoted in the book lost their jobs on its publication), majority opinion gathered behind the message of Silent Spring. Spurred into action by public concern, the US Government passed a flurry of laws on environmental protection. Quite rightly, Carson has been called the ‘fountainhead of the modern environmental movement’.
Events in science that have had the potential to change humanity so profoundly are rare. Carson’s insight seems on a par with Edward Jenner’s invention and championing of vaccination. Until Silent Spring was published, few members of the public ever thought that human beings were connected with, or depended on, the environment around them. This was not a result of ignorance, but of scientific arrogance: they believed the assurances of scientists that humans were now in a technological position to take control of nature and harness it for human good. Stewart Udall, then US Secretary of the Interior, remembers this time as the age of ‘the atom changing our lives, of the conquest of nature, of technology being the great thing that was going to change the world’. The natural world, he says, was ‘pushed into the background’.
That was the spirit in which DDT was sprayed with such astounding abandon on farms, streets, schools, swimming pools and the countryside. Silent Spring destroyed that spirit: suddenly, people realised that humans are part of the environment, not standing in isolation above it. Yet despite Carson’s extraordinary work, it is a lesson we are still struggling to learn.
The beauty of Rachel Carson’s prose is breathtaking – Silent Spring was, in part, such a huge success because Carson captured the poetry of nature in her writing. In her last letter to her friend Dorothy Freeman, Carson waxed eloquent about the monarch butterflies of Maine. Carson was in the late stages of her cancer and aware that she was unlikely ever to see the monarchs return to her beloved Maine after their winter migration. She and Freeman had spent that September morning together on the lawn of the Newagen Inn and enjoyed ‘the sounds of the wind in the spruces and surf on the rocks, the gulls busy with their foraging, alighting with deliberate grace, the distant views of Griffiths Head and Todd Point, today so clearly etched, though once half seen in swirling fog’. Most of all, though, Carson told Freeman, she would remember watching the monarchs begin their migration: ‘that unhurried westward drift of one small winged form after another, each drawn by some invisible force’. Evidently, Carson and Freeman had discussed each butterfly’s fate never to return from this closing journey of their lives. The monarchs, Carson said, taught her about the cycles of life: ‘it is a natural and not unhappy thing that a life comes to an end’.
Within a few months Carson had died, leaving a legacy – a new sense of environmental responsibility – that we have yet to fully work out. The monarchs are still caught up in that legacy: thanks to shifting weather patterns and the overuse of weedkillers, the inhabitants of Maine and the rest of continental America are seeing fewer monarchs return each year.
It is not necessarily an irreversible trend, as NASA scientist James Hansen will tell anyone who cares to listen. In the summer of 2008, concerned at the monarch’s decline, Hansen took his grandchildren out into the wilds of eastern Pennsylvania to find some milkweed, the only plant monarch caterpillars will eat. They dug some up and planted it in his garden. The following year, they found the transplanted milkweed plants dotted with monarch caterpillars. Hansen and his grandchildren