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NY Times Sunday Book Review September 14, 2012
The Poisoned Earth
By ELIZABETH ROYTE
ON A FARTHER SHORE
The Life and Legacy of Rachel Carson
By William Souder
Illustrated. 496 pp. Crown Publishers. $30.
On the bookshelves of many a contemporary environmental journalist looms
at least one canonical text she’s hesitant to read. For this reviewer,
it was Rachel Carson’s “Silent Spring,” among the gloomiest books ever
written, an unrelenting catalog of crimes committed by man against
nature. But after reading William Souder’s engrossing new biography of
Carson, “On a Farther Shore,” I returned to the book and discovered its
central message to be — depressingly — timeless. Substitute organic
pesticides and herbicides with the endocrine-disrupting compounds found
in everyday household items or the creep of chemicals used in
hydrofracking, and you may experience the same hair-prickling alarm
felt by Carson’s readers 50 years ago.
“Silent Spring” was a clarion call that helped pave the way toward
establishment of the Environmental Protection Agency, tighter controls
on the use of chemicals and other regulatory achievements. But success
for its unassuming and enigmatic middle-aged author was no fluke, as
Souder makes abundantly clear. By the time Carson signed her contract
for this book, she had written scores of magazine and newspaper articles
and three best-selling books about the sea, one of which, the lyrical
“Sea Around Us,” had been serialized in The New Yorker. She was
considered the nation’s pre-eminent nature writer. Her great themes,
novel to many Americans at the time, were the biological forces that
link all life through the ages, the interdependence of living organisms
and the continual cycling of nutrients and genetic material through
species and over time.
Before Carson became a superstar of narrative nonfiction — showered with
awards, honorary degrees and speaking offers — she was a mild-mannered
government drone who spent 16 years writing press releases and pamphlets
for what eventually became the United States Fish and Wildlife Service.
It was a perfect job for a biophiliac (Carson was an avid bird-watcher)
who excelled at doing homework and massaging experts for information.
(Though Carson had a master’s in zoology, she never worked as a
scientist. And while she felt drawn to the sea and specialized in
matters oceanic, she spent little time on the water, rarely ventured
deeper than her ankles and never corrected the media’s presumption that
she was a frequent diver.)
But even as Carson churned out propaganda, she was reading and
collecting government reports on the unintended consequences of
pesticide use. By 1946, she had serious doubts not only about
pesticides’ safety but about government’s ability — or will — to protect
environmental health over economic interests. By the summer of 1962,
when The New Yorker excerpted three chapters of “Silent Spring,” her
audience was primed for science-and-technology-related anxiety.
Americans knew about birth defects caused by thalidomide, a supposedly
safe drug; they’d weathered a “cranberry scare,” in which
pesticide-contaminated fruit was pulled from the market just days before
Thanksgiving; and they’d learned to “duck and cover” in anticipation of
a nuclear attack.
Carson artfully linked radioactive fallout with the indiscriminate use
of pesticides; they were, Souder writes, the “twin fears of the modern
age.” The parallels between the chemicals were, to Carson, exact and
inescapable: both were invisible, acutely toxic, mutagenic and had
effects that could last for generations. Such negative impacts, Carson
believed, were the consequence of the “impetuous and heedless pace of
man rather than the deliberate pace of nature.”
Carson had a knack for encapsulating big ideas and for saying exactly
what she meant. Her voice could be clear and plain (“The problem that
concerns us here . . . ”) or poetical (she feared “a sterile world
ungraced by the curving wing of a bird in flight”). But none of this
came easily. Souder paints Carson as an obsessive reviser and a
meticulous researcher who was often blocked, she said, by her uneasiness
that human beings had acquired the power to reshape the world so profoundly.
Souder is at his best when he places Carson’s intellectual development
in context with the nascent environmental movement. The storm over
“Silent Spring,” he notes, was a “cleaving point” in history when the
“gentle, optimistic proposition called ‘conservation’ began its
transformation into the bitterly divisive idea that would come to be
known as ‘environmentalism.’” (Souder isn’t shy about expressing his own
disappointment with what he views as a permanent wall between partisans,
with nature and science pitted against an “unbreakable coalition of
government and industry, the massed might of the establishment.”)
As Carson and her publisher expected, the chemical industry pounced on
“Silent Spring” — even as it climbed best-seller lists — for overstating
the downside and ignoring the upsides of pesticides. (Souder quotes
Carson directly defending herself only once. California, one of the few
states with accurate records, she said, was reporting “as many as 1,000
accidental poisonings a year.” That might be good enough for Souder, but
we never learn if the victims were crickets, catbirds or campesinos.)
More significant, because they linger to this day, were the attacks that
cast ecology as a subversive subject and Carson as a Communist. To love
nature, in this absolutist paradigm, is to abhor business, to reject
capitalism and by extension America itself. One chemical company claimed
that by condemning pesticides (in fact, the book argued only for limits
and restraint in their use), Carson hoped to reduce our food supply to
“East-curtain parity.”
Souder writes vividly and with great empathy for his subject and her
cause. But steeped in Carsoniana, he occasionally slips into her
old-fashioned locutions (“And so you see that . . . ”), or even into
grandiosity (Carson has “the voice of someone standing above this
elemental environment and feeling within it the slow pulse of geologic
time and the mighty force of evolution that lies inside and beyond the
surging waters”). One wishes, also, that the author had paid more
attention to gender politics: he doesn’t explain how Carson managed to
write four intensely researched books while running a household,
managing the financial affairs of her family and, later, raising her
orphaned grandnephew. Nor does he fully explore Carson’s unconventional
romantic arrangement. He sketches the outlines of her 11-year intimate
relationship with a married woman named Dorothy Freeman but fails to
explain how or if Freeman’s husband, Stanley, dealt with it.
But these points detract little from an absorbing narrative. In Souder’s
telling, almost every aspect of Carson’s life and times becomes
captivating: her difficult personal circumstances (she grew up in rural
poverty, was the sole breadwinner in her family and battled breast
cancer while writing and then defending “Silent Spring”); the publishing
milieu; and the continuing friction between those who would preserve
nature versus those who would bend it to provide utility for man.
Souder warms up slowly, presenting Carson as a mild and mousy girl who
fell into her career thanks to a charismatic mentor. As she matured,
however, Carson quietly simmered with attitude, indignation and, once
she became more successful, a righteous ego. Released from government
service and financial peril, she roared at the forces she believed were
destroying nature, her greatest source of pleasure and the thing without
which, to pervert the classic advertising slogan of the agricultural
chemical manufacturer Monsanto, life itself would be impossible.
Elizabeth Royte is the author of “Garbage Land” and “Bottlemania.”
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