What brought you to Rachel Carson and sustained your interest in her over several decades?
Originally it was because I was teaching environmental history to undergraduates and none of them knew who Rachel Carson was. Some of them had heard of Silent Spring, but there was a huge gap in their education in highschool. So my initial reaction was that this was terrible, because this is one of the key thinkers of the twentieth century about where we are and where we’re going. And it’s a book that is not only rich in a scientific way – it’s rich in public policy as well. So I began to write a classroom biography to remedy the situation. Then I found I had a whole bunch of personal connections with Rachel Carson that I didn’t know about. We were from the same area outside of Pittsburgh; her mother and my grandmother were in the same women’s circle, which I found out after my grandmother’s death. My high school biology teacher turned out to have been one of Rachel’s best friends in college and one of the four students in science at Rachel’s college – there were only four allowed to be in science [ed.: Carson attended Pennsylvania Women’s College in Pittsburgh in the late 1920s]. Finally my parents moved to an area that was a former cranberry bog that Rachel used to come to with her mentor from Chatham College to study wildflowers. So I sort of had these three personal connections and I turned from just writing a classroom biography to writing a big biography. And no one had been able to do that because of various problems with the Carson estate. So I just began to interview all the people who were still alive and knew Carson. Thank goodness I did, because I took about two hundred interviews and now they’re all dead except for one man and he’ll be one hundred next year. So the book has some important staying power because of the original research that went in to it with people that actually knew her and could talk about what it was like to live through Silent Spring.
What was the research process like and what kind of obstacles were there to writing the book?
The research process was first to read everything Carson ever wrote. I got a fellowship to the Beinecke library at Yale where her papers are. And then I interviewed all these people and started writing at the Smithsonian. The hang-up with the estate was that there were some sensitivities in Carson’s life. They were loath to have a biography and made it impossible to do by charging a lot of money to quote Carson. I was able to get in because I did my homework the other way. I went the back streets and got these other people to say that I wasn’t some hack and was going to write something judiciously done that wasn’t just an exposé.
Silent Spring had such a consciousness changing effect when it came out. We have a different set of concerns, but it seems like there’s a need for that kind of change again. Do you think that kind of public impact is something that’s still possible?
There’s an article coming out in the New York Times Magazine this Sunday by Eliza Griswold asking exactly if it’s possible for a book today to make the kind of splash that Silent Spring made. And a lot of people are convinced that it isn’t, both because of the historic day in which we live and the multiplicity of issues but also because policy questions that make no one able to speak for as many as Carson could speak for. However, I think the author of the article and I disagree on that – I think it’s kind of a bogus question. Harriet Beecher Stowe wrote Uncle Tom’s Cabin a hundred years before Carson and it made exactly the kind of splash that Silent Spring did a hundred years later. And who knows, maybe that same kind of book could be written today. Uncle Tom’s Cabin took a moral question, slavery. Rachel’s book is also about a moral issue: what are we doing to the environment and should we be doing that. I think there are similarities between the two. Another book taking a moral issue of our time could also have that kind of impact it were written well. That’s a big caveat because no one can write like Carson did; she was one of the best writers of the twentieth century.
Pesticides seem quite distant from current environmental concerns, where climate change is so dominant. What is the continued relevance of Silent Spring?
The environment has become a real battlefield now; there are so many competing interests. There have been some very good books on global warming and climate change, but there hasn’t been a single one that’s been able to wrap them all together and get people galvanized in quite the same way. I think that the body politic is so fractured and so poisoned really by the questions of whose science is right and what is science – how do we know for sure and that since science is never certain maybe it [climate change] doesn’t exist and it’s all a hoax. There’s that aspect that Carson didn’t face in her day.
But even Carson was attacked with very similar arguments.
Absolutely.
Do you think there’s something about how broad an issue climate change is?
I think so. Carson went into groundwater and air as well as carcinogens and so forth, but her real point was to galvanize people to take some action and to morally question their government and not just to sit back and assume that whatever they say must be right.
Silent Spring isn’t just about pesticides though, but about having a ecological consciousness.
Right. That everything is connected to everything else. And I think that is still the issue. Until we see ourselves as part of dual systems, of interconnected systems, we’re not going to go anywhere.
Fundamentally, her book comes down to seeing environmental rights as human rights. And that I think is the galvanizing issue. It isn’t just about whose world it is – it’s our world and the environment is us and we are it. The politicization is going to happen no matter what, but if we frame the discussion of environmental rights in the framework of a human rights discussion – that environmental rights are human rights – then we see two, dual, systems as one. And that’s the only hope.
Carson worked for the federal government and DDT was developed for the military. How can Carson help us chart a path between the necessary role of government and also the danger of government and military dominance in scientific research?
When she makes a speech that’s in my book Lost Woods to the Garden Club of America she says that when you here someone make a claim about something, you have to ask “who speaks and why?” And that was quite a revolutionary statement. She was being very political there, I think. What she was really suggesting was this: “You don’t believe it now, but the government and the legal system can lie to you because of money and because they want to protect themselves.” Money and power are the operating system, even more so today. So in suggesting that scientists and government officials was a huge blow and it was revolutionary. I see many seeds of social revolution in Silent Spring – in suggesting that governments lie, that we have to be vigilant, that money and not just goodwill is a motive, in suggesting that environmental rights are human rights. It’s really a democratic manifesto.
-Emilio Comay del Junco
