Another Silent Spring
Earth Day in the Midst of a Global Pandemic
There was a strange stillness. The birds, for example — where had they gone? Many people spoke of them, puzzled and disturbed. The feeding stations in the backyards were deserted. The few birds seen anywhere were moribund; they trembled violently and could not fly. It was a spring without voices. On the mornings that had once throbbed with the dawn chorus of robins, catbirds, doves, jays, wrens, and scores of other bird voices there was now no sound; only silence lay over the fields and woods and marsh.
…
No witchcraft, no enemy action had silenced the rebirth of new life in this stricken world. The people had done it themselves.
Rachel Carson, Silent Spring
Here we are, on the 50th anniversary of the Earth Day, living through another ‘silent spring’. This spring is silent for reasons different than those Rachel Carson wrote about in 1962, yet intimately connected. It is not the songs of the birds that have gone missing. On the contrary: as I sit here in my NYC apartment facing the backyard, I hear more birds than I ever did in this city. Rather, it is the human sounds that have mostly disappeared. The usual cacophony of the city life -people yelling, children running and laughing on the streets, cars honking, airplanes and helicopters hovering above- is mostly muted now, replaced by the increasingly assertive songs of birds, interrupted only by the heart-wrenching, ear-piercing sounds of ambulances passing by.
A peculiarly silent spring.
Carson and her seminal book, Silent Spring, are often credited with inspiring the modern environmental movement. Carson herself had passed away from breast cancer two years after the publication of the book, before seeing the full bloom of the movement she inspired, but prior to her premature passing, she had already become a high profile public figure, testified before the Congress, and succeeded to get President Kennedy to direct his Science Advisory Committee to investigate her claims, which were in fact substantiated in the resulting report.
In those same two years, Carson had also attracted the wrath of the chemical and agricultural industries and other interested parties. She was accused of overhype, or more pointedly, of ‘hysteria’, for being a cat-loving-spinster out of her own depth. At the same time as Carson inspired the movement that would culminate in the celebration of the first Earth Day and the creation of Environmental Protection Agency in 1970, and the ban of domestic use of DDT in 1972, she had also inspired the counter-reaction to that movement: an organized campaign to spread skepticism about the connections between economic activity and environmental degradation; intense lobbying efforts to undermine attempts at regulation and to equate environmental protection with an assault on American economy; and PR campaigns to discredit the public faces of the movement, especially if those were female faces like Carson’s then and Greta Thunberg’s nowadays.
56 years after her passing, there are still articles and websites blaming Carson for the millions of deaths caused by malaria over the years –‘for killing more people than Hitler’, in the utterance of one fictional character- because of the role she had played in the DDT ban. It is true that malaria is estimated to kill hundreds of thousands of people annually -majority of whom are children, and predominantly in sub-Saharan Africa- and this is after a substantial decline from the much higher case and fatality numbers earlier in the 21st century. If DDT was effective in eradicating the mosquitoes that transmit the Malaria-causing parasites, then, by facilitating the ban on DDT, haven’t Carson and the environmental movement been unsuspecting accomplices in the malaria death toll? This line of argument of course disregards the fact that DDT-resistant mosquitoes were already a concern by the time Carson published her book, as well as the fact that Carson herself had said on various occasions that she did not promote a wholesale ban of insecticides but their irresponsible overuse, and that exceptions for the purpose of eradicating infectious diseases would be well warranted.
In fact, such exceptions were always built into the systems of regulations. The U.S. DDT ban applied only to domestic licensing and agricultural use, not its export. And while DDT is one of the substances included in the Stockholm Convention that restricts the use of Persistent Organic Pollutants globally, it also includes an exemption for combating malaria. The WHO itself has re-indorsed the use of DDT for indoor residual spraying in malaria endemic countries in 2006, despite continued concerns about its effects on human health. But of course, the bigger problem with blaming restrictions on the use of environmental pollutants for the persistence of malaria is that it overlooks the complex web of causes that have much more to do with poverty, underdevelopment, inequality, prolonged conflict, poor public health infrastructures and the lack of international interest and resources.
While a discussion of the legacy of Carson is beyond the point here, I do find it meaningful on this uniquely quiet Earth Day to revisit the entangled stories of her Silent Spring, the public’s strong and immediate reaction to it, the environmental movement and the counter-reaction it inspired, the national and international regulations and institutions that were born out of the struggles and compromises between them, the continued effects of environmental pollution we are ‘obliged to endure’, as Carson put it, and the millions of lives lost to infectious diseases over the years, often in places far away from where many of the other actors in this story were to be found.
It is important to revisit this history in the midst of a global pandemic as we contemplate the relationship of human beings to their natural environment; to remember, once again, the permeability of the human body; to reassess, once again, the environmental costs of ‘human progress’, and the vulnerabilities that lie right beneath the facade of that progress; to recognize, once again, the disproportionate ways in which different communities and societies are afflicted by environmental toxins or by infectious diseases; to confront, once again, our growing existential fears and anxieties, and the wide range of reactions they inspire in us -from becoming climate activists to being mindful of our own individual environmental footprints; from fatalism and withdrawal to science skepticism to conspiracy theories; from creating local grassroots movements and mutual aid societies to embracing right wing populism and even ecofascism. It is important to revisit that history not only for its relative success in pushing the cause of environmental protection, but also for its failure to dismantle the false dichotomy between human progress and planetary well-being that we are still faced with today -and a whole set of other false dichotomies, between public good and individual liberty, global welfare and national interests, justice and security, one’s right to work and another’s right to live.
Millions of Americans took to the streets on April 22nd, 1970, in celebration of the first Earth Day, and to demand action on environmental pollution. On its 20th anniversary on April 22nd, 1990, many more millions across the globe participated in Earth Day celebrations. Today, on its 50th anniversary, there are no crowds out celebrating, as many of us are staying home or observing some type of social distancing. There have been much smaller public gatherings in the last few days across the United States though, not for celebrating but for protesting, to reopen the economy. The economy they call to reopen was founded on slave labor and continues to exploit immigrants and people of color, it has done irreparable damage to the environment for decades and has been the major driver behind global warming, it has condemned majority of people to bare existence while creating extreme wealth for a tiny fraction. In this exceptional moment where it has come to a halt, let’s say to hell with that economy. On the 50th anniversary of the Earth Day, let’s not plan for its reopening, but its demise for good, to be replaced with something better.
