It’s the end of the world as we know it

WHO is the next Rachel Carson?

It’s a question you hear a lot in environmental circles. Where is the writer who can bridge the gap between poetry and science? Where is the book whose message is so accessible, so imperative, that it inspires not only activism but legislation? Her fourth book, “Silent Spring,” on the effects of DDT exposure on plants, animals and humans, was published in 1962. Already a bestselling author with a trio of books on ocean life, Carson risked her health, reputation and credibility to get the message out. The book was an immediate bestseller. The New York Times called it the “ ‘Rights of Man’ of this generation.” Attacks on the author’s credibility and accusations from the pesticide industry that she was “hysterical” were quickly and easily refuted and dismissed. Carson was asked to testify before Congress, and as a direct result of the book, the Environmental Protection Agency would later ban the use of DDT. The environmental movement and the laws created in the 1970s were a direct result of her appeal to common sense.

In his introduction to the 1994 edition of “Silent Spring,” Al Gore wrote that it and Harriet Beecher Stowe’s “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” “rank among the rare books that have transformed our society.” When Carson died in 1964 of a heart attack after battling breast cancer, she left a gaping chasm between raw data and literature.

This is not to say that several authors haven’t come close. The three most often mentioned as worthy of the Carson mantle are Theo Colborn, whose work on the 1996 book “Our Stolen Future” took on the issue of how chemicals affect fertility, development and intelligence; Bill McKibben, whose 1989 book “The End of Nature” was one of the first to tackle climate change and how the very definition of what it means to be human will change as we destroy nature; and Gore, whose movie, book and ever-evolving slide show, “An Inconvenient Truth,” has awakened many to the immediate implications of climate change.

Two new books offer explanation as to why no new Carson has emerged: “The Gentle Subversive: Rachel Carson, Silent Spring, and the Rise of the Environmental Movement” by Mark Hamilton Lytle and “The End of the Wild” by Stephen M. Meyer. The first builds on previous biographies -- most notably by Linda Lear and Paul Brooks and also “Always, Rachel,” the letters from Carson to her dear friend Dorothy Freeman -- but goes beyond these books to explore the roots of Carson’s environmentalism and reasons for her powerful impact on the American imagination. And if it is true, as Meyer claims, that “[w]e have lost the wild for now,” then the very source of inspiration for writers and naturalists like Carson has dried up. “The End of the Wild” is one of those terrifyingly clear little books, seemingly undaunted by hand-wringing in the marketing department, in which the author states unequivocally that the battle has ended in defeat. No amount of regulation will alter the fact that, he writes, “the extinction crisis -- the race to save the composition, structure, and organization of biodiversity as it exists today -- is over, and we have lost.”

Carson was born in 1907. Her mother, Maria, who was Rachel’s friend and source of strength, believed in the teachings of the Arcadians, “a sentiment that flourished in early twentieth-century America and harkened back to the eighteenth-century parson-naturalist Gilbert White,” and scientist-philosophers like Alfred North Whitehead who began thinking and writing about nature as a “web of life.” Carson, encouraged by her mother, published her first stories in St. Nicholas magazine for children, which encouraged young naturalists across the country. She was drawn to what Lytle calls “the literature of escape” -- writers such as John Burroughs, Edwin Way Teale and John Muir, wandering naturalists whose writing invoked the spirit of the natural world as well as a sense of freedom and discovery.

Lytle is extremely interested in Carson’s mentors, the teachers and scientists who guided her through undergraduate work at the Pennsylvania College for Women, Johns Hopkins (where Carson studied zoology), and the Woods Hole Marine Biological Laboratory (where she studied cranial nerves in reptiles). In 1935, she began her career as a government scientist (an aquatic biologist) in the U.S. Bureau of Fisheries; editing reports, writing radio scripts and, in 1937, her first article for the Atlantic, which in 1941 became her first book, “Under the Sea-Wind.” Her 1952 book “The Sea Around Us” was serialized in the New Yorker, a perfect venue for Carson’s unique blend of the sober and the provocative.

Carson believed that it was just as important to know as to feel: “Once the emotions have been aroused,” she wrote, “a sense of the beautiful, the excitement of the new and the unknown, a feeling of sympathy, pity, admiration or love -- then we wish for knowledge about the object of our emotional response.” Lytle takes it one step further: “Carson’s writing did not simply evoke the dangers of science run amok. A reverence for the mysteries of nature and the intricate web of life linked her to the romantics. With their idealism, passion, and fascination with the unknown world, romantics often flaunt convention.”

What made Carson a true subversive, writes Lytle, was the philosophy at the core of all these books, as different as they are in tone and structure and subject matter -- the idea that nature, not man, is and should be at the center of the living world; that nature is not something to be managed by its creatures, however puny or powerful they may be. And that we ignore this cosmography at our peril.

Yet it’s all a matter of degrees. Since Carson’s time, wandering naturalists have become an endangered species. Most scientists do not want to be called romantic. Most environmentalists, scared off by negative publicity and accusations of fomenting hysteria, are loath to focus on a negative future in their writing, believing it conveys a hopelessness that inspires inaction. These things worried Carson but did not keep her from telling the American people about the potential dangers they faced. McKibben, like Carson, softened his prognosis with a reverence for nature that Meyer (somewhat disingenuously, for it turns out that he does in fact have a plan, however impossible it may seem) does not seem to share. He recommends a kind of euthanasia. We should stop the magical thinking that drives environmentalists to create regulations, refuges and biosphere reserves that only increase species vulnerability by creating ecosystem ghettos. The Endangered Species Act is a form of human-driven evolution -- we decide what lives and what dies and how many and where. Why not, he proposes (a very modest proposal), “let the unfettered market determine how and where we consume natural resources?” Let the “weedy species,” the grasses and cockroaches define the new wild. “The web of life will become the strand of life.”

The only possible way out, according to Meyer, who refers to the wildlands concept “advocated by those in the deep-ecology movement,” would be to set aside at least 50% of the United States to be untouched by human hands until it reverts (in however many billion years) to wilderness. The rest of us should huddle together in the places we’ve destroyed so conclusively that there’s no redemption imaginable. Although we have lost the wild for now, he ends on a hopeful note, “[p]erhaps in five or ten million years it will return.”

All of this makes us yearn for McKibben, at heart a romantic naturalist in the Carson tradition, who held out hope even as he forced the reader to acknowledge that “our reassuring sense of a timeless future, which is drawn from that apparently bottomless well of the past, is a delusion.” We still have a desire for, a need for, pristine wilderness and an idea of nature as hardy, but as McKibben emphasizes, “we have ended the thing that has, at least in modern times, defined nature for us -- its separation from human society.”

This message, which seemed so harsh and histrionic in 1989, seems gentle and quaintly subversive in the new century. We are going to see more and more books like “The End of the Wild” and they are going to hit closer and closer to home. Words will not be minced. Suggestions for practical lifestyle changes will replace sweet wandering.

Where can we turn for solace? The specific antidote for the particular depression engendered by this conversation is, unsurprisingly, reading the naturalists -- Muir, Burroughs, John Hay, Terry Tempest Williams, but also the humble catalogs by taxonomists and observers who spent much of their lives in the field (the one we have destroyed). I would recommend a new, expanded edition of the 1936 classic “Hardy Californians: A Woman’s Life With Native Plants” by Lester Rowntree.

Rowntree, often called the female John Muir, spent most of her life wandering through California, from the high peaks of the Sierras to Joshua Tree and the deserts, collecting plants. In her books and hundreds of articles, she sought to capture the personality and spirit, as well as the texture, of California wildflowers. She was not a scientist, but in her quiet way she was an advocate, like Carson, for humility in the presence of creation.

For it may well be that cataloging is the best that we can do at this point in history. Compiling a record using all of our senses is not unlike inscribing the names on the wall in tribute to Vietnam veterans or keeping the record of names of those who died in the Holocaust or Hiroshima: “These notes of mine were taken in all manner of places in California,” wrote Rowntree in her preface to “Hardy Californians.” “In storm-lashed spots and in sheltered corners sweet with the repetitious litanies of bird song; on the hot floor of the glistening desert; on sands and bluffs by the sea; in the fragrant chaparral; in the caves and canons of lonely islands; within the dense dark shade of Redwoods; on wind-swept mesas; under the hymn-like music of the mountain conifer forests; and on breath-taking summits.” *