Rachel Carson's Environmental Ethics
Author(s):
Philip Cafaro
Introduction
Rachel Carson has been called the founder of the U.S.
environmental movement, which some date, plausibly, to the
publication of Silent Spring in 1962. That
best-selling book focused public attention on the problem of
pesticide and other chemical pollution, and led to such
landmark legislation as the U.S. Clean Water Act and the
banning of DDT in many countries throughout the world. Whatever
Carson's arguments were in Silent Spring, they
succeeded. Yet she has received little attention from
environmental ethicists.1
I believe Rachel Carson was not just a successful
polemicist, but an important environmental thinker. With the
recent publication of a definitive biography, Linda Lear's
Rachel Carson: Witness for Nature, we can better
understand her environmental philosophy, for Carson lived that
philosophy as well as wrote about it.2Meeting Carson the scientist and
naturalist clarifies her understanding of the role knowledge
can play in a larger relationship to nature. Studying her
fifteen-year career as a U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service
biologist gives valuable insight into her views on practical
conservation issues. Carson's personal story teaches us much
about humility and courage, as she triumphed over various
setbacks and achieved great literary success, while faithfully
discharging her many responsibilities to family, friends, and
nature. Still, in order to best understand Carson's
environmental ethics, the place to start is with her final
work, Silent Spring.
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Silent Spring
Silent Spring constitutes an extended argument
for strictly limiting the use of pesticides, herbicides, and
other dangerous agricultural and industrial chemicals, and for
their careful application and safe disposal when such use is
necessary. This argument rests on both factual and evaluative
premises. Factually, Silent Spring's case rests on
numerous scientific and anecdotal accounts of the abuse of
these chemicals. It also rests on such easy-to-establish facts
as companies' common failure to test products' effects on
humans and non-humans, users' frequent negligence in following
instructions for applying agricultural chemicals, and the
weakness and lack of enforcement of government regulations.
Carson's clear presentation of such facts, and of the basic
science needed to understand the issues, gave her book its
authority. Carson's scientific credentials had already been
firmly established in earlier works which had popularized
recent developments in oceanography and marine biology. Without
Carson's scientific credibility and impressive presentation of
"the facts", Silent Spring would not have won such
a large hearing.3
Nevertheless, evaluative or ethical premises were equally
important to Carson's overall position. She avoided complicated
ethical argument in Silent Spring, perhaps
believing that the ethical issues really were quite simple.
More likely, Carson reasoned that simple appeals to widely held
values would be more convincing. In any case, Silent
Spring is filled with short, emphatic ethical statements
and arguments. Evaluatively (and somewhat schematically) its
plea for restraint rests on a triple foundation of human health
considerations, the moral considerability of non-human beings,
and the value to humans of preserving wild nature and a diverse
and varied landscape.
Doubtless most important for many readers were Carson's
chapters on acute pesticide poisoning, and these chemicals
potential to cause cancer and human birth defects. For these
readers Carson states the moral clearly: 'Man, however much he
may like to pretend the contrary, is part of nature. [He
cannot] escape a pollution that is now so thoroughly
distributed throughout the world'.4Examples of human sicknesses and
fatalities caused by inappropriate use of chemicals recur
throughout the book.
Carson was acutely aware of the importance of good health,
having suffered a variety of serious illnesses over the years.
In fact, she was dying of cancer as she finished Silent
Spring. Yet in writing the book, she seems to have been
more concerned with the destruction of wild nature and its
resultant human loss. In her acknowledgments, she writes that
it was a letter from a birdwatcher, who 'told me of her own
bitter experience of a small world made lifeless' by pesticide
poisoning, which 'brought my attention sharply back to a
problem with which I had long been concerned. I then realized I
must write this book'.5Carson told Life magazine: 'I wrote [Silent
Spring] because I think there is a great danger that the
next generation will have no chance to know nature as we do'.
In a letter to her best friend she wrote: 'I told you once that
if I kept silent I could never again listen to a veery's song
without overwhelming self-reproach'.6
Silent Spring clearly shows Rachel Carson's
concern for all of life, human and non-human. Many of its
arguments explicitly assert or implicitly rely on the moral
considerability of non-human beings. For example, she recounts
a massive dieldrin spraying program to eradicate Japanese
beetles in and around Sheldon, Illinois. Robins, meadowlarks,
pheasants and other birds were virtually wiped out; so were
squirrels. Amazingly, ninety per cent of area farm cats were
killed during the first season of spraying. 'Incidents like the
eastern Illinois spraying', Carson reflected:
raise a question that is not only scientific but moral. The
question is whether any civilization can wage relentless war
on life without destroying itself, and without losing the
right to be called civilized . . . These creatures [wild and
domestic] are innocent of any harm to man. Indeed, by their
very existence they and their fellows make his life more
pleasant. Yet he rewards them with a death that is not only
sudden but horrible.Carson goes on to describe the ghastly
convulsions observed in poisoned birds at Sheldon, and
concludes:
By acquiescing in an act that can cause such suffering to a
living creature, who among us is not diminished as a human
being?7
This passage clearly implies moral considerability on the
animals' part and moral responsibility on our part. Both
inflicting unnecessary suffering and causing unnecessary loss
of non-human life are morally wrong. A fully human being is a
humane being, feeling compassion for the suffering of others. A
true civilization does not dominate or destroy the non-human
world; it protects and seeks to understand it.
In another section, Carson fights the common prejudice
against insects by explaining to her readers the important role
of honeybees, wild bees and other pollinators in natural and
human economies. 'These insects', she concludes:
so essential to our agriculture and indeed to our landscape
as we know it, deserve something better from us than the
senseless destruction of their habitat.8
Here again, the notion of desert clearly implies moral
considerability. Similar examples could be multiplied many
times. They are not usually found pure--that is, Carson does
not assert non-human moral considerability regardless of, or in
contrast to, human self-interest. Instead, as in the examples
above, she asserts non-human moral considerability and asserts
that our selfish human interests practically harmonize with its
recognition.
Our interests and their interests largely coincide --for two
reasons. First, we inhabit the same environment. Hence we
cannot poison other animals without poisoning ourselves.
Second, preserving wild nature helps promote human happiness
and flourishing. Carson approvingly quotes ecologist Paul
Shepard and U.S. Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas on
the aesthetic value and intellectual stimulation provided by
wildlife, wild places, and a diverse and varied
landscape.9She also adds her own arguments:
To the bird watcher, the suburbanite who derives joy from
birds in his garden, the hunter, the fisherman or the
explorer of wild regions, anything that destroys the wildlife
of an area for even a single year has deprived him of
pleasure to which he has a legitimate right.
Over increasingly large areas of the United States, spring
now comes unheralded by the return of the birds, and the
early mornings are strangely silent where once they were
filled with the beauty of bird song...Can anyone imagine
anything so cheerless and dreary as a springtime without a
robinÕs song?
Who has decided -- who has the right to decide -- for the
countless legions of people who were not consulted that the
supreme value is a world without insects, even though it be
also a sterile world ungraced by the curving wing of a bird
in flight. The decision is that of the authoritarian
temporarily entrusted with power; he has made it during a
moment of inattention by millions to whom beauty and the
ordered world of nature still have a meaning that is deep and
imperative.10
Pleasure, adventure, beauty, grace, even meaning--all these
may be driven from our world along with the "target organisms",
impoverishing our own lives. A Silent Spring is a
season of loss to us and to them, the losses inseparably
linked. As she finished Silent Spring, Rachel
Carson was planning her next book: a guide to help parents
explore nature with their children, tentatively titled Help
Your Child to Wonder. 11
What is the relative importance of these three main
evaluative premises -- preserve human health! respect the moral
considerability of non-human beings! promote human happiness
and flourishing! -- in Silent Spring? I see no
evidence that one was any more important than another to
Carson's main argument. The book's title suggests, perhaps,
that Carson herself was motivated more by the latter two
premises, with human health concerns secondary. This impression
is strengthened when we recall that her previous books were
works of natural history which did not deal with human health
issues. Nevertheless, health is necessary for happiness and
flourishing, and human health considerations play a prominent
part in Silent Spring. Given their ubiquity and
interrelatedness, it seems best to say that all three premises
are crucial to Rachel Carson's environmental ethics. They are
the three strong legs of an environmental ethics in which a
healthy, diverse environment provides the wherewithal for human
and non-human flourishing.
Carson's critics often tried to drive a wedge between these
three ethical premises, forcing her to acknowledge cases where
various human interests, and especially human and non-human
interests, were at odds. As a bit of doggerel in an information
packet from the National Pest Control Association had it:
Hunger, hunger, are you listening,
To the words from Rachel's pen?
Words which taken at face value,
Place lives of birds 'bove those of men.12
Many critics argued that DDT was necessary to prevent
mosquito born diseases and increase harvests in developing
nations.13Here the question of this necessity became
important (were there other ways to accomplish these important
goals?) along with a complete reckoning of the actual effects
of using these chemicals. Carson generally steered clear of the
ethical question of how to balance human and non-human
interests. She probably believed that she stood a better chance
of moving society toward safer, reduced pesticide use by
emphasizing the common dangers pesticides posed to humans and
non-humans. In her own life, however, she often went
considerably out of her way to avoid harming non-human beings,
carefully returning microscopic tidepool specimens to the ocean
after studying them, for example.14
Similarly, Carson criticized the increasing simplification
and sterility of modern farm and suburban landscapes, pointing
out a human cost to such dullness. Her opponents countered that
this was the cost of progress and prosperity, in effect arguing
that increased wealth and productivity were more important than
the merely aesthetic values appreciated by birdwatchers. 'We
can live without birds and animals', reflected one
correspondent, 'but, as the current market slump shows, we
cannot live without business'.15Once again, Carson preferred to argue
that the choice -- birds or business -- was a false one, in
most cases. But she also stood up strongly for the importance
of non-economic values in a truly human life; particularly the
appreciation of beauty, the search for knowledge, and the
achievement of wisdom.16Such values were important to many of her
readers, she believed, and if they weren't, they should be. As
for herself, she found birds more essential than banknotes to
her happiness.17
In general, Carson (and legions of environmentalists to
come) emphasized the complementarity in the great majority of
cases of the three basic goals of protecting human health,
preserving non-human life, and promoting human flourishing. She
shone a spotlight on the selfishness and short-sightedness
which so often undermined all three goals. Meanwhile, in trying
to move her society toward greater recognition of non-human
interests and higher human interests, Carson developed an
environmental ethics with both non-anthropocentric and
enlightened anthropocentric elements. While Silent
Spring shows how these two aspects may 'converge'
regarding an important public policy issue, Carson's own life,
dedicated to knowing and appreciating nature, shows how they
converge at the personal level.18Recognition of the intrinsic value of
non-human beings provides benefits that outweigh the
restrictions such recognition places upon us. So too, a nobler
view of human life -- one focused on friendship, the pursuit of
knowledge and a rich experience, rather than on getting and
spending -- should lead to less environmentally destructive
lifestyles. The lives of the great naturalists -- including
Rachel Carson's -- suggest that we really will live better
lives when we do right by nature.19
As philosophers, we are inclined to ask: what are the
'foundations' of Rachel Carson's environmental ethics?
Otherwise put: how does she justify her three main evaluative
premises (or her two controversial ones, concern for human
health presumably needing no justification)? Clearly,
meta-ethical reflection would have been out of place in a
popular work like Silent Spring, but I have found
little evidence that Carson gave sustained attention to this
issue elsewhere. Perhaps she believed that people who
understood and experienced wild nature would come to accept its
moral considerability and its continued importance to human
happiness and flourishing, and that philosophical arguments
could add little to such understanding and experience. Perhaps
she believed that by implying such general ethical principles
as "cause no unnecessary suffering" or "preserve opportunities
for human knowledge and experience", she was resting on ethical
ultimates which were beyond justification.
In Silent Spring Carson describes poisoned
ground squirrels whose attitudes in death -- backs bowed,
mouths filled with dirt from biting the ground -- suggest they
died in agony. She adds the simple reflection that causing such
suffering diminishes us as human beings. She pictures a varied
and beautiful roadside filled with bright flowers and buzzing
insects, then the same after spraying, a dull, sere, silent
wasteland. Now, she writes, it is 'something to be traversed
quickly, a sight to be endured with one's mind closed to
thoughts of the sterile and hideous world we are letting our
technicians make'.20Carson could paint such pictures and draw such
obvious morals for her readers. In her earlier natural history
writings, she helped hundreds of thousands of people to
recognize new plants and animals and appreciate what they were
seeing. She could create or enhance a mood before nature of
wonder, appreciation, or reverence. But more than that she
could not do. Without a personal experience of these things,
there is no is from which to move to the moral ought. With such
experience, the movement from is to ought is typically
accomplished. Let the philosopher who can better explain this
process do so!
Another intriguing question remains at the foundational
level: the role that religion or spirituality played in
grounding Carson's personal environmental ethic. Silent
Spring is dedicated to Albert Schweitzer and Carson's
biographer, Linda Lear, reports that a handwritten letter and
inscribed portrait from Schweitzer were Carson's most prized
possessions in her last years. In her foreward to Ruth
Harrison's Animal Machines, a pioneering work in the animal
welfare movement, Carson wrote of the need for a 'Schweitzerian
ethic that embraces decent consideration for all living
creatures--a true reverence for life'. Carson's previous
best-seller The Edge of the Sea shows flashes of a genuine if
unobtrusive spiritual sensibility; particularly in its final,
stirring paean to 'the enduring sea' and 'the ultimate mystery
of life', but also in its appreciation of the 'fragile beauty'
of small, transient, individual life-forms.21 Paul Brooks, Carson's
friend and long-time editor, wrote that Carson 'felt a
spiritual as well as physical closeness to the individual
creatures about whom she wrote' and asserted that 'her attitude
toward the natural world was that of a deeply religious
person'.22
Still, I think the importance of religion and spirituality
to Carson's environmental ethics can be exaggerated. She
clearly had moments of spiritual epiphany, but Carson's more
usual posture before nature, in her books and in her life,
seems to have been appreciation and interest. Reverence,
respect, and appreciation are not three names for the same
thing. Appeals to a proper reverence may have strong rhetorical
and logical force, when addressed to believers, but Carson uses
them sparingly in her books. Carson did write to a friend that
the 'Reverence-for-Life philosophy is of course somewhat like
my own', and other approving references to Schweitzer are
scattered throughout her writings and correspondence.23But it could be
that for her, the word "reverence" captures an ascription of
high value or intrinsic value, rather than an essentially
religious view of the world. Too, Carson always puts the
emphasis on life rather than on any putative creator. She
certainly had little interest in orthodox religious
doctrine.
Rachel Carson received many awards for writing Silent
Spring. In accepting the Schweitzer medal of the Animal
Welfare Institute, she said: 'I can think of no award that
would have more meaning for me or that would touch me more
deeply than this one, coupled as it is with the name of Albert
Schweitzer'. After discussing the account of how he first
formulated his cardinal principle of 'reverence for life',
Carson continued:
In his various writings, we may read Dr. Schweitzer's
philosophical interpretations of that phrase. But to many of
us, the truest understanding of Reverence for Life comes, as
it did to him, from some personal experience, perhaps the
sudden, unexpected sight of a wild creature, perhaps some
experience with a pet. Whatever it may be, it is something
that takes us out of ourselves, that makes us aware of other
life. From my own memories, I think of the sight of a small
crab alone on a dark beach at night, a small and fragile
being waiting at the edge of the roaring surf, yet so
perfectly at home in its world. To me it seemed a symbol of
life, and of the way life has adjusted to the forces of its
physical environment. Or I think of a morning when I stood in
a North Carolina marsh at sunrise, watching flock after flock
of Canada geese rise from resting places at the edge of a
lake and pass low overhead. In that orange light, their
plumage was like brown velvet. Or I have found that deep
awareness of life and its meaning in the eyes of a beloved
cat. 24
Here the focus is clearly on experience, rather than on
philosophical principles or religious doctrine.
Perhaps it is most accurate to say that Rachel Carson
embraced nature in all its manifestations, from the small to
the grand and from the scientific to the mystical. These
experiences and interactions seem to have motivated her own
powerful concern and effective action on behalf of nature.
Ultimately, I think, her ethical foundation is experiential.
Aesthetic, intellectual, sensual, imaginative, personal
experience grounds ethical judgments and action. In the main,
Carson's writings are concerned to facilitate such experiences,
rather than to argue for particular ethical positions. They
certainly do not argue for particular religious
beliefs.25
Three further themes round out the ethical argument of
Silent Spring. First, Carson's disapproval of
economism -- the overvaluation or exclusive focus on economic
goals and pursuits. Second, her criticisms of a human 'war on
nature'. Third, her warnings concerning the increased
artificiality and simplification of the landscape.
Carson criticized the age as one 'in which the right to make
a dollar at whatever cost is seldom challenged'. Corporations
and individuals make 'insatiable demands' on the land, while
commercial advertising lulls the users of dangerous chemicals
into a false sense of security. Non-economic values and
interests are routinely sacrificed to economic ones, while the
'true costs' of chemical spraying, including costs that cannot
be measured in dollars, are left uncounted.26Worst of all, people lose
the ability to see the land and its natural communities for
what they are, to learn their stories and appreciate their
beauty and complexity. Instead nature is reduced to natural
resources--both in our minds and on the ground--which humans
may fully engross or utterly change, without compunction.
Carson believed that conservation had to take economic reality
into account, including the need to feed and protect growing
numbers of human beings; hence her many suggestions for
alternatives to chemical control and safer means of applying
chemicals, when necessary. But she also saw the failure to
recognize non-economic realities as a denial of our full
humanity. Like the failure to prevent unnecessary suffering,
the failure to understand and appreciate nature lessened our
stature as human beings.
Carson was equally uncompromising in her criticism of what
she saw as a 'needless war' on nature. Again and again, she
decries the desire for domination in back of much of the use of
agricultural chemicals.27She saw a reveling in power for its own sake and
a will to simplify the landscape in order to control it. But
'the "control of nature"', she concluded Silent
Spring:
is a phrase conceived in arrogance, born of the
Neanderthal age of biology and philosophy, when it was
supposed that nature exists for the convenience of man . . .
[The] extraordinary capacities of life have been ignored by
the practitioners of chemical control who have brought to
their task . . . no humility before the vast forces with
which they tamper.28
Speaking directly to millions of Americans on the television
show 'CBS Reports' a few months before her death, she repeated
the message:
We still talk in terms of conquest . . . I think
weÕre challenged, as mankind has never been challenged
before, to prove our maturity and our mastery, not of nature
but of ourselves.29
Carson doubted that human beings would find peace among
themselves without first making peace with nature.30
Finally, Carson spoke out against artificiality and
simplification: on farms, forests and rangelands, as well as
towns, suburbs and highway margins. Anticipating our own
contemporary concern for the preservation of biodiversity,
Carson quotes ecologist Charles Elton, that 'the key to a
healthy plant or animal community lies in . . . the
conservation of variety'.31Such conservation of variety, particularly
at the local level, is also the key to preserving human
opportunities to know and enjoy nature. Carson insists that all
native species have a right to persist in their
environments--not just the ones human beings find attractive or
useful. And while we must manage and change much of the
landscape to suit our needs, some areas should be left wild,
free from human artifice and control.32
These three critiques -- of economism, domination, and
artificialization -- come together in Carson's criticism of
government efforts to wipe out sagebrush in the western United
States.33In an attempt to 'satisfy the insatiable demands of
the cattle-men for more grazing land', millions of acres of
sagebrush were sprayed with herbicides yearly during the 1950s
and 60s, in order to replace sage with grass. Carson asserts
that even from an economic point of view, this is a dubious
attempt, since the costs of the spraying program are immense
and the sagelands are already being utilized for grazing. More
important, though, the sage belongs on the landscape.
Well-suited to the arid climate west of the hundredth meridian,
through a long process of competition sage has come to dominate
large portions of the landscape, and many native birds and
mammals have come to depend on the sage. Eradicate the sage and
the sage grouse and antelope will dwindle or disappear. 'The
land will be poorer for the destruction of the wild things that
belong to it'. So will its human inhabitants--whether they know
it or not.
Once again, Carson does not provide elaborate arguments to
justify the moral considerability of these wild species and
natural communities, or the value, to us, of knowing and
appreciating them. A true teacher, she knows that she cannot
prove the superiority of knowledge over ignorance. But she can
make the pursuit of knowledge attractive. Once her readers know
and experience that of which she speaks, she is convinced, they
will value it. 'The natural landscape is eloquent of the
interplay of forces that have created it', Carson writes. 'It
is spread before us like the pages of an open book in which we
can read why the land is what it is, and why we should preserve
its integrity. But the pages lie unread'.34That is the problem. Before we
can appreciate ethical arguments for its preservation, we must
appreciate wild nature itself, and we cannot appreciate what we
have not seen, experienced, or at least imagined. Like a long
line of naturalist/conservationists before her, then, Rachel
Carson worked to teach us to read in the book of nature. In
turning to her earlier natural history writings, we gain a
fuller understanding of her environmental ethics.
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Non-Anthropocentrism
Today Rachel Carson is primarily known for Silent
Spring. But that was her fourth book to make the New
York Times bestseller list. Carson's natural history writings
-- Under the Sea-Wind (1941), the number one
best-seller The Sea Around Us (1951/1961) and
The Edge of the Sea (1955) -- explored the
astounding diversity of littoral and marine ecosystems. She
took readers to some of the wildest and hardest to imagine
places on earth: Arctic tundra in the grip of winter; the
weird, dark depths of the ocean; microscopic planktonic worlds.
Just as surely, Carson uncovered the many details of nature
close to hand: the fishing techniques of herons and skimmers;
the fine structures and hidden beauties of jellyfish. She was
also a great explainer of relationships and connections. 'It is
now clear that in the sea nothing lives to itself', she wrote,
and what holds true in the sea holds true throughout the
biosphere.35
This oft-repeated message resounds somewhat ominously in
Silent Spring, but even here Carson's clear
message is that life's complexity and interconnections are
cause for appreciation and celebration, if also for restraint.
'One might easily suppose', she wrote in an earlier book, 'that
nothing at all lived in or on or under these waters of the
seaÕs edge', but by its end we know differently, and we
come to the edge of the sea with new eyes, a better sense of
'the spectacle of life in all its varied manifestations', and a
desire to learn more.36Carson never doubted that increased knowledge
was more precious than increased material wealth, or that a
more widespread knowledge of nature would motivate people to
protect it.37And knowledge, for her, was not simply learned, but
lived and experienced, engaging and developing the senses and
emotions as well as the mind, our imaginations as much as our
analytic abilities.
Non-anthropocentrism is a main theme in the natural history
works. We have already seen that Carson's ethics were
non-anthropocentric: she recognized the moral considerability
of non-human beings. But Carson's work reminds us that
non-anthropocentrism is both an ethical position and an
intellectual task, and the latter demands as much from us as
the former. In particular, it demands repeated attention to the
non-human world: the setting aside of our works and purposes
and a concentration on natureÕs own stories and
realities.38Experienced often enough and set within the proper
intellectual frameworks, we may, we hope, see ourselves truly
as parts of a more-than-human whole. Carson is convinced that
such non-anthropocentrism is a part of wisdom.
The attempt to transcend anthropocentrism is found in her
earliest book, Under the Sea-Wind. In an 'author's
questionnaire' submitted to the marketing division of Simon
& Schuster, her first publishing house, she wrote:
I believe that most popular books about the ocean are
written from the viewpoint of a human observer and record his
impressions and interpretations of what he saw. I was
determined to avoid this human bias as much as possible . . .
I decided that the author as a person or a human observer
should never enter the story, but that it should be told as a
simple narrative of the lives of certain animals of the sea.
As far as possible, I wanted my readers to feel that they
were, for a time, actually living the lives of sea
creatures.39
Carson goes on to describe her efforts to imagine for
herself, and recreate for her audience, the world as
experienced by sandpipers, crabs, mackerels and eels. In this
difficult attempt, Carson worked back from what she knew of
each animal's natural history, to try to imagine how it might
perceive its environment and its varied interactions with other
creatures. Under the Sea-Wind is a fascinating attempt to marry
an imaginative, phenomenological exploration of other
consciousnesses with the latest researches in scientific
natural history.
Even in this first book, Carson's imagination took her
beyond a focus on individual animals to the larger forces which
shape their lives. 'I very soon realized', she wrote in the
questionnaire:
that the central character of the book was the ocean itself.
The smell of the sea's edge, the feeling of vast movements of
water, the sound of waves, crept into every page, and over
all was the ocean as the force dominating all its
creatures.40
How to make the ocean a character without inappropriate
personification thus became a delicate task. Like other serious
interpreters of nature, she struggled to avoid bogus
personification and the pathetic fallacy, on the one hand, and
an unjustified reductionism and simplification of nature's
complexity, on the other.41
Carson's next book, which gave her fame, also took
non-anthropocentrism as a key intellectual goal. The Sea Around
Us synthesized recent discoveries in oceanography and marine
biology, presenting them to a public whose interest in the sea
had been aroused by the naval battles and new underwater
technologies of World War II.42 Carson pictures the astonishing variety
and strangeness of marine life, and works to instill a sense of
the vast, titanic forces which have created it over geologic
time scales. She repeatedly invokes the ocean's radical
non-humanity, asking readers to imagine underwater 'tides so
vast they are invisible and uncomprehended by the senses of
man', or lights traveling over the water 'that flash and fade
away, lights that come and go for reasons meaningless to man',
though 'man, in his vanity, subconsciously attributes a human
origin' to them.43This ocean wilderness teaches humility and wisdom,
she believes, for modern man:
in the artificial world of his cities and towns...often
forgets the true nature of his planet and the long vistas of
its history, in which the existence of the race of men has
occupied a mere moment of time.44
The wildness and radical otherness of nature should be
known, imagined, experienced--on pain of ignorance and
arrogance.
Achieving such a perspective involves both knowledge and
imagination. From such a perspective, non-anthropocentric value
judgments will tend to follow, along with a truer sense of the
importance of our own problems. Her biographer writes:
'Carson's fan mail revealed that The Sea Around Us had touched
a deeper yearning for knowledge about the natural world as well
as for a philosophic perspective on contemporary life'. The
book came out at a time of great anxiety over an escalating
Cold War. One reader wrote:
We have been troubled about the world, and had almost lost
faith in man; it helps to think about the long history of the
earth, and of how life came to be. When we think in terms of
millions of years, we are not so impatient that our own
problems be solved tomorrow.
Another said: 'This sort of thing helps one relate so many
of our man-made problems to their proper proportions'. These
responses were among those most appreciated by Rachel Carson,
whose personal ethics placed a premium on the virtues of
humility and fortitude.45
Non-anthropocentrism is thus a key to Rachel Carson's
ethical philosophy, which contains the three complementary and
equally challenging injunctions: "Respect nature!" "Know
nature!" and "Place yourself in proper perspective!" We mistake
the nature of ethics, and Carson's ethics in particular, if we
separate the intellectual from the ethical challenge here, or
fail to acknowledge an ethical force behind all three
injunctions. For Carson, arrogance is both an intellectual and
a moral failing, while ignorance is as culpable as wrong
action.
Because she placed such a strong emphasis on knowing nature
and transcending our habitual focus on people, science was a
key human activity for Carson. 'The aim of science is to
discover and illuminate truth', she said in a speech accepting
the National Book Award. Ideally, that illumination should
inform the everyday lives of common people: not by creating
more wealth or new consumer products, but by creating people
who better know the earth which they inhabit and which has
created them. 'We live in a scientific age', she continued,
'yet we assume that knowledge of science is the prerogative of
only a small number of human beings, isolated and priestlike in
their laboratories'. But to believe this is to cut the average
person off from self-knowledge, because 'it is impossible to
understand man without understanding his environment and the
forces which have molded him physically and mentally'.46
Carson clearly believed in science. She earned an MA in
marine biology from Johns Hopkins University, worked as a
government scientist for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service,
kept up with the latest developments in a wide variety of
fields, and made her name as a scientific popularizer. Yet she
also saw many of science's limitations. In contrast to common
scientific practice, Carson emphasized direct appreciation of
individual organisms. Personal connections to particular
places, such as her beloved Maine coast, were very important to
her. She rejected a purely objective outlook; her own writings
often sought to create an emotional response to nature, which
she believed would help further conservation. 47
Many of Carson's critics, including some scientists, accused
her of 'emotionalism' after the publication of Silent
Spring, usually making more or less explicit reference
to her gender.48 In a typical example, a reviewer for Time magazine
wrote that Carson's case was 'unfair, one-sided, and
hysterically overemphatic'. 'Many scientists sympathize with
Miss Carson's love of wildlife', the reviewer continued:
and even with her mystical attachment to the balance of
nature. But they fear that her emotional and inaccurate
outburst in Silent Spring may do harm by
alarming the nontechnical public, while doing no good for the
things that she loves.49
In response, Carson suggested that there was something wrong
with people who felt no emotion in response to nature or
nature's destruction. Emotional attachment, aesthetic
appreciation, and a personal connection to particular places
should complement the pursuit of rigorous science, she
believed, since these all furthered our understanding and
appreciation of nature, which in turn improved our lives. 'I am
not afraid of being thought a sentimentalist', she told a
gathering of women journalists:
when I stand here tonight and tell you that I believe natural
beauty has a necessary place in the spiritual development of
any individual or any society. I believe that whenever we
destroy beauty, or whenever we substitute something man-made
and artificial for a natural feature of the earth, we have
retarded some part of man's spiritual growth.50
In an earlier article, she assured parents with a limited
knowledge of nature that they could still help their children
appreciate it, since 'it is not half so important to know as to
feel'. Furthermore, she wrote, 'it is possible to compile
extensive lists of creatures seen and identified without ever
once having caught a breath-taking glimpse of the wonder of
life'. 51
Carson reflected long and hard on the proper role of science
in human society. Just as it called into question the
haphazard, unregulated use of pesticides and herbicides,
Silent Spring touched off a heated debate, among
scientists, on the proper ends of science: whether to control,
dominate and change nature for human purposes, or to preserve,
protect and further our understanding of it, as is. Obviously,
this debate continues and has lost none of its urgency, as
witnessed by the recent growth of both conservation biology and
a massive biotechnology industry. Rachel Carson is properly
seen as one of our first and greatest conservation biologists,
who popularized the wild worlds of sea and shore and incited
people to work to protect all of nature.52
Carson valued science and the personal experience of nature
because they helped her to understand nature's stories and thus
achieve a larger, truer, non-anthropocentric point of view. She
was also a self-proclaimed realist, and this seems to have
played an important role in her environmental ethics. Science
can achieve truth and thus illuminate our lives, she believed.
It teaches us, for instance, that we are kin, however distant,
to all the life with which we share the Earth. As she expressed
it in The Edge of the Sea, a scientifically-informed personal
experience gets us in touch with 'the realities of existence',
with 'elemental realities'.53 Carson was aware of the great gulfs of
ignorance surrounding so many scientific questions in her day;
her revisions to new editions of her books reminded her of the
provisional nature of scientific knowledge. As a natural
historian, she was also aware of the shifting, evolutionary
nature of nature. She wrote in The Edge of the Sea's conclusion
of 'coastal forms merging and blending in a shifting,
kaleidoscopic pattern in which there is no finality, no
ultimate and fixed reality--earth becoming fluid as the sea
itself'. What holds for the earth and sea obviously holds for
organic nature, as the nature and meaning of life 'haunts and
ever eludes' the seeker after knowledge.54 This passage suggests a
Peircean limit concept of truth and reality, as the ever
elusive goals of an endless process.
Nevertheless, it is a process to which Carson is
passionately committed. As a scientist, she needs the concept
of reality to make sense of scientific progress. As a
naturalist, she values knowledge over ignorance and personal
acquaintance with nature over casual disregard. As a mystic and
nature lover, she speaks of 'enchanted' experiences when the
'realities' of nature 'possessed my mind'.55 As a conservationist,
she wants to protect 'The Real World Around Us'--as she titled
one talk--from humanity's relentless pressure to replace the
creation with our creations.56 Only a belief in reality, and in the
possibility and sweetness of knowing and connecting to reality,
can make sense of the goals Rachel Carson pursued throughout
her life. She put it this way in a speech accepting the John
Burroughs Award for excellence in nature writing:
I myself am convinced that there has never been a greater
need than there is today for the reporter and interpreter of
the natural world. Mankind has gone very far into an
artificial world of his own creation. He has sought to
insulate himself, in his cities of steel and concrete, from
the realities of earth and water and the growing seed.
Intoxicated with a sense of his own power, he seems to be
going farther and farther into experiments for the
destruction of himself and his world. There is certainly no
single remedy for this condition and I am offering no
panacea. But it seems reasonable to believe--and I do
believe--that the more clearly we can focus our attention on
the wonders and realities of the universe about us the less
taste we shall have for the destruction of our race.
57
Carson is surely right here. Environmentalists need to offer
some positive alternative to gross economic consumption and the
trivial pleasures offered by our destructive modern economy.
With Carson, I can think of no alternative superior to a
physical and intellectual engagement with the natural world.
Away with all epistemological caviling which would deny such
realities! Away with all post-modernist literary maunderings
which would substitute clever wordplay for knowledge and
experience of what Carson elsewhere calls 'the great
realities'!58 The alternative to such realism is solipsism and
the ever more exclusive focus on artificial worlds and virtual
realities of our own creation.
Reading Silent Spring reminds us that it was
not sophisticated postmodern deconstructionists but naive
realist birdwatchers who provided much of the evidence about
the dangers of pesticides that Rachel Carson laid before the
public. Carson herself mentions how easy it is for people to
destroy wild things when they do not even know they
exist.59
So we need to know 'the real world around us' for its own sake.
But we need to know it for our sakes, as well. 'I have had the
privilege of receiving many letters from people who, like
myself, have been steadied and reassured by contemplating the
long history of the earth and sea, and the deeper meanings of
the world of nature', Carson wrote. 'In contemplating "the
exceeding beauty of the earth" these people have found calmness
and courage'.60
Carson needed such calm fortitude throughout her life: to
meet her many family obligations, to stand up to the personal
and professional attacks leveled against her after Silent
Spring was published; to persevere through difficult
health problems during her last decade. In fact, she finished
Silent Spring racing the cancer that she knew
would shortly end her life. Half a year before her death,
Carson and her best friend spent a morning at the seashore near
her cottage in Maine, watching the fall migration of monarch
butterflies. 'This is a postscript to our morning at Newagen',
she wrote later that afternoon:
something I think I can write better than say. For me it was
one of the loveliest of the summer's hours, and all the
details will remain in my memory: that blue September sky,
the sounds of wind in the spruces and surf on the rocks, the
gulls busy with their foraging, alighting with deliberate
grace . . . But most of all I shall remember the Monarchs,
that unhurried drift of one small winged form after another,
each drawn by some invisible force. We talked a little about
their life history. Did they return? We thought not; for
most, at least, this was the closing journey of their lives.
But it occurred to me this afternoon, remembering, that it
had been a happy spectacle, that we had felt no sadness when
we spoke of the fact that there would be no return. And
rightly--for when any living thing has come to the end of its
cycle we accept that end as natural . . . That is what those
brightly fluttering bits of life taught me this morning. I
found a deep happiness in it--so, I hope, may you. Thank you
for this morning.61
Back to Top
Conclusions
I'd like to end by noting several respects in which Rachel
Carson's life and work might point the way forward for
environmental ethics. First, Carson's frequent criticisms of
human attempts to dominate nature suggest important parallels
with contemporary ecofeminism. Consider also the roles
compassion and caring seem to have played in her environmental
ethics; also, her emphasis on the importance of direct
experience. Finally, there were her pioneering efforts in the
primarily male worlds of science, government service and
conservation--and the misogynistic tone of many of her critics.
All this suggests that Carson may be an important resource for
ecofeminist reflection.
Second, Carson's philosophy of 'reverence for life' seems to
support the whole spectrum of environmental activism. During
her careers in government conservation work and private
advocacy, she tackled many environmental issues, from pollution
prevention to natural areas restoration to ending ocean dumping
of atomic wastes. A recent collection of Carson's shorter and
occasional pieces, titled Lost Woods, perhaps gives us a fuller
picture of her conservation interests than we have had
previously. Several pieces highlight her advocacy for
wilderness, including 'The Real World Around Us' and 'Our Ever
Changing Shore'. The latter includes a moving plea for the
preservation of wild beachlands:
Somewhere we should know what was nature's way; we should
know what the earth would have been had not man interfered.
And so, besides public parks for recreation, we should set
aside some wilderness areas of sea-shore where the relations
of sea and wind and shore--of living things and their
physical world--remain as they have been over the long vistas
of time in which man did not exist.62
Other articles show a concern for the beauty and health of
more developed landscapes.
Lost Woods also contains Carson's prefaces to the U.S.
Animal Welfare Institute's educational booklet 'Humane Biology
Projects' and to Ruth Harrison's Animal Machines. These
indicate her commitment to the humane treatment of animals. 'I
am glad to see Ruth Harrison raises the question of how far man
has a moral right to go in his domination of other life', she
writes:
Has he the right, as in these examples [of intensive
farming], to reduce life to a bare existence that is scarcely
life at all? Has he the further right to terminate these
wretched lives by means that are wantonly cruel? My own
answer is an unqualified no.63
In her biography, Linda Lear shows that Carson muted her
animal welfare advocacy, out of concern that it would undermine
her case against the misuse of pesticides. Nevertheless, while
writing Silent Spring, she wrote to a confidante
that 'I wish I could find time to turn my pen against the Fish
and Wildlife Service's [her own former agency's] despicable
poisoning activities [of predators and "vermin" such as prairie
dogs]...it is all part of the same black picture'.64What are the
similarities between sacrificing a wild beach for condominium
development and sacrificing the happiness of a veal calf for
the pleasure of a gourmand? In both cases, human interests come
first, no matter how trivial. In both cases, we dominate or
deny nature and create new anthropocentric realities. In both
cases, profit trumps a true humanity. This is the 'black
picture' which commands misery or disappearance for so much
that is "not us". Carson's example suggests that a philosophy
of love and appreciation for all nature and its creatures can
bridge the gaps between environmental ethics and animal welfare
ethics, and between anthropocentric urban environmentalists and
biocentric wildlands advocates.
This indicates a final way in which Rachel Carson might
point a route forward for environmental ethics: through her
example of personal commitment and activism. Carson was a woman
of great character who balanced her personal, professional and
political responsibilities with utter integrity. She did not
relish controversy, but she did not retreat from it, when
necessary. No one else, she realized, had the combination of
literary skill and scientific knowledge to write Silent
Spring. Her struggle to synthesize a mountain of current
scientific work and write one final book that was both accurate
and compelling, in the face of family tragedy and failing
health, provides one of the heroic stories in conservation
history. One cannot read about it without being deeply moved.
When Carson writes to a friend that it is 'a privilege as well
as a duty to have the opportunity to speak out--to many
thousands of people--on something so important', we know she
means it and love her for it.65
Here knowledge and respect for nature, and personal humility
and commitment to nature, go hand in hand. Such an ethics is
certainly demanding. Yet reading of Carson's life, one learns
how much she received in return for living up to it. Perhaps we
too may hope that Nature will repay us for our attentiveness
and efforts on her behalf. As inspiration and provocation,
then, Rachel Carson's life and writings also hold great
potential for environmental philosophy. 66
Back to Top
- 1A
recent search of the International Society for Environmental
Ethics bibliography turned up zero articles on Rachel
Carson's environmental ethics or environmental philosophy.
Popular readers such as Botzler and Armstrong, 1998,
Zimmerman, 1993, and Gruen and Jamieson, 1994 do not include
anything written by Carson. Pojman, 1994 does include a piece
by Carson, however, and the second edition of the popular
introductory text DesJardins, 1997 covers Carson more
extensively than the first edition.
- 2I have
made extensive use of Lear, 1997 in preparing this essay.
Although I have tried to acknowledge that use fully in the
footnotes that follow, I am sure that I have picked up some
ideas or information from Professor Lear that remain
unacknowledged.
- 3Lear,
1997, pp. 396-456.
- 4Carson, 1962, p. 169.
- 5
Ibid., p. ix.
- 6
Quoted in Lear, 1997, pp. 424, 409.
- 7Carson, 1962, pp. 93-96.
- 8
Ibid., p. 73, emphasis added.
- 9
Ibid., pp. 22, 77.
- 10
Ibid., pp. 84, 97, 107, 118-119.
- 11
Freeman, 1995, p. 391; Lear, 1997, pp. 461, 466.
- 12
Quoted in Lear, 1997, p. 435.
- 13
Ibid., pp. 433-437.
- 14
Brooks, 1972, p. 8. Rachel Carson learned this respectful
attitude from her mother, who, according to Carson's brother,
'would put spiders and other insects out of the house, rather
than kill them' (Gartner, 1983, p. 7).
- 15
Lear, 1997, p. 409.
- 16
Brooks, 1972, pp. 324-326.
- 17
Gartner, 1983, p. 8.
- 18
The 'convergence thesis' is the idea that convincing,
properly formulated anthropocentric and non-anthropocentric
ethics will largely converge in their practical environmental
recommendations. See Norton, 1991.
- 19 I
discuss this 'convergence' and develop the idea of an
environmental virtue ethics grounded in our enlightened
self-interest in Cafaro, 2001.
- 20
Carson, 1962, pp. 96, 71.
- 21
Lear, 1997, pp. 322, 438, 440. Harrison, 1964, p. viii.
Carson, 1955, pp. 196, 215-216.
- 22
Brooks, 1972, pp. 8-9.
- 23
Freeman, 1995, p. 62; Brooks, 1972, p. 242.
- 24
Brooks, 1972, pp. 315-317.
- 25
Readers should know that Carson's biographer Linda Lear
believes that she was a more spiritual person than my essay
implies. Lear thinks that the concept of 'material
immortality', treated in Under the Sea-Wind and
latter writings, is key to Carson's religion, and that her
environmental ethics is grounded in this religious
sensibility (Lear, 2001; see also Freeman, 1995, pp.
446-447).
- 26
Carson, 1962, pp. 23, 66, 38, 69.
- 27
Ibid., pp. 118, 64, 83. Recent environmental historiography
confirms the importance of an ideology of conquest and
domination in the growth of modern industrial agriculture.
See Feige, 1999, pp. 171-181.
- 28
Carson, 1962, p. 261. Note the close connection between is
and ought implied in the pairing of 'biology and philosophy'.
Post-Darwinian biology has shown us that life on earth was
not created for our benefit, that we are evolutionary
latecomers, and that we are kin to all life. Philosophical
ethics should accommodate this new-found knowledge.
- 29
Quoted in Lear, 1997, p. 450. Among others, Thomas Hill, Jr.
has also suggested that 'a proper humility' is an important
environmental virtue. See Hill, 1983: 216, 219, 223.
- 30
See Carson, 1998, p. 196, and Lear, 1997, p. 407. In a
commencement address delivered two years before her death,
Carson explicitly linked human domination of nature to 'the
Jewish-Christian concept of man's relation to nature'
(Gartner, 1983, p. 120).
- 31
Carson, 1962, p. 110.
- 32
Ibid., p. 78. See also Carson, 1998, p. 194.
- 33
Carson, 1962, pp. 64-68.
- 34
Ibid., 65. Note the quick move from is to ought.
- 35
Carson, 1955, p. 39.
- 36
Ibid., pp. 41, 15.
- 37
Carson, 1962, p. 118.
- 38
See Saito, 1998: 135-149.
- 39
Carson, 1998, pp. 55-56.
- 40
Ibid., p. 56.
- 41
Gartner, 1983, pp. 35-36; Lear, 1997, pp. 90-91.
- 42
Lear, 1997, pp. 203-204.
- 43
Carson, 1951/1961, pp. 106, 45.
- 44
Ibid., pp. 29-30.
- 45
Lear, 1997, p. 205. See also ibid., pp. 219-220, and Carson,
1998, p. 62.
- 46
Lear, 1997, pp. 218-219.
- 47
Gartner, 1985, p. 3.
- 48
Lear, 1997, pp. 430, 461.
- 49
Quoted in Brooks, 1972, p. 297.
- 50
Carson, 1998, p. 160.
- 51
Gartner, 1983, p. 118.
- 52
Lear, 1997, pp. 428-440.
- 53
Carson, 1955, pp. 13-14.
- 54
Ibid., pp. 215-216.
- 55
Ibid., p.13.
- 56
Carson, 1998, pp. 147-163.
- 57
Ibid., p. 94.
- 58
Ibid., p. 92.
- 59
Carson, 1962, pp. 110-115, 118.
- 60
Brooks, 1972, pp. 325-326.
- 61
Ibid., pp. 326-327.
- 62
Carson, 1998, p. 124.
- 63
Ibid., p. 196.
- 64
Lear, 1997, p. 352. For more on Carson's views and actions on
behalf of animal welfare see Brooks, 1972, pp. 314-317;
Gartner, 1983, pp. 6-7, 26-27.
- 65
Lear, 1997, p. 328.
- 66
Thanks to Kris Cafaro, Clare Palmer and an anonymous reviewer
for detailed comments that significantly improved this essay.
Special thanks to Linda Lear, the second "anonymous"
reviewer, for detailed comments and for generously answering
various questions about Rachel Carson's life and
thought.
Back to Top
References
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Environmental Ethics: Divergence and
Convergence. 2nd ed. Boston: McGraw Hill.
- Brooks, Paul 1972. The House of Life: Rachel Carson
at Work. Boston: Houghton Mifflin.
- Cafaro, Philip 2001. 'Thoreau, Leopold, and Carson:
Toward an Environmental Virtue Ethics', Environmental
Ethics 23: 3-17.
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