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By Root 971 0

health of human and nonhuman creatures. Her work led to the eventual banning of DDT, one of the main pesticides of that era, and more generally to an awareness that many applications of science and technology have unintended consequences for people and for other animals. The title Silent Spring is a reference to the impact of pesticides on bird populations, many of which were threatened by the bioaccumulation of pesticides used on crops. Pesticides remain long after their application on both crops and insects: Birds eat crops and insects, and as a result the pesticides accumulate in their bodies. And when birds of prey eat the smaller insect-eaters or crop-eaters, they receive a concentrated dose of pesticides. DDT accumulated in the bodies of predators, leading to the thinning of eggshells, and populations of hawks feeding on smaller birds experienced a sharp drop in reproductive rates. Silent Spring had a huge impact, becoming the subject of a movie and a TV documentary and staying at the top of the New York Times best-seller list for several weeks.

This was the background that allowed Johnson and Nixon to pass environmental legislation unprecedented in scope and extent. In 1970 Nixon commented to the leaders of the Sierra Club that “[a]ll politics is a fad. Your fad is going right now. Get what you can, and here’s what I can get for you.”4 And he proceeded to get a remarkable amount for them. His legislative achievements include the National Environmental Policy Act, the establishment of the Environmental Protection Agency, the Clean Air Act, the banning of DDT, the Clean Water Act, and the Endangered Species Act. All of this legislation has continued to form the basis of our environmental policy for the last three decades, and no subsequent president has come close to this level of environmental activism.

Perhaps surprisingly, there is no evidence that the state of the environment actually mattered personally and emotionally to Richard Nixon, as it clearly did to Teddy Roosevelt. But as indicated by the above-cited remark he made to the Sierra Club, Nixon saw that the times required environmental action and provided the voting public with what it wanted.

On the one hand, the times we’re in today are rather like the 1960s and early 1970s: There is again a widespread intuition that we are doing something potentially disastrous to the environment. There is nobody as eloquent as Rachel Carson in Silent Spring, but Al Gore’s documentary An Inconvenient Truth and his Nobel Prize have had an impact, as have the reports of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the Stern Review, other official bodies emphasizing the changes we are forcing in our most basic environmental systems, and the stream of television documentaries about the threats to forests and marine life.

On the other hand, there is a major difference between the environmental issues we face today and those that precipitated the flurry of legislation under Johnson and Nixon. The difference is local versus global, pollution that damages the area in which it is created versus environmental damage that affects the world as a whole. Ozone depletion, climate change, and deforestation affect the entire globe. Their consequences are truly global—and may paradoxically often be invisible to the people who are causing the damage. We humans are impinging on the operation of global systems on which all creatures depend: That is different from the more localized pollution that was recognized in the 1960s and addressed, quite successfully, by Presidents Johnson and Nixon and in equivalent legislation in other advanced countries in the 1960s and 1970s. Another difference is that the population of the earth has roughly doubled over the intervening forty years, and living standards have risen by a factor of between two and three so that the impact of economic activity is now vastly greater than when Rachel Carson was writing. The potential for damage has risen massively.

Why are conservatives in the United States currently so hostile to environmental issues, when there