Rachel Carson and the ecological imperative
The publication of Rachel Carson's Silent Spring in 1962 marked a formative moment in the modern environmental movement. Ostensibly a critique of the widespread use of the pesticide dichlorodiphenyltrichloroethane (DDT) in commercial agriculture, Silent Spring also offered a damning account of the human in nature, a moral and political call to arms articulated in the language of ecological science. Widely recognized as the text that propelled environmental issues into the public discourse, it was perhaps the first book to capture our peculiarly modern sense of environmental apocalypse, to give voice to a new fear growing in the popular imagination, that 'along with the possibility of the extinction of mankind by nuclear war, the central problem of our age [is] the contamination of man's total environment.1
To furnish her critique of 'Man Against the Earth', as the book's original title put it, Carson drew on the most recent theoretical insights from ecology, a science whose future political significance was as yet unknown. The theory of nature proposed by ecosystem ecology in the 1960 - composed of imbricated biophysical systems, connected by material flows and powered by solar energy - allowed Carson to trace the passage of harmful chemicals like DDT across local and global ecosystems. I suggest in this essay that ecology also offered Carson a normative view of 'man's' relation to nature that underpins the provocative, apocalyptic message of Silent Spring. Granted that ecology provided Carson with the concrete facts of environmental destruction, I argue that it also offered her the grounds for a novel range of environmental values, which continue to inform the basic tenets of the environmental or 'ecological' movement today.
This chapter therefore addresses a central problem of environmental philosophy: namely, the relation of science to morality and politics, their interdependence and their co-determination. How has ecology conditioned - in a historical-epistemological but also a logical-deductive sense - our understanding of what is at stake or under threat in environmental destruction? Are scientific theories and observations mobilized in support of already established moral and political values, or do values 'flow' from science, which shapes and transforms them, provides them with their significance and even their intelligibility? And what happens to our ethical-political views if and when the science changes? To approach these questions, this chapter proposes a reading of Silent Spring alongside a short theoretical history of early ecology, noting the confluences between them. At the same time, I draw out the more fundamental logical and metaphysical basis of Carson's environmentalism, such as the ideas of holism, balance and teleology in nature.
The ethics of Silent Spring
Carson never makes any explicit ethical arguments in Silent Spring, apparently preferring to rely on the facts of pesticide use alongside 'simple appeals to widely held values'.2 As Linda Lear notes in her biography of Rachel Carson, this was in part a product of the social and epistemological constraints surrounding the book's release.3 The case made in Silent Spring was polemical and based on new, widely unknown research. It had to appeal to a general public and combat the criticism expected from government scientists, lobbyists and policymakers. As a woman and with no PhD or institutional affiliations, Carson was forced to bracket her moral, political and religious convictions in favour of a more rigorous and objective writing style to be taken seriously and to protect herself from potential litigation.4 That she was still labelled a 'hysterical female', a 'bird and bunny lover' and a 'communist' only attests to the validity of these concerns.5
Still, Carson does make occasional moral assertions that provide clues as to what, for her, is at stake in the debate over pesticides. She writes for instance with regard to an extensive pesticide program in Illinois:
Incidents like the eastern Illinois spraying 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.... By acquiescing in an act that can cause such suffering to a living creature, who among us is not diminished as a human being?6
Condensed paragraphs like these contain multiple overlapping and sometimes conflicting moral claims, in this case regarding the meaning of 'civilization' and the precarity of its existence, as well as the worth of nonhumans both for humans and in themselves. The language is emotive and politically charged: pesticide use is characterized as a 'war on life' waged by 'civilization'. But without full explication and argument it is difficult to know what for Carson is morally significant in pesticide use. Is it the harm to humans, to nonhumans, or to society or 'civilization'? Should nonhumans be spared of suffering because of their usefulness or worthiness to humans, or because of their own intrinsic worth? In short, Carson never really tells us why we ought to oppose pesticide use, although it is on this fundamental philosophical basis that her environmental politics rests.
Without this justification, Silent Spring loses its political importance - it is 'just' a collection of facts, like a textbook or a catalogue. This at least is the conclusion that follows from the traditional philosophical distinction between fact (which describes how the world is) and value (about how the world ought to be). Facts are never sufficient to form moral conclusions, on this view; no description of pesticides, of their concrete effects on human health or wildlife, is enough to conclude that pesticides ought not to be used. But perhaps Silent Spring, though it does not itself make any ethical arguments, relies implicitly on arguments made elsewhere? Perhaps its aim is to inspire moral sentiment by appealing to already established values regarding for instance human health, the suffering of animals and the preservation of American wildlife and wilderness. This is something like the orthodox reading that I want to challenge in this chapter, made for instance in a recent article by philosopher Philip Cafaro, who suggests that Carson's moral account '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.7 Such values are complementary and widely held by the American public (or at least by those likely to read Silent Spring). All that remains is for Carson to direct public attention to the facts of pesticide use to highlight its moral implications.
I want to contest this common-sense view by looking closer at some of the arguments Carson makes in Silent Spring, since while 1 agree that Carson does not ever tell us why we ought to oppose pesticide use, I do not agree that Carson 'just' presents the facts of pesticide use, or that Silent Spring 'lacks' moral argument. Nor do I think that Carson relies on already established values to make her case; indeed, many of the claims Carson makes often conflict with already established or widely held values regarding the worth of humans and nonhumans. The more radical reading I will propose is that the 'facts' of pesticide use themselves always already contain normative ideals regarding humans and their relationship to nature. As we will see, this is chiefly a result of the ecological theoretical language in which these facts are articulated. Facts, after all, are never simply the product of observations isolated from explanation or theory. Ecology, by theorizing the place of the human organism in its environment, contains implicit political and moral claims regarding our actions and their unforeseen consequences, not just for human or nonhuman well-being but for the state of the environment itself.
Chains, systems, wholes
Carson's main concern in Silent Spring is to advocate for the regulation of pesticides, herbicides and other agricultural and industrial chemicals. When used in commercial agriculture to poison weeds and insect pests, such chemicals are stored in the fatty tissues of organisms and carried up 'food chains' to predators like birds and fish.8 These chemicals further contaminate human food and water supplies and have even been found in human breast milk.9 Carson showed that although the 'web of life'10 means pesticides like DDT have an effect far beyond their intended victims, they do not need to be directly consumed but can be carried across the planet by rivers, oceans and atmospheric currents, famously ending up in the reproductive systems of Antarctic penguins.11 The 'silent spring' from the book's title is the imagined result of this process, where 'a strange blight' brings 'a shadow of death' to the American countryside, where 'only silence lay over the fields and woods and marsh'.12
Central to Carson's book is the concept of the 'food chain' or 'food web', first developed by Charles Elton in his book Animal Ecology in 1927. Elton describes how organisms are connected to each other through a dependency on food, where plants are eaten by herbivores eaten by carnivores, in turn eaten by decomposers after they die.13 Each organism occupies a 'niche', a specific role in relation to other organisms dictated by its size and capabilities determining what it eats and what are its enemies.14 Elton's conceptual terminology was adapted for use in radiation ecology, a field which emerged in response to the problems of radioactive waste and fallout after World War II.15 Founded and funded by the Atomic Energy Commission, the primary goal of radiation ecology was to track the movement of radioactive isotopes between different species in contaminated ecosystems.16 Scientists discovered that predators accumulated radioactive isotopes in surprisingly high quantities, a discovery that led to an understanding of how substances are distributed across and carried up food chains.17
Later ecologists in the I940s and I950s, such as Raymond Lindeman, Eugene and Howard Odum and G. Evelyn Hutchinson, further developed Elton's ideas into a subdiscipline known as 'ecosystem ecology'. Lindeman's influential paper 'The Trophic-Dynamic Aspect of Ecology' was among the first to attempt to quantify the food chain concept by measuring the exchange of energy and materials between plants and animals.18 He drew on developments across physical sciences like thermodynamics, cybernetics and systems theory to explain ecosystems in non-vitalistic, holistic terms. Energy in the form of sunlight is captured by plants via photosynthesis and passed to consumers and decomposers, at each stage being transformed into heat and lost to space through respiration. By observing the transfer and transformation of energy between organisms and their environments, Lindeman could conceive of Cedar Bog Lake, where he conducted his study, as one large ecological system or 'ecosystem'. The parts of this system are both living and non-living: sunlight, soil, air, water, even the decomposing bodies of dead organisms, all play an important role. All living things depend on the flow of energy and matter to metabolize and reproduce and thus depend not only on the other organisms of the food chain but also on non-living features of the environment. Indeed, as Lindeman notes, it becomes difficult from this perspective to separate the living community from the non-living environment, especially if what is being prioritized is the flow of energy and matter.19 Lindeman quotes Oxford botanist Arthur Tansley, who coined the term 'ecosystem' in 1935:
The more fundamental conception is ... not only the organismcomplex, but also the whole complex of physical factors forming what we call the environment or the biome. ... It is the systems so formed which, from the point of view of the ecologist, are the basic units of nature on the face of the earth. ... These 'ecosystems', as we may call them, are of the most various kinds and sizes. They form one category of the multitudinous physical systems of the universe, which range from the universe as a whole down to the atom.20
The ecosystem - the complex of organisms and their non-living environment - is thus the 'basic unit of nature' for ecologists. These 'physical systems' are stacked in terms of scale, from the size of an atom to the planet to the entire universe, and are interlinked by common functions and shared parts. When Tansley mentions the atom in the quotation above, it is in a sense closer to that of the New Physics of the twentieth century than the atomism of classical physics. The atom here is not simply a low-level 'part' of the universe, its ultimate cause and explanation. It is itself a system, a set of relations between protons, neutrons and electrons that is 'greater than the sum of its parts', in that it only exists once its parts achieve a functional unity. The rules which govern the actions of neutrons or electrons are necessary but not sufficient for learning about the functioning of the atom, which has its own large-scale laws. Similarly, the neutron or electron depends on the entire atomic system for its own functioning and cannot be fully understood unless it is connected to the other parts of the system and oriented towards the functioning of the whole. Removing a neutron from an atom to study it in isolation would fundamentally alter the system and the behaviour of the neutron itself - in this case, with fatal consequences. In the words of Levins and Lewontin, the relationship between a system and its parts is 'dialectical', in that the parts make up the system and the system conditions the behaviour of the parts.21
This 'holistic' view of nature, in which natural systems are integrated wholes composed of but not reducible to the behaviour of their parts, is a central theoretical premiss of both scientific ecology and the political 'ecological' movement. Influenced by the ideas of Charles Darwin, ecology was the first discipline to theorize the organism-environment relation as a whole, and was thus seen to challenge the dominant reductive and mechanistic methodology of classical biology, which focused on physiology and the mechanics of bodily processes.22 Ernst Haeckel, who coined the term 'ecology' in his Generelle Morphologie der Organismen, defined it as 'the comprehensive science of the relationships of the organism to its surrounding environment'.23 Similarly, almost a century later, Eugene and Howard Odum defined ecology in their seminal textbook Fundamentals of Ecology as 'the study of the interrelation of organisms to their environment'.24 In other words, ecology is aimed primarily at the relationships between living and non-living things. It does not reduce living things to non-living parts or vice versa; indeed, ecology claims to transcend such divisions. As Lindeman suggests, part of the theoretical importance of ecology is that it moves beyond the strict boundaries of physics, geology, climatology or biology, which study matter and life independently, toward a more 'holistic' approach that conceives of living and non-living things as interrelated parts of a greater system.
The holistic method of ecology figures prominently in Carson's work, especially in her early 'Sea Trilogy', which drew on ecological theory as much as it contributed to it. Consider for instance this passage from The Edge of the Sea:
To understand the life of the shore, it is not enough to pick up an empty shell and say 'This is a murex,' or 'That is an angel wing.' True understanding demands intuitive comprehension of the whole life of the creature that once inhabited this empty shell: how it survived amid surf and storms, what were its enemies, how it found food and reproduced its kind, what were its relations to the particular sea world in which it lived.25
Thus, understanding the physiology of an individual organism is insufficient for an understanding of its behaviour and of the greater system of which it is part. An atomistic, reductive method will not provide a full picture of coastal life, which in its highly complex and relational nature must be studied as a broader, more comprehensive ecological whole. This alternative 'holistic' method - intuitive, non-reductive and dialectical - lies behind the insights which Carson deploys to great effect in Silent Spring, allowing her to propose a view of nature as a series of integrated and organized wholes that function according to their own irreducible large-scale laws. It enables Carson, at a practical level, to trace the circulation of harmful chemicals like DDT between organisms where, along with other nutrients and minerals, they eventually pass to predators at the top of the food chain. But, at the same time, holism offers Carson the conceptual and analytical grounds on which to base her particular ethical-political position.
Carson's chief concerns in Silent Spring are with human health and the suffering of nonhumans. But it is an oversimplification to claim that Carson's moral opposition to pesticide use is only on biocentric or enlightened anthropocentric grounds. To define these terms: biocentrism is when I believe that nonhumans ought to be protected because they have intrinsic worth (beyond my uses for them), whereas enlightened anthropocentrism is when I believe that nonhumans ought to be protected for my interests and uses (for example, I find them beautiful and inspiring; seeing them suffer is unpleasant to me, etc.). When Cafaro claims that Carson's activism 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', he is claiming that Carson's activism is (implicitly) justified on biocentric and enlightened anthropocentric grounds.
Yet Carson's moral opposition to pesticide use is not just founded on the worth of individual insects or penguins or even on the worth of individual humans. Instead, I argue that what Carson values is the ecological whole to which both humans and nonhumans belong. In other words, hers is not simply a biocentric ethics which places intrinsic value on individual organisms but an ecocentric ethics that values the whole of which the individual organism is a part. It is not the damage to this or that individual organism that concerns Carson but the effect that pesticides have on the entire system of biotic and abiotic relations. Indeed, Carson never suggests that pests in commercial agriculture ought not to be harmed; she admits for example that in the case of intensive agriculture, which undermines nature's 'built-in checks and balances ... control of some sort becomes necessary'.26 It is because pesticides like DDT spread well beyond their intended victims, killing further species and ultimately undermining the stability and integrity of the ecological whole that Carson suggests that they ought to be opposed.
In this case, the holistic methodology of ecological science comes to shape Carson's consideration of humanity's ethical relationship to nature - of what kinds of harm are morally significant or insignificant, of which beings deserve to live and which deserve to die. According to ecocentrism, the death and suffering of individuals are necessary for the continuation of the ecosystem and therefore morally insignificant to the extent that they do not affect ecosystem integrity and stability. As I will argue later, what is important to ecocentrists is that such death and suffering accord with the 'normal' or 'natural' rate of ecological processes, and that these processes are not 'disrupted' by 'unnatural' or 'synthetic' chemicals produced by 'man'. It is worth emphasizing here that this ecocentrist position for the most part conflicts with the established values of Americans living in the early ig6os. The notion that the needs and desires of humans ought to be subordinate to the welfare of the ecological whole contradicts widely held anthropocentric views of the instrumental relation of humans to natural resources. Moreover, for wildlife conservation groups at the time, like the Audubon Society, it was the suffering and demise of individuals and species that most concerned their members and not the preservation of 'systems' or 'ecological wholes'. It is only in the wake of Silent Spring that 'environmental' laws and advocacy groups concerned chiefly with the preservation of ecosystems emerged.27 Much environmental policy and activism today can be called 'ecocentric' in so far as they aim chiefly at preserving and maintaining whole ecosystems rather than individual organisms or resources favourable to humans.28
Balance as the natural telos of ecosystem development
To illustrate Carson's ecocentrism, consider the following passage from Silent Spring:
The bitter upland plains, the purple wastes of sage, the wild, swift antelope, and the grouse are a natural system in perfect balance. Are? The verb must be changed - at least in those already vast and growing areas where man is attempting to improve on nature's way.... Few seem to have asked whether grasslands are a stable and desirable goal in this region. Certainly nature's own answer was otherwise.29
Carson here exchanges Elton's 'food web' for the more complex notion of a 'natural system' understood as an integrated set of relations between organisms and the environment that is 'in perfect balance'. Crucially, this balance is under threat: that 'the verb must be changed' - presumably from 'are' to 'were' - implies the process of degradation has already begun. 'Man', in attempting to improve on 'nature's way', has undermined nature's balance, in this case by clearing brush for grazing. Because the man-made grassland ecosystem is contrary to the 'goal' of the region, 'man' risks an outcome that is neither 'stable' nor 'desirable': the whole closely knit fabric of life has been ripped apart. The antelope and the grouse will disappear along with the sage. The deer will suffer, too, and the land will be poorer for the destruction of the wild things that belong to it. Even the livestock which are the intended beneficiaries will suffer; no amount of lush green grass in summer can help the sheep starving in the winter storms for lack of the sage and bitterbrush and other wild vegetation of the plains.30
What is significant for Carson in this case is not simply the clearing of sagebrush from the plains - or, rather, it is not sagebrush itself that Carson is interested in protecting, even if it is the only thing directly harmed through human intervention. What is at stake is the knock-on effect that clearing sagebrush has on the 'fabric of life', on the broader ecological community. That clearing sagebrush impinges on the well-being of antelope, grouse and even introduced livestock follows from the holistic principles of ecological science, which stress the unity and interdependence of individual organisms within an ecosystem.
Indeed, this unity and interdependence is intrinsic to the 'ecosystem' concept, which must exhibit a certain degree of coherence and integration to be defined as such. Eugene and Howard Odum, for instance, define an ecosystem as
any unit that includes all of the organisms (i.e., the 'community') in a given area interacting with the physical environment so that a flow of energy leads to clearly defined trophic structure, biotic diversity, and material cycles (i.e., exchange of materials between living and non-living parts) within the system.31
According to the Odum brothers' definition, if a loose collection of organisms does not display any 'clearly defined' organization, it cannot be considered an 'ecosystem', much like a loose collection of organs cannot be considered a body. An ecosystem must display an organic unity similar to an organism itself, in which all the organs work together to produce the functional body. Indeed, the first theories of ecological communities from the early twentieth century were predicated on this 'organismic' view of nature, most famously the 'superorganism' conception developed by Frederic Clements.32 Clements claimed that any community of plants (an 'association' in his words) developed in a way that was comparable to the development of an individual organism. As the organs in a body are functionally related, Clements believed that the members of an association were closely integrated and organized, that each plant or plant species served a purpose within the association, and that the association as a whole could be understood using a similar logic to physiology.33 Clements claimed that the evolving association eventually reaches a 'climax state' in which it displays a high degree of stability and integration.34 In this sense, Clements imagined the plant community as equivalent to an organism that 'arises, grows, matures, and dies.35
This teleological view of nature, where communities have an inherent tendency to reach higher, more developed states, is made possible only through the attribution of an organic unity to the community as a whole. It is only by viewing organisms as highly integrated and interdependent that it is possible to imagine the collective evolving towards a preconceived end. Clements's view of communities as 'superorganisms' eventually fell out of favour towards the mid-twentieth century and was replaced by Tansley's 'ecosystem' concept, which attempted to rid ecology of its vitalism by describing communities in terms closer to physics and engineering. But even within this highly physicalist conception of nature, the evolutionary telos suggested by the organismic view is retained. In the definition by the Odum brothers above, for instance, ecosystem development 'leads to clearly defined trophic structure, biotic diversity, and material cycles'. And although the driving force of this process is the 'flow of energy' that passes through the ecosystem, a self-organized, functional unity is still presumed to be the principal goal or outcome of system change. Ecosystems display, in Eugene Odum's words, 'a strategy of development ... directed toward achieving as large and diverse an organic structure as is possible within the limits set by the available energy input and the prevailing physical conditions of existence.36 The outcome of this 'strategy' is mutualism and cooperation between organisms and a 'balance' in the relations between organisms and their environment. Organisms evolve, regulating their growth and reproduction in accordance with environmental factors like the storage and release of nutrients, and eventually the system as a whole reaches what the Odums call 'homeostasis', a state of maximum efficiency and mutual benefit.37
This teleological understanding of ecosystem development is fundamental to Carson's normative claims regarding human destruction of ecosystems. If these systems 'naturally' tend towards highly stable, integrated and efficient states, then obstructing this tendency - for instance by destroying key species like sagebrush - could have potentially catastrophic effects on the system and its remaining inhabitants. It thereby becomes possible to judge which actions are desirable or undesirable to the extent that they facilitate or hinder the internal telos of the ecological whole. Again, what is significant in such cases is not simply the effect of human interference on individual organisms but the condition of the ecosystem itself. This sort of moral judgement cannot result from established biocentric or enlightened anthropocentric values. Rather, it depends on the description of nature as a balanced, integrated and teleological whole by ecologists like Clements and the Odum brothers. What emerges with or alongside this scientific description are moral and political judgements regarding the 'ideal' ecological state and human behaviour towards it. I will return to this point shortly.
'Man' versus 'nature'
'Man' occupies an important but ambiguous place in Carson's schema. On the one hand, 'man' is part of ecosystems in that he is threatened by ecological disaster as much as any other species. 'Man, however much he may like to pretend the contrary, is part of nature', Carson writes. '[He cannot] escape a pollution that is now so thoroughly distributed throughout our world.38 It is precisely because 'man' is part of ecosystems that his harmful technologies are able to penetrate and spread across ecological networks and endanger even his own life. On the other hand, it is because 'man' stands apart from ecosystems that he is able to intervene in their development - that is, that he can be said to 'disrupt' the progression of ecosystems to homeostasis. For this reason, humans (and the by-products of their actions) are simultaneously described as natural and unnatural by environmentalists: they are 'natural' as another thread in the 'fabric of life', and 'unnatural' in so far as they cut across other threads, obstructing the intrinsic end of ecosystem development.
This paradox is clear in Carson's book. The famous first chapter, 'A Fable for Tomorrow', nostalgically describes a small American town 'in harmony with its surroundings.39 When 'an evil spell'40 settles on the community, livestock perish, humans become sick, and birds and wildlife disappear: 'the people had done it themselves.41 Much like the story of 'The Fall' from the book of Genesis, the ontological status of humankind suddenly changes once it acquires a power and responsibility that pit it against the workings of nature. Carson explains in the following chapter:
The history of life on earth has been a history of interaction between living things and their surroundings. To a large extent, the physical form and the habits of the earth's vegetation and its animal life have been moulded by the environment. Considering the whole span of earthly time, the opposite effect, in which life actually modifies its surroundings, has been relatively slight. Only within the moment of time represented by the present century has one species - man - acquired significant power to alter the nature of his world.42
The first line of this quotation is grounded in the theoretical insights of ecology and evolutionary biology and it leads quickly into the subtle, quasi-metaphysical claims in the next few lines. As opposed to 'life', whose modification of its surroundings is 'relatively slight', 'man' has acquired the technological power to radically alter the world. He does this, Carson explains later, by creating 'synthetic' chemicals, or by 'tampering with the atom' to produce 'unnatural' radiation.43 These chemicals when used as pesticides or herbicides are strongly opposed by Carson to 'natural' or 'biological' methods of pest control like introducing predators or multi-crop farming.44 The use of 'natural' and 'unnatural' in this case seems to stem from a normative necessity, a way to point out, as philosopher Ted Toadvine puts it, that 'something wrong needs fixing.45 While it is obvious that humans are part of local and global ecosystems, 'endorsing our own seamlessly natural status would seem to entail that everything that we do and create - from nuclear waste to plastic trees - would be just as natural as anything else.46
In this reading, Carson resorts to the inherently normative but unjustified language of 'natural' and 'unnatural' to articulate a qualitative difference between human technologies and the techniques of other living beings. After all, Carson is wrong when she says that 'life' modifies its surroundings 'relatively slightly'. One dramatic counter-example is the Great Oxygenation Event in the Proterozoic, when cyanobacteria that evolved the ability to photosynthesize released huge amounts of oxygen, creating today's oxygenated atmosphere and destroying the anaerobic majority of life on Earth.47 Of course, the selective stress that resulted led eventually to the development of eukaryotes, who used the poisonous oxygen in the atmosphere as a resource, and without whom complex multicellular beings like animals and plants would never have evolved.48 It is not, then, the empirical fact of the destruction of living beings with chemicals (like oxygen) that is 'unnatural' or even 'evil', which is why Silent Spring does not stop at the facts of environmental destruction but goes on to employ a more normative, quasi-metaphysical discourse of 'man' versus 'nature'.
Another reading of Carson's narrative of life on Earth is that what Carson opposes in environmental destruction is not the fact of anthropogenic environmental modification but its extraordinary speed and scale - that an enormous quantity of ecosystems are being destroyed in a relatively short span of time. Put differently, it is not a qualitative difference that sets 'man' apart from 'nature' but a quantitative one. In this reading, Homo sapiens is no more ontologically significant than any other species except in its use of technology, which has rendered it highly competitive and dangerous. And, despite the inflated consequences of their actions, humans are no more 'unnatural' than the cyanobacteria which caused the Great Oxygenation Event or any other 'invasive' species that disrupts ecological balance and integrity. This reading accords with ecologists like the Odum brothers as well as with more recent environmental accounts which tend to eschew terms like 'natural' or 'unnatural'. The popular environmental writer Elizabeth Kolbert, for instance, describes the contemporary environmental crisis as the 'sixth mass extinction event'; in other words, another extinction event in a long sequence including the Great Oxygenation Event.49 Her book's subtitle, 'An Unnatural History', suggests that what marks these events out from the 'natural' or normal progress of Earth's history is their sheer speed and scale of destruction rather than some qualitative ontological difference between 'man' and 'nature'.
Ecological time and space
Over and above the concrete fact of biocide, however, ecological science still provides the yardstick by which ecological disturbance is measured and by which the actions of 'invasive' species (like humans) can be understood as contradicting the 'normal' or 'natural' programme of ecosystem development. For instance, the unusual speed of the destruction of the sagebrush plains in Silent Spring is calculated with regard to a prior nature existing before the colonization and industrialization of America. This temporal dimension of destruction is delimited by what philosopher J. Baird Callicott calls 'ecological time', 'defined by ecological processes such as ... succession and disturbance regimes.50 In other words, diagnosing ecological disturbance requires a 'normal' temporalization determined by ecological processes, since any other metric (for example, geological time) is insufficient. Twenty thousand years before the arrival of European settlers in North America, the sagebrush plains would have exhibited an entirely different ecological composition - namely, tundra populated by woolly mammoths and sabre-toothed tigers. Of course, the transition from these Pleistocene ecosystems to the relatively warm Holocene would have meant large-scale extinction, migration, adaptation and ecological transformation. But because the scale of this transformation accords with 'ecological time', it is ontologically and morally insignificant by the standards of ecocentric environmentalism.
If ecology offers Carson a 'normal' temporalization of nature by which the moral significance of human action is measured, it equally provides a spatial imagination in which nature is enclosed within a kind of permeable conceptual membrane. The limits of this membrane are determined by the integrity and stability of the ecosystem, by its internal balance that results from the fine-tuning of ecological evolution. Within the membrane, 'normal' or 'natural' ecosystem processes take place and the system progresses towards its final mature state. The teleological end of ecosystem development is thus inscribed into this total and enclosed whole - it is internal to the self-organized and self-directed functioning of the entire ecological complex and is defied only in so far as it is disrupted from the outside. In this way, ecosystems come to be understood as threatened by external 'abnormal' or 'unnatural' forces which undermine the system's internal order, for instance by 'invaders' that have not co-evolved with the system and can therefore outcompete the system's inhabitants, with disastrous effects on the system as a whole.
From this description of 'normal' or 'natural' ecological activity, Carson derives scientific justification for her condemnation of pesticide use. At the same time, ecology provides a means to determine whether human action is morally objectionable based on whether it contradicts ecological time or invades ecological space, thereby undermining the ecosystem's 'ideal' condition. Philosophers will object that this commits the 'naturalistic fallacy', and I agree. Just because ecosystems tend to be stable, integrated and efficient when untouched by humans does not mean that they ought to be that way. A 'natural' ecosystem might be 'in perfect balance' but the corresponding question that remains to be answered is why balance is better and for what or for whom. Presumably Carson takes for granted why we would want ecosystems that are natural, healthy and balanced. This is precisely what is intriguing - and concerning - about the dependency of environmentalism on ecology. As science describes healthy and balanced ecosystems, these in turn become the paragon of nature and the ideal outcome of human action, transforming our moral intuitions and reorganizing modern politics and law.
Ecological science and environmental values
The problem here is that in narrowing the gap between fact and value, we lose sight of how ecological 'facts' are themselves constituted by their historical, political and theoretical context. As Helen Longino explains in her book Science as Social Knowledge, science is never purely objective but is shaped by social, political and scientific norms.51 In line with Thomas Kuhn, Longino stresses the theory-ladenness of observation, the way in which facts are always made to cohere with theoretical paradigms and organized so as to support key hypotheses. These considerations determine which facts are deemed relevant and what interpretation of the facts is produced. As Hilary Putnam argues, the evaluation of evidence by its relevance or descriptiveness or the judgement of theories as 'coherent' or 'simple' presupposes a range of scientific norms which distinguish 'good' from 'bad' science.52 In addition to these scientific norms - what Longino calls 'constitutive values' - are a range of 'contextual values' that arise from the social and political context in which scientific research is carried out. In this case, science is shaped by the background assumptions and even the moral and political convictions of scientists, which influence what questions are asked, what counts as good evidence, and which hypotheses are considered plausible.
The theory of nature as holistic, stable and teleological provided by early ecologists like Clements, Elton, Lindeman and the Odum brothers is pervaded by contextual values - background assumptions and political and moral convictions regarding nature and its relation to 'man'. The concept of 'stability' or a 'balance of nature', for instance, has a long history in the West from Ancient Greece through medieval Christian scholarship to modern Darwinian science.53 Indeed, 'stable' ecosystems are, by definition, those ecosystems that are most appealing and useful to humans - they are more diverse and attractive, more productive and reliable. In other words, 'stable' and 'natural' ecosystems are those that best align with our modern human preconceptions of what constitutes useful, beautiful and pristine nature. When ecologists approach nature in the guise of a value-neutral observer, they bring these ideals and assumptions with them and organize their observations to suit both hegemonic social ideals and the prevailing theoretical paradigm.
There is no better evidence for this than the radical paradigm shift experienced by ecosystem ecology in the I970s and I980s. While mid-century ecologists emphasized flows of energy and matter controlled by feedback mechanisms in the manner of cybernetic machines, ecologists of the ig8os came to see ecosystems as a more disaggregated collection of individuals joined merely by physical interaction via functional relationships, for instance predatory-prey, parasite-host, symbiosis, and so on. An important article by Robert May cast doubt on the stability-diversity hypothesis by showing that mathematical models of ecosystems displayed chaotic behaviour despite having high degrees of complexity.54 Another paper by Drury and Nisbet concluded that there was no determinable direction in ecological change, no progressive development of species diversity, biomass or integration, and no final 'climax' or stable equilibrium state.55 These and many more studies served to call into question the kind of science which Carson relies on in Silent Spring.
The point here is not that Carson based her book on incorrect science and that for this reason the moral and political message of Silent Spring should be dismissed. It is that Carson - and much ecocentric environmental thought that follows her - is wrong to assume that ecological science by itself offers objective and sufficient basis for action - that is, that its description of 'normal' nature is enough to condemn human 'interference' and destruction of ecosystems. Beyond committing the 'naturalistic fallacy', the problem with sticking to the science without interrogating its intrinsic social and political assumptions is that the science in this case strongly determines our consideration of what is at stake in environmental crisis - its chief causes, threats and solutions. The major conflict that emerges from Silent Spring, for instance, is 'man versus nature', and its central concern is the physical condition of ecosystems. Environmental 'harm' is thus conceived as the destruction of ecosystems by 'man', where the solution is a return to 'natural' or 'biological' methods of farming and pest control. In short, what is obscured are the social and historical conditions that produce ecological destruction in the first place. Carson does of course criticize the 'chemical industry' and the 'Industrial Age.56 But in so far as these are viewed as emerging from 'man', we lose sight of how environmental issues are produced by socially and historically determined relations of societies to their material environments - for instance, by the necessity for capitalist societies to constantly expand and prolong the accumulation of capital.57 At the same time, the discourse of 'man' versus 'nature' overlooks the countless cultures and civilizations that have lived in relative harmony with their environments, as well as the disproportionate effects experienced by different societies as a result of environmental destruction.58
The solution to the problem as it is framed in Silent Spring is better science and tighter regulation of industrial chemicals rather than the dismantling of corporate control over agriculture. While widespread policy reforms have curbed the impact of pesticides like DDT on human health and wildlife, the agricultural and chemical industries have found ways to avoid making substantial changes to their industrial practices precisely by following Carson's recommendations and by coopting the language and ideas of Silent Spring. After the banning of DDT, for instance, the development of 'safer' pesticides like neonicotinoids and glyphosate (not without their own human and nonhuman health risks) have meant a dramatic overall increase in agricultural pesticide use.59 By marketing themselves as 'sustainable', 'regenerative' and 'eco-friendly', agricultural corporations have maintained vast monocultures cultivated using industrialized, chemical-intensive methods.60 Corporations and governments today promote the maintenance and restoration of ecosystems (often to the exclusion of local and indigenous people) only to expand ecologically destructive operations in other areas.61 This is not to mention the political impact of the 'green' or 'regenerative' agricultural sector in the Global South over the course of the twentieth century, which by 'selectively appropriating demands of environmental, food safety, animal welfare, fair trade, and other social movements ... widen[s] the gap between privileged and poor consumers as it deepens commodification and marginalizes existing peasants'.62
Conclusion
A Silent Spring less occupied by the facts and more concerned with social critique may have pre-empted these problems. But then it would not have been the Silent Spring whose explosive popularity kickstarted the modern environmental movement.63 As I have argued, Carson's strict adherence to the science of pesticide use and its dangers made Silent Spring a formidable weapon to be wielded by burgeoning environmental lawyers and activists against government complacency and corporate greed. Ultimately, it was this adherence to the 'facts' - or, rather, their organization into a coherent theory of nature - that offered Carson the logical and epistemological grounds on which to oppose irresponsible pesticide use. By describing nature as holistic, stable and teleological, ecology shaped Carson's conception of what is at stake in environmental problems - namely, the invasion and destruction of natural ecosystems by man-made, synthetic chemicals. Such an approach to environmental problems excludes social histories of imperialism, capitalism and corporate power. Indeed, it is by adhering to ecological theory that a new agricultural regime has emerged over the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, one that employs 'ecological' techniques and wields 'ecologically responsible' language in order to strengthen corporate control over food production. Far from advocating for a dismissal of science in connection to environmental issues, this chapter recommends paying closer attention to science to uncover its dependency on social and political values. Silent Spring serves as an important reminder that a wholesale reliance on the 'facts' deprives environmentalism of its analytic basis for political action.
Endnotes
Footnotes
1. Rachel Carson, Silent Spring, Hamish Hamilton, London, 1962, p. 7. ↩
2. P. Cafaro, 'Rachel Carson's Environmental Ethics', in R. Pickett, S. Palmer, C. Armesto and J. Callicott, eds, Linking Ecology and Ethics for a Changing World, Springer, Rozzi, 2013, p. 164. ↩
3. L. Lear, Rachel Carson: Witness for Nature, Henry Holt, New York, 1997. ↩
4. Ibid., p. 398. See also L. Lear, 'Rachel Carson's Silent Spring', Environmental History Review, 17(2), 1993, p. 30. ↩
5. Lear, 'Rachel Carson's Silent Spring', p. 36. ↩
6. Carson, Silent Spring, p. 82. ↩
7. Cafaro, 'Rachel Carson's Environmental Ethics', p. 164. ↩
8. Carson, Silent Spring, p. 19. ↩
9. Ibid. ↩
10. Ibid., p. 52. ↩
11. W.J. Sladen, C.M. Menzie and W.L. Reichel, 'DDT Residues in Adelie Penguins and a Crabeater Seal from Antarctica', Nature, 210(5037), 1966, pp. 670-73. ↩
12. Carson, Silent Spring, pp. 3-4. ↩
13. C. Elton, Animal Ecology, Macmillan, New York, 1927, p. 56. ↩
14. Ibid., p. 63. ↩
15. C. Kwa, 'Systems Ecology and the Management of Ecosystems', Science and Nature: Essays in the History of the Environmental Sciences, ed. Michael Shortland, British Society for the History of Science, Stanford in the Vale, 1993, p. 213. ↩
16. Ibid., p. 219. ↩
17. Ibid., pp. 219-20. ↩
18. R. Lindeman, 'The Trophic-Dynamic Aspect of Ecology', Ecology 23, 1942, pp. 399-417. ↩
19. Ibid., p. 399. ↩
20. Arthur Tansley, quoted in Lindeman, 'The Trophic-Dynamic Aspect of Ecology', p. 400. ↩
21. R. Levins and R. Lewontin, The Dialectical Biologist, Harvard University Press, Cambridge MA, 1985. ↩
22. See Carolyn Merchant's paradigmatic critique of classical science and celebration of ecology in her essay 'The Death of Nature', Environmental Philosophy: From Animal Rights to Radical Ecology, ed. Michael Zimmerman, Prentice Hall, Saddle River NJ, 1993. ↩
23. E. Haeckel, Generelle Morphologie der Organismen, vol. 2, Georg Reimer, Berlin, 1866, p. 286. ↩
24. E.P. Odum and H.T. Odum, Fundamentals of Ecology, 2nd edn, W.B. Saunders, Philadelphia PA, 1959, p. 4. ↩
25. R. Carson, The Edge of the Sea, Houghton Mifflin, Boston MA, 1988, p. 7. ↩
26. Carson, Silent Spring, p. 9. ↩
27. For example, in the United States, the Environmental Defense Fund 1967, the National Environmental Policy Act 1970, the Natural Resources Defense Council 1970, UNESCO Man and the Biosphere Programme 1971, and the United Nations Conference on the Human Environment 1972. ↩
28. For example, the Convention on Biological Diversity, the European Union Natura 2000, and the United Nations Decade on Ecosystem Restoration. ↩
29. Carson, Silent Spring, p. 54. ↩
30. Ibid., p. 55. ↩
31. Odum and Odum, Fundamentals of Ecology, p. 8. ↩
32. F. E. Clements, 'Nature and Structure of the Climax', Journal of Ecology, 24(1), 1936, pp. 252-84. ↩
33. C. Elliot, 'The Legend of Order and Chaos: Communities and Early Community Ecology', in K. deLaplante, B. Brown and K.A.Peacock, eds, Philosophy of Ecology, Handbook of the Philosophy of Science, vol. 11, North Holland, Oxford, 2011, p. 74. ↩
34. F.E. Clements, Plant Succession, Carnegie Institution of Washington, Washington DC, 1916. ↩
35. Ibid., p. 16. ↩
36. E.P. Odum, 'The Strategy of Ecosystem Development', Science 164, 1969, p. 266. ↩
37. Odum and Odum, Fundamentals of Ecology, pp. 25-6. ↩
38. Carson, Silent Spring, p. 154. ↩
39. Ibid., p. 3. ↩
40. Ibid. ↩
41. Ibid., p. 4. ↩
42. Ibid., p. 5. ↩
43. Ibid., p. 6. ↩
44. Ibid., p. 9. ↩
45. T. Toadvine, 'Naturalism, Estrangement, and Resistance: On the Lived Senses of Nature', in Ontologies of Nature, ed. M. Oele and G. Kuperus, Springer, New York, 2017, p. 182. ↩
46. Ibid. ↩
47. L. Margulis and D. Sagan, Microcosmos: Four Billion Years of Microbial Evolution, University of California Press, Berkeley CA, 1986, p. 99. ↩
48. J. Gross and D. Bhattacharya, 'Uniting Sex and Eukaryote Origins in an Emerging Oxygenic World', Biology Direct 5, 2010, p. 53. ↩
49. E. Kolbert, The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History, Bloomsbury, London, 2014. ↩
50. J.B. Callicott, 'Postmodern Ecological Restoration: Choosing Appropriate Temporal and Spatial Scales', in deLaplante, Brown and Peacock, eds, Philosophy of Ecology, Handbook of the Philosophy of Science, vol. 11, p. 314. ↩
51. H. Longino, Science as Social Knowledge: Values and Objectivity in Scientific Inquiry, Princeton University Press, Princeton NJ, 1990. ↩
52. H. Putnam, 'Beyond the Fact/Value Dichotomy', Crítica: Revista Hispanoamericana de Filosofía, 14(41), 1982, pp. 3-12. ↩
53. See, for example, F.N. Egerton, 'Changing Concepts of the Balance of Nature', Quarterly Review of Biology, 48(2), 1973, pp. 322-50; D. Botkin, The Moon in the Nautilus Shell: Discordant Harmonies Reconsidered, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2012; D. Simberloff, 'The "Balance of Nature" Evolution of a Panchreston', PLoS Biology 7, 12(10), 2014, pp. 1-4. ↩
54. R. May, 'Will a Large Complex System Be Stable?' Nature 238, 1972, pp. 413-14. ↩
55. W.H. Drury and I.C. Nisbet, 'Succession', Journal of the Arnold Arboretum, 54(3), 1973, pp. 331-68. ↩
56. Carson, Silent Spring, pp. 149, 153. ↩
57. See M. Bookchin, The Ecology of Freedom, Cheshire Books, Melbourne, 1982. ↩
58. A. Malm and A. Hornborg, 'The Geology of Mankind? A Critique of the Anthropocene Narrative', The Anthropocene Review, 1(1), 2014, pp. 62-9. ↩
59. See F.R. Davis, Banned: A History of Pesticides and the Science of Toxicology. Yale University Press, New Haven CT, 2014; M. Mart, Pesticides, a Love Story: America's Enduring Embrace of Dangerous Chemicals, University Press of Kansas, Lawrence KS, 2018; C. Patton, 'A World Drenched with Pesticides: Rachel Carson's Silent Spring', Origins: Current Events in Historical Perspective, Ohio State University, 2022; https://origins.osu. edu/read/world-drenched-pesticides-rachel-carson-silent-spring. ↩
60. G. Cusworth, J. Lorimer, J. Brice and T. Garnett, 'Green Rebranding: Regenerative Agriculture, Future-pasts, and the Naturalisation of Livestock', Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, 47(4), 2022, pp. 1009-27. See also A. Bless, 'The CoOptation of Regenerative Agriculture: Revisiting the Corporate Environmental Food Regime', Globalizations, 2024, pp. 1-23. ↩
61. J. Fairhead, M. Leach and I. Scoones, 'Green Grabbing: A New Appropriation of Nature?' Journal of Peasant Studies, 39(2), 2012, pp. 237-61. See also A. Dickens, 'Indigenous Peoples Bear the Brunt of Global Greenwash', The Ecologist, 2015; https:// theecologist.org/2015/sep/23/indigenous-peoples-bear-brunt-global-greenwash. ↩
62. H. Friedmann, 'From Colonialism to Green Capitalism: Social Movements and Emergence of Food Regimes', in F.H. Buttel and P. McMichael, eds, New Directions in the Sociology of Global Development, Emerald Group Publishing, Amsterdam, 2005, p. 227. ↩
63. After all, Murray Bookchin's book Our Synthetic Environment (Knopf, New York, 1962) made an explicitly social and political critique of industrial chemical use and was published a few months before Silent Spring with little public attention. ↩
Cite this article
Finian Worrall. Rachel Carson and the ecological imperative. Conjunctions: humanatures reproduction disjunctions, 2025. CRMEP Books, London, UK.