Fifty Years of Silent Spring
Post by Arielle Helmick
Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring was published fifty years ago today. Having taken her name, we at the RCC would like to take a look back at Carson’s legacy, in terms of what she has meant for the Center, as well as what positive environmental change has happened in the last fifty years, as reflected upon by some of our fellows.
The Rachel Carson Center is…in Germany?
One of the most common questions we get at the RCC has to do with our name. Why is a center for advanced study in the environmental humanities that is based in Munich named after an American biologist and nature writer, who never worked in Europe? The reasons for our recognition of Carson highlight the legacy she left for the world and reflect the Center’s mission.
To begin with, Carson represents the beginning of the modern environmental movement. She was not the only “environmentalist” figure in the early 1960s, but her book Silent Spring certainly served as one of the catalysts of current ecological understanding and activism. And, the beginnings of environmental history and the environmental humanities can be clearly tied to the environmental movements of the 1960s and 1970s.
More profoundly, Carson—a marine biologist—wrote approachable texts about nature, the sea, and pesticide use for the general public. She bridged the gap between the natural sciences and the humanities with her accessible writing.
Moreover, Carson had a significant global impact; she may have been an American working primarily in North America, but her work has traveled, and is still travelling, the globe. Silent Spring had been translated into a multitude of languages by 1970, including French, German, Portuguese, Dutch, Italian, Icelandic, Swedish, and Japanese. Throughout its five decades of existence, the book has continued to be read and translated, and Carson lives on in global dialogues about the environment.
In Rachel’s Wake: How Far Have We Come?
To commemorate the fiftieth anniversary of the book, we asked fellows past and present at the Center to share their opinion on what they consider the greatest accomplishment in environmental protection in the last fifty years to be. Here are some of their responses.
Paul Josephson, Colby College, Maine, US
“The greatest accomplishment in environmental protection in the last fifty years is the establishment of regulatory agencies with teeth to enforce statutes. While in many places (the United States, Russia, and elsewhere), businesses and others have pushed back against regulation, there is a silver lining to smog-less clouds: children in kindergarten and elementary school often learn about ecosystems, recycling, and other important things on a basic level. We’ve all seen an 8-year-old boy or girl tell Mommy or Daddy not to waste food, to separate paper, plastic, glass, and to protect biodiversity. At least I have. Thank you, Rachel Carson, resident of Maine.”
Siddharta Krishnan, Ashoka Trust for Research in Ecology and the Environment (ATREE), Bangalore, India
“The superlative ‘greatest’ implies a collective, albeit legislated or popular, intervention in a crucial environmental resource or process for the well-being of a maximum number of people. But it’s important to think about geographical scales and associated resource and cultural specificity. So from a global perspective, consensus on climate change could be the greatest act of environmental protection. But for pastoral or riverine resource cultures, the greatest could be maintaining grassland or savannahs; and disallowing damming respectively could also be one of the greatest protective acts.”
Melinda Laituri, Colorado State University, USA
“I have a very US-centric answer to your question — I think that US Clean Water Act of 1972. This act made significant progress in cleaning polluted waters and regulating discharge into US waters.”
Gary Martin, Global Diversity Foundation, UK
“Among the many great accomplishments in environmental protection in the last 50 years, I would highlight the achievements and international recognition of Indigenous Peoples’ and Community Conserved Areas and Territories (ICCAs). From the smallest sacred groves in Ethiopia to the largest indigenous reserves in Amazonia, community conservation is leading the way in guaranteeing environmental resilience around the world.”
Lawrence Culver, Utah State University, USA
“The great change in environmental protection over the last fifty years has been the evolution from an environmentalism aimed at specific places—national parks, for example—to a more ecologically aware and global environmental movement. This is its greatest achievement, and has produced some notable successes, perhaps most especially the global banning of CFC chemicals which damage the ozone layer. Rachel Carson’s warnings about DDT played a huge role in this, as Silent Spring demonstrated that pesticide exposure was a problem without borders, and that chemicals could move through ecosystems in ways never imagined or intended. Now we will have to see if this movement can build on its success to tackle even greater global challenges, from overfishing of the oceans, to potable water shortages, and the challenge of climate change.”
Ingo Heidbrink, Old Dominion University, Virginia, USA
“In fact, if I start thinking about what has been achieved during the last fifty years when it comes to environmental protection, most of what comes to mind is about what has not been achieved up to now.
However, I think there’s maybe one point we should consider as a major achievement and that’s the simple fact that environmental issues have been recognized. Following the principle of “Recognizing, Understanding, and Overcoming” and realizing that researchers and environmental activists all around the globe are trying to understand, there might be at least hope that we could overcome all these challenges one day, even if we are at best at the beginning of the journey…”
What do you see as the greatest achievement in environmental protection in the last fifty years? Share your ideas as a comment below!
Further Reading:
- Stoll, Mark. “Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring, A Book that Changed the World,” The Environment & Society Portal. 2012.
- Nixon, Rob. “Rachel Carson’s Prescience.” The Chronicle of Higher Education. 3 September 2012.
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