Sixty nine years ago, on this day, April 14, 1964, Rachel Carson died. Her second book, based on three long articles in The New Yorker, was Silent Spring. It is surely one of the most influential books of the twentieth century.
The amount of carbon dioxide in the air was roughly 321.8ppm. As of 2023 it is 420ppm, but check here for daily measures. ,
The context was
Carson had written a previous book, on the oceans, in which she mentioned that the Arctic climate was warming. However, her work on “Silent Spring” serialised in three long articles in The New Yorker was a publishing sensation, coming just as a series of anxieties about the consequences – social and environmental – around the 1950s boom were coming to a head.
By this time, Carson was already seriously unwell with the cancer that was to kill her. She was, of course, ferociously attacked by the chemicals industry and its allies. This is what happens…
What I think we can learn from this
Vale Rachel Carson!!
Her enemies were instructive.
Other doom-critics were less guarded in their attacks. Few were more indignant than Thomas R. Shepard, Jr., the publisher of Look magazine. In his remarkable 1973 book The Doomsday Lobby, coauthored with Melvin Grayson, he clearly allowed outrage to divert him from the path of reason. Particular invective was reserved for Silent Spring. The book was, the two men argued, an attack on the business establishment, an attack on scientific and technological progress, an attack on the United States, and an attack on man himself. Millions of Americans had bought the book “as avidly as the buxom hausfraus of Bavaria had bought the garbage of Adolf Hitler, and for much the same reason.”
(McCormick, 1991:85) Reclaiming Paradise
See also Lewis Herber (aka Murray Bookchin), who wrote a book called “Our Synthetic Environment” covering the same territory. See here for more info – https://blog.oup.com/2015/08/murray-bookchin-climate-change/
And see tomorrow’s post for Herber/Bookchin’s next book, in 1965…
What happened next
DDT came under the microscope, and went from more-or-less wonder chemical to pariah in 8 years…
The global environment movement took off in 1968/9
What do you think? Does this pass the ‘so what?’ threshold? Have I got facts wrong? Interpretation wrong? Please do comment on this post, unless you are a denialist, obvs.