Tag: Rachel Carson

Categories
Arctic

July 2, 1952 – Rachel Carson says Arctic warming

Seventy-one years ago today… Rachel Carson book The Sea Around Us is published. It includes observations (uncontroversial) on Arctic climate warming…

“It is now beyond question that a definite change in the arctic climate set in about 1900, that it became astonishingly marked about 1930, and that it is now spreading into sub-arctic and temperate regions. The frigid top of the world is very clearly warming up.”

After revising the completion date, Carson completed the manuscript in June 1950. By that time, several periodicals (The New Yorker, Science Digest, and The Yale Review) were interested in publishing some of the chapters.[6] Nine of fourteen chapters were serialized in The New Yorker beginning on June 2, 1951, and the book was published on July 2 1952 by Oxford University Press.

The amount of carbon dioxide in the air was roughly 312ppm. As of 2023 it is 423ppm, but check here for daily measures. 

The context was that in the 1950s DDT was good for you. As was Technology. Everything was going to be better living. And Carson came along and said ‘not so fast’… She wasn’t the only person to say this, but she said it well…

What I think we can learn from this

Resistance is fertile

What happened next

In 1962, when Silent Spring came out, the Chemicals industry, etc. went apeshit, unused to being challenged. Attacks of all sorts ensued. Of course. And have kept going…

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.

Categories
United States of America

April 14, 1964 – RIP Rachel Carson

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.

Categories
Ignored Warnings United States of America

September 27, 1962 – “Silent Spring” published as a book

On this day September 27  1962  the hugely influential book “Silent Spring” was published.

It had already been serialised in the New Yorker from June.

Carson’s book is regarded as the starting gun for public awareness of the dangers of technology-driven economic growth (what is now known as “The Great Acceleration” in some circles).

Industry’s response was predictable, involving heavy-handed satire and attempted smears (Carson was a lesbian, Carson was only a woman and therefore emotional and unreliable etc etc).

(Btw, see Hoffman and Ocasio (2001) Not All Events Are Attended Equally: Toward a Middle-Range Theory of Industry Attention to External Events)

On this day the PPM was 316.25 ppm. Now it is 421ish – but see here for the latest.

Why this matters. 

If you stick your head above the parapet and say that what seems normal is actually deeply problematic, expect trouble. (That is not to say you deserve it, or should accept it, but you’d be wise to expect it).

What happened next?

Well, in the short-term, the Cuban Missile Crisis of October 1962 almost solved all of humanity’s long-term problems very abruptly.