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7 Thinking Ecologically: The Legacy of Rachel Carson Lorraine Code In my 2006 book Ecological Thinking: The Politics of Epistemic Location, I read between the lines of Rachel Carson’s texts—especially Silent Spring (Carson 1962)—in order to develop an epistemological approach I call ecological naturalism. I begin by showing how the dominant theories of knowledge of affluent post-Industrial Revolution societies have been complicit in perpetuating a rhetoric of mastery and possession: of knowledge “acquired” for manipulation, prediction, and control of nature and human nature; of knowledge as a prized commodity that legitimates its possessors’ authoritative occupancy (and sometime abuse) of positions of power, as they recast “the natural world” as a resource for human gratification. The ecology movement’s critical stance with respect to an energy-fetishized society’s unquestioning reliance on a simplistic, unreconstructed scientistic methodology for acquiring knowledge is well known. In the early twentyfirst century, critiques of scientism have become a focus of revisionary social-political praxis and contestation, both feminist and other, beyond anything Carson could have imagined. Social and political commitments permeate Rachel Carson’s own scientific practice, if often implicitly, in work that was indisputably ecological well before the term had achieved common currency in everyday English and in professional scientific circles. As it has evolved—albeit contentiously —to inform late-twentieth-century and early-twenty-first-century ecological science and environmental activism, Carson’s legacy is impressive in its potential to unsettle the settled assumptions of an epistemological orthodoxy that sustains a conviction in the value of individual (read: individualistic), detached, and depersonalized mastery and control. By contrast, a commitment to democratic conversation and negotiation characterizes her manner of weaving scientific and extra-scientific evidence together, and of circulating her findings to an often skeptical public. Her work entered the public arena with the power to interrupt the 118 Code complacency and hubris of “man’s” presumptive dominion over all the earth. To people who know Carson as a path-breaking practitioner of ecological thinking and action, these claims will not be new. But it is worth recalling—as most present-day ecological thinkers will know—that it is possible, then as now, to work as a naturalist, even as an environmentalist or wildlife scientist, without thinking ecologically. What, then, makes Carson’s work distinctively “ecological”? And why am I commending it to epistemologists, more generally, on these grounds? According to Carson’s biographer Linda Lear, it was when she was gathering material for The Edge of the Sea in the early 1950s that her thinking shifted from being geographical in content, tone, and intent to becoming explicitly ecological. The shift is attributable, in large part, to her having initiated a process of producing a “biographical sketch” to explain the “special features of each environment to which creatures [had] to adapt”; to studying their “life cycles and physical habitats,” identifying “ways in which they had adapted to various and often continuously changing conditions ” (Lear 1997, 229). From this epistemological stance, Carson began to study different types of shore—rock, sand, and coral—and to write about “each geological area as a living ecological community rather than about individual organisms” (ibid., 243). As her commitment to ecological thinking consolidated, Carson characterized the scope of biology as “the history of the earth and all its life--the past, the present, and the future,” adding that “neither man nor any other living creature may be studied or comprehended apart from the world in which he lives.”1 This echoes a point from her acceptance speech for the National Book award: “It is impossible to understand man without understanding his environment and the forces that have molded him physically and environmentally”2 and without understanding how man, in turn, has made and is constantly remaking that environment. Such is her ecological credo. Carson’s claims must be read with care. She is not proposing that these environmental “forces” determine the processes and products of knowledgemaking . Her often-implicit contention throughout her work is that their constitutive effects need to be taken carefully into account: that where, when, how, and by whom knowledge is made may have to be investigated in practices of evaluating the knowledge itself, and that one cannot assume without question that knowledge-achieved transcends the circumstances of its making to claim universal pertinence. In this regard, there are significant points of continuity between Carson’s ecological thinking and Donna Haraway’s work on “situated knowledges,”3 which I have read in...

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