The Ecological Landscapes of Jane Jacobs and Rachel Carson

Within the field of urban studies, perhaps no book has garnered more attention than Jane Jacobs’s 1961 classic, The Death and Life of Great American Cities. Both vilified and praised, Death and Life effectively changed how people understood cities. Noted urban historian Kenneth Jackson claimed that Jacobs was “the single most important author on cities in the twentieth century.”¹ Urbanist Marshall Berman argues that “Jacobs’ work has often been appreciated for its role in changing the whole orientation of city and community planning.”² From an environmental studies perspective, Rachel Carson’s landmark 1962 book, Silent Spring, drew on the new science of ecology to document the hazards of chemical pesticides, transforming how human societies understood the physical environment. Published only fourteen months after Death and Life, Carson’s book engendered a fundamental shift in environmental politics. As historian Ted Steinberg has argued, “Carson helped transform ecology into the rallying cry of the environmental movement.”³

Although much has been written about Jacobs and Carson individually, very rarely are their works examined together.⁴ In essence, urbanists treat Death and Life as fundamentally an urban text, while environmental scholars underscore the importance of Silent Spring only within an environmental context.⁵ Perhaps because of disciplinary specificity, this dissection seems appropriate, if not warranted. Yet Jacobs’s book was not simply an urban text, but was part of a larger ideological movement that embraced ecology as an alternative model for human development. Likewise, Carson’s critique of “modern” chemicals expanded the meaning of nature that fundamentally broke down the barriers of city and country.

Taken together, the themes Jacobs and Carson explored transcend the spatial and disciplinary boundaries of city and nature. Indeed, the interdisciplinary nature of their work opens a way to consider how Jacobs and Carson invoked a common language to criticize physical geographies or landscapes that have often been considered incongruous. At the same time, however, Jacobs and Carson’s articulation of ecology as a possible way to reframe human society reinforced certain barriers of exclusion, rather than transcended them. Both authors, for example, ignored the complicated history of race and class. So, as ecology emerged as a new political expression during the 1960s, it subsequently became identified with privileged whiteness, thus reinforcing barriers of exclusion Jacobs and Carson hoped to eliminate. Thus, although Death and Life and Silent Spring opened new analytical terrain to consider the connections between cities and nature, thereby breaking down geographic barriers, their ecological arguments also neglected the complexities and politics of human differences. This was an oversight that limited the impact of their work, despite its profoundly transformative nature.

Recently, urban political ecologists have attempted to rectify the division between city and nature, while broadening the terrain on which ecology becomes enmeshed with urban change and human history. Scholars such as Nik Heynen, Maria Kaika, Erik Swyngedouw, and Roger Keil have explored the processes connecting the city to nature. According to Keil, “urbanization is not merely a linear distancing of human life from nature, but rather a process by which new and more complex relationships of society and nature are created.”⁶ Or, as Heynen, Kaika, and Swyngedouw suggest, “there is nothing a-priori unnatural about produced environments like cities.”⁷ Likewise, Sabine Barles, Christoph Bernhardt, Dorothee Brantz, Simone Neri Serneri, Geneviève Massard-Guillebaud, Dieter Schott, and Martin Melosi also have called attention to the naturalness of cities, arguing that the divisions between environmental and urban history are often artificial and counterintuitive.⁸ Elsewhere, historian Joel Tarr, one of the preeminent scholars of urban and environmental history, has suggested that it “would be difficult to write urban history without touching on some environmental elements.”⁹ Despite these works, the ways in which scholars trace the intellectual trajectories of Carson and Jacobs suggest the bifurcation of urban and environmental history to be something quite tangible and concrete. This article seeks to narrow this gap, suggesting that the works of Jacobs and Carson provide a way to transcend the disciplinary boundaries of city and country, and to explore an interrelated history at a critical moment in...