#rachel carson

[thirdity]

I like to define biology as the history of the earth and all its life — past, present, and future. To understand biology is to understand that all life is linked to the earth from which it came; it is to understand that the stream of life, flowing out of the dim past into the uncertain future, is in reality a unified force, though composed of an infinite number and variety of separate lives.

Rachel Carson, "Introduction", Humane Biology Projects (1961)

[noosphe-re]

Life not only formed the soil, but other living things of incredible abundance and diversity now exist within it; if this were not so the soil would be a dead and sterile thing. By their presence and by their activities the myriad organisms of the soil make it capable of supporting the earth's green mantle.

Rachel Carson, Silent Spring

[entheognosis]

The more clearly we can focus our attention on the wonders and realities of the universe about us, the less taste we shall have for destruction.

Rachel Carson

[exhaled-spirals]

« [The Atlantic] ran [Rachel] Carson’s essay with the title “Undersea” in the September 1937 issue. Weeks [the editor] had identified what many of Carson’s readers would come to understand: She didn’t merely present facts and information, but invited readers to join her in a way of seeing beyond the limits of our own perceptions. The wonder animating her writing and the beauty of her prose is what made it so effective—and what subjected her to intense criticism as a woman writing about science.

A meticulous editor of her own work, Carson scrapped an elaborate opening to “Undersea” in favor of a simple one: “Who has known the ocean?” The answer—that “neither you nor I, with our earthbound senses” can possibly experience that alien medium—becomes a summons “to sense this world of waters known to the creatures of the sea.” Carson advises readers to “shed our human perceptions of length and breadth and time and place, and enter vicariously into a universe of all-pervading water.”

The essay that follows is an exercise in doing just that. Carson’s writing moves like a musical composition, carrying the reader through different realms of sea life—the tide pool, the middle depths of the ocean, the ungraspable reaches of its floor. In her telling, each element taken together makes for a grand cosmic symphony. “Every living thing of the ocean, plant and animal alike, returns to the water at the end of its own life span the materials that had been temporarily assembled to form its body,” she explains. “Individual elements are lost to view, only to reappear again and again in different incarnations in a kind of material immortality” that lives in everything: the tiniest plankton, the yellow-crowned purple sea slug, the great bulk of the blue whale.

The sensibilities that Carson embodied—an engagement with the natural world rooted in both wonder and scientific rigor—continued a tradition of women naturalists extending back to the 19th century. On her family’s farm outside of Pittsburgh, Carson’s mother, Maria, encouraged her to explore and study on her own. Maria, and Carson herself, were shaped by writers such as Olive Thorne Miller and Anna Botsford Comstock, who brought to life birds, insects, plants, and forests. [...]

With Silent Spring, the blend of curiosity and scientific rigor that made “Undersea” so compelling evoked something more than wonder; it became a call to environmental action. [...] As Silent Spring’s influence grew, she became subject to intense backlash, much of which questioned her credibility as a woman writing about science outside of academia. For critics, the lyrical quality of Carson’s writing was grounds for suspicion rather than praise. “Many scientists sympathize with Miss Carson’s love of wildlife, and even with her mystical attachment to the balance of nature,” one wrote in Time. “But they fear that her emotional and inaccurate outburst in Silent Spring may do harm by alarming the non-technical public.”

The trouble for Carson’s critics was that even if her attachments to nature seemed a little mystical, her conclusions were correct. What they decried as a flight of fancy or emotion was instead a serious proposition. Using the findings of science to awaken people’s imaginations wasn’t a problem; it was the point. As Carson told a group of women journalists in 1954, “The more clearly we can focus our attention on the wonders and realities of the universe about us, the less taste we shall have for destruction.” »

— Jake Lundberg, "Rachel Carson Has Known the Ocean" in The Atlantic

[whilereadingandwalking]

In some ways, reading Silent Spring was a deep bummer. We as a society rose up against insecticides after reading Rachel Carson’s magnum opus, but we still have so much to learn in changing our outlook towards working with nature instead of against it, in refusing to allow corporations to run the world of scientific research where it can impact lives (and especially to allow them to run and influence the FDA and other consumer protection agencies), and in demanding more rigorous study of the chemicals unleashed into our environment and bodies.

But in other ways, that is precisely what makes it still so worth reading. Carson’s work is still intensely relevant. It also made me determined never to use another insecticide without full PPE on for the rest of my life, and to oppose their use all together unless there’s legitimately no other choice. She preempted the struggles we’re now having with forever chemicals and microplastics, writing poignantly about the permeability of the human body. (Warning that her section on cancer is a bit outdated with more modern research.) She also makes a fierce argument for respecting the natural intervention of nature and the ways that so many of our troubles are caused by our own disruption of natural checks and balances to the system. Like many climate activists today, she stressed that doom and gloom are not the answer, because humans have the ability to invent and innovate, if we just put money behind genuine science and don’t make drastic, unscientific decisions. It is still vividly relevant, beautiful, and worthwhile reading. I also got to read this in Silver Spring, Maryland, which is where Carson wrote it.

Content warnings for ableist language.

[natureisthegreatestartist]

[forasecondtherewedwon]

Hey, happy Earth Day to you from me because I haven't seen any Earth Day posts going around yet. Earth Day is 56 years old this year, which is pretty cool.

Thanks to the schedule I made last October for my PhD comprehensive exam reading list, I am, by utter coincidence, reading Silent Spring by Rachel Carson today. Many consider Silent Spring the foundational text of the environmental movement. I'm 85 pages in at the moment, and it's both a rhetorically impressive and incredibly upsetting read. I'm reading it because one of my highest priorities, in this degree and in my life, is continuing to further my knowledge about the climate crisis, globally and locally. By doing this, I believe I improve my ability to act, and act wisely.

After spending almost seven months reading intensely about the environment through the eyes of many different writers of fiction, nonfiction, and poetry, the concept I've been turning over and over in my mind is belonging. Approaches that lean towards hope rather than despair are ones in which the author experiences, even if they don't put into words, a sense of belonging in the world.

Talking to the people in my life, including classmates at my university, I've commonly encountered a deep love of the natural world, yet an even more influential feeling of regret or helplessness rooted in the belief that humans are an inherently bad and out-of-place thing in the world, tragically capable of a destructive power so much larger than our will to care-take, nurture, and leave alone. We've forgotten our belonging, and that forgetting is to the detriment of ourselves and our planet.

This is just an impromptu post to share a little about my current concerns and thought processes, and to give you—if you find you need one today or any day—an impetus that fortifies or repairs your relationship with agency. Remember that everything on this planet exists in relation. You are not outside of that. If you need something to do for Earth Day, I encourage you to reflect on and tend your sense of belonging 🩷

[halcyonidae]

— Rachel Carson, Always, Rachel: The Letters of Rachel Carson and Dorothy Freeman 1952 - 1964