Faith in Nature: Environmentalism as Religious Quest

1. Newton's Disciples

1 / Newton’s Disciples T he environmental movement began with a concern for what was happening at the time—with DDT in our body fat and organochlorinesinourdrinkingwaterandtheawfulenvironmentalnews of the late 1960s, the discovery that economic development and population growth threatened wilderness and even the world’s ecosystems.1 In the spring of 1970, when a quarter-million people rallied in Washington, D.C.,forthefirstEarthDayandmanymoreatteach-insandprotestsacross the country, they wanted to change the laws, not discuss humanity’s deep ties to the world. Politicians also focused on the present. They had passed laws to save parks and manage resources; now they passed laws mandating preservation of “the environment.” The National Environmental Policy Act spoke in general terms, but most legislation had specific targets. Laws set targets for the reduction of pollution in the air and the water, banned some chemicals and regulated others, established a program to save endangered species, and imposed specific duties on industries and people. Like the environmentalists, the politicians spoke of the moment. President Richard Nixon declared that the 1970s were the decade in which we had to act: “It is literally now or never.”2 Many agreed. a sense of wonder Environmentalism, though, does not make sense without the deeper current of concern about the way humans are related to the world. Rachel 14 Carson attracted public attention and gained headlines with warnings of the dangers of pesticide residues, but achieved lasting popularity not from muckraking, but morality. She preached—that is not too strong a word— that we had a duty to life on earth, the “obligation to endure.” We had to understand our place in the world, change our values and our hearts.3 Even at the time, people realized that Carson’s case involved more than human health. Her admirers made her a modern nature saint, and her opponents looked more at her values than her science. Speakers for the National Agricultural Chemicals Association questioned her scientific credentials and evidence, but they charged with much more fervor that she opposed science, progress, and Western civilization, that if we took her ideasseriouslywewouldsoonbelivingincavesandeatingnutsandberries. To be human, they said, we had to conquer nature, and modern society had written a glorious page in the annals of civilization by developing the wonderful chemicals that had saved so many people from disease and so much food from the ravenous hordes of our insect enemies. There was a lot of injured professional pride and economic interest in these accusations , but also outrage at what her opponents saw as Carson’s denial of the power of human reason and her rejection of the triumph of the human spirit that produced modern civilization. Carson’s opponents were wrong in thinking the public would rally to the old cause—most people saw at least some merit in Carson’s case— but right in seeing the contest as fundamental.4 The “conquest of nature” and living as “a plain citizen of the biotic community” involved diªerent ways of accepting the universe. One view denied that humans were part of nature or at home in it; the world was only raw material to be used for what we wanted. The other declared that the world was our home, that we were creatures of nature as well as culture who were charged with the duties of good citizens not just toward human society but the larger community of nature. We needed nature to live a full and fully human life. Before she wrote Silent Spring, Carson’s reputation rested on her writings about wild nature, and her own love of the earth and its life lay at the foundation of her activism. Like many other nature writers and environmentalists , her fascination with nature began early, aided by her Newton’s Disciples 15 mother and life on sixty-five acres in Springdale, a small town east of Pittsburgh . Her academic interests, though, seemed entirely literary until her junior year in college, when a required biology course led her into science . She received an M.S. in biology in 1932 and spent the next twenty years as a government biologist, doing research and editing publications, while pursuing a second career as a nature writer. Her first book, Under the Sea Wind (1941), attracted little attention (probably because it appeared about the time the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor), but a second, The Sea Around Us (1952), made the best-seller lists. Carson became and remained a full-time writer until her death in...