Cheers to Endless “Noisy Summers” Thanks to Rachel Carson’s “Silent Spring”

Here at Brainwash, we celebrate bold, fearless, visionaries. Especially those who challenge the status quo, risking everything for the hope of a better world.

So today we’re celebrating Rachel Carson — born on this day in 1907 — for her meticulous investigative reporting work and her uniquely brilliant, beautifully-poetic storytelling that helped us take a right turn towards a road less traveled.

“We stand now where two roads diverge. But unlike the roads in Robert Frost’s familiar poem, they are not equally fair. The road we have long been traveling is deceptively easy, a smooth superhighway on which we progress with great speed, but at its end lies disaster. The other fork of the road — the one less traveled by — offers our last, our only chance to reach a destination that assures the preservation of the earth.

-Rachel Carson, Silent Spring

I read Silent Spring as a graduate student (Science Writing) at Johns Hopkins University. And I’ll carry pieces of it with me always. It is both deeply disturbing and immensely powerful. It forever altered the thinking and behavior of individuals and industry.

Ultimately, this book launched the environmental movement as we know it today. It’s shaped millions of young, influential minds from Erin Brockovich to Greta Thunberg.

In it, Carson challenges the $300,000,000 pesticide industry, exposing the potentially harmful and catastrophically deadly effects of widespread agricultural and aerial chemical spraying to control insects — with a particularly deep dive into Dichlorodiphenyltrichloroethane — commonly referred to as DDT.

But Carson did something else, equally impressive. She pioneered an entirely new genre of writing. The lyrical artistry of poetry and fiction… the mysticism of fantasy… Carson brought all those same aesthetics into the realm of non-fiction.

As I said before, Silent Spring is immensely impressive with its meticulously documented research and reporting, well-deserving of a Pulitzer in investigative journalism. But its prose reads poetically — nature personified and brought to life in a sublimely Romantic-Era way, giving Wordsworth and Coleridge a run for their money.

All the while, using the whole gambit of literary elements like metaphor and imagery as complements to her carefully constructed narrative arc designed to “win her case” — with objectively clear, concise, intelligent, philosophical and legal vernacular.

It’s a true masterpiece. Her argument and entire case against the industry is airtight. Something most lawyers will only ever dream of emulating.

Case and point: see collection of quotes from the book below:

“Most of us walk unseeing through the world, unaware alike of its beauties, its wonders, and the strange and sometimes terrible intensity of the lives that are being lived about us.”

“Those who contemplate the beauty of the earth find reserves of strength that will endure as long as life lasts. There is something infinitely healing in the repeated refrains of nature - the assurance that dawn comes after night, and spring after winter.”

“Have we fallen into a mesmerized state that makes us accept as inevitable that which is inferior or detrimental, as though having lost the will or the vision to demand that which is good?”

“How could intelligent beings seek to control a few unwanted species by a method that contaminated the entire environment and brought the threat of disease and death even to their own kind? Yet this is precisely what we have done. We have done it, moreover, for reasons that collapse the moment we examine them.”

“As Albert Schweitzer has said, ‘Man can hardly even recognize the devils of his own creation.’”

In Carson’s imagined and real portrayal of a Silent Spring, the sound of silence is what happens as a consequence of man trying to control pests that destroy crops and are otherwise a nuisance to our modern and luxurious notions of “comfort”.

Illustration by Valero Doval, courtesy of The New York Times Magazine

But those chemicals do not discriminate… and once they’ve disrupted the web of life, we have inadvertently harmed or killed not only the pests that annoy us... But the birds that sing to us. And the bees that pollinate our crops to provide our food supply. And the very marrow in our own bones. And the organs, blood, and tissue of our own offspring.

So surely it is no surprise that Carson’s exploration of this inconvenient truth ruffled some feathers in a big way.

According to The Environment & Society Portal:

The history books say that the American environmental movement began on 16 June 1962, the date of the New Yorker magazine that contained the first of three excerpts from Rachel Carson’s new book, Silent Spring. Controversy ignited immediately. Just five weeks later, before the book was even out, a 22 July headline in the New York Times declared, “‘Silent Spring’ is Now Noisy Summer.” Houghton Mifflin released Silent Spring on 27 September. It sold hundreds of thousands of copies and stayed on the best-seller list for thirty-one months.

Sadly, Carson died of breast cancer when she was just 56-years-old in 1964 — just two years after this book was published in 1962.

And although she didn’t live to see the tsunami effect her work had on the world and the environment at large, we can all thank her in our own small ways (natural pest repellents vs chemical ones, for a start) as we continue walking down this road less traveled so that we may enjoy endless noisy summers.